Internet Valhalla

Most viking burials were similar in bent to modern burial practice (1). People were buried or cremated in normal clothes or buried with personal effects of importance. The more spectacular burials - the flaming boat rides - were likely reserved for important figures in a tribe.

I have taken many of the entities I followed on social media, set them adrift in a faering, and ignited their path towards Internet Valhalla. It’s not that they do not have value, they just no longer serve a purpose for me. Thus the respectful metaphor…. while still offering the opportunity to light them on fire,

Metaphorically.

Building the Boat

These words from today’s exercise in The Focus Course were a boon for motivation:

Attention is earned, not owed. Just because you were interested at first doesn’t mean you have to pretend to be interested forever. Your priorities change, your interest changes, your availability changes.

I had, in fact, just yesterday asked myself why I was following some people who are negative nigh constantly. Did I really want or need that negativity in my life?

Despite the answer being seemingly obvious, there was an internal swell (2) of resistance in which my brain offered many reasons why I was awful for wanting un-follow anyone, even businesses (3).

Placing the oars

It’s a curious thing how difficult it is to do something like this. Remember LiveJournal? When I first started blogging in 2001, it wasn’t easily possible to know if and when a person stopped following you. LJ gave you a list of followers and you could, I supposem check it every day. Or there were tools, sure, but the default state kept us blind to it. And I think it was better for it. I have my reasons for following and unfollowing who I please. As do you and, really, it isn’t any of my business to understand the why’s and wherefore’s 4) for your decision. You don’t owe me your attention any more than I owe you yours.

Shoving the boat off

So, that was satisfying in the end. Doubly so because it this further reinforces current efforts to reduce distraction on my phone. With even less content, good or otherwise, I have fewer reasons to check.

And. And this is something I did not expect to click along with removing distraction from my life:

My desire to create better things in the world increases every time I remove distraction.

And perhaps this is the key, dear reader, to my point.

A Flood of Creativity

The way we forestall our own drifting to internet Valhalla is by making things that are useful and good for people. What is useful and Good can differ radically person to person and that is both OK and desirable.

What draws me to you and you to me is the thing that make us unique; our perspectives, or interactions, our interpretation of the world is as varied as we. The intersection of creativity and humanity is the avatar for experience. If we can discover what that is for us and present in a positive way, we cannot help but flood the world with good things.

This is to say that both the Focus Course, reducing distraction, and my stepping away from a project that had been, at best, a bog of frustration, has done wonders for me.

It’s all been going just swimmingly since. (5)

1. Minus embalming. How typically human is modern burial? We put our bodies to decompose in a box that stops our decomposition from actually return our bodies back to the natural order. Humans: too important to feed a tree. ↩︎

2. Swell, get it? ↩︎

3. Aren’t businesses people too? ↩︎

4. Those words mean the same thing. ↩︎

5. Were there enough water-related puns in this entry? I’m just trawling for your approval. ↩︎

Controlling Distraction

If you can’t rely on yourself, upon whom can you rely?

Committing to little changes, day to day, is exactly how you build personal integrity. You teach yourself that, yeah, you can do the things you intend to do, accomplish the projects you build for yourself. And getting to the point where you know implicitly that you have the capacity for these things is a long journey.

The first task in the Focus Course is to give something up for the duration of it. It has two-fold intention: 1. Take the time gained by giving something up to do the course. 2. Building trust in yourself that you can meet personal commitments.

It’s the baby-steps to ensuring you complete the course and start to trust yourself.

Reducing Distraction

I’ve chosen to reduce distraction in my life. I have pretty serious organizational requirements for my phone home screen. The apps on the home screen are the ones I use every day and need to be immediately in reach. Everything else I access via search and should, for the most part, be things I don’t use too much lest I get annoyed with the extra steps required to access them (unlock phone> pull down home screen> enter search text> tap on up> instead of unlock phone> tap app).

Here is my home screen before (left) and after (right) reorganization. for the Focus Course.

