open letter to roo roo

Amanda's recent post about not being able to write immediately made me think of this meme that I found a long time ago. In May 2008 I started writing this post about not being able to write, and intended to answer all the questions in the meme to get my creative writing juices flowing. And then I never did. Aaaanyways, now I'm posting it without my answers to my good buddy Roo Roo. May my failure as a writer inspire the crap out of you, or somebody. Or nobody. As we say in France, disfruta:

In the interest of "writing" I have spent the past hour at work not working, but rather wandering the internet looking for writing tips. I came across some interesting writing exercises that are supposed to cure writer's block. I guess the idea is similar to warm-up exercises in sports or drawing or music - like playing the scales or stretching the muscles. Some people say the hardest part of writing is coming up with a topic (which is what these exercises address).

I believe the hardest part is starting to write. I guess the exercises also help the writer start to write, because writing about some random topic that doesn't really matter to you is way easier than writing about something you find important. I always feel like the reason I can't write is the fear that I might mess it up. It's easy enough to go back and edit something you've already started, but the thought of starting is sometimes too...weighty, or something.

Anyhow, here's the single solitary writing exercise I found that isn't meant for writers of fiction:

1. Do you outline?

2. Do you write straight through a book, or do you sometimes tackle the chapters out of order?

3. Do you know how a book is going to end when you start it?

4. Where do you write?

5. What do you do when you get writer's block?

6. What size increments do you write in (either in terms of wordcount, or as a percentage of the book as a whole)?

7. How many different drafts did you write for your last project?

8. Do you let anyone read your book while you're working on it, or do you wait until you've completed a draft before letting someone else see it?

9. What do you do to celebrate when you finish a draft?

10. One project at a time, or multiple projects at once?

11. Do your books grow or shrink in revision?

12. Do you have any writing or critique partners?

13. Do you prefer drafting or revising?

14. What are your favorite writing books?

15. Morning writer, evening writer, or doesn't matter?

16. How do you handle reviews?

17. How do you handle rejection?

18. Do you prefer to work on writing by yourself? Or do you prefer collaborating?

19. Able to work on airplanes?

20. Have you ever abandoned a book or an article that you had finished? When? Why?

21. What writing advice do you really believe in?

jingle lyrics contest

I am offering a handsome reward of $10 to anyone who can fill in the blank below. I've already tried to google it with no success. You'd probably have to be a serious Cape Cod radio listener to even know this song, the ubiquitous Zooquarium jingle that plays every 15 minutes from April to Septmeber. Enjoy:

(to the tune of ren and stimpy's "Log" song)

what are we gonna do today?
there's the beach or miniature golf to play
or we could go to the mall (NO!)
are you ready to say
let's all go to the zoo

we can have some fun while we learn about culture
just watch out for the ____ and the turkey vultures!

zooquarium
zooquarium
it just might be more fun than the beach
or anything else
it just might be more fun than the beach

and PS: Zooquarium is nowhere near as much fun as the beach (or anything else)

i'm not an engineer

but I do spend 20 hours a week having my intelligence insulted by engineers, so when I found Cooking for Engineers, I was expecting a useless collection of gross recipes written in a condescending, unintelligible manner. I should rephrase that - I was hoping it would be like that, so I'd have an excuse to call engineers useless, gross, condescending, and unintelligible.

Oh look, I just did it anyways!

But I digress. Cooking for Engineers is actually a super awesome and incredibly super website. Some of the recipes are weird chemical experiments, mock apple pie and the like. But most of the recipes are good, plus there are lots of pictures, plenty of step by step information for the more difficult stuff, and interesting explanations of the science behind cooking and baking phenomena. Check it out next time you're at work - especially if you work with engineers, who may walk by, spot a chart like this, and think you're actually working:

:

Material	Thermal diffusivity
Copper	120 * 10-6 m2/s
Aluminum	100 * 10-6 m2/s
Cast Iron	22 * 10-6 m2/s
Carbon Steel	14 * 10-6 m2/s
Stainless Steel	4.3 * 10-6 m2/s

who knew?

The best thing about this website is that I can spend hours on it at work, and nosy coworkers looking over my shoulder may assume I'm just making some work-related charts and graphs.
Except when I start laughing really really loud.

pumpkin pie contest

since I'm unable to win a pie contest where the participants are "other people," I decided to have a pie contest with myself. I totally won.

this year for Thanksgiving dessert, my mother is making a chocolate-y thing and my aunt is making apple pie. I'm the one who should get to make apple pie, since I've been diligently, painstakingly perfecting my recipe for over two years now. Maybe my family heard about my staggering loss at the annual Halloween apple pie making contest.

