Someone I know told me I had given up on this blog.
Probably true. I don't come around here very often, that's for sure.
More and more, I just feel like the truth can't be told. I can't say what I really think and feel; or, if I do say what's actually on my mind, I'd better make sure my commentary is not attached to my real name.
I hold a lot of unpopular opinions on a wide range of topics. I could hurt a lot of feelings among people who know me personally. Past, present, and future employers might not like things I have to say (the Thought Police are all too often corporate rent-a-cops). There is very little room for carelessness. Bridges burn so easily.
There are places on the Internet where you can supposedly go to keep an online diary and really let it all hang out.
And then I read things about how information analysts can identify supposedly anonymous bloggers by mathematically breaking down and analyzing their writing (this of course assumes they have a sample of writing they know for sure belongs to a particular person).
Pretty scary.
Which means that posting to this blog becomes one of those things I just somehow skip over. If I have to water everything down or "code" it, it loses the charge for me somehow. It's not fun anymore.
Still, there's no hurry. Fools rush in and all that.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Friday, January 30, 2009
ch-ch-changes
I've been lax about posting to this blog now that I'm working and playing around mainly on Facebook these days. If I can figure out how to sync this to Facebook, then I may post more often.
I may also make another committment to post on a daily basis, maybe do one post every day for 60 days. Something like that, just to re-establish the habit.
I'm enjoying my new job as a technical writer for a music equipment manufacturer. They recently laid off my boss, so things have been hectic, to say the least. The remaining team (myself and one other writer) are making headway, but we have a lot to sort out.
The Daily Grind
Typically, I get up around 6:00am, shower, and then head to the UW campus to catch my bus to the office, located in the northern Suburb of Bothell, WA. Including walking to and from the bus stop, it takes around an hour to get to and from work.
This means I don't have much time left over for other stuff, like blogging and keeping my guitar chops. And learning new music for the upcoming Tuning the Air season.
On performance nights, I have to take the bus all the way from Bothell to Fremont, including one transfer to the typically crowded and cramped 44 bus that runs along 45ths St. On a bad night, the trip might take 2 hours, so I have to leave work way earlier than I would like.
Unfortunately, the tighter schedule means I've had to cut back drastically on any guitar circle involvement outside of Tuning the Air. No more House Circle, even on the weekends. I've missed House Circle meetings with Curt for several weeks. I need that time to cook, clean, and focus on getting my playing together for Tuning the Air.
And I'm not able to be at Fremont Abbey early for stage setup; I enjoyed that work, so I miss it. I don't necessarily get any satisfaction from walking in and finding the staging already completed. I discovered the setup period worked as a grounding ritual for me before a performance, and I noticed the difference before-and-after difference in the quality of my state.
So, I'm in a radically different period now compared to my period of "golden poverty."
I'm so damn tired
The time crunch from working means I'm also usually sleep-deprived and exhausted by the end of the week. I get about 4-6 hours of sleep every night during the week, and the sleep debt accumulates. By the end of the week, I get either cranky or totally loopy.
I should know better, but I never seem to learn.
On the bright side, I've committed to the goal that I shall not hit the "snooze" button in the morning when I get up. In the last two weeks, today was the only day when I allowed myself to snooze in past the alarm
Now I need to work on committing to my bedtime. The habit of staying up overpowers me most nights.
I'm getting into this idea of waking up in the morning and getting stuff done on the weekends, so I need to do something about the sleep deficit if I want to succeed in that aim.
Getting serious about goals and focus
I've also gotten heavily into working on formalized goals and scheduling for my daily life. I've been working mainly out of The Power of Focus, and I've also joined a weekly "Mastermind Group" with my flophouse-mates AR and CW.
For the Mastermind Group, we get together to talk about our goals, work on formalizing and focusing our aims, and holding each other accountable (in a spirit of goodwill).
It's definitely made a difference, but I have a long way to go in confronting my habits.
And in formalizing my dreams and goals in writing, which is harder than it might sound. The question, again and again, is this: "Can you be more specific?"
It's actually difficult.
A lot of this came about from waking up to the fact that my plan of moving to Seattle, going back to school, and getting a new, improved job had worked. I count it as the first time that I had succeeded at achieving an inner-directed goal.
A lot of it had to do with using Nicholas McConnell's Brain Organizer. I had it all written out in that format, and when I went back and looked at it again recently, I realized I had achieved nearly everything I had written out.
