Christmas has come and gone, and while the dreaded tree is still up, a constant source of stress, having to keep my child from ripping things from its plastic branches, I know that, soon, it will be out of sight for some time coming. It's nothing against the holidays, mind you - it's just one more thing that I need to worry about when I bring my boy upstairs to chill out, eat dinner, watch TV, play, whatever.
Since my last post I've been on an organization quest. Which is to say, I've been questing to find ways to organize, not really getting particularly organized. I'm on the cusp of a breakthrough, though! Really! I am! And just in time, too.
Over the last few months, I've been making efforts to get myself back into school. While there was a lot of bouncing around, meetings, phone calls, so on and so forth, it seems like the path is laid out. I'm scheduled for 4 classes this semester, night-time so when I do find the right job I'll still be able to attend. As much as finding a job is important to me, I don't want to simply apply a band-aid. This is about the long-term, something I usually have trouble planning for.
And it's exciting! To the point where, honestly, it's a bit surreal. In less than a month, I'll be attending my first college class ever. I'll spare you the details as to why I didn't go right out of high school, but, suffice it to say it's better this way. If I had gone then, I would have failed and likely never attempted again. Now that I've matured a little bit (only took me a decade and a half) I feel like I'm ready to tackle anything.
I'm not saying that any of this is going to be easy for me. I'm just saying I don't feel overwhelmed. Except, maybe, by the organization I mentioned earlier.
When I moved back from Florida, it was basically an escape. No real sense of what goes where, just get things in a box and get out of town. I didn't like my time in Florida, and I'm glad to see it behind me. But now I have the issue of not only trying to organize my belongings, but the belongings of my entire family, and this is simply to make things easier for the myriad tasks that are sitting underneath all the detritus.
I've come to accept that my brain prioritizes things differently than many people around me, which is a point of frustration for some - my wife included. I'm terrible at maintaining things at home. Starting new projects, grandiose ideas, creative energy, none of that's a problem. It's the day-to-day, needs-to-be-done tasks that my brain sabotages me on. ENFP, ADD, LOL.
So, I've been searching high and low for some kind of organization system - something that "just works" for people with my mind set. So far, there's no one single system. There's suggestions, tips, guidelines, but no concrete path to how to organize my own thoughts, projects, duties. So, mother of invention arrives again, and I've begun lashing together my own system.
Hopefully I'll report back with some elegant solution that someone out there might be able to use - or, I'll come back with pictures of my "office" looking like it's home to a conspiracy theorist, with red string interconnecting tasks, and pictures of random objects which I've long forgotten the purpose of.
Thursday, December 26, 2013
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
But Is It Canon?
I've had so much desire to create something of late, but I've been keeping myself so busy with this, that and of course the ever-present other that it's been difficult to even let an idea coalesce into a clotted seedling. There's primordial thought floating around, but ideas need time to find purchase. And then I think, how much art there must be that goes unrealized just to keep civilization strung together in the day-to-day. Seeing as humans haven't changed all that much, I imagine some overworked serf with beautiful thoughts that turned to dust with his bones.
But in the grand scheme of things, we wouldn't have the ability to create at all, if all we did was create.
"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance."
A friend of mine asked me why I wrote, and I answered something along the lines of this. I want an abandoned copy of my book to be found at someone's yard sale, and for someone to read it and be happy for reading it. That's it. I don't care particularly when this happens, I just want to shout down the 4th dimension and have it echo somewhere along the line.
Art is a reflection of its time, though, and man, we're going to look silly thousands of years from now. All of the art that speaks to the struggles of humanity and nature will be studied by our descendants, and the thought that will keep crossing in their quantum-computer logic processors that replaced their soft, badly wired brain will be "did these poor folks really think this way? It can't be."
Sci-fi writers and futurists (sci-fi writers who don't write) have been contemplating what the future will think of us since time immemorial. This isn't a new concept. Our ideas, however they're presented, require a certain amount of interpretation that only having lived that particular life can truly realize the meaning of. You put forth an idea that as important to you, and eventually, when you go, your reality will undergo a retcon.
Our particular point of view is not canon.
This isn't to say that art isn't worth creating, unless, of course, your concern is only of getting your message across with crystalline clarity. Going back to the yard sale, where a dog-eared copy of a book of mine is discovered by someone who's never come across my name before, they could walk away happy having read it - but their reasons for being happy could be entirely different than I had intended in the writing. I think I'm OK with that.
But in the grand scheme of things, we wouldn't have the ability to create at all, if all we did was create.
"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance."