Just to recap, last year I was convinced I lost because, unlike some people, I didn't let the Pillsbury dough boy make my crust. This year I lost by an even huger margin, despite using a store-bought crust.

sooooo anyways, i basically suck at making apple pies that people like, yet I decided to try my hand at making pumpkin pie, which I don't even like. (My dad and grandfather like it though). Since I never made it before, I looked at dozens of PP recipes online, confused them all in my brain, then made two different recipes and let The People choose which was better.

PP1 was based loosely on a combination of the recipe from the can of pumpkin and the aforementioned "research." It involved a can of pumpkin, the usual spices and some salt and flour, 3 eggs, 3/4 cup of brown sugar, 2/3 cup of maple syrup, and 1 1/4 cup of half and half. I mixed them all together, poured it into the crust and baked it at 350 for a little over an hour. I had to cover the crust with aluminum foil after about 20 minutes. The middle was a little jiggly when I took it out, so after cooling it on a wire rack, I refrigerated it for about two hours. It came out pretty well, nice and dark, but too sweet for my taste.

PP2, the product of "additional research" plus the recipe from the can of sweetened condensed milk, was a lot more labor-intensive. First I prebaked the crust with foil around the edges. Then I mixed a can of pumpkin, a can of sweetened condensed milk, and the spices - but not the eggs - in a saucepot on the stove and cooked for about 15 minutes. I brought it almost to a boil and then turned off the heat and let it cool and thicken before beating in 2 eggs. I have no idea why I waited to add the eggs, but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. I put it in the crust and baked it at 425 for 15 minutes (with foil already on the edges) and then turned the heat down to 350 for another 40 minutes, and cooled it on a wire rack.

PP2 looked much lighter and the filling was a lot less dense, but the texture was a lot better and more even. I'm sure that was due to cooking the pumpkin before putting it in the oven. It was also a lot less sweet, which I like, but the maple flavor of PP1 was really nice compared to the canned white sugar flavor of sweetened condensed milk. I can't believe modern chemistry hasn't come up with a sweetened condensed maple milk yet. If any Future Homemakers of America are reading this, consider SCMM development and testing as a possible final project. Now stop reading and get back in the kitchen!

so The People's votes were pretty much split down the middle at work today - I think they were just happy to taste pies instead of reducing toxics. So for Thanksgiving, I think I'm going to try a combination of the two recipes, somehow incorporating the mapley deliciousness of PP1 into the fluffy better-cookedness of PP2. And I'll take pictures, because these pies are a gorgeous vision to behold.

i just met my high school self, and it was depressing

lately I've had delusions of grandeur involving me writing a lengthy blog post that encompasses all the stuff that's been going on for the past few weeks. that's not going to happen, and I'm in a hurry to share this gem I just found upon rediscovering my TI-86 (more later on why I've been forced to rediscover it...)

:yO.ANN.YOU.SHOULD.LI
KE.USE.YOUR.BRAIN.MOR
E.AND.YOUR.TI-86.LESS
...AND.THE.ONLY.REASO
N.YOU.BEAT.ME.ON.THE.
COMBINED.SAT.IS.CAUSE
.I.HAD.SOME.IMPORTANT
.SHIT.ON.MY.MIND...

I thought that was just hilarious, for the obvious reason (it's ridiculous) but also because the "use your brain more comment" was painfully true. A good 50% of the time I spent in high school chemistry and math classes was wasted in that manner, writing programs back and forth on graphing calculators. Another 25% was spent playing Tetris on the calculator. And for the final 25% of class time, I would make other programs with all the formulas and definitions that might be on the exam, e.g.:

ph=-log h+
log= -log oh-
H+=antilog(-ph)
ph+poh=14
kw=h+*oh-=1.0*10^-14
pH=pKa+log (bs/ac)

WHAT? I have no idea what ANY of that means. Antilog? Am I on crazy pills here? I feel like I'm on crazy pills here.