   <img src="_Blog+-+controlling+distraction+1.PNG" alt=" Before ">  Before  




   <img src="_img.png" alt=" After ">  After  

It was pretty tight to start, in that I try to be clutter-free with my devices, but my home screen included two of the most distracting apps (two that I thoroughly enjoy) easily to accessible - Twitter and Instagram. Now, I have moved them to the Distraction folder and “promoted” Omnifocus (1) to the dock, re-added Vesper (2) and Reeder (3) to the home screen, and created workflows (the black custom icons) to do things I do everyday with my phone faster.

But how will you tweet (4)?

I am not abstaining from Twitter and Instagram; rather, I want access to them to be more deliberate. Before, when I had any idle moment or just pulled out my phone to do something, I’d end up checking either for updates, umping into Facebook soon after, and losing a few minutes to them (at best); or, at worst, bouncing between them for more than a few minutes in some sort of brain-dead social zombie app shuffle that ended with me forcibly shaking myself out of the daze.

In the grand scheme, not so bad; I mean, I still get work done on time and with good quality. I just want to avoid the idleness cycle that pulls attention into un-useful tasks. If I’m going to “waste” time, I’d rather do it with Reeder where I’m reading and acquiring some new knowledge, than seeing yet another cat photo.

Directing boredom

Boredom isn’t a bad thing. It can be useful to be bored if you handle it directly. And by that I mean, embrace the idle moments with intention If I’m bored, read and article to enrich myself. Or take a sinful moment in a line to let my mind breath between moments.

Really, we spend so much of our lives racing to get stuff done that we don’t need to race through our leaner moments. You’re not missing out.

1. Omnifocus is my GTD app. I switched to it last month and have felt way more in control of my time. I still can’t quite get recurring tasks to work as desired in my perspectives - that they appear every morning and drop when checked. It seems you can’t have a recurring due task that doesn’t always appear because of its due status. ↩︎
   
   
2. Vesper is where I’ve started keeping snippets of poems, journals, anything creative that occurs to me. Like I think of a phrase I like the cadence of so I jot it down for later review or usage. ↩︎
   
   
3. RSS reader. Ostensibly Reeder contains beneficial content, stuff I want to read to learn something or get news. I don’t think anything I read regularly is fluff but I also don’t know how I would define fluff… ↩︎
   
   
4. If you like discussing the manner in which creative people work, you should listen to Cortex. This sentiment occurred in the first few episodes and the way CGP Grey and iMyke talk about work and distraction resonates with me like crazy. ↩︎

Self-immolation

I signed up for Shawn Blanc’s Focus Course this weekend in the hopes of rebuilding my creative self and further help remove me from the cloud of self-doubt and anxiety I have been having in my creativity in the last few months.

THe course is about doing our best creative work, about building space in our lives to make the things we want to make. It’s turning creativity and personal expression into a rewarding routine. It is an encapsulation of many of the things I have been trying to accomplish with varying degrees of success this last year in my Virtue Project, my writing and handwriting routine, my reading note structure… everything I’ve been trying to do daily.

I have been trying to write an extended version of my Virtue Project the last two months and it has been agony. I mean serious gnashing of teeth, self-hatred, and surprising amount of resistance that I just do not understand. Every time I sit down to write, world fills with fire and feel helpless to avoid it.

Sitting down to write is like a come down to the kitchen, light the kitchen table on fire, sit down with my coffee, and sit there while it spreads up my arms and consumes my face. All the discomfort is self-inflicted both in that I sit down to write but force myself to stay there until either I quit in frustration or run out of time before work.

In the best cases, I write a paragraph or two before time runs out. Those few sentences have become a drop-dead fight rather than a joy or even a challenge. And any attempt write something else just fuels it, fuels the resistance.

The resistance has grown to an obsessive smolder; it follows me through the day and distracts me from my job.

“You should be writing.”

“You didn’t even get a sentence out today.”

“What do you know about the topic; who are you to bother writing that?” (1)

I’m shelving the extended writing project for now in the name of personal sanity and, hopefully, as a way to step around the fire blocking any progress forward. It’s about giving myself permission to do other things, to find some joy again, to redefine my routine in the morning away from self-immolation and back towards a comfortable, creative hearth.

