um, hi there…
i have no excuse for not keeping everyone updated on my exploits over the past month, apart, i suppose, from the exploits themselves, which have kept me rather busy.

but that’s pretty lame.

i am writing today from palm beach gardens, FL, where i have spent the holidays with my mother and grandmother, and actually, i don’t have any updates for you beyond that skeletal announcement, sooo… maybe i should skip this part and go with more of a distraction-oriented technique…

is that a new sweater you’re wearing? because the color really suits you. you look ten years younger. i hardly recognize you. in fact, have we met? i think you need to send me your bank account information and the last four digits of your SSN, just so i can be sure you’re really who you say you are… and by the way i’m going to tahiti next week, can i send you a postcard?

:)

(don’t really send anything, grandma…

…but i’ll still send a postcard)

ok so anyway, a year ago i wrote a post describing a potential new end-of-year tradition - the compilation of a playlist; a soundtrack of sorts for the year gone by; a record, as i put it at the time, of “the songs that happened to stand out for me in a given year, be they new discoveries or old favorites that are somehow heard anew.”

i like this idea for lots of reasons, not the least of which that i have always found the compilation of mixes to be hella fun, and it turns out that picking out songs that trigger memories of the key events of the year gone by is a very enjoyable activity with quite a bit of reflective potential, so… good new year’s game! i did it again!

this year, however, i finally abandoned all pretense of ever intending to actually burn the finished product onto CD, and as a result there was no very strong incentive to limit my choices to a number that would fit easily within the memory requirements of antiquity. whether that led to a bloat of laziness or a blossoming of potential i shall leave for you to decide, but, whatever the verdict, if you decide to play along i shall increase your mp3 collection by 44 units, so i hope that there are at least one or two selections that help you kick off the year with a smile.

fwiw, 6 of the songs are actually the movements of one cello suite, so that kind of skews the tally, and in a few cases there are several songs in a row because they have been inseparably fused together in my memory as components of some pastiche of imagery and sound that i heard in my head at one point or another during the year, but have not yet fully discovered how to translate into this shared domain we know as the physical world. that is quite possibly a project for the year ahead, so… stay tuned for volume 3! :)

as it is, i offer you my year in music, 2007, zipped up for less frustrating downloading (but still passively time-intensive… go read someone else’s blog! drink tea!), ordered with one ear to a rough chronology and the other to pacing and flow. whether any of it shines through the cracks of my tinkering or not, i hear a story when i listen to these songs, and i am privileged to have the chance to share that story now with you.

enough words.

January-July.zip
August-December.zip

happy new year.

i am hereby moving my camera into my purse even though it takes up too much room, because keeping it in my backpack clearly doesn’t do enough to ensure that i have it when i want it.

i got back last night from a little trip to palm beach, FL, where my mother is living now and where she was just officially ordained as a unitarian universalist minister after many years of preparation and hard work. the ceremony was a big success, and it was nice to see and hear so many people telling my mom how cool she is, because they are right. :)

congratulations, reverend momma. i am proud of you.

[insert touching photograph here]

it was fun to see both of my parents - my dad flew down for the weekend and i realized that i hadn’t seen him in nearly two years! - and i am going to colorado and then florida again during the holidays, so there will be more time to catch up, which is good.

i also enjoyed seeing the ocean, and floating in it for a little while yesterday morning before we ate lunch and headed to the airport to send me back west. i have been to the pacific ocean a couple of times this year but i swear that the water in florida is warmer and bluer in november than the water in southern california even under the august sun, and the shells on the beach push some buttons that giant seaweed creatures still don’t quite reach, as much as i love them and as much as i learn to appreciate the beauty of rugged, rocky pacific views.

[insert super blue ocean shot here, followed by fun close-up of the broken shell section of the beach where i made little mosaics for a while]

the autumn weather in portland has made me hesitant to make too many rain jokes, lest i reinforce false stereotypes or tempt bad weather sprites to teach me to be careful what i ask for, but last night i flew in to heavy fog and drizzling rain, which continues today, so perhaps winter is starting to stake its claim on the PNW. flying into PDX at night is kind of a ripoff because you can’t see any of the mountains, which are absolutely stunning from the air. i had a window seat on both flights this time, too, and it was fun to fly over cities at night and try to guess where we were. it’s actually quite hard. i started wondering whether, as we enter the age of satellite photography on every desktop, a new dimension of urban planning will emerge to play with how we look from above.