Daily blueprint
Lately, one big new change for me is that I sit down and write out a daily blueprint for the coming week, with a complete schedule for each day. So far, my days more-or-less conform to the outline I set out for myself. I read my blueprint the night before, right before I go to sleep.
Related to this, I had a moment on the bus one day; I was watching some high school kids board the bus, and wondered what it would be like to be in high school at this time. Would it be any different?
Then I suddenly realized that my daily blueprint work, as an inner-directed exercise, felt completely different, and had a different texture from my previous life experience. In high school, for example, I had a daily blueprint, but this structure was provided (and imposed) from outside, by other people.
Even on a Guitar Craft course, someone else gives you the daily plan, and you go look on the bulletin board to see what will be happening for that day.
To sit down and pull a structure for my day from inside of myself is altogether different. It's hard to describe. Maybe it's a difference in commitment, or an altogether different test of your commitment.
You're on the hook to yourself, and you find out what is important to you. You find out where you have resistance. Sometimes the resistance surprises me--why can't I seem to follow through sometimes on something that is important to me?
You find out when you're fooling yourself about your commitment to your own dreams.
Alternatively, it may also reveal when you haven't dug deep enough and built a convincing set of aims and goals for yourself.
In the last few years, I've come around to the notion that a real decision is energized by emotion, not just the logical, cerebral decision that "I should do this."
If your decision is not energized with emotion, the "decision" you've made to do something has no force. One success author I've been reading even claims that the energy of emotion added to a decision or formulation of an aim is all-important; he says the emotional charge invokes something like telepathy or download from the universe itself.
In other words, if your heart isn't in it, it won't work.
This little bromide is as cliche as it gets, but it also holds some truth.
However, it does not answer the question of how to actively work with the heart. It doesn't give you the "technology" for invoking the heart's blessing to a decision.
Consider that a work in progress.
Which "I" gets up in the morning?
I experienced a moment this week when I confronted that fact that one Ian goes to bed, but a completely different Ian wakes up the next day.
Ian #1 has aspirations and goals; he's gung-ho about getting up early and attacking the day, about moving things forward.
Ian #2 would sleep until noon, and he likes to hit the "snooze" button three or four times. He's completely forgotten about Ian #1's goals and aspirations.
So, first off, this work of not hitting snooze is kicking my butt. I usually feel awful in the morning. The transition from sleep to waking state is hideous. My brain does not want to let go of the sleeping state (on the other end, my brain usually doesn't want to let go of my waking state the night before, either).
Once I'm awake, everything is fine, but it seems to take about 15 minutes on average to make the transition complete.
Anyway, I've been writing my weekly goals on a dry erase board and posting it on my dresser near my bed.
On the morning in question, I woke up, hit the "alarm off" button and stumbled around for several moments holding my head and shivering in the cold morning air in my room.
I looked up, saw a bunch of squiggly lines on a white thing near my bed and thought, "What the %$^# is that?!"
For about 30 seconds, I literally had no idea what I was looking at. Ian #2 had completely forgotten all that stuff, had never heard of it, had no idea what that stuff was. Nada. Zilch.
Then it all came back.
To see how completely I had forgotten shocked me.
On the bright side, I suddenly new my goals again in detail. I was reminded and back on the case.
I've always heard it's important to have goals and such written down and visible to you as often as possible, and it's true.
Pondering future blogs
For future posts, I'm considering posting my daily blueprint at the beginning, and then writing the usual stuff below, mainly in reaction to the blueprint. Some people blog their detailed, daily schedule, but I've never had the oomph! to sit down and figure out how to do that. I've discovered I don't naturally think and experience my day in that sort of structure.
Most of my blogs and private journaling is about the experiential content of the day (and my response/reaction to that), but I've completely neglected the container of that experiential content.
By posting my daily blueprint, I can see the container, respond based on how my day "tracked" to that planned shape, mull over the deviations, and respond to any material that comes up in response to this comparison process.
A three-fold process. I'm not sure how this would track to notions of active-passive-reconciling.
Something else to ponder, I guess.
Oh, yeah.
Someone accused me of being "cheesy" when I mentioned my recent goal work. Maybe it is cheesy, but I don't think so. I'm seriously interested in how successful people function, I've met a few by this point, and successful people seem universally to apply some kind of structuring process to their lives. Details may vary, but they're more similar than different
I'm interested in becoming successful at whatever I genuinely want to do. I've gotten a taste here and there of what it could be like, and I want more of that.
