Handy Polymath

Bitching & moaning your way to happiness

About 16 months ago I had A Moment.

Stuck in a meeting in the cube farm, listening to a painful power-point based on the theme of “you should be grateful I’m condescending to teach you lazy slackers how to suck eggs“, I caught a wave of dissociation that differed from the usual brand triggered by too much coffee, Sudafed, and cubicle-based sensory deprivation.

At the time, as I flipped to a fresh page and began listing the things I’d rather be doing, it seemed like yet another stab at distracting myself. Anytime a person occupies a role that doesn’t occupy their mind, that extra capacity has to be channeled elsewhere.

A scrawled list of “things I should be doing instead” hardly merits daydream status, much less distraction or hobby.

Deciding not to be a cog

In retrospect, the panicky burning in my gut should have been a big clue that this wasn’t another hit of anesthesia. Just writing down the things I’d rather be doing and creating felt dangerous. Transgressive. It felt like a last futile gesture against failure.

For some of us, fitting into a box for a paycheck is signing on for Stockholm syndrome; we will absorb the role given to us because that’s the only way to function in it. Having been relegated to being an Office Wife, I found it hard to remember that I had far more to offer. The ambition and drive that had propelled me from early adolescence felt insolent and reckless in this context.

I’d chosen a job based on what I could get, not what I wanted to do or what I needed from work. Desperate to stay in the wrong box, I’d become a whipped cur. Yeah, that stung.

‘Put up or shut up’ means if you take action, you can keep bitching as you work

Most of the time, though, you find you don’t need to carp and moan because it’s a waste of fuel.

The material accomplishments are simply one front of the struggle that I began that day. On the mental front the re-wiring has been deep and ugly, and I’ve pushed through several bad habits of thought and action, some of them with dandelion taproots down into childhood.

My spur to action was being told I was worthless, and listening to the voice inside that shot back, “Oh hell, no.” Against that backdrop, it’s been hard to take most of my standard excuses seriously anymore.

Self-sabotage is so GenX, Heather. Knock it off.

Leaders don’t piss in your cereal. This includes the leadership involved in getting your monkey brain and your lizard brain on-board with the brilliant schemes your fevered human brain cooks up.

I’m learning to be kinder to myself even as I hone and apply my ambition. I’m learning how to accomplish things with help, and in support of others. Both the sovereignty and the openness I’m learning how to inhabit would have scared the bejeebus out of me two years ago.

Wonderful friends, my dear hearts, came to visit this weekend. Alas, Captain Trips also came to call. And so Labor Day weekend featured friends, food, drink, staying up til dawn, soul-baring conversations in the night, and stomach flu rampaging through 6 adults and one preschooler.

I lost a week, there. Fortunately everyone is recovering from the Captain, with myself bringing up the rear in falling ill the last and feeling human only since this morning. After starting the laundry and airing out the house, our home is no longer appalling.

I’ve caught up on chemistry this afternoon, and have algebra lined up for conquer this weekend. I’m now officially a post-bachelor at Wayne. It’s strange getting into the groove of school when I’ve only had a couple labs so far. Online classes are flexible, piecemeal things, and run only on internal momentum. You can fit them into the cracks of your day, but they have less weight in reality and can be shoved aside too easily when distractions mount.

In other news, I finished that damned painting I started in April, which turned out surprisingly well. As I’ve funneled my drive toward detailed organization into pursuing a vocation, I’m able to see how the same precision and control were doing me no favors in the arts. Now that I’m regularly practicing Aggregate Futzing, the next step in the journey is to become adept at the Shitty First Draft.

I’m not good at first drafts because they aren’t defined enough, they aren’t right, they mean doing more work to get them right, and so I end up paralyzed at the beginning for lack of knowing the end. For lack of reassurance that I’m on the right track. This is why artists embrace mind-altering substances. They offer mental lube to slip ideas out into the world half-formed, and a little plausible deniability for any judged lack of merit. It’s a two-fer.

Considering that the ideas I’m wrestling with are novel-sized, and that my own definition of a novel is that it’s a fractal/harmonizing story you can’t keep in your head all at once, that must be unwound onto the page before you can finally grasp it whole, this becomes a problem. These two ideas about the how of writing cancel each other out and leave a sucking riptide of unexpressed stuff in my head without a working vent to reach the outside.

And I know most writing problems are solved by writing, but this is also a matter of rebooting. I’ve finally sacked up to the necessity of culling many thousands of words that I know don’t fit the story and archiving them in a specimen jar somewhere. So today I’ve started a clean new file for all the parts of the story as it is right now in my brain, whether they fit together or not, and let them fight it out in a Shitty First Draft.

I promised someone I love a first chapter by the end of term.