In college the TI-86 slept for the first three years, then I busted it out again for the single solitary science class I took to fulfill the gen ed requirements. I should have taken geology or "forensic biology" or one of those other blatantly easy courses that humanities majors took to fulfill the requirement while maintaining GPA. But I had a crappy GPA anyways, and my roommate and I thought it would be FUN to take a mechanical engineering class instead, mainly because it was twice a week in the afternoon, instead of three times a week in the morning like most science classes. We thought this would allow us to continue our debaucherous lifestyle by night while learning cool stuff about airplanes by day. HA. That was among the top five mistakes of my college career, and that's really saying a lot.

Anyways, the class was a disaster, but the subject matter provided a lot of good fodder for immature jokes about "thrust," "yaw" and "skin friction." In the TI-86 I found a ton of haiku we wrote, mostly involving the professor and the TA "inducing drag" on each other, and some junk like this:

:flaps incr camber an
d lift. roll ailerons
pitch tail chg dir
:yaw rudder
:elevator horistab
:vrot is tang to blad

WHAT? All of this was kind of fun to find again after all these years, but in a way it's extreeeemely depressing. I mean, I was writing all this in the calculator so I wouldn't have to actually "learn" it, but I did "know," albeit in the most rudimentary sense, what I was talking about. That's right, there was a time in my life when I had some concept of sine and cosine, and just a few years later I actually understood (kind of) how an airplane stayed in the air. These days, if it weren't for the many chemistry textbooks that live on my staircase, I couldn't even tell you the difference between an acid and a base.

I guess it's all relative, because back then I couldn't have told you how to say "nail polish remover contains acetone" in Spanish. I also didn't know the mortality rate of the Lowell mill girls, or the historical trajectory of computer and electronic component manufacturing employment in Essex County. But do any of those things actually matter?

I'm starting to wonder if maybe I'm spreading myself too thin over the years. Let me put it this way - I started nursery school when I was four years old. I'm now almost 26, which means I've been in school (in some capacity) for 22 consecutive years. Yet by some miracle, I'm still not an expert, or anything close to that, on any one thing. You know, that whole "little of everything and all of nothing" thing? Blech. I've learned and forgotten more information than I can fathom, probably due to the fact that I'm constantly switching gears, or the fact that I have the memory of a goldfish. Either way, the other depressing result of this is that I'm basically unqualified for any job that I might actually want.

(Yes, I have stopped "wanting" my current job.)

green journalism

I heard a story on NPR about greenwashing, the long-time bane of my existence. it almost made me want to start writing some thesis again. but anyways, one of the commentators was talking about "green journalism," and it made me think of this piece I read a long time ago by Jack Shafer, editor at Slate:

Often as sensationalistic as its yellow predecessor, green journalism tends to appeal to our emotions, exploit our fears, and pander to our vanity. It places a political agenda in front of the quest for journalistic truth and in its most demagogic forms tolerates no criticism, branding all who question it as enemies of the people. (read more)

a brief foray into what I learned in grad school

kind of. in lieu of working I've been doing a lot of thinking, due in large part to Ben's recent post about commuting and unhappiness, followed by Amanda's incendiary comment about living in Lowell, and my recent discovery that I'll be living in Lowell for at least another year, if not longer.

so public transportation in Lowell basically sucks. the bus system is completely out of touch with the needs of people who would actually take the bus to get to work and back. the buses don't run often enough that you could take them and get to work on time, so the buses are often pretty empty. since there aren't enough people riding the buses to justify more routes or more frequent trips, the problem is kind of a vicious cycle.

the bus and train station used to be downtown (good) but when they expanded route 3 and the Lowell Connector, they moved the station to a weird location that's right off the highway, but a long walk from downtown. so ironically, the public transportation is now convenient only for people with cars. although I can't prove it, I suspect that a lot of these drivers live in the suburbs and spend their money outside of Lowell.

so the bus sucks, driving sucks (especially my car), there's no subway, and Lowell isn't especially bike-friendly. however, it's pretty easy to walk places in my neighborhood, and even more so downtown. There used to be a supermarket pretty close to my house, but they closed it and opened a shiny new one directly across the street from another supermarket, in a fancy neighborhood. apparently the hannaford brothers felt that maximizing their profits and squashing the competition were more important than my personal hunger. but there are a few convenience and liquor stores, a 24-hour Walgreens, plenty of restaurants, and some other good stuff within a few minutes walk, and another supermarket about a mile and a half away.

on a related note, I found a cool distraction called Walk Score that calculates the "walkability" of your address. you put in your address and it lists grocery stores, schools, parks, bars, libraries, movies, etc. within walking distance of your house, and rates the address on a scale from 0-100. my house got a 48 out of 100, which is better than I thought, but probably due to stuff like the claim that "Christine L. Allum, Independent Herbalife Distributor" is considered a "grocery store."

