Posts from — April 2011

I’ve been thinking of my attention as of late in terms of money; in the sense that we all have a limited amount of time in our day and therefore, by default, a limited amount of attention.  We can spend our attention mindful of our attention budget, taking into consideration all that needs to get accomplished, or we can spend our attention freely, letting the day take us where it will and perhaps ending up at the end of the day with a long to-do list still incomplete.

The first way of spending my attention is pretty fucking boring, to be frank.  I mean, I need to be an adult and get my work done and get the laundry done and tick off all the tasks on my to-do list.  But it’s like exercise: I feel good after I’ve done it, but I don’t enjoy doing it.  It makes me feel virtuous, but it doesn’t feel creatively fulfilling.  And I usually get to the end of the day and feel like I spent all of my time on other people and not myself.  I can literally go through day after day of doing things for other people, placing myself second, and never getting to myself and my own wants at all.

The second way doesn’t work either.  It’s sort of like eating brownies for every meal.  The first one tastes great, but after a bit, you start to feel queasy from all of the fat and sugar, your body quite aware that there’s no substance to the food.  I’ll declare a mental health day from work and use it to read blogs, jumping into Facebook and Twitter, and I’ll look at the clock and realize that four hours have passed and I’ve enjoyed myself, but I don’t feel full.  My to-do list is still screaming at me.  And I generally feel like crap about myself when I don’t feel that I’ve been productive.

And at the same time, who defines productivity except myself?

I put a post-it note above my computer last week that reads:

Because I need that reminder.  I have a tendency to run instead of walk.  I have a tendency to feel panicked that I’m not doing enough when it’s quite clear that I’m stretched thin.  This race is entirely internal — I don’t feel like I’m racing other people.  I feel like I’m racing the universe itself; time itself.

I internalized Mr. Keating’s speeches in Dead Poets Society a bit too deeply — I feel like every moment of the day, I am screaming at myself to seize life (carpe diem!) and even if I’m holding it, I’m still screaming at myself to seize it harder.

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There’s another way to think about spending attention.  In the example above, it’s about being mindful of quantity.  I have 1440 minutes in my day.  How am I going to allot them to the various things I need to do and want to do?

The other side is quality.  Am I spending my attention on things of worth?  I’d argue that when I’m mindful of how much time I’m spending on it, reading blogs is a quality activity.  I learn something new; my world is expanded; and I connect with another human being.

That is, when the blog is worth reading.  Or when the news story is worth following.  It is too easy to get sucked into the outrage of the day.  It is too easy to waste hours of time over someone else pushing our buttons.  I felt that was last week with the whole Scott Adams misogynistic rant.  I could feel myself getting sucked into thinking about it, reading about it, talking about it.

What a waste of time.

Laurie’s point at the end of the Scott Adams post is what kicked off this idea — that I don’t need to give myself a Tiger Blood transfusion just because someone else is putting the bag on the IV pole (wait, what sort of analogy is that?  Why do I need a transfusion?)  It was further cemented by a brief email conversation with a friend who said that his blog traffic was high if he was talking about something controversial, weighing in on the big daily blogosphere brouhaha.  But his readership dropped considerably if he wrote a touching post about himself.

Personally, I skip over the posts about the big daily blogosphere brouhahas because it goes back to quality — and I don’t see drama as time well-spent.  But I love his quieter posts about himself.  Those are the ones that move me and make me feel as if I spent my attention wisely upon reading them.

It’s not that hard to turn down the Tiger Blood transfusion; to say “no thank you” to someone else’s drama when your peeking into their world.  But what about when they kick down your figurative door and drag you into the drama?  This happened recently to Flotsam and she wrote a long, albeit important (and worth reading!) piece about it.

She states about not interacting with people who are trying to provoke you:

Alas, Conventional Wisdom made contradictory demands upon me. One such set of demands goes like this: Do Not Acknowledge Internet Trolls/Do Not Let Internet Trolls Dictate Your Behavior. The idea is to proceed as if the incident never happened at all, so as not to give them the satisfaction of knowing that they “got to you.” Attention will only encourage them, because attention is what they want, so we mustn’t give it or The Terrorists Win.

Putting yourself out there means that people crash into you (some nicely, some not so nicely).  On one hand, you get the giant game of Marco Polo that Alexa mentions at the end of the post.  On the other hand, you get the email that she mentions at the beginning of the post.