A friend of mine asked me why I wrote, and I answered something along the lines of this. I want an abandoned copy of my book to be found at someone's yard sale, and for someone to read it and be happy for reading it. That's it. I don't care particularly when this happens, I just want to shout down the 4th dimension and have it echo somewhere along the line.
Art is a reflection of its time, though, and man, we're going to look silly thousands of years from now. All of the art that speaks to the struggles of humanity and nature will be studied by our descendants, and the thought that will keep crossing in their quantum-computer logic processors that replaced their soft, badly wired brain will be "did these poor folks really think this way? It can't be."
Sci-fi writers and futurists (sci-fi writers who don't write) have been contemplating what the future will think of us since time immemorial. This isn't a new concept. Our ideas, however they're presented, require a certain amount of interpretation that only having lived that particular life can truly realize the meaning of. You put forth an idea that as important to you, and eventually, when you go, your reality will undergo a retcon.
Our particular point of view is not canon.
This isn't to say that art isn't worth creating, unless, of course, your concern is only of getting your message across with crystalline clarity. Going back to the yard sale, where a dog-eared copy of a book of mine is discovered by someone who's never come across my name before, they could walk away happy having read it - but their reasons for being happy could be entirely different than I had intended in the writing. I think I'm OK with that.
Saturday, November 23, 2013
NaNoWriMo? Is that now? Did I miss it?
I was tempted to steal someone else's idea of compiling my cover letters and putting them into NaNoWriMo's wordcount, to see if I wrote a novel's worth of introductions yet, but I feel like that would be cheating. After all, it'd be a very strange autobiography of sorts, wouldn't it?
If I were to do another autobiography, I'd do so by trying to compile my various blog posts from the multitude of different social sites I've been a part of since... well, since social sites have existed, really. It'd still be largely incomprehensible, of course, but it would at least give me an opportunity to save these thoughts from the webrot that seems to be starting to affect older sites. You begin to take for granted that some of your older content will be available online for all time, but sometimes, when you go looking for it, you find that it's been painted over by new code, the old content wiped clean.
The first time this really hit home was when I went looking for an old picture.
It wasn't a particularly nice picture, mind you. It was a random shot of an apartment I had in Florida with a friend of mine. In frame of the picture was a painting by my Great Uncle, a woman in nude, painted in green. That painting was something of a centerpiece of wherever I was living at the time, all the way to my time in New Orleans. But when Katrina was bearing down on the Big Easy, my wife and I thought it best to get out of town. We hastily packed what we could and drove, of all places, to Florida to avoid the hurricane. It was only part-way down the contraflow that I realized that I had left the painting behind.
No traffic allowed back in. Too bad, so sad. The storm probably wouldn't be that bad, though, right? It'll be there when you get back.
And it wasn't that bad! Well, not where we were staying, anyhow. Apparently the damage to our apartment was minimal, and our belongings remained largely intact. However, the landlords of that apartment felt that we weren't returning - which, we weren't, at least not permanently - and quickly curbed what we had left, despite the moratorium on things like that. The Green Lady was gone.
It's my hope that someone loved it, and it's hanging up in their house now, rather than becoming compost. But, there likely wasn't a huge run on art, in the weeks directly after Katrina. But the one thing I did have, I recalled, was a single picture of it, from an old apartment, sitting on Webshots. Maybe I could recreate it somehow - a poor facsimile, but at least something to honor the painting.
No such luck. Webshots had been bought out by another company only weeks before I had attempted to check, and in their buyout they wiped all the old accounts and associated pictures. Webrot had cleaned the slate. My only digital reminder was gone, effectively, forever. Maybe it exists on some hard drive sitting around in storage somewhere, but I've had no luck so far. Now all I can do is remember it.
And so it goes with other sites. I learned recently that one of my favorite social sites, Turntable.fm, is closing come December 2nd. It was a great place to learn about new music, and now they're moving onto a live-streaming venue, despite the success of the site. There are alternatives, of course, but, you've invested time, and in some cases, money to these sites. Digital media isn't supposed to be something you lose forever, not if you have enough backup. But as people move onto leaving their thoughts and memories on websites, it's just as susceptible to damage as anything along the path of a hurricane.
I imagine the ruins of Facebook, broken albums and missing posts, years from now, with no record of them save for the odd screenshot that was passed around after it went viral. And even those are hosted on imgur.
So maybe the answer to webrot, aside from extensive backup, is to gather up what you like, and put it in a book. Add it to your word count while NaNoWriMo's site is still functional.