so now i’m back, WAY behind on nanowrimo, and confronting the task of gathering and/or redistributing my portland material footprint before i head out for a while. i am both glad to be here and glad to be in motion. the west coast has set some deep hooks in me over the past eight months, and now i begin the task of determining which lines i want to sever and which i want to continue to play out, no matter which ocean i swim in next.

tonight lauren and tif celebrate their november birthdays and some time in the next day or so victor returns from his bowling and supercomputing convention, at which point he may or may not have energy for portland adventures that will most likely involve neither. and sharon and i are inventing a tofurky dance. and chakra wants me to make a pie. and there may be another boat? and i might be hijacking jonathan’s car?

hello, friday. another cup of coffee, anyone?

every day i go through a little dance with myself in order to find the motivation to work on the things i really want to be doing right now even though i know i should also be spending more time focusing on making money.

i have spent a good bit of time in these past few months sticking my tongue out at the whole “making money” thing, and i think i’ve just about got the nyah, nyah bug out of my system. i can acknowledge that my current patterns are unsustainable (and waiting for an unknown uncle to bequeath me a castle is always best as fallback-plan rather than centerpiece-of-financial-portfolio), and that i don’t seem all that driven to find short-term work in portland for some reason, so i had kind of given myself an end-of-year deadline on deciding whether i am going to stay or move.

in that spirit, and with the “make money” script running as well, the other day i started applying for holiday work around town, but then i realized that i am going to be in florida for nearly a week in november, and i am most likely going back again for christmas, and there is really nothing on my calendar in portland for december other than “become progressively annoyed with the rain.” so…

i made the decision that i really should just give my notice on my apartment, move out at the end of the month, and pursue living arrangements that do not require me to pay rent until such time that i have secured gainful employment.

that decision made me feel good, but there remains a playful “i see your bluff, and i call” twinkle in my eye that the nyah, nyah bug has made difficult to see, and the fact that i am feeling about ready to lay down this hand does not at all mean that i am second guessing my game.

this summer has been very, very, good for me, and i am not so much walking away from the paths i have been teaching myself to walk as i am taking the time to prune and weed the garden that i am learning to plant as i go. that is the dance of finding motivation that began this post. it takes energy each day, but at some point, one message i always come to is “write more,” “write anything,” “write every single day.”

i was remembering this message this morning when kevin says to twitter he says:

WTF am I thinking?? I just signed up for NaNoWriMo. http://www.nanowrimo.org/

and i says right back:

@kmakice WTF are you thinking, indeed?! I’M the one who should do that! In fact this is the first year i’m not too overcommitted. hmmm…

NaNoWriMo, you see, for those of you who have not followed the link yet, is a brilliant project wherein some folks try to get you to commit to writing a novel over the course of the month of November. NaNoWriMo is funspeak for “National Novel Writing Month”, and i realized when i was thinking about it today that the idea is really the same as the idea behind the one hour essay project: use the power of a community of accountability to get people to write stuff they already want to write anyway but usually make excuses about. NaNoWriMo is just on a way bigger scale and has a way better name. but NatEsWriHo doesn’t really roll off the tongue very well, so i think i can be forgiven.

anyway, the actual commitment is to write 50,000 words of fiction between November 1 and November 30, and i have thought about doing it for many years, but i always felt like grad school or work or the fact that i was out of the country and changing where i slept every few days were sufficient excuses to defer. today, however, i woke up saying to myself “you are going to keep working on your own projects for the rest of november” and “write more” so when kevin reminded me about NaNoWriMo and i realized that it was indeed november 1, it kinda felt like the universe could not possibly have hit me on the head with a bigger stick.

so what can i say?
i listened.
i have officially pledged to write myself a novel this month.
and move out.
and keep working on a web project with a friend of mine.
and go to florida for my mother’s ordination.
and enjoy some birthdays and turkey days with the fine, fine folk here in stumptown.
because of all the things that have kept me pulling for a reason to stay for a while, they are the only ones that ever really mattered, and i will miss them deeply and visit whenever i can.

so here’s to friends, freedom, and fifty-thousand fucking words.

because if i write a novel this month i will not even care if pirates ransack all of my possessions and leave me penniless on the plank.
i will do a swan dive and swim across the sea because i will be just that cool.

ahoy.