I’m not even sure where I’m going with this beyond the fact that I have been acutely aware as of late of how I am spending time.  Of how much I spend on others and not on myself.  Of whether I’m buying quality moments with my attention or whether I’m buying garbage — and whether what I buy is totally in my control (I mean, if someone steals my wallet, the money is gone but I didn’t choose how I spent it.  When you get an email like Alexa received, you don’t necessarily choose how you spend your attention because you’re going to be affected emotionally).

How are you spending your attention?  Your daily 1440 minute allotment?

A few weeks ago, we went to a Star Wars event.  They had a band playing the score from the movies, props from the sets, and art projects.  Some kids came in costume.  (Our family phoned it in with Star Wars t-shirts.  By which I mean the Wolvog and I wore Star Wars t-shirts, and the ChickieNob and Josh said, “so, you’re going to wear that?”)

The crowning moment of the event was the parade of characters.  Unfortunately they skipped over providing ANY FEMALE CHARACTER despite the fact that probably 1/3rd of the crowd were girls.  We got a soft-spoken Obi Wan, some storm troopers, and various other minor characters.

Obi Wan mentioned that they were all members of a group who dress up and attend charity events or help out non-profits, or simply dress up and enjoy each other’s Star Wars company.  He then mentioned that the regional group has thousands of members, not to mention the fact that they are a drop in the bucket of the overall membership to the organization.  Across America, there are people slipping into Princess Leia’s white gown or Darth Vader’s heavy-breather mask AS YOU READ THIS.

This blew my mind for some reason.

I’m not sure I love Star Wars enough to hang out and chat about the Force with others, but I could think of plenty of well-loved movies or books I’d dedicate my time to recreating with costumes and accents and such.

I could see myself as a random Harry Potter character.  Or playacting as the member of a band (though I guess that’s a little bit what that Rock Band game is… right?).  And if there was ever a group of people dressing up and playing The Phantom Tollbooth, I’d slip myself into a big furry Tock costume.

What group would you join if it existed?

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I watch a lot of YouTube while I’m supposed to be writing.  In my defense, I write very quickly and I’m fairly prodigious in the amount of pages I churn out, therefore, I don’t feel badly that I use roughly half my writing time watching YouTube and surfing the Web.  I chalk it all up as idea-casting.

My favourite thing to watch beyond music videos and footage from old concerts is television clips — either things I remember or things I missed the first time around.  As of late, I’ve been on a comedian kick, my two favourites being Andy Kaufman and Gilda Radner.

I’m not sure how much either of them identified as Jewish in daily life, but it fills me with such nachas that I can list them as Jewish comedians.  There are a lot of Jewish comedians; a lot of Jewish writers and performers and actors.  And I don’t feel extreme pride over all of them.  For instance, it has never stirred me emotionally that Jerry Seinfeld is a member of the tribe.  I like his work and I’ve gone to see his stand-up routine, but it makes no difference to me whether he’s Jewish.

There is no rhyme or reason as to whether I feel that pride that we’re in the same group.  Gilda Radner, yes.  Andy Kaufman, yes.  Judd Apatow, no.  Eugene Levy, yes.  Jerry Seinfeld, no.  Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer, yes. (Sorry, Jorma Taccone, that we can’t claim you.)

The words are bleeped out, but I’m fairly certain that this isn’t the best thing to watch at work. But when you get home…

This, on the other hand, totally acceptable for the workplace.  Even if you don’t work in your living room like me.

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Sometimes I sit and think about all the names I’m never going to get to use.  I know most people have more names that they love than they could possibly have children — that isn’t unique.  But they also probably don’t give it as much thought as I do — and I chalk that up to the brick wall between myself and procreation.

If you are involved at all in NaBloPoMo, Eden Kennedy’s brain-child that involves posting daily for an entire month (a bloggy response to NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month where you commit to writing a novel in the month of November), you know the news… I’m running it now.

NaBloPoMo merged with BlogHer, and BlogHer hired me to run it.  Apparently, being the most anal person on earth with colour-coded systems for everything in my life pays off every once in a while.  So I will now be organizing NaBloPoMo for BlogHer, and still running IComLeavWe (the commenting response to NaNoWriMo) for myself, and using my tremendous organizational powers for good instead of evil.

Because can you imagine the amount of evil I am capable of doing with this paper-filing brain?

It has sort of been a wonderful end of the week after the announcement because all these bloggers I knew from years past crawled out of the woodwork to reconnect.  They had closed one blog and opened a new one and were now living life, doing NaBloPoMo, and when they saw my name they thought — oh! the ALI community.  It felt like the email equivalent to Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne.”  Except there was no snow falling because it wasn’t Christmas Eve.  It was more like the end of March.  So there was rain.