Walk Score can't tell you that the nearby bar is a super-shady dive, or that the supermarket closed a year ago. also, it seems to calculate distances "as the crow flies" as opposed to how you would actually walk there (you know, on streets and stuff). I MapQuest-ed a store that Walk Score said was 0.66 miles away, and found out it's more like 1.39 miles. anyhoo, I wouldn't use this to scope out potential places to live, knowing the reality of where I live vs. what Walk Score thinks, but it's a really good idea in theory. check it.

roo roo's meme

What were you doing 10 years ago?
I was 15 and had just started working at my very first real (not my dad's store) job. It was a truck stop/diner/bakery on route 20 in Worcester. It was actually kind of cool, in the front we served meatloaf and american chop suey, but in the back they were making these incredibly elaborate wedding cakes. I started off washing dishes and eventually got to wait tables. ah, the beginning of my long and illustrious waitressing career. good times, free food, learning dirty jokes from gnarly truckers. then right before school started, I got fired because the owner's daughter was back from 'maternity leave.'

What were you doing 1 year ago?
It was my first summer off the Cape in 4 years, and it was motherfucking hot in Lowell. I had just inadvertently signed myself up for a world of pain, working two impossible jobs at the same time, yet still managing to accomplish very little. I was at the office for like 9 hours a day, the first three of which I spent on email or the phone with boss #1, trying to coordinate a seminar series that never quite went according to plan. The rest of the day I sat outside writing in a notebook, pretending to work for boss #2 and freaking out because she was coming back from vacation and I had done nothing in weeks, making phone calls and socializing with passersby.

Kelly had just had Croix, so that was pretty exciting. there was a girl from Spain who had just arrived to live at my house for a month. Amanda and I spoke drunken Spanish to her at the Folk Festival. she kind of sucked, but there were way better foreign exchange students to come.

Five snacks you enjoy
1. string cheese
2. granola bars
3. string cheese
4. string cheese
5. string cheese

Five songs that you know all the lyrics to
1. "shoop" - salt n pepa. no self-respecting girl between the ages of 23 and 33 will ever forget a line of that one.
2. "ripple" - grateful dead. same as above, except by "girl" I mean "hippie"
3. "meet me in the morning" - bob dylan
4. "el baile de los que sobran" - Los Prisioneros
5. all of Remain in Light - Talking Heads

Five things you would do if you were a millionaire
1. buy a regular car
2. buy the house I live in right now
3. quit my job
4. go to Morocco
5. do something, uh, philanthropic with the rest

Five bad habits
1. spending money I don't have
2. vanilla kreme donuts
3. chronic, debilitating procrastination
4. constantly indulging my desires to escape (from the house, the office, work, thesis, responsibilities, awkward situations, consciousness, etc.)
5. self-indulgence part II: drinking, smoking, eating and sleeping as much as I want, pretty much all the time

Five things you like doing
1. road trips
2. iced coffee
3. writing
4. frolicking, preferably in nature
5. escaping/eating/drinking/smoking/sleeping

Five things you would never wear again
1. champion sweatshirts over white turtlenecks
2. jelly shoes
3. bodysuits with the snaps
4. blossom hats
5. legwarmers. kidding!

Five favorite toys
1. coffeemaker
2. coozies
3. cell phone
4. the internets
5. my brand new mortar and pestle

deep thoughts

• it's f-ing hot and gross
• it's been pouring rain for 15 minutes
  
• 20 minutes ago I put a bunch of clothes on the clothesline
• I'm sitting at a window from which I can see the clothesline
• again, it's pouring rain
• and it just occurred to me that I should take the clothes down
• they are already soaking wet
• I'm leaving them on the line

• I am sweating over boring power point presentations
  
• I hate work
  
• more than work itself, I hate the fact that I'm spending a Sunday catching up on work that I was supposed to do this week
• even more than that, I hate that I was expected to do this work during 4th of July week
• 4th of July is not allowed to happen on a Wednesday ever again.

• an NPR commentator just called someone a "jackass." whoa.