4 days in to the decision, and 2 days into the course, and I feel a least a little better. I’m writing this instead of flailing, which is a step in the right direction. And while part of me thinks it is personal failure to set aside a project I feel so strongly about - which I do and in a positive way - it’s more important to allow for personal sanity rather than constantly relighting the pyre.

1. This last one is especially toxic, I’m aware, and I am talking to people about it. ↩︎︎

Whiskey and Airports (Dram and Drag)

Couple of things up front:

1. I swear I write cigar reviews too. I just drink a bunch more whiskey than I smoke cigars.
2. I am writing this under the influence of delayed flights in Detroit airport.

As a Chicagoan, there are a number of things I like about DTW compared to O’Hare. It’s not gargantuan while still serving international flights. The terminals are laid out in two parallel lines joined by the single coolest audio-visual art installation I’ve ever seen. The toilets are clean (1). And I can get acceptable food in about 15 minutes while waiting for fights.

I was delayed today while flying to Boston - I’m heading to do elbow-to-elbow support for end users of my software - for 2.5 hours because of storm systems over the east coast. Personally, I’m ok with delays when the gate attendants are communicative abut the reasons so I have a concrete sense of that delay (2). Today, they were being communicative, so I went sushi and whiskey hunting.

Food in general can be touch and go in an airport, fish especially so. You don’t really know what sort of access places can get with all the security scrutiny of goods coming in and out of the terminals. It’s why, when you find a good place to eat when you have nothing but interstitial time between flights, a good restaurant can be like finding El Dorado. Just made of fish. This, oddly, seems dolly so for a restaurant that stocks good whiskey.

Today I stumbled upon Yamasaki 18 year, one of those mythologized whiskeys known for its general amazingness.

Japanese whiskies (3) hit their renaissance (4) in 2010 when Yamazaki started winning awards. Having had the 14 year before, and found it sweet and smoother than you’d expect for a 14 year, I was excited to see the 18 year. In an airport.

The neatest thing

(see what I did there?) The dram itself is probably the smoothest whisky I’ve ever had, much smoother than Johnnie Walker which is know ’round as the smoothest of whiskies (5). And I think that’s an accomplishment given the advantage blending gives to controlling particular variables in the whisky experience.

Nose

Yamasaki is such a demure drink. It’s so soft on the nose and only aromatic of oak, maybe a little resin (like a violin resin) and kind of that pleasant alcohol nature. If I could choose one word, I’d say, “simple.” Not in a derogatory way; rather in a focused way. It’s not simplistic. Just simple. Pure.

Taste

Oak and oak and more oak and a sweetness somewhere between oranges and nectarines with some of that syrup you get at the bottom of a fruit cup in your elementary school lunch. It’s hardly overpowering in sweetness, but it certainly isn’t backing down on it. It’s just nicely balanced woodiness and sweet notes. It would make an excellent aperitif or dessert whiskey if you’re having a tame fruit tart - thing too sweet because you’d lose the best of the whisky.

It don’t think I’d call it complex. It is smart in its approach in that Yamazaki knows what the whisky can become. If you try the 14 year, you can see the start. It’s a bit more aggressive (insofar as Japanese alcohol is never aggressive) in flavors but has more acrid moments in the middle.

Those are essentially gone with 4 years longer in the cask.

The problem with airports

Buying alcohol in airports is an act of desperation. Usually, and I’m making gross generalizations here, the people drinking in an airport are delayed six ways from Sunday and are applying the best salve they can find to their over-tired wounds. Airport bar know this and charge accordingly. We are, after all, a captive and surly audience. You can expect to pay about $10 for a decent pour of Jameson which, otherwise, would cost you maybe $5 in the average bar.

Yamasaki 18 year? Holy shit. But, like I said: captive audience. I was willing to pay the price…

(And hold on a second where I realize that I am extremely lucky in that I could pay the following for a glass of whisky)

…of $32.

…

I know, right?

Like it was good but probably not that good.