So call me cheesy.
Some people just build a prison for themselves. Have they ever actually thought about what they want out of life? Have they ever written it down? Ever?
Maybe life kicks them around because they let it.
In this world, to be oppressed or dealt a bad hand is a real factor some people must struggle with. But can't we find that little space where we have some control and can make some kind of active decision for ourselves?
Sometimes we have choices, and we don't even realize it.
I'm not sure what else to say about it, except to get snarky, and there's no point in going there. Who needs it?
Alright, I'm gonna let this one go for the evening...
I may also make another committment to post on a daily basis, maybe do one post every day for 60 days. Something like that, just to re-establish the habit.
I'm enjoying my new job as a technical writer for a music equipment manufacturer. They recently laid off my boss, so things have been hectic, to say the least. The remaining team (myself and one other writer) are making headway, but we have a lot to sort out.
The Daily Grind
Typically, I get up around 6:00am, shower, and then head to the UW campus to catch my bus to the office, located in the northern Suburb of Bothell, WA. Including walking to and from the bus stop, it takes around an hour to get to and from work.
This means I don't have much time left over for other stuff, like blogging and keeping my guitar chops. And learning new music for the upcoming Tuning the Air season.
On performance nights, I have to take the bus all the way from Bothell to Fremont, including one transfer to the typically crowded and cramped 44 bus that runs along 45ths St. On a bad night, the trip might take 2 hours, so I have to leave work way earlier than I would like.
Unfortunately, the tighter schedule means I've had to cut back drastically on any guitar circle involvement outside of Tuning the Air. No more House Circle, even on the weekends. I've missed House Circle meetings with Curt for several weeks. I need that time to cook, clean, and focus on getting my playing together for Tuning the Air.
And I'm not able to be at Fremont Abbey early for stage setup; I enjoyed that work, so I miss it. I don't necessarily get any satisfaction from walking in and finding the staging already completed. I discovered the setup period worked as a grounding ritual for me before a performance, and I noticed the difference before-and-after difference in the quality of my state.
So, I'm in a radically different period now compared to my period of "golden poverty."
I'm so damn tired
The time crunch from working means I'm also usually sleep-deprived and exhausted by the end of the week. I get about 4-6 hours of sleep every night during the week, and the sleep debt accumulates. By the end of the week, I get either cranky or totally loopy.
I should know better, but I never seem to learn.
On the bright side, I've committed to the goal that I shall not hit the "snooze" button in the morning when I get up. In the last two weeks, today was the only day when I allowed myself to snooze in past the alarm
Now I need to work on committing to my bedtime. The habit of staying up overpowers me most nights.
I'm getting into this idea of waking up in the morning and getting stuff done on the weekends, so I need to do something about the sleep deficit if I want to succeed in that aim.
Getting serious about goals and focus
I've also gotten heavily into working on formalized goals and scheduling for my daily life. I've been working mainly out of The Power of Focus, and I've also joined a weekly "Mastermind Group" with my flophouse-mates AR and CW.
For the Mastermind Group, we get together to talk about our goals, work on formalizing and focusing our aims, and holding each other accountable (in a spirit of goodwill).
It's definitely made a difference, but I have a long way to go in confronting my habits.
And in formalizing my dreams and goals in writing, which is harder than it might sound. The question, again and again, is this: "Can you be more specific?"
It's actually difficult.
A lot of this came about from waking up to the fact that my plan of moving to Seattle, going back to school, and getting a new, improved job had worked. I count it as the first time that I had succeeded at achieving an inner-directed goal.
A lot of it had to do with using Nicholas McConnell's Brain Organizer. I had it all written out in that format, and when I went back and looked at it again recently, I realized I had achieved nearly everything I had written out.
Daily blueprint
Lately, one big new change for me is that I sit down and write out a daily blueprint for the coming week, with a complete schedule for each day. So far, my days more-or-less conform to the outline I set out for myself. I read my blueprint the night before, right before I go to sleep.
Related to this, I had a moment on the bus one day; I was watching some high school kids board the bus, and wondered what it would be like to be in high school at this time. Would it be any different?
Then I suddenly realized that my daily blueprint work, as an inner-directed exercise, felt completely different, and had a different texture from my previous life experience. In high school, for example, I had a daily blueprint, but this structure was provided (and imposed) from outside, by other people.