• I just made some clams stuffed with
• ritz cracker crumbs
• celery
• onions
• chorizo
• white wine
• cholula sauce
• butter
• and clams
• they look delicious, but it's too f-ing hot and gross to eat
  

various internets

I spend a lot of time sitting at a computer pretending to work, but others don't have that luxury. so just in time for Monday morning, I wanted to share with you, the kind taxpayers of the Commonwealth, a few of the things that have been keeping me "busy" while I'm getting paid to reduce toxics. some call it webjunk, I call it a way of life.

• Erowid: a website about drugs, "providing access to reliable, non-judgmental information about psychoactive plants and chemicals and related issues." we're talking all 'psychoactive' drugs, both plant-based and chemical, legal and illegal: alcohol, MDMA, caffeine, morning glory, cannabis, heroin, chocolate, opium, LSD, and all manner of pharmaceuticals. the stories in the experience vaults are pretty f-ing fascinating.

• Gröûp X: thanks to Mr. H for bringing to my attention the best (and probably only) fake Arabic rap group ever. The Mario twins: they look so goddamn the same, if I ask them if they want an ice cream, they BOTH say yes!

• Personal DNA: it's that colorful little box in the sidebar. You take a long-ish test (good for when you're serious about procrastinating but want to feel like you just "did" something for the past hour) and it gives you a personality analysis. Then if you're really bored, you can Psych You/Psych Me and take tests for other people. No more work, EVER!

• The Sublime Philosophical Crap Test: like the Spark tests I used to do instead of writing my undergrad thesis, the people who wrote this are pretty funny, but you get that sinking feeling that they really do know what they're talking about. They give you a painfully long analysis - the very short version of mine was: You scored 55% Non-Reductionism, 11% Epistemological Absolutism, and 100% Moral Objectivism! You are an N-S-O: a metaphysical Non-Reductionist, an epistemological Skeptic, and a moral Objectivist! yay?

micro-management

the other day I was talking to a certain human resources specialist I know, and she said that during job interviews the HR people will often ask "what type of manager do you work best with?" as someone who has never had a real job interview, that really piqued my interest. is there a "correct" answer, or are you really supposed to tell the truth?

roo roo made a good point - the "correct" answer would be to describe the management style of the potential new boss, but since the interviewee has no way of knowing the new boss' style, it's better to tell the truth. if the management is going to be so different from what you work well with, why would you want that job?

anyhow, what I found most interesting were the two categories of management she mentioned: hands-off or hands-on. I've never really had a boss as hands-off as the one I do now, and it's KILLING ME. I always thought I hated to be supervised and took it as my boss somehow doubting me. however, now I'm seeing that 'management' is a two-way street. when no one is around to watch me, when I don't have to check in and report my progress, I just don't do anything.

I got this job just a few weeks ago, and due to that whole cubicle incident I have been doing most of my 'working' outside the office. most days I hang out with Homero in Patty's office, talk about Mexican soap operas, and consider it work because we are speaking Spanish. then yesterday he had to go out in the field and collect samples, so I was left alone in the office. for the first time in weeks, I actually WORKED. it was crazy, I don't even know what came over me. but don't worry, it only lasted for about 20 minutes.

today I came to my actual office and assumed my position in the cubicle. it's actually not that bad - there is AC, unlike in Homero's office, and my desk is high enough that I can cross my legs under it, which is pretty much all I want out of life. but the atmosphere here is very different from anywhere I've ever worked before - it's SILENT. you could hear a pin drop in here. at first I thought maybe a lot of people were out today, but I took a walk around and saw that there are at least 25 people in the office, but no one talks to each other!

in the office where I worked last summer, it was nearly impossible to get anything done because everyone was constantly chatting - and not about work, not even a little. that place was a total zoo, there were always students coming and going, people having meetings in any spot they felt like it, visitors from out of town who had to be introduced to every single person who worked there, etc. in particular, my office roommate was addicted to the conversational arts. his entire job consisted of talking on the phone to people, networking and finding jobs for students, and any time he wasn't on the phone he was chatting with me... or having visitors, such as the Vietnam vet/talk radio personality/masseuse, who went by "David the Painkiller," and stopped by frequently to sing us his latest tragicomic social commentary song. he was the man.