today i achieved a schedule pattern that i think about a lot but rarely attain:
last night i went to sleep between 10 and 11 pm.
this morning i woke up at about 3:30, did some work, and made breakfast around 6 or 7, stopping to go outside and watch the sun rise.
since then i’ve been puttering around, doing some odd bits and pieces of things, and growing sleepy.
now it’s noonesque, and i’m going to take a nap. possibly for mulitiple hours.
when i wake up, i will have the rest of the afternoon and evening ahead of me, fueled not only by my nap but also by the knowledge of my early productivity, which makes for a nice cushion to ward off grumpiness. i tend to get a lot more done when i’ve already got some things done to get myself started, and getting that boulder rolling reliably is really the crux of all my sleep and motivation experiments.

the basic idea of today’s approach is to get a full night of sleep, but split it into pieces. it usually doesn’t work for long because it’s hard to get in a good-sized nap on a regular basis, and because, once i fall asleep, i have difficulty convincing myself that i should really get up after my first complete sleep cycle, which takes between 4 and 5 hours. i also don’t tend to sleep as much on the whole, which makes getting up progressively more difficult even if i’m not tired because the grog can pull the “you probably need more sleep” card.

i’m not convinced that i really do need more sleep, though, or at least not as long as i have things to keep me busy, which is hopefully most of the time. the idea is modeled upon the way i operate when i’m camping, high, or otherwise really in the zone of some project. when it works otherwise, it is usually by accident, which is what happened this time. i didn’t actually intend to go to bed at 10 or 11. i just lay down because i had a headache and couldn’t really do anything else. i told myself i would rest until my headache went away, and then get up and do more work. my headache went away after a couple of hours, but i kept telling myself i could sleep more. this is not strange for me - after an initial zonkout, i tend to sleep rather lightly and often engage in a lengthy period of “no, not yet… not yet… not yet…” with regard to the question of whether it is time to get up, and one of the greatest joys in my life is answering “no” to that question. there are two different modes of this, however - nap mode and night mode - and nap mode is much easier to break out of because i don’t think i’m supposed to attain a “full night’s sleep” feeling before i get up, and ironically that makes it much easier to relax.

the idea, therefore, is basically to trick myself into always being in nap mode, and it came about because at some point i decided that thinking of time cyclically kind of stresses me out. i do pretty well with “tomorrow is another day” kinds of thoughts at night, and can muster all kinds of resolve about how i will get up early and conquer the world, but when the morning rolls around and i face the other side of the coin (”today is the first day of the rest of your life” and all that) the grog just pipes up with something along the lines of “well, best be rested up then, shouldn’t we?” and i go back to sleep.

i think this comes from an expectation about the kinds of things that make for a successful “day” as unit of time - getting up, eating, exercising, working, doing chores, being social. as if days are these puzzles to solve, and the goal is to break life into the right shapes and sizes so that all the appropriate goals fit within the frame. that’s really intimidating to me for some reason, and apart from that it strikes me as a rather silly illusion. to me, life feels much more like a continuous game of tetris, and the core competency is more about reacting to each piece as it comes and knowing what kind of floor you have to build upon. one day there might be a lot of blocks, the next there might be a run on those little t-shaped jobbies. it is silly to get pissed off when you don’t get the same order you got yesterday, and i’d rather just pause when i’m tired than hit reset at some regular interval just because someone says it’s time for bed.

the REAL insight, of course, is that the difference between pause and reset is all in my head. and the napping approach is kind of like mental training wheels for that lesson.

so welcome to the next layer of my insanity.
if you followed all that, you get a prize.
:)

i’ll write about it again with a bit more effort at coherence if it actually bears fruit this time, eh?

the whole reason to deny rituals and acknowledgement to those on the margins is to keep them marginalized.
denying those same things from ourselves and our friends in the name of solidarity is playing into that game and accepting disempowerment.
i do not believe in keeping people i love from things that renew and inspire them.

this post suffered from draft dodging, so it’s a bit old, but i wanted to finish and post it anyway:

i’ve been engaging in an interesting little political exercise over the past couple of days.

firstly, as a backdrop, i should tell you that david and i are conducting what we call “liberty class” as a part of my unofficial self-administered phD project. we have both become interested in the revival of interest in libertarian thought that seems to be occurring with increasing regularity among the generation that is now coming of professional age, perhaps most prominently in the business philosophy of john mackey, CEO of whole foods, but first really registering on my radar through the journalistic commentary of jonathan rauch.