If I were to do another autobiography, I'd do so by trying to compile my various blog posts from the multitude of different social sites I've been a part of since... well, since social sites have existed, really. It'd still be largely incomprehensible, of course, but it would at least give me an opportunity to save these thoughts from the webrot that seems to be starting to affect older sites. You begin to take for granted that some of your older content will be available online for all time, but sometimes, when you go looking for it, you find that it's been painted over by new code, the old content wiped clean.
The first time this really hit home was when I went looking for an old picture.
It wasn't a particularly nice picture, mind you. It was a random shot of an apartment I had in Florida with a friend of mine. In frame of the picture was a painting by my Great Uncle, a woman in nude, painted in green. That painting was something of a centerpiece of wherever I was living at the time, all the way to my time in New Orleans. But when Katrina was bearing down on the Big Easy, my wife and I thought it best to get out of town. We hastily packed what we could and drove, of all places, to Florida to avoid the hurricane. It was only part-way down the contraflow that I realized that I had left the painting behind.
No traffic allowed back in. Too bad, so sad. The storm probably wouldn't be that bad, though, right? It'll be there when you get back.
And it wasn't that bad! Well, not where we were staying, anyhow. Apparently the damage to our apartment was minimal, and our belongings remained largely intact. However, the landlords of that apartment felt that we weren't returning - which, we weren't, at least not permanently - and quickly curbed what we had left, despite the moratorium on things like that. The Green Lady was gone.
It's my hope that someone loved it, and it's hanging up in their house now, rather than becoming compost. But, there likely wasn't a huge run on art, in the weeks directly after Katrina. But the one thing I did have, I recalled, was a single picture of it, from an old apartment, sitting on Webshots. Maybe I could recreate it somehow - a poor facsimile, but at least something to honor the painting.
No such luck. Webshots had been bought out by another company only weeks before I had attempted to check, and in their buyout they wiped all the old accounts and associated pictures. Webrot had cleaned the slate. My only digital reminder was gone, effectively, forever. Maybe it exists on some hard drive sitting around in storage somewhere, but I've had no luck so far. Now all I can do is remember it.
And so it goes with other sites. I learned recently that one of my favorite social sites, Turntable.fm, is closing come December 2nd. It was a great place to learn about new music, and now they're moving onto a live-streaming venue, despite the success of the site. There are alternatives, of course, but, you've invested time, and in some cases, money to these sites. Digital media isn't supposed to be something you lose forever, not if you have enough backup. But as people move onto leaving their thoughts and memories on websites, it's just as susceptible to damage as anything along the path of a hurricane.
I imagine the ruins of Facebook, broken albums and missing posts, years from now, with no record of them save for the odd screenshot that was passed around after it went viral. And even those are hosted on imgur.
So maybe the answer to webrot, aside from extensive backup, is to gather up what you like, and put it in a book. Add it to your word count while NaNoWriMo's site is still functional.
So They Said I Should Write a Blog
I'm surprised to find that the one wish, the one dream that I have, is that of living alone with my family. It's odd enough that I have a family to speak of, now, meaning that I have children - but the fact that my wife and I, along with our child and child-to-be, live with her mother. However, as the job market seems to take to looking at someone with my strange skill set and lack of formal education with a cynical eye. How could I provide anything to their company? they often ask themselves, in my imagination.
I could list the ways, but I feel that perhaps now is not the best time for a self inventory. At least not in that sense.
My wife and I moved in with her mother and father when her father was sick - stage 4 lung cancer. We moved in to help with this, that and the other, but admittedly, it did help us to save a little money as well. We had a child on the way, a child that her father, regrettably, did not survive to see. We expected to help her family as he was ill, and for a while after he was ill as well. This was never a permanent solution. And yet, we remain.
Florida was not doing well. Layoffs cascaded down the East coast of Florida, taking with it my contract position. A contract position, by the way, which was supposed to move to a permanent one after 6 months. It had been two years when the pink slip finally made it into my hands. I had dodged a few cuts, thanks to the praise of my supervisors. They had insisted that I was a valuable asset and that others would be better to cut first. Still, I couldn't stay out of that particular spotlight forever. I still had the dark mark of "contractor" despite the aforementioned promise of a permanent position.
With so many cuts being made, they effectively sealed off any options to climb up into the company. And when things got bad enough, they cut the rope - the few straggling contractors hanging onto that threadbare thing plummeting into unemployment.
I had some success freelancing, for some time, but sadly the nature of freelancing is not having the authority to make decisions, even if you're effectively left solely responsible for the project at hand. All the advice in the world won't save a project that the owner doesn't want to invest money or time into, and the whole thing disintegrated in time.