but I digress. I'm trying to get to the whole micromanagement thing, but my ADD is off the charts lately. (ironic?) so I was messing around on myspace and my boss' secretary walked by... I felt a little twinge of "oh crap, I'm supposed to be working." so I did work, for nearly an HOUR. it was awesome. and it made me realize that the very thought of a boss-type being around is enough to make me work. this whole "I have a boss, in the abstract sense, but he doesn't give a shit what I do or where I am, and also he's abroad for a month" really isn't what I need to be productive. I honestly do need someone looking over my shoulder. not necessarily like "telling me do do stuff" or anything like that, oh no. but existing, yes, and being present, yes.

i got sick of that after a while and returned to Homero's office where I can blog and otherwise procrastinate in peace. my conclusions: I enjoy being in an office where I talk to people all day, but I don't get anything done. I can only work, however, under circumstances of complete silence and oppressive micromanagement. so, I have no choice but to admit what has been obvious to everyone else for a long time: I'm not cut out for "work." It's true, a "job," no matter how you slice it, is simply not the best use of my time.

if you'll excuse me, I have to go have some drinks downtown with my RESD peeps. it's been a long day here at the office.

"work"

so here I am, on a beautiful and sunny Friday afternoon, at "work," in my "office," wearing my "shoes." this BLOWS. there's good news though - when I got to work today no one tried to move me to a different location, plus I now have my very own PHONE and MAILBOX. yes, i have truly arrived. then my boss' assistant, who is quite possibly the only nice person in the entire place, showed me how to use the fax machine and the copier. believe it or not I was already familiar with those devices, but it was sweet of her anyways. everyone else in the office kind of looks at me like "who the fuck is that" but no one actually introduces themselves, so their loss, they'll never know who I am and why I'm the awesomest.

anyhow, having my own mailbox really gave me the sense of permanence I needed to feel comfortable at work. comfortable enough, anyways, to sit there for a few minutes, take off my sensible shoes under my desk, fill out my hours for the week, and leave. I'm in my other adopted office now, which belongs to Patty. her office is way nicer, it's painted in soothing tones and Homero is right next to me so I can pester him endlessly with translation issues. today we went over guinea pigs, which in case you were wondering, are NOT delicious.

in lieu of actually working, I have been messing around with pandora a lot today. in addition to being a good way to listen to music from anywhere, it's a really cool idea. it's based on something they call the Music Genome Project, which identifies "traits" of songs or artists you tell it you like. then it finds and plays other music that shares similar characteristics. for example, I'm currently listening to my 'Born Under Punches Station.' I told it I liked the Talking Heads song 'Born Under Punches,' and right now it's playing a song called 'Thieves Like Us' by New Order, according to them "because it features electronica influences, extensive vamping, groove-based composition, a dynamic male vocalist..." so when it picks a song you like (or don't like) you tell it, and it gradually modifies the content of the "station" according to what it thinks you're telling it. get it? i'm pretty obsessed with it as a way to discover new music. this thing always plays songs I otherwise wouldn't ever hear, and it's pretty fascinating to explore all the trait categories they use. apparently I'm a huge fan of 'vamping.' who knew?

dispatch from tha fahkin gahdin

it's true, I'm hollering at you from my back yard, can you sense the outdoorsiness? I just set up a little office out here consisting of a chaise lounge, beach towel, water bottle, and my cell phone. You know, in case I need to make any important business calls. So far, things are progressing nicely in my newly appointed zone of productivity. I just hope my little old lady neighbors don't come out to do any gardening, because I look like kind of a weirdo out here. Kind of.

so today was supposed to be my first day of work at a new job. I'd tell you who I'm working for but that would violate my self-imposed rule of Extreme Blog Anonymity. Anyhow, I met with my new boss last week and he gave me a bitchload of things to get started on and told me to show up at the office Monday morning (today) to get settled. I spent an hour this morning trying to read all the stuff I was supposed to be perusing over the weekend, then got myself all stressed out trying to figure out what to wear. i read an article in Cosmo yesterday (I swear I do NOT have a subscription to Cosmo, this was a momentary lapse of reason at the supermarket checkout.) so the article said that flip-flops are always inappropriate for the office. I didn't know that. I panicked. I don't own any summer shoes that aren't flip-flops. So I wore flip-flops anyways, and prepared to be judged.

