I went to see the ergo people, I’m trying a few different things, including working differently. And I think my hands are getting better. For a while I wasn’t hopeful they would get better which scarred me really bad. There are so many things I want to do with my hands and that I want to say through them. And it’s not that they are really that bad. But I’m 34. There is no reason my hands should be hurting now. So I’m just trying to be preventative and take it easy for a while.

Anyway, for those of you wondering what happened. There it is.

I told him I would forward him the link but now that I get home I feel almost irresponsible doing it. When I forward something I’m saying “I like this” or “I believe in this.” But that isn’t the case here. I think the movie is interesting, but I have doubts about some of it and don’t think it should be viewed without a critical eye. If my friend came back saying “Thank you for showing that to me it really opened my eyes.” I would feel like I misled him.

I tried to forward it with links to a couple sites that attempt to debunk it. But many of those seemed to have their own agendas and again, I couldn’t find the right ones to give a good balanced background.

I’ve been thinking about how we ingest information and what questions we ask. We all try to check the validity against our intuition,

Why forward it at all you might ask? Well he had a talk with someone recently about the 9/11 attacks and had been considering if the government may have been involved. Zeitgeist has a whole section on this. I think this is a useful documentary because it is powerful and seems convincing on it’s own. But if you are questioning and researching, you see the holes. The process of finding the holes in these claims, might help him see the holes in what he was told.

And that is something I am looking forward to people doing more of. Questioning what we hear, and talking about those questions. I think people are going to be doing that more with more information available on the web.

In the end, I’ll send it to him. With a warning that he should be looking deep for holes. I’ll send a couple links along of sites with alternate opinions. Quote 2 or so specific points so he can see a counter with good evidence. Hoping to open up a new fold in the movie while he watches it.

My cousin Fred (above) has been trying to sell his truck. A few weeks into trying to sell it he gets hit at an intersection in Reno. Nobody is hurt or anything. A young black kid gets out of the car. He’s on the way to his brother’s house to pick up his tux for prom that night. His parents show up, they are screaming at him, “I can’t believe you did this, you just got off probation!” He’s begging Fred not to call the cops, he has no insurance. Fred says, I’m sorry man I gotta call the cops you got no insurance.”

The cops come and do their thing. The whole time the parents are yelling at the kid. The kid is freaking out, “What am I gonna do now”. They don’t have another car and the prom is ruined for him.

Finally Fred interrupts them yelling at each other, “Hey! Look, I got a little old beat up Tercel at home. If you want it for the night it’s yours.”

“Really?” the kid says.

“Really?” the Dad says.

“Really.”

A little later the kid rides his bike up to Fred’s house and the Dad drives up. While Fred is showing them the car the Dad says, “Wait, do you even know how to drive stick?” Nope.

So Fred takes him to the parking lot of the grocery store 2 blocks away for a lesson. There’s 2 Postman on a break. They see them going in circles in the lot. Stalling and, KCHun-KchunGing the whole time. They take off probably figuring they don’t want to get hit.

20 minutes later they are back at the house.

Fred’s giving him the car. “Ok, here’s the license, registration, don’t get pulled over”

“Don’t worry I won’t get pulled over. Umm by the way, do I have to bring it back tonight?”

“Yea you gotta bring it back tonight! What, you think you’re going to get lucky?”

“Well, I’m kinda hoping.”

“Ok, i tell you what. If you get lucky, you bring it back tomorrow. If not, you bring it back tonight!”

“Ok no problem.” And the kid is off.

About midnight Fred gets a call. It’s the kid. “Hey man, you remember that shakey shakey thing (if you ever tried to learn stick, you know what this is) well the cops saw me doing that on Virginia Street and they think I’m drunk and stole it. By the way man, I forgot, what’s your name?”

Needless to say, the cops don’t believe his story.

The cops finally called Fred, verified him as the owner, and the kid was on his way. Next morning the kid shows up.

“Hey man, I got lucky.”

[Much rejoicing]

So the kid thanks Fred. Takes a white sheet he had brought for the back seat which is all fucked up. Puts it on his back, and rides his bike home.

No shit.

