Tag Archives: productivity

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A Lot of Words About Sleeping and Shit Like That

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I feel like I will go to sleep. I went to sleep after the last post. It was great. Yesterday, I was sitting in the park on my break and I went to sleep there. It was fitful, but at least it was sleep I guess. This morning, Molly woke me up at 7 AM to say she had been awake since 5 AM. I fell asleep again until 7:30, when she woke me up for good. I am very sleepy now and have to be up at 7:30 tomorrow to go to a basketball game with Morgan and some people from work. To play basketball, that is, and then after that to go to work for twelve hours. I have Sunday off, though, and Morgan will be moved out by tomorrow afternoon, so I don’t know what I’ll do about that. Try to go back to regular life, I suppose, unless I get drunk on Saturday night and have to sleep most of Sunday away.

I guess by the time you’ll be reading this though, by the time you do read this, it will be Saturday already, since I’m scheduling posts now because I’m worried that I’m going to miss a day or something or just not feel like it, or really because I was in the mood to write such a long post a few days ago that I wanted to break it up for you, but it turned out not to be that long at all and I already wanted to start writing again by today. I probably won’t have time tomorrow, though, so that will be good.

Anyway I guess I would just delete this whole thing, but I’m trying not to care still.

I guess I’ll take a nap, fuck it. Twenty minutes and then get up and do the dishes. Get the hell out of here. Hit the fucking road, jack.

Last night, the bar manager wasn’t working and life was so stress free. I should do something about it, I guess, tell her off and stop listening to her. Cut her out of my life. Deal with her. I don’t know. Live in the moment. Or just quit my job, I guess, I don’t know. It’s also stressful that a lot of people are leaving my job so I don’t know who is going to cover the shifts that I need off coming up in the summer. But I give people the advice all the time: the less people they have to cover your shift, the less they can afford to fire you if you don’t show up for it. But then I end up feeling to guilty about the whole thing.

I want to get back into my honesty routine and all of that, but this last week helping my little brother out I guess has been fulfilling enough to my inner critic that I’ve let myself just sit around on balconies eating Cadbury eggs and shit like that.

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Clean Something, Clean Anything

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It was the strangest thing, after I got done writing that last post I read three articles about hating on white people and stuff like that, and then I went inside and started washing dishes. Then I did that cleaning project I wanted to do: take shit from under my bed and dust it off and sweep under there and shit like that. I told…what was my wife’s name again? Molly. I told Molly I would do it sometime soon yesterday. So I did it today. Why not?

Anyway I had no intention of doing that shit when I was sitting out there on the balcony. I figured, fuck it, I’ll just write a bunch of shit down. Fuck this day. Waste it.

It was either the coffee or the writing that gave me the energy to start cleaning shit up. Or it was because I went into the living room and Morgan was there talking on the phone and I was going to say something to him but I figured I might as well do the dishes first while he was on the phone and once I started actually moving my life from disorder to order in that way, I had the strength to move forward onto bigger projects.

After I cleaned under my bed and shit, the apartment felt pretty good, less dusty anwyay. I heated up some quiche and I went back out to the balcony. Morgan and I sat there just staring out into the day. It is really nice outside right now. It’s too much too fast though. I miss the spring. It was spring yesterday, but today it will be summer. Who knows if we’ll ever go back to spring because last week it was pretty much late winter.

But we’re always romanticizing something that probably isn’t real. Like the idyllic part of our childhood before we became self-conscious, and other shit like that.

Now I’m laying on the bed, typing more shit. It’s about time to go to work. I guess I have to get dressed and set up the feeders for the cats. What else? I guess that’s really it, although I should start work on Molly’s website, or else apply for a job, and I really should get back on my exercise program before I lose all the gains I was seeing, at least I should do the sit-ups. 

I don’t know if I’ll do any of that. I might just lay here and fall asleep. Fuck it. I have a weird life. Morgan asked me if I would ever get a tattoo. I said I didn’t know. When I was 16, I wanted flames going up my arms from my wrists like the lead singer of Linkin Park. He said that would have been ok. I said yeah but everyone would know that I had gotten that tattoo in the 90’s. 

I thought about it and I probably wouldn’t get a tattoo because who has the time or the money to do something like that. It would be cool to have a tattoo, but the way I live I probably wouldn’t get around to planning something like that. According to my value system it’s frivolous. I try to only do things that aren’t frivolous, at least that’s what I tell myself. And then I sit around on balconies staring off into nothing.

But some people just go around doing things that they want to do. They go to work and they work and then they come home and just do things. But I can’t even think of things that I want to do when I really think about it. Like Molly asked me yesterday, what do you want to do? And I tried to think of an honest answer because most of the time I would never assert myself about some shit like that because I just go along with whatever she wants to do and I couldn’t think of an answer. Besides have sex. Sex and eating, that’s all I do. I like drinking, too, but I like that less and less as it hurts more the next day or the night of, even, when I drink just enough to feel good but not enough to knock me out. I know there are things I want to do, I think, I never thought it was just going somewhere and eating, but maybe it is.

I mean sure I want to go hang out with the girl I was formerly obsessed with, but I don’t even know what I want to do with her, just go dancing I guess or sit on a bed talking, basically anything that seems like it’s leading to sex. Or eating.