In that, it’s a lot like the Detroit airport. If you’re going to get stuck anywhere, a linear airport terminal which feels vast and open and bright, with its i-have-been-mopped-at-least-once-this-year bathroom floors, it is pretty good.

So relative to my situation, it was a bargain to enjoy something that hugged my tongue in its unabashed oaken flavors and smooth finish while I contemplated by delayed flight to Boston which, after writing this, is still an hour from boarding.

Assuming the weather cooperates. And if it doesn’t? I think I saw a bottle of Jameson Black Barrel around here somewhere.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

1. I mean, as far as public restrooms trafficked by thousands of people in a day really can be.↩︎︎

2. If they’re not talking, I wonder how likely it is to shorten all-of-a-sudden and leave me stranded, mid slow and luxurious sushi meal. Because, really, Sora at DTW is mighty fine sushi for an airport.↩︎︎

3. “E” omitted here because Japan produces whisky in the Scottish style, generally. ↩︎︎

4. Which is weird to write because Japan wasn’t known for whisky until very recently. Yamasaki, owned by Suntory, was the first in the early 1920s. They mostly labored in local fame until 2010-ish when Yamasaki swooped in and started winning top prizes for 3 out of the 4 years following. ↩︎︎

5. Blended whiskies have the advantage of, well, being blended to adjust certain characteristics. It is like booze chemistry. ↩︎︎

Silence, The Sequel

I completed the Round 2 of Silence with only a few observations:

1. I feel like I’ve got it down pretty well. I’ve always been a pretty quiet dude.

2. I was positively loquacious on Friday night when I got to OmegaCon and around friends in a rustic lodge in Nowhere, Wi. I talked myself lightheaded.

I feel like the later should count as a failure but I needed to be around people who get me and have no expectations. I was able to relax and relieve some tension. And that should account for some value beyond following a this virtuous credo I’m attempting.

This may be rationalizing.

Or I’ve well internalized modern expectations for silence? Which is certainly possible though as previously stated, i’ve never been much of a talker. Society values vocal contribution and extraversion, especially in men (1), and dominating a conversation is some ridiculous social trophy (2). But, again, I’ve never been much for that; I like absorbing conversation, or fading into the background in larger, unfamiliar, gatherings.

But, extraversion is the expected mode of operation today, or at least the ideal. So I may well have been virtuous according to modern societal expectation, I do not think extraversion was well regarded in Franklin’s era. At least not like today. Today, to be brash, loud, forthright is to be in charge. To be quiet or reserved is to be passive or defective (3). Modern expectations for Silence or founded upon an extrovert ideal.

From Susan Cain’s Quiet

The Extrovert Ideal has been documented in many studies, though this research has never been grouped under a single name. Talkative people, for example, are rated as smarter, better-looking, more interesting, and more desirable as friends. Velocity of speech counts as well as volume: we rank fast talkers as more competent and likable than slow ones. The same dynamics apply in groups, where research shows that the voluble are considered smarter than the reticent — even though there’s zero correlation between the gift of gab and good ideas.

Regarding the gender differences, in particular I’ll call out from the same book,

Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.

Emphasis mine but I think that’s important.

Anyway. I was acting “properly” according to current standards which is rare for me.

Maybe it’s that I can’t really lose. I’m quiet and I learn. I talk and people listen (4).

1. Arguably, it’s only ok for men to be verbose. Research regularly shows that men talk more in school or in meetings and, if women speak even 30% of the time, are seen to be talkative or bossy. ↩︎

2. In some cases. ↩︎

3. In men. Women, gosh, you’re always supposed to be reserved. Can’t have any opinions or thoughts. What are you, bossy? geez… ↩︎

4. Likely because of my bossbosyy parts. How idiotic is that? ↩︎

Temperance, take 2

My views on Temperance haven’t changed much with tis second round. It is obvious to me why Franklin listed it first in the line of virtues. All things flow from temperance; or, I suppose, all vice flows from intemperance.

The trend I see with my own virtues is that days where any other virtue receives a red dot, Temperance is often the first to fall. To wit, one loses composure, will power or organized thought when drinking and becomes so much more likely to laze about the rest of the evening doing very little of purpose.