I’m not sure where to start this. I disappeared for a while. I got overwhelmed. I piled some big dreams on myself, got lost and started to think I’d never get them done. So I pulled away. Stopped writing and stopped reading anything that inspired me. I stopped watching anything that spoke to me. I just didn’t see how I’d ever do what I want to do with that information. I don’t have the time. I don’t have the knowledge. I don’t have the time to gain the knowledge.

So instead of driving myself crazy, getting more and more worked up about the way the world is with no way to do something about it, I just ignored it all. I decided to enjoy life and ignore all that for a bit. I know there are things you can do. Organizations and causes you can join. But most of them don’t satisfy what I want. Most of the places you can help, I think the cause they fight for is a symptom of a larger problem. It’s the larger problem I want to fight.

I got to that place where you see what is “wrong with the world” behind every newspaper article, commercial, tv show, in every segment of the tv show. My brain was bursting with what it saw. Fwiw I think I’m behind most other people in seeing a lot of this. My thoughts sounded like what you might hear from a college freshman being introduced to so many new ideas for the first time. And even though I might be behind, the passion is important. I don’t want to ignore it. I don’t want it to dull. That to me would be the worst crime. So instead of accepting these things when I don’t have the time or skills to try and do something about them, I ignored it. In hopes of saving the passion for when I’m better prepared to do something.

To ignore all that drives me a whole different kind of crazy. But at least it isn’t an impotent crazy. I’m trying to pull myself out of that now and the first step I think is finding a balance in my life between these dreams, my work, and my personal life. My work is fulfilling and I love my life (which is also full). Either of the other 2 could envelop me on it’s own. So making time for doing something of my own is hard.

But the nagging.

I feel I have something I should do. I can’t ignore that and I don’t give up. So how to choose how to balance, that’s my first step. I’m not even very good at balancing work and fun and now I’m adding a 3rd thing on top. But that 3rd is important to me. I think following your dreams is the most important thing. But I need to work. And I’m 34, I want to live life everyday and enjoy whatever youth I have left. But the responsibility to my dreams paralyzes me most nights. What to do?

That’s where I’ve been. There is a way out. I’m not the first person to be in this conundrum and I won’t be the first to find a way out(through). But I will find that way out(through).

First I’ll let myself be inspired again. I think I’m in a place where I can process it again. My fever has died a little in the acceptance that having it only in my mind is not helpful. So it’s not as paralyzing to think about. I want to find a way to process, organize all this info. Maybe in a way that will help more people than just me.

(Jon Brion’s beautiful song from the movie that won’t leave my head.)

After that I read “How the city hurts your brain.” There was bad and good in this. I definitely feel that in cities and try to protect myself from it. I am not usually really outdoorsy but when I am in a city I have more of a longing for nature. I think moving to the Presidio will help balance this. (I’m excited). The other part I thought was really interesting was,

Recent research by scientists at the Santa Fe Institute used a set of complex mathematical algorithms to demonstrate that the very same urban features that trigger lapses in attention and memory — the crowded streets, the crushing density of people — also correlate with measures of innovation, as strangers interact with one another in unpredictable ways. It is the “concentration of social interactions” that is largely responsible for urban creativity, according to the scientists.

When I am stuck on what to write or trying to figure something out, I go for a drive. Seeing the things out there I wouldn’t see staring at a pad and pen trigger my next idea. Sometimes TV does the same. Outside input from this wonderful world we live in shows paths I could never think of on my own.

In appreciation of the life reflected in the images. I wanted to link to this episode of “This I believe.” She reminds me of my Grandpa Buckie who is a western man. And the values that I saw in the words and images from this weekend, I know from him and my Dad.

Enjoy

Reading the posts, editing some and trying to figure out my working style.

They aren’t good enough to post yet. But close. Im realizing i cant be a perfectionist and I’m going to produce a lot of crap for a while. As noted by Ira Glass. I have been holding ideas in my head and not getting them out there because I can’t express them good enough.

But holding them back ensures I will never get them out.

Accepting some crap for a while is progress.

I’m trying writing them and editing them later to get major kinks out.

The process is a work in progress like the words.

As long as the desire is constant.