But I also like just sitting and talking with people. I like talking with people, especially the girl I was formerly obsessed with. I like playing basketball, too, and writing down dumb shit. I like learning shit, I think I do. Sometimes I even like cleaning, but I don’t know if it’s just because I feel like if I’m cleaning, I’m safe from my inner critic, the one that tells me whatever I’m doing isn’t right, that it would be better if I did something else entirely. And then I do that and it’s the same thing. It’s always something I can’t even do, really, or won’t do, because I’m scared. I should just go around doing things I’m scared of, I guess, is the lesson. I don’t know.

Fuck it, I think I’ll go to sleep.

Blogging, The Process , , , 2 Comments

Milestones Aren’t Literal Rocks, Steven Covey

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Tree Branches on the Sidewalk
A huge tree limb lying on the sidewalk.

This tree branch is fucked up.

There’s this thing where eventually you quit everything. I’m about to quit posting every day. I have good ideas, somewhere, but I can’t get to them because I’m forced to spend five minutes just typing random shit on here.

Five minutes is not really five minutes, though, of course, because how do I write a blog post? I read my most recent posts, I read other people’s posts, I check my stats from every conceivable angle, and by that point it’s time to use the bathroom.

I’m into productivity entertainment, so I often read self-help books in general and organizational books especially and people are always telling you to do the Pomodoro technique, which is working flat out for twenty-five minutes and then resting, and then seeing how many of those you can do a day, and, maddeningly, these things are referred to, unironically, as pomodoros; the semi-colon here means that I have license to do whatever the fuck I want with this sentence since no one knows what a semi-colon actually does, and so on, or some other technique like perhaps the one thing a day technique espoused by minimalists and their hangers-on where you find something that is actually important, something that, if you got it done, you would count the day a success, and you just do that thing, and the other things take care of themselves, and this is related to the days of Steven Covey when people would go around getting paid thousands of dollars to stand on a stage putting sand in a container, and then pebbles, and then large rocks and showing you that it didn’t fit and then they would reverse the order so the big rocks go in first and then the pebbles and magically the sand would just slide around that shit and it would all fit perfectly in the container and they would say, take care of the big things and the small things take care of themselves, and then finally you have some people who say don’t worry about being productive just ‘trust the process’ and all of that well, you know recently I said to myself fuck all of that.

Which is easy to do, people say fuck it all of the time and we never really know what they’re talking about do we except for a general notion of fuck societal norms I’m a rebel I do what I want and shit like that generally but anyways…

Sure, do some technique why not, it’s got to be more effective than long periods of gearing yourself up for something followed by hasty run on sentences.

But guess what, post for the day? Done. I’m out of here. Thanks for reading my blog!

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Three Hours of Typing / Twenty Minutes of Writing

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My new routine is get up, do chores, sit in front of the computer for four hours organizing my notes on Evernote and telling myself I’m doing some deep thinking here.

I just wrote some new stuff for my Trapper John story, and I guess that was twenty minutes out of the time that I spent messing around on my computer. I guess I’m kind of conflicted about this whole thing because on the one hand, I’m having a mental battle against all these ideas about productivity I put together over the years and on the other hand I spend all this time thinking and then when it’s time to go to work I feel like I wasted my time. I guess I should stop trusting my feelings. Twenty minutes on a story I wrote last year is a good thing if I ever actually publish the damn thing.

I want to stop there and say, is publication the goal, or is making a good story the goal? Well, there is no goal, and if you stop to ask what the goal for everything is, you eventually ask until you get back to the beginning of time and you wonder why we’re all really alive anyway, and that question never makes me feel any better. I’m thinking I should base my life on something arbitrary, like money, say, and leave it at that.

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Williamsburg is a hotbed of highly manipulated botanical installations

In that case, yes, publication is the goal. I will make someone else publish this goddamn story somewhere. I don’t care if it’s the most rinkidink-ass shit you never heard of. If you’ve got any suggestions, let me know.

I changed it so there aren’t any cops in the story, just a mob of people that want this John the Trapper guy dead because he’s clearly weird and a guy has mysteriously died. Marley is a necromancer who is worried what the dead guy, Snoops, will be capable of if he comes back from the dead. It’s all based around the scene at the pub with the cat shit bag delivery.

I don’t know what the market is for this kind of story since I understand nothing about markets. I’m going to change that, though, by God, I’m going to become a goddamn master of the markets. I’m going to be a corporate tycoon. I’m going to sail my skyscraper across the nations, making weird valleys and phantasmagorical ridges as I raze the landscape like a giant, vindictive glacier.

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No Fear Without Imagination

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I feel burdened by the strength of my imagination. Whatever I turn it to, it contorts, magnifies or compresses, demonizes or glorifies.

Who was it that convinced me that I would enjoy driving a Ferrari? Who was it that convinced me later that I would be happy being a hobo begging for change and spending it in dive bars with strange and interesting characters? Who was it that made me scared of being attacked on the street at night? And a million other fantasies that I’ve never experienced.

Instead of taking risks and experiencing the rewards, I run through a simulation in my head and decide against it based on what I find there. Which is great because I get to experience all of the psychic pain that I would have if these bad things had happened, but I don’t get any of the rewards.

The only way I really get anything done is to go in blind, to jump without giving myself enough time to imagine the outcome.