because of jonathan rauch, actually, i first subscribed to reason magazine a few years ago (fwiw, rauch was very recently interviewed by reason on, in his own words “my philosophy of everything,” and the interview can be found here), and because i talked about articles and ideas from the magazine somewhat often, david picked up the subscription when i left the country for a while, and it became the first shared text for what would evolve into our liberty class.

somewhere in those same past few years, david took a few crosscountry drives and listened to atlas shrugged on tape in the car. i listened to book one (of three) before we took it back to the library, and agreed to read the whole thing eventually so that we could talk about it more, a committment which i finally honored just last week, and about which i intend to write a paper soon. in the meantime, david listened to another book on tape - Libertarianism: A Primer, which is a new book by one of the head honchos at the cato institute that was written to take advantage of the aforementioned revival in interest amongst the new generation. david also started doing things like reading john stuart mill for fun.

so class is in session, eh?

anyway, anyway, anyway, the political exercise in which i have been engaging over the last few days is listening to Libertarianism: A Primer for the liberty class while also watching the youtube/cnn debate that was held last monday night for the current democratic presidential candidates.

commentary on the format of the debate aside (which is a big aside… internet media coverage of this election is going to be a fascinating thing), this has been an interesting experience. i haven’t put much time into thinking about the election yet, and i think that is partly because i don’t really know how my shifting politics will impact my behavior in the upcoming months, and i have been postponing thinking about it all that much.

as a longtime (as longtime as one can be at 28) bleeding heart liberal and proud of it, it’s hard to contemplate association with a political philosophy that many people i respect see as tantamount to treason, or at least as selling out or succumbing to a nice brainwash. it’s hard for a lot of reasons that will take a long time to fully explore, but one of the top reasons has to do with money, and it is money that inspired me to write this post.

i am coming to believe, you see, that the liberal camp does quite a bit of damage by going to such lengths to distance itself from the pursuit of wealth. i agree that there are many important things in life that money cannot buy, and fixating on money as the sole pathway to happiness is silly, but neither of those beliefs imply that money itself is evil, and the idea that caring about profit requires not caring about people is dangerous in its ability to disarm us of the very tools most crucial to our defense.

money is a tool, and like any tool it is wielded most powerfully by those who are not afraid to grasp it with purpose. we could make a statement about the potential danger of sharp blades by refusing to learn how to hold a sword properly and flailing around wildly whenever anyone hands us one as a show of studied ignorance, but we are much more likely to lose fingers that way than if we allow ourselves to grip the handle firmly and learn to gauge the weight and edge for ourselves. perhaps more tragically, however, if we don’t take the time to learn such control, we place ourselves at the mercy of other’s protection in times of danger, and we open ourselves up to being fleeced in the process.

i think this happens a lot with people, myself included, who sometimes wear poor money management as a sort of badge of pride. “oh, i just don’t want to bother worrying about such things” is the ultimate statement of privilege, and we can’t really complain about the concentration of wealth in the hands of conservatives as long as we ourselves refuse to put effort towards the accumulation of our own. if we honestly don’t want to play the money game, that’s fine. i’m going to burning man this month (which operates on a gift economy), and i am quite happy to support models of community where something other than money is the focus of interaction. at the same time, however, i think that money is not an idea that should be tossed aside simply because it is possible (or even probable) for people to use it irresponsibly, and i don’t think that it is fair for us to shame people for their pursuit of wealth and then turn around and tell them that we think they should spend it on things they don’t really value.

bottom line: if we think money can do some good, let’s shut up and work on getting our own; if we really don’t think money is the answer, let’s stop asking for people to give it to us.

anyway, this is turning into quite the rant, and i know i need to take the time to articulate myself more clearly and succinctly. i know, for instance, that there are many liberals who are quite happy to manage their money and do so with aplomb, particularly among the rising tide of my own generation (which is indeed why the increased interest in libertarianism is so intriguing). i also know that this is a rather unintuitive position for me to be honing during a time of voluntary unemployment and self-imposed poverty, and to that argument i can only offer my word that reconciling that conflict is indeed the focus of my current energies, and i’m doing it the best way i see how. so perhaps irate commenters will provide me with the motivation to clarify my positions as i go. :)

in the meantime, i exercise my license to blather about ideas in progress, and i now turn to the actual source of inspiration for this post, which was a comment joe biden makes in the following clip about taxes:

the comment, as i’m sure the title of this post has already revealed, is his father’s quote: “don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget” which is really basically just the flipside of “put your money where your mouth is.”