I’ll see you in a week or less.

:O I would love to be able to do that. Sounds like a damn superpower!

I don’t sleep much, which I don’t mind, and I always had a hard time sleeping. It’s been getting worse lately though and I started taking Tylenol PM about 6 months ago even though I always told myself I would never take any sleep aid. There has been more on my mind than normal, more at work, some projects I want to work on, and just some waking up about life in general that has been keeping my mind spinning at night. Good things but lots to process. The Tylenol is a blessing in some ways since I’m actually sleeping more than normal (about 7 hours a night now).

However, I think forcing my brain to calm down instead of finding a calm with all the new things I’m trying to do is causing the left over thoughts to bubble up still in other ways. The last 2 months or so I notice that I’m carrying around stress in my back and my body which I never ever did before. (I usually don’t even like back rubs because they don’t do anything for me) I’ve been having more bad dreams. Usually dreams about work where shit is due or about my life where things just aren’t right. Also, i seem to be grinding my teeth at night. Grrrrr

It is 12:37am. If I walk away right now, I will still be tossing and turning. Why?
* This here that I’m writing would be another unfinished idea
* I would want to go outside for a minute to smell the fresh air. 5 minutes, 10 minutes. Wont be enough. Why? Because I didn’t go enjoy the day any today and 5 minutes on the steps at the end of the day isn’t enjoying it.
* Maybe a few thoughts to my little booknotes idea I want to work on

Sometimes TV can cover these enough to let me sleep. Sometimes a pill. But those are poor substitutes for the calm that Joe found and he had lots more going on than I do.

So what is that calm? The ability to lay your head back and be happy right where you are. No, not exactly happy. To let go of everything and be comfortable right where you are. None of that other stuff matters enough to think about. Taking 5 more minutes to think about it isn’t important.

I guess that’s what it sounds like to me since I need to be comfortable that I did the best I could that day. So maybe getting to that place for me will mean doing the extra few things to make me comfortable with the day. There is a discipline of pulling off sleep like that in this extreme example of Joe. But for even that to work there is a comfort with the self that is a prerequisite. That is the part that will loosen my back again and unclench my teeth.

Anyway, the point of all this, no more Tylenol PM.

I have been thinking about booknotes a lot. I am reading a couple books that I have to underline things all the time so I can remember what is important but there is so much I want to remember.

Here is my normal process,

* Underline things I find interesting. (pen or pencil)
* color the edge of the page so I can find important pages by looking at the side of the book. (highlighter or marker)

But this system still has the info locked in the book. In college I had a piece of paper that I would make notes on with page #s and that stays with the book. But I am not in college anymore. The paper was handy when I had the assignment of writting a paper on the book. The paper was just notes of things I found interesting. The notes would add up to the single goal of writing a paper. But without the assignment, what I find interesting in the book and the directions I might take it are so varied that writing notes is too big of a task. The lack of a goal engorges the possibilities beyond what seems manageable.

I have often considered using colors on the edge to distinguish types of notes but never found a categorization that fit for anything.

But with either of my processes, whether I only underline, or write notes and keep that with the book, the ideas are still locked in the book.

My brother is the opposite of me. I like a book that is marked, noted-up, and that looks used. My brother sees books as sacred and likes them pristine.

He made a comment recently that “writing is lonely work” There is much about writing that is lonely, but it is researching that we were discussing at that moment. So I started thinking about how true that is. And it is partly because what you find interesting is locked in the book. A collection of underlined passages and notes may form a picture to someone else but you are the best person to make sense of it.

So I’ve been wondering about how to free that information and I’ve got some ideas. We’ll see where they take me.

In 2 days I already setup the most basic entry to let me record booknotes. Most all of this is because off all the things you can do with Drupal by adding the right modules onto it.

As a side benefit of learning these technologies, lots of pieces have fallen into place on my understanding the technology behind Flickr. In learning a little of the Drupal system and interface there are some php and MySQL mentions. Seeing what that does somehow gives me a better understanding of what happens when the pages load on Flickr. It also helps me understand a little more of what the engineers are talking about. Not that I will understand that much of it. But it takes some of the mystery out which is nice.