I called the dude on my way in, because the building houses a nuclear reactor and you need a code to get in. Don't worry, my job has absolutely nothing to do with nuclear research. We'll all live to see another day. So the dude was not there, but rather getting his car fixed, and asked me to "refresh his memory" on why we were even meeting. Sweet. It appears this guy is a little different from some bosses I've had in the past. Some people like to keep a tight leash on their grad students and know where they are at all times, preferably within the bosses' line of sight, in case there's an extremely tedious and/or annoying task that needs doing.

This guy would be at the other extreme - he told me I can pretty much do whatever I want as long as the work gets done. While this is good on sunny days like today when I want to be in my outdoor office, or pretending to work when I'm actually at the beach, it's kind of a bad thing in general for someone like me. I tend to be pretty horrible at accomplishing things even when I'm two feet away from whoever I'm working with. I have a feeling I'm going to be doing a lot of procrastinating all week long then doing all of my hours at once in an overnight work extravaganza right before my meetings with him.

Eventually I did go over to the office, met some people, and saw the little grad student containment area. It actually has a window, with a stunning view of the student parking lot. Not as awesome as my outdoor office, but I think I saw a water cooler. Free water is the dopest.

So I decided to call it a day around 1pm, and made the rounds distracting people I know who work on that side of campus. When I got home I toyed with the idea of doing work, but decided it was more important to search for the sunniest spot on the property. A true grad student never quits researching. My findings: the front porch only gets sun in the late afternoon, the side porch only gets sun in the early morning, and the whole climbing-out-the-attic-window-to-sit-on-the-roof thing just seemed like a recipe for disaster.

Speaking of disasters and findings, my thesis isn't happening right now, so if people could just go ahead and stop asking me how it's going, that would be grrrrrreat. I saw a girl from my department today, she was holding that coveted box of watermarked paper, on her way to hand it in to the librarian. I felt a fleeting twinge of motivation to do something with my own thesis, but it was immediately replaced by "who the fuck am I kidding?" I didn't even consider going to get the transcribing machine, it just seemed way more important to work on my tan. And those are my priorities for the next few weeks.

Other than that, things are going well. The no-income thing hasn't been as bad as I thought it would be; my tax return only lasted a few days but two friends just moved away and left me an inordinate amount of free crap. I've been eating a lot of ice cream lately, but I've also been going to the gym. A few of you got introduced to (i.e. forced to feel) my guns on Saturday night, and my rock-hard abs should be ready for peer review in another week or five. Speaking of Saturday night, I'm never starting drinking at 6pm again.

notes from underground

this may or may not come as a surprise to you, but I simply did not do any work this week. I last blogged on Monday, a day that was completely devoted to useless introspection and worrying about not doing any work. The maxim of the day was:

1. Write a crap thesis
2. Edit it

After blogging about it and washing some dishes, I called [GERTRUDE STEIN] and broke down, hysterically returning to "I'm a confused young child and I need my mother" mode. [GERTRUDE STEIN] is a professor with many misguided students of her own, but she was a little taken aback upon discovering that I have no "goal for the future." Oh well. We set up a meeting. I went out drinking in Nashua and saw some good live music.

On Tuesday I slept late, accosted [MARV ALBERT] and told him about my dilemma. He left me with the following:

Motivation does not cause production, production causes motivation.

Seemed like a good idea at the time. Then I had my meeting with [GERTRUDE STEIN], who assigned me a single task to be completed by the next day:

Make a list of things to do.

I made the list, divided the tasks into four categories of difficulty and time-consumption, and got ready to tell [JOSEPH STIGLITZ] that I had decided not to finish on time. He was, to say the least, not pleased. It was very awkward, I think he felt like has done all he can and failed. Of course, I'm the one who sucks, but I think deep down he knows that.

I went home, took a long scalding shower, went out drinking in Cambridge, and saw some good live music.

On Wednesday I slept late, and [GERTRUDE STEIN] stopped by my house to see my list of things to do. I showed it to her and we decided on some deadlines for things I should get done by our next meeting. She gave me some money and a foot-bath-thingy that she bought for my dead grandmother. Then I went up to Salem, dropped my vacuum cleaner off to be fixed, and went to the music store to see about my guitar. It would cost $150 to fix, a big expense considering I paid $25 for the guitar, so it's back to sandpaper and wood glue for me and my axe. The music store dude also tried to help me find a 4-track cassette deck with pitch control to slow down my interviews with, the cheapest used one was $180. I said to the dude,

I just don't have enough money to fix all of my problems in life.