i started thinking about all of this because my kneejerk reaction to that quote was a kind of snorting noise, driven by an emotional upswell on the order of: “as if Money is the most meaningful reflection of my values!!”, to which the part of me that was also listening to libertarianism: a primer, promptly rebutted: “hold up, who said anything about most. what does your budget reflect if not your values? why does the idea that you should be open about money make you defensive?”

and that really got me started. why do i relinquish the decisions about where my money goes to the goverment anyway?! why don’t i see it as my responsibility to ensure that i am supporting my values in whatever ways i can?! how do i get off telling people that they don’t know how to handle their wealth when i don’t even want to look at how much i spend on candy or beer because i might not like what i see?!

and the clincher revealing the true extent of my current political shift:
what makes me think that supporting my values is anyone’s job but my own?

basically, if i choose to spend money but i’m not certain that my budget reflects my values, how can i honestly say that i know what my values are? wearing a blindfold when we open our pocketbooks because we associate money with depravity and we’d rather be above it is ridiculous and irresponsible, and i just need to grow the hell up.

this led me to two immediate conclusions:

1) the complexity and obscurity of the national budget is a disgrace
2) i should follow senator biden’s advice

so herein begins a monthly experiment in disclosure:

i need to figure out how to wrap in credit card expenses, which are unfortunately rising this month due to aforementioned unemployment. and i’ll try to break down “other” a bit more.

but it’s a start, eh?

we can talk about whether this means i’m turning against taxes later. :)

the project today was to begin to tackle the beast of the question of what i’m doing with myself for the rest of the summer. i haven’t talked much here about the lunchmaking business idea, but i did a one week trial run of making lunches for some folks in the office, and i learned a few good things:

1. i love the idea of getting paid to cook: spending my time figuring out stuff to make and then sharing it with people is fun and rewarding.
2. transportation and scalability are major factors in lunch delivery, and the number of customers i would need to actually profit from the endeavor is higher than i originally estimated.
3. there are a number of travel opportunities in the next few months that are relatively high priorities for me right now, and it would be difficult to both devote myself fully to making lunches and be free to take off as needed to take advantage of said opportunities.

the repercussions of these lessons have been stewing this past week as i hung out with my mom and enjoyed the holiday, and i realized today that i have pretty much decided that, while i may continue to test ways to make food to sell while i’m in town, it is not my first priority for the summer, and if that’s the case, i either need to find another job or just embrace a month or so of continued debt and turn my energies to more important matters.

after exploring some part-time job options and looking at a calendar and playing sudoku with the potential pieces of my schedule (to steal victor’s amusing metaphor), i have tentatively decided to opt for the latter plan.

in other words, this weekend i’m going to try out the idea that i dive fully into travel and my own unpaid work for the next few months, using up my welch allyn cushion, making money where i can with food and whatever else presents itself as i go, possibly accruing a bit more debt, and letting the bits and pieces in the stewpot of my brain marinate a little longer before turning the heat down in order to divert more energy to the pursuit of income.

this might be an unwise decision, but when i’m honest with all the parts of myself that i can’t really sum up here, it feels very much otherwise, so i’m enjoying the chance to pencil in the first few pieces and see how the view opens up as i camp at crater lake this weekend.

here is the skeleton i have sketched out in my thinking today:

july 6 - 8: crater lake - car camping and hiking with friendly meetup folks
july 11: fly to pittsburgh - crash the edge, stay with reed, bum a ride to wv
july 12 - 15: masontown, wv - all good
july 20?: harry potter book party/wake for the unknown victim
july 21 - 22: san francisco - wordcamp
(allow the norcal contingent to compete for my company so as to save travel and enjoy good times? transport to truckee on the 30th?)
july 30 - aug 15: lake tahoe - backpacking the rim trail with christie
(fly to indy from sfo?)
aug 17 - 19: bloomington, in - sugar hill
(fly to sfo from indy, and either portland from sfo or san diego from sjc?)
if portland {
aug 25: portland - sue and michael get married!!
(fly from portland to vegas or san diego?)
}
else aug 20 - 26: san diego
aug 27 - sep 2: black rock city, nv - burning man
(fly ___ to indy? play with the bardzells?)
sep 8: bloomington, in - the 11th annual decadent garden party
(fly from indy to ___, ___ to portland)
sep 10 - oct 2?: breathe. make money. take a sailing class. keep up aikido.
oct 26 - 28: las vegas, nv - vegoose
nov 11 - dec 2?: palm beach gardens, fl - mom’s ordination. holidays. breathe. make money. help mom build up her online presence.
dec 2? - jan 1: coastal oregon? - NYE 2007
2008: portland, take two? new zealand? the ocean? italy? the summer festival circuit?