Even a single drink, measured before consuming, throws me off my game. I suspect there’s really two reasons for that:

1. A drink signals to my mind that the night is over so I settle in to read or watch television.
2. I don’t eat directly when getting home and often exercise between work and home which enhances the effects.

No. 2 above is restating my previous edicts — don’t drink on an empty stomach which I have been especially bad about following. The most formidable distortion of logic is that I can cook while I’m making dinner. That’s like drinking on a full stomach, right (1)? Add a little inebriation to it and that logic seems like the foundation of a new way of life!

No. 1 is somewhat less insidious on any single day but a string of days becomes a momentum killer. There’s much to do right now - Spring means the war with yard continues (2), I’m trying to research and write these entries, I’ve added (inadvertently?) a new section to this blog (3), and I’m trying to read more this year (4, 5), and maintain some relevance for my business (6) — and ending a day when there’s good light too frequently means these other projects get delayed. It’s both a bad association and a bad habit. I sort of worry that my habit is to have a drink nearly every night because that seems like a lot.

According to recent surveys (summarized above), 30% of all adults abstain completely while another 30% have a drink a week. About 30% have 1 drink a night while 20% of adults have 2 drinks a night (that’s where I tend to fall). The top10% of adults drink 10 drinks a day which is terrifying (7). So, depending on how you slice the numbers, it puts me at above average for American adults, average for typical American Adult drinking patterns, and a light weight for all adult drinkers in America (8).

It’s hard to find numbers for alcohol consumption in Franklin’s America but it wasn’t unheard of to consume a beer or cider, which were closer to 4-6% alcohol, at each meal. It wasn’t until whiskey distillation became popular that Colonial American drinking started to be problematic — the rise on proof affecting American productivity.

So: a new day, same problems. What I’m getting at is the ease of which I fall into intemperate habits which affect all aspects of my life. Clearly, I have not mastered Temperance. I’m fighting against years of… I don’t want to say bad drinking habits… but a lack of attention to them. I’m building awareness and seeing more connections to how intemperance affects everything else.

Habit is stronger than reason.

• George Santayana

However, it will take yet more time to internalize this understanding. Habit is not rational, especially bad habits. To be able to short circuit that habitual takes habituating the inhabitation of your habit. You have to make a new habit to break the old habit. So, asking myself if the drink is “worth it”, a damn tough mental calculus to begin with, it is going to take time for that question to become habit (9)

1. Nope, nope it isn’t. ↩︎
   
   
2. Years of neglect has it overrun but we’ve made really good progress to beat back some of the more invasive species in the last year. ↩︎
   
   
3. Is this how you turn vice into virtue, write about it? Maybe but I enjoy a good dram and drag now and again and making it an intellectual pursuit enriches the whole experience for me. ↩︎
   
   
4. Though I only track what I’m reading or have read, you can find me on Goodreads. I’d like to hit a book a week but I don’t know how to account for the ridiculous amount of research I do for much of my writing. Or the internet articles I read most days (5). ↩︎
   
   
5. Using Goodreads has prompted me to realize how much I read on line. I average about 20-30 articles online a day from various blogs and news sites — places like Daring Fireball, The Pen Addict, Kottke, and other similar sources. Length varies but they tend to be 500 to 1500 words (2-6 pages). I… read a lot. ↩︎
   
   
6. The struggle with Bunny Rope right now is probably a meaningful post on its own…. ↩︎
   
   
7. I read the summary at the Washington Post. which was a review of Paying the Tab: The Costs and Benefits of Alcohol Control (affiliate link), analysis of alcohol control since the 50s. ↩︎
   
   
8. I’m ok with that. Can you imaging drinking two bottles of wine a day? I think I did that once, as in two bottles in one night once, in my 20s and it was pretty awful. But, that is not how addiction works. ↩︎
   
   
9. And this doesn’t even begin to touch the effect mood has on the desire to drink. Had a good day? Have some whiskey! Had a bad day? Have some whiskey! Reward systems and how we apply them is also a whole other thing…. ↩︎