When I got home I smoked a little [PLAIN OLD TOBACCO] and started rereading Notes From Underground. Let me tell you, there could not have been a worse time for me to get [PLAIN OLD TOBACCO] and read a narrative about inertia and alienation. The Underground Man said:

Oh, if I had done nothing simply from laziness! Heavens, how I should have respected myself, then. I should have respected myself because I should at least have been capable of being lazy; there would at least have been one quality, as it were, positive in me, in which I could have believed myself.

So yeah, that was depressing. On Thursday I woke up early and got a phone call from my friend [JUDY BLUME], whose anti-procrastination advice seems to have failed both of us. I went to school and picked up the readings for the conference paper, put them in my bag, and proceeded along with my time-wasting. I did some emailing, checked out some phrenology charts, and considered doing radical brain surgery on myself.

[DOSTOEVSKY HIMSELF] approached me and asked how things were going. I told him exactly how things were going... He said that in the 13 years it took him to write his dissertation, the best advice he ever got was accept his own unique writing process, as different and/or crazy as it might seem to others. He told me he has noticed that I get myself worked up so much before I even begin writing, and that certainly adds to the amount of time it takes me to produce. A lot of people think that's my 'problem' because they can just sit down and write something. He told me:

Getting overwhelmed is the first step of your process, always. But in a way, you MUST work yourself up, so don't beat yourself up over it. Recognize that you do get overwhelmed, that you will get overwhelmed, and accept it as a part of your writing process.

That was some of the most sensible advice I've gotten so far. Everyone tells me to stop 'being hard on myself,' but it seems much more useful to frame it as accepting something I do and working with myself, rather than fixing something I do (or don't do) and trying to change myself. I also tend to believe that I ought to be hard on myself, considering that myself is a person who does very little work. Anyhow, that made me feel better and gave me the energy I needed to get through the rest of the day.

I TA'ed my butt off for the hour or two left before class, sharing some sage-ish advice about the group projects, while simultaneously trying to do the reading that all the actual 'students' had finished days before. Whatever.

To make a long story short, my thesis is no closer to finished than it was two weeks ago. But I got a slew of [hopefully] good advice nuggets in my travels, I have a dozen new articles to read and a new paper to write, and I did a lot of yoga, drinking, and live-music-listening. Now I have to go make some lentil stew, lest I lose my not-writing-my-thesis momentum.

deterioration and reframing of the plan

I hadn't had an e-crisis in days, then this morning I woke up from a thesis nightmare of epic proportions. I've been pretty much bipolar all day, vacillating between ridiculously happy and relieved and ridiculously depressed and hopeless as I seriously consider, for the first time, the fact that I probably won't finish on time to graduate in June, but more importantly, that I can consciously decide not to. April 19th, the day when master's theses are supposed to be submitted to the library, is paralyzing the crap out of me - I have the power to change that, but the repercussions could be very damaging.

If all I had to do was write my thesis, April 19th might not be so scary. I could make myself just sit down and write for the next 22 days and end up with something - it wouldn't be as good as I want it to be, but it would be done and I could get on with my life. Unfortunately, I have a few other obligations hanging over my head: my RA, my TA, a paper I'm supposed to be helping to write and present at a conference, and a looong-overdue project from the fall. While my boss/chair has given me permission to pretty much slack off on everything except the TAing, I can't help but feel guilty that I'm still getting my exorbitant (ha) RA paycheck and not doing much.

Soooo, I had a crazy thought this morning... What if I just decided to be honest with myself and admit that this isn't going to happen? I could concentrate on the other stuff, feel good about actually getting something, anything done, and write my thesis over the summer. I'd have to justify my reasoning to a lot of people, and feel like I'm disappointing my parents and professors (whether or not it's true).

Would it be the end of the world? No, but I hestitate to give myself permission for something like that, because I'm notorious (in my own mind) for giving myself an inch and taking a mile. I know that if I make the decision to extend my deadline, I'll be taking one more step towards the precipice that is never finishing. Summer could easily turn into fall and then winter, etc., and the next thing you know I'll be 40 and still trying to finish my thesis. It's going to be especially dangerous if I get a job.

I just want to do a good job on this thesis though, I care so much about the topic that I couldn't fathom handing in something I'm not at least 75% proud of. I know I have to let go of some things, I know it's never going to be as perfect as I'd like, but I just can't help thinking that a few extra weeks would change everything.