all those question marks on next year should imply that all those things are still considered very much up in the air, but their ghosts are staking out claims to some of my attention. turning question marks into periods is the point of all that comes before.

one step at a time.

comments? advice? warnings? interest in tagging along?

i get in these moods sometimes where i start thinking about responsibility, and the differences between what we do every day to keep the wheels turning and what we really need to do in order to be good people. i think, for the most part, that a lot of what we think we need to do is a farce, but we do it anyway because it makes us feel on top of things. i think there are a lot of good reasons for this approach, and indeed that one of the inspiring features of the human condition is that we do some rather amazing stuff just because we can.

we also, however, get hung up on a lot of crap and wade through life with a heavy burden of insecurity. we worry about
and i think these worries often get in the way of our ability to answer questions about

sometimes i have a day where i’m just like “you know what? no. i’m just going to sit here and drink a cup of tea. and

it’s a huge luxury to be able to have days like this and not lose my job, run out of food,
but i think that luxury is actually a part of what leads to the reaction. unfair as it may be, i do not live in a world where i can kid myself into thinking that
and that, i think, implies a new sort of responsibility
if i don’t believe that i have to fit into the slots that culture has carved out for me

over the weekend i took some much needed time to start figuring out how to wrap my mind around the question of what next, and in order to do so i sat down with a piece of paper and started making lists. what are my priorities right now? what regular expenses do i know that i have for at least the near future? what potential sources of income do i have that satisfy the latter while still furthering the former? what steps do i need to take to make those sources viable?

this was a very good exercise. i ended up with a couple interesting ideas and have some tangible things to work on, so i’ll talk more about how those things unfold as they move along. right now, though, i want to take a minute to talk about making lists, because it really is one of the most powerful activities i know, and for some reason i realize this a few times a year and yet still never discipline myself to just sit down and do it with any consistency or regularity.

i know it’s obvious but lately i’ve been really struck by the idea that all these things i know would make my life better but still don’t do? like exercising more or eating better or not letting the dishes pile up or drinking more water? it’s not laziness that keeps me from biting the bullet. it’s guilt. for some reason i think that, if i was really built for such endeavors, i would be doing them already. and maybe one day i will just wake up and figure out what’s holding me up and never look back. like it’s a matter of triggering some secret internal switch, rather than admitting that the only switch to flip is the one that makes me devote energy to looking for switches when the lights are already on.

anyway, when it comes to listmaking, a big hurdle for me is that i have grandiose visions. you see, i happen to believe that computers are enabling an evolutionary shift in our ability to classify and manipulate information. i believe that we are on the cusp of being able to think Better, and figuring out what that means and how i can help it along is the reason i meddle in these things we call HCI and design. i know in my gut that listmaking is a part of the picture, and so i find it very difficult to sit down in front of a piece of paper or a computer screen without coming up with a host of ideas that get me really excited but which i have neither the time nor the ability to implement before dinner, which frustrates the meddlesome intermediary step of writing down what i need at the grocery store.

this is incredibly lame, since i will never get to the point where i can build the tools i want until i get over myself and manage my ideas with the tools i have, so i just need to shut up and knuckle down, which is what i told myself this weekend. then the topic came up yesterday as well, when i sat down with the lists i had made and tried to decide where to take them next, and it was in the midst of this thinking, while on a blogroll break, that i tripped over something i have encountered in the past but never given much thought, and that is the world of text-only to-do management.

the to-do market in web 2.0 land is pretty intense. the good folks over at 37 signals offer tadalist, which suffers a bit because in some ways it’s just an attempt to get you to spring for their not-free content management apps, and it kinda shows. more excitingly, there are remember the milk and gubb, both of which have their devotees and each of which has different strengths and weaknesses. and some folks just hack their way through the to-do jungle using various elements of the googlesphere.

but nobody gets it Just Right for goldilocks, so she keeps trying out new chairs…

meanwhile, back in web 1.9, some geeks staunchly defend the practice of keeping their to-do list in a .txt file, and pundits scratch their heads, because how can you have gradients and rounded corners with a freakin’ .txt file?! avert thine eyes!