NaBloPoMo is also a good fit because it is now the receptacle of my daily, unending string of questions, which have now been shunted into daily writing prompts.  One of which I will offer each week in Roundup to entice you to one day commit to doing NaBloPoMo.  I’m calling it ComOnNaPro (Comment on NaBloPoMo Prompt) — a chance to test in a comment if you have the brain power to do a full month of NaBloPoMo.

So, to sum up, I’m the new face of NaBloPoMo.  I will continue to do good instead of evil with my incredible, Rolodex-like brain.  I will sometimes suggest a double helping of writing and commenting by begging you to give NaBloPoMo and IComLeavWe a chance at the very same time.  I need to grow at least five inches rather quickly so I can fill Eden Kennedy’s cool-ass shoes.

Josh wanted me to do an April Fools Day Roundup linking all the blog posts listed below to porn.  And I told him I wouldn’t.  Not because I love you and respect you, but because I hate April Fools Day.

After I wrote that paragraph, I read it aloud to Josh who commented that it made him sound like he knew anything about Internet porn.  In actuality as I write this, Josh is reading War and Peace on his blackberry. (His goal was to read the longest free book he could find on the smallest Kindle screen.)

I’m not sure I just elevated your opinion of Josh with that last thought.

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I’m just going to be honest here: I fucked up this entire week.  I didn’t get anything accomplished that I wanted to get accomplished.  The house is a wreck — piles of random papers on the kitchen table, toys across the living room floor, unfolded laundry.  I’m phoning it all in at the moment.  ChickieNob asked me if I wanted them to clean up the living room and I said, “nah.”  What sort of person tells other people not to clean up their clutter?

I didn’t practice guitar enough.  I got frustrated with the song I was working on and pretty much quit because it was making me feel like a loser.  I’m sure I’ll regret that action at my next guitar lesson.  I ate like shit when I ate at all.  I ate french fries for dinner one night.  I meant to make a protein with them, but I didn’t.  My email inbox is overflowing.  I didn’t replace guitar practice, cooking, or returning correspondence with anything amazing.  I couldn’t really tell you where this week went.

I don’t even know why I told you all of that except that it simply felt good to unload it.

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Most people know of my fear of mayonnaise — it is even part of my BlogHer profile because it felt like it was pretty much the most important thing someone should know about me.

Yesterday, I encountered a post on BlogHer about mayonnaise and I had to tweet about it.  So I closed my eyes and thought about England (isn’t that what you’re supposed to do during situations such as LH-surge sex and tweeting about mayo?) and wrote it.  And Lori saw and came back with this:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/LavLuz/status/53629223776169985″]

Could not stop laughing.

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Instead of the Weekly What If: what food item would you banish from this earth if given the power?

You might think I’d say mayo, but I’d actually choose chocolate-covered crickets because that would rid the world of crickets too.

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And now, the blogs…

Stumbling Gracefully has an interesting post about aging that gave a lot of food for thought.  In the first part of our life, we work towards all of these goals, and in the second part of life, we simply… well… live those goals.  It’s the ever after — whether it is happily or not.  And it’s her explanation at the end of how to relive the roller coaster or the forging of new roads (of creating your own new goals) that resonated with me.

Life of the Barely Sane has a post about open adoption and medical records.  About seeing your child ill and not having the answers to questions asked, and how that feels.  It is a post simply about the importance of knowledge — not just because it gives us information that can push us towards a solution, but because information can also make us feel settled.  And sometimes that is equally important — to know answers to yourself or to be able to provide them to a child.

CD1 Again has a post about defining family and a conversation she has with her step-daughter.  She explains that she needs to convey: “I’m her step-mom and I don’t want to take her mother’s place when she’s with us. I’m her friend, one of her parents, and someone who loves her very much. But at the same time, I have to make her understand that I would love to have been her mom, lest I make her think I don’t love her like a mom.”  I think what struck me is this idea of — within any relationship — wanting more.  I have certainly felt it as well as what she writes about how these relationships knock at the tender spot in an infertile woman’s heart.  It’s a post worth reading and thinking about.

Lastly, Empty Whole records the a-ha moments that took her out of mourning the end of the cycle.  The first is really interesting especially in regards to risk and what odds we would need to lay out that money on a cycle (vs. taking it to Vegas!).  But the second one just made me smile since I also read those signs and often hope they’ll somehow provide the answers I need.  And the one she passed is a damn good reminder.

The roundup to the Roundup: No April Fools joke here.  I really wasted this week.  I can’t believe I had to tweet about mayonnaise.  Answer the Weekly What If.  And lots of great posts to read.