I hoped my move back up North would prove an immediate change for work. It did not. However, some help did arrive in an unexpected way. We were doing badly enough to ask for state cash assistance, and as a stipulation of that assistance either my wife or I had to attend a 4-week "course" at a local employment center. The main courses were useful, but only marginally so. It was the optional courses that really proved helpful. Resume writing, cover letters, interview skills, even LinkedIn courses. I went out of my way to absorb as much information as possible.
It was actually the teacher of the LinkedIn class that encouraged me to start up a blog. It just took me some time to put my thoughts together to really put my energy into it. The real catalyst was just how intolerable it's become living with people that aren't my direct family, though. If nothing else, this blog will serve as a means to say things that others in this house don't have the patience to listen to.
My interviews effectively went up 1000% - although they've yet to lead to a job proper, I will say that I have a lot more confidence after attending the career classes, and the fact that employees are now seeking me out to talk to me is a sure sign that a job is coming soon enough. On top of that, I'll be beginning my schooling come January - years later than intended, but, that's not the point. I can brag and boast about my ability to work (which is fantastic, by the way), but if they want to see certification on my resume, so be it - I'll happily provide. Besides, I love to learn. Really, it's a win-win.
So, yes, some frustration exists with my current situation. I don't know if anyone reading this is in the same situation as I am - but, if you are, I'll say this: there's always something to look forward to.
This blog won't be entirely me thinking aloud - well, perhaps I can't make that promise - but it won't be entirely thinking aloud about one particular subject. My mind wanders, and so, too, will the nature of my writing. Feel free to throw ideas my way as to what I might write. You may be very surprised as to my take on the subjects.
I could list the ways, but I feel that perhaps now is not the best time for a self inventory. At least not in that sense.
My wife and I moved in with her mother and father when her father was sick - stage 4 lung cancer. We moved in to help with this, that and the other, but admittedly, it did help us to save a little money as well. We had a child on the way, a child that her father, regrettably, did not survive to see. We expected to help her family as he was ill, and for a while after he was ill as well. This was never a permanent solution. And yet, we remain.
Florida was not doing well. Layoffs cascaded down the East coast of Florida, taking with it my contract position. A contract position, by the way, which was supposed to move to a permanent one after 6 months. It had been two years when the pink slip finally made it into my hands. I had dodged a few cuts, thanks to the praise of my supervisors. They had insisted that I was a valuable asset and that others would be better to cut first. Still, I couldn't stay out of that particular spotlight forever. I still had the dark mark of "contractor" despite the aforementioned promise of a permanent position.
With so many cuts being made, they effectively sealed off any options to climb up into the company. And when things got bad enough, they cut the rope - the few straggling contractors hanging onto that threadbare thing plummeting into unemployment.
I had some success freelancing, for some time, but sadly the nature of freelancing is not having the authority to make decisions, even if you're effectively left solely responsible for the project at hand. All the advice in the world won't save a project that the owner doesn't want to invest money or time into, and the whole thing disintegrated in time.
I hoped my move back up North would prove an immediate change for work. It did not. However, some help did arrive in an unexpected way. We were doing badly enough to ask for state cash assistance, and as a stipulation of that assistance either my wife or I had to attend a 4-week "course" at a local employment center. The main courses were useful, but only marginally so. It was the optional courses that really proved helpful. Resume writing, cover letters, interview skills, even LinkedIn courses. I went out of my way to absorb as much information as possible.
It was actually the teacher of the LinkedIn class that encouraged me to start up a blog. It just took me some time to put my thoughts together to really put my energy into it. The real catalyst was just how intolerable it's become living with people that aren't my direct family, though. If nothing else, this blog will serve as a means to say things that others in this house don't have the patience to listen to.
My interviews effectively went up 1000% - although they've yet to lead to a job proper, I will say that I have a lot more confidence after attending the career classes, and the fact that employees are now seeking me out to talk to me is a sure sign that a job is coming soon enough. On top of that, I'll be beginning my schooling come January - years later than intended, but, that's not the point. I can brag and boast about my ability to work (which is fantastic, by the way), but if they want to see certification on my resume, so be it - I'll happily provide. Besides, I love to learn. Really, it's a win-win.
So, yes, some frustration exists with my current situation. I don't know if anyone reading this is in the same situation as I am - but, if you are, I'll say this: there's always something to look forward to.
This blog won't be entirely me thinking aloud - well, perhaps I can't make that promise - but it won't be entirely thinking aloud about one particular subject. My mind wanders, and so, too, will the nature of my writing. Feel free to throw ideas my way as to what I might write. You may be very surprised as to my take on the subjects.
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