said pundits sometimes cough uncomfortably, however, when it is mentioned that one person who is not above this approach is marissa mayer, director of consumer products at google, which always makes its way into interviews somewhere. apparently she has sections for each person she deals with and, i don’t know, different projects and stuff, and she sits down every day and figures out what to do based on some sort of magical system that is never really discussed directly. kind of like pagerank! :)

this factoid has always made me go “huh…” without really inspiring me to jump on board. i mean, i can See the advantages of a digital dumping ground to a paper one because i could theoRetically cut and paste and not have to rip out scribble-filled pages, but… that is a world where theory and practice will never meet, folks. it and the world where i could theoRetically go on a 5-mile run before breakfast every day can meet up for martinis and trade wisecracks, and i’ll just keep living here in the land of things i actually care to focus energy upon.

anyway, what i realized today (with more “duh” than “huh”) is that i have been a bit dense. my inner computer geek has been making up for a lot of lost time over the past few years, and i predict that it has still not reached its mature state, but i still sometimes fall prey to the fallacy of forgetting that my power to sic the computer on a given chunk of information is independent from the existence of buttons and dropdown menus. and in this case that means that i forgot just how much one can do with text if one is not afeared of the command line…

so yeah, geek alert #FFFF00 (yellow), k?

gina trapani at lifehacker, who spearheads a little community called todo.txt, builds her system around a plain ‘ol .txt file full of lines like this:

p:blog @home @computer @offline write about list management

where p:____ denotes a project and the “@____”s denote the contexts in which the task might come up, an approach that is in line with the rhetoric of productivity guru david allen, who founded and leads the cult of GTD (Getting Things Done).

GTDisms aside for the moment, you can see the basic idea of a list with tasks and categories, and with a bit of grit this list can be updated directly from the command line like this:

echo '@store @grocery @cooking lemons' >> todo.txt

and knowledge can be intelligently extracted from said list like this:

grep @grocery todo.txt

which spits back the whole line “@store @grocery @cooking lemons”, along with any other lines that have @grocery in them. a bit wonky, but i am nevertheless empowered to fight scurvy with deliciousness, so i might best think twice before turning up my nose at such an offering.

and presto!
you slice it, you dice it, you email it to yourself, you add categories on the fly, and that mess of a .txt file starts to feel “interactive” pretty quick.

there is actually a pre-written script package at todo.txt that makes it so you can just say stuff like:

add @store milk
or
list @store

and also archive and complete items without getting too wacky.

so that’s handy, and with a few basic scripting skills of your own, you are well on the way towards the sort of testing and tweaking that i haven’t been able to find the patience for when it comes to paper or learning to play nice with someone else’s API.

and all while giving the inner geek a little playtime and not relying on someone’s flashy website that might go down because cats are in ur serverz.

i expect that david, as my personal grep evangelist and “what you UI people always seem to forget is that building top-notch UI’s takes energy” foil, will be absolutely ecstatic over this post once he returns from his current mission to decrease international ignorance of the glory of bryce and zion, and to all this i say, work well done, /_\.
:)

but it’s all in the name of expending that energy more efficiently later.
or something…

i know this is all rather rambly, but i think what i’m saying is that i realized, in thinking about all of this, that it is important to grant that it is possible to overlook the experimental value of old skool hackery in the pursuit of the user experience. we design heads get in this place where, just because we wouldn’t be caught dead releasing something into the wild, we think there is nothing to learn from it. in our hurry to put things before the user early and often, we limit the scope of the questions we are able to ask, and in doing this we are in danger of distancing ourselves too much from the creative potential of a good raw geekout.

this is touchy, because i am not at all saying that we should back down from the cause of user-centered design, nor am i saying that all designers need to be computer geeks. i’m just saying that we should remember that the point is to expand the computing family tree, and we don’t do that by severing the roots, or by telling the people who want to climb up a mountain the hard way that they are silly for not taking the new paved trail.

every trail has a different view, after all, and sometimes we have goals other than just getting to the top as quickly as possible.

ok, too much metaphorical meandering.

i’ll read this later and see if it makes any damn sense, and in the meantime, i’ll take a crack at organizing my life from the command line, so that you don’t have to.
;)

i am a rather reflective person by nature, but lately i have been paying even more attention than usual to my behavior in group settings. i think this is because i have become increasingly aware of the level of anxiety that i am prone to carrying around, and i am interested in the ways that it impacts my interpersonal relationships, and in experimenting with ways to shift my behaviors for the better.

if you don’t want to hear me yammer and psychoanalze myself, spare yourself now.

go look at this amusing map of online communities instead.

those of you who remain may or may not know that something i have known about myself for a while is that i can lapse into a rather clingy mode if i’m not careful. it is most common when i am worried about making a good impression, which is annoying, since it tends to sabotage that particular goal rather handily.

which is, of course, it’s self-perpetuating psychological purpose.
isn’t being human fun?

anyway, i become clingy because i am not good at making decisions, which might not make sense at first, but trust me on this one. i developed a habit of deferring decisions in groups because i almost always prefer to follow the prevailing mood rather than risk bickering over little things that mean much less to me than interpersonal harmony, and when there is someone whose favor i am trying to curry this desire is heightened. i hover, trying to decide what the other person wants to do, allowing the conversation to dwell in the land of “oh, i don’t know… what sounds fun to you?” for an interminably long period, and it took a surprisingly long time for me to realize how god-friggin crazy annoying this is. turns out it’s usually considered a feature when our friends have opinions on things, and the most fun happens not when one person leads blindly but when everyone bounds forward with their eyes wide open, letting their quirky energies synthesize to form ideas that could never emerge from one mind alone.

it’s also a helluva lot easier to figure out if you play well with someone if they are willing to lay their cards on the table now and then. it’s a risky concept for our tender egos, but oh so simple if we look it in the face, and it still boggles my mind how hard it is for so many people (me among them but not me alone!) to grasp…

anyway, for the longest time i thought that i truly didn’t care about most decisions, be they group or solo, but at some point i realized that i am actually just very easily crippled by the desire to find The Right Answer and so it rarely seems worth it to bother much with decisions unless they are necessary and unavoidable. if, however, i let go of The Right Answer and instead focus on listening to what the information at my fingertips is best able to recommend at the moment, it turns out that i am actually very good at making decisions. i am a very observant person, and i think well on my feet, so if i trust my instincts and am honest with myself, i come up with a lot of neat things to do and say and think about.

as a special bonus my anxiety level also plummets, leaving me freer to truly consider the options and implications, and thus freer to change my mind, and thus more likely, in the end, to find a choice that makes me happy.

this is a concept that is revolutionizing my life.

to return to the point of my cling potential, though, it is interesting to watch my revolutionary self butt heads with the conservative habitmonger of vulnerability when i find myself in a group where there is someone to whose opinion i am particularly sensitive, for whatever reason. i feel myself bouncing crazily from one extreme to another. i throw out wild ideas. i use lulls in conversation to assess the mood and try to react. i shake my head at myself in the bathroom mirror and take deep breaths. i laugh and say to hell with it all and dive in and collapse and sit back and arch my eyebrows as the mood strikes me.

this process is both exhausting and invigorating, and it leaves me wondering what it’s like to meet me right now.

sometimes i feel like i shouldn’t seek out any long-term relationships for a while because so much is in flux, and there is so much that i am germinating in the window box of my independent self that i want to give things the chance to root a bit more deeply before exposing them to the more tumultuous ecosystem of the wider world.

sometimes, though, i feel like the opposite is true. like this is the best time ever to walk into my life and stay a while. like i have more to offer than ever before, and also more willingness to truly listen. i’m scoping out the land to start a garden, and i need help, and it’s going to be fun.

the truth, of course, is that i should keep my mind and eyes and heart open to whoever and whatever comes my way, and make decisions as they present themselves, and let go of worrying about clinging so that i can be relaxed enough to master a light strong loving touch.

and, all things considered, i actually think i am doing pretty well.

i know it’s always tempting to end discussions like this on an upward note, and i know that sometimes i feel less confident than i do at the moment, but it seems worth putting on the record that, by and large, one of the defining characteristics of this year in my life is that i feel like i’m experiencing a real shift in the level of my game. maybe it’s my saturn returning or maybe it’s just a coincidentally timed convergence of lots of things i have been working on as i crest the ridge of true adulthood.

whatever is to credit or blame, i feel myself making progress, but i also still laugh at myself a whole lot. i still fumble and giggle and squirm even as i become better and better at dancing and opening up and looking the people i meet squarely in the eye with a twinkle and a smile that says “i am ready to both teach and learn.” i still worry that i am missing something, even as every fiber of my experience teaches me that the only way to miss things is to spend your energy looking for what you expect instead of what’s actually there.

i breathe in anxiety and attachment.
i breathe out wonder and embrace.