Even on a Guitar Craft course, someone else gives you the daily plan, and you go look on the bulletin board to see what will be happening for that day.
To sit down and pull a structure for my day from inside of myself is altogether different. It's hard to describe. Maybe it's a difference in commitment, or an altogether different test of your commitment.
You're on the hook to yourself, and you find out what is important to you. You find out where you have resistance. Sometimes the resistance surprises me--why can't I seem to follow through sometimes on something that is important to me?
You find out when you're fooling yourself about your commitment to your own dreams.
Alternatively, it may also reveal when you haven't dug deep enough and built a convincing set of aims and goals for yourself.
In the last few years, I've come around to the notion that a real decision is energized by emotion, not just the logical, cerebral decision that "I should do this."
If your decision is not energized with emotion, the "decision" you've made to do something has no force. One success author I've been reading even claims that the energy of emotion added to a decision or formulation of an aim is all-important; he says the emotional charge invokes something like telepathy or download from the universe itself.
In other words, if your heart isn't in it, it won't work.
This little bromide is as cliche as it gets, but it also holds some truth.
However, it does not answer the question of how to actively work with the heart. It doesn't give you the "technology" for invoking the heart's blessing to a decision.
Consider that a work in progress.
Which "I" gets up in the morning?
I experienced a moment this week when I confronted that fact that one Ian goes to bed, but a completely different Ian wakes up the next day.
Ian #1 has aspirations and goals; he's gung-ho about getting up early and attacking the day, about moving things forward.
Ian #2 would sleep until noon, and he likes to hit the "snooze" button three or four times. He's completely forgotten about Ian #1's goals and aspirations.
So, first off, this work of not hitting snooze is kicking my butt. I usually feel awful in the morning. The transition from sleep to waking state is hideous. My brain does not want to let go of the sleeping state (on the other end, my brain usually doesn't want to let go of my waking state the night before, either).
Once I'm awake, everything is fine, but it seems to take about 15 minutes on average to make the transition complete.
Anyway, I've been writing my weekly goals on a dry erase board and posting it on my dresser near my bed.
On the morning in question, I woke up, hit the "alarm off" button and stumbled around for several moments holding my head and shivering in the cold morning air in my room.
I looked up, saw a bunch of squiggly lines on a white thing near my bed and thought, "What the %$^# is that?!"
For about 30 seconds, I literally had no idea what I was looking at. Ian #2 had completely forgotten all that stuff, had never heard of it, had no idea what that stuff was. Nada. Zilch.
Then it all came back.
To see how completely I had forgotten shocked me.
On the bright side, I suddenly new my goals again in detail. I was reminded and back on the case.
I've always heard it's important to have goals and such written down and visible to you as often as possible, and it's true.
Pondering future blogs
For future posts, I'm considering posting my daily blueprint at the beginning, and then writing the usual stuff below, mainly in reaction to the blueprint. Some people blog their detailed, daily schedule, but I've never had the oomph! to sit down and figure out how to do that. I've discovered I don't naturally think and experience my day in that sort of structure.
Most of my blogs and private journaling is about the experiential content of the day (and my response/reaction to that), but I've completely neglected the container of that experiential content.
By posting my daily blueprint, I can see the container, respond based on how my day "tracked" to that planned shape, mull over the deviations, and respond to any material that comes up in response to this comparison process.
A three-fold process. I'm not sure how this would track to notions of active-passive-reconciling.
Something else to ponder, I guess.
Oh, yeah.
Someone accused me of being "cheesy" when I mentioned my recent goal work. Maybe it is cheesy, but I don't think so. I'm seriously interested in how successful people function, I've met a few by this point, and successful people seem universally to apply some kind of structuring process to their lives. Details may vary, but they're more similar than different
I'm interested in becoming successful at whatever I genuinely want to do. I've gotten a taste here and there of what it could be like, and I want more of that.
So call me cheesy.
Some people just build a prison for themselves. Have they ever actually thought about what they want out of life? Have they ever written it down? Ever?
Maybe life kicks them around because they let it.
In this world, to be oppressed or dealt a bad hand is a real factor some people must struggle with. But can't we find that little space where we have some control and can make some kind of active decision for ourselves?
Sometimes we have choices, and we don't even realize it.
I'm not sure what else to say about it, except to get snarky, and there's no point in going there. Who needs it?
Alright, I'm gonna let this one go for the evening...
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