Quality Assurance vs. Quantity Ensurance*

I’ve changed tactics recently with regard to ideas.

I used to ruthlessly vet any idea that dared set foot in my brain, attacking it from several angles and then quarantining it until such time as it developed into something actionable, useful, or robust enough to somehow create itself in spite of me.

I’m trying something different. In my aim to learn the practice and rewards of chronic piecemeal effort (Aggregate Futzing, if you will) as opposed to epic feats of effort (Fits of Conan), I’ve taken a new stance on ideas.

Ideas do not have to prove themselves. They are nascent and modular and can be gathered like shiny things, strung into artless necklaces, kept in a row on a windowsill and white glued into preschooler found art.

*I may have coined that word; ‘ensurance’ meaning the guarantee of a ready supply

Relative Denominations of Effort

Fits of Conan are big bucks to spend. They are rare, wearying, dramatic and I used to think the only headspace in which I could produce anything of use or merit.

In comparison, Aggregate Futzing is almost too cheap to meter. It’s doing one thing, which is no big deal even if you don’t feel like it. It’s moving something to a different room, or finding the right cable, or looking up a parameter and noting it for later. Maybe I do a handful of them, if I get into the mood once I’m there. Mainly it’s the practice of setting myself up for success: what are the barriers that keep me from doing this Big Thing? Okay, let’s clear one or two and call it a day.

Eventually, the way is clear and the Big Thing is easy, and no longer a big thing. Strangely, this method takes less time (both invested time and chronological time) than gathering a head of steam and plowing through in a Fit of Conan.

Spending the Coin of the Realm

Fits of Conan are not bad in themselves. When I was locked into the seasonal cycle of nihilistic winters and could only make hay when the sun shone, being able to compress 12 months of thinking and accomplishment into the months between April and September was a highly adaptive skill. Especially considering that the academic year is the opposite of when my brain worked best.

So we don’t do that anymore, my brain and I. What worked then is no longer so useful now. I discovered Aggregate Futzing as a conscious technique when I didn’t plant a garden last year. Instead, I puttered when I happened to be outside with the kid. I showed her bugs and seeds, let her dig in the dirt, and half-assedly planted a few things in pots. In high summer we ate berries, zucchini, peppers, tomatoes, chives, and I had an urban paradise of potted greenery, in the form of a garden I hadn’t realized I’d planted.

Yes, in my mid-thirties I finally realized that there’s a wide range of places a seed can grow, between a huge tilled bed you get a sunburn digging and a sterile envelope you never get around to opening. For instance, stick it in a pot by the door and water it once in a while as you pass by.

The fact that it seems to work for ideas as well is illustrated by this journal, and the little potted experiments described here.

When You Like Ideas, They Like You Back

A slime mold can navigate a 5″x5″ maze in about 8 hours. This requires patience, slow effort, and the unflagging optimism that all life shares: there is food out there and I will find it. A slime mold is pretty much a big weird roving cell, and yet it solves problems and makes its way in the world. Such is the power of Aggregate Futzing. Such is the power of dropping seeds and smart cells and ideas somewhere nutritious and warm, and letting them develop.

So I’ve got things germinating and cooking, fiascoes and flops and fabulous futures, and I’m noticing something about ideas in general. When they’re accepted, given a little something to work with and not expected to amount to anything, they’re free to play and bump into each other. They make friends. They invite the whole neighborhood over for popsicles and running naked through the sprinklers.

So I find myself with an Etsy store, scribbling lace patterns to prototype, sketching graphics for pen & inks, investigating giclee printers and print on demand companies, learning crochet to implement yet more crafty ideas and writing songs for a novel. And today I wondered if I should maybe send out the first chapter of the other novel, even as I plunge into chapter two. This seems daunting, so I think I’ll write a little on the next things that happen, see if one of my editing circle can take a gander at the beginning, and scope out a few transoms to throw it over.

Walt Whitman wrote, “I contain multitudes.” This would be a pithy beginning for a project chronicling a person’s renaissance, wouldn’t it?

Here’s a better one:

“I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death. “
–Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Today I wore only pajamas. I cleaned up shit, dabbled in domesticity, broke bread with the two people I love the most, made things, and read. I was loved by family, friends, and pets, and am obviously doing justice to my priorities to have found myself here today.

I now swear to keep on keeping on, while taking more time to savor where I am right now, spending less time fearing and dreading the future.

So here I begin, in a conscious moment where I pause and survey the cloud of moments that surround me: past, potential, the trajectories of my loves as they move through their own stories and I play my part.

What you’ll find here:
plans
strategy
tactics
journals of hard work
epiphanies
breakthroughs
discoveries

What you won’t find (too much of) here:
whining
rationalization

I am happy. I will now concentrate on doing more fun stuff, and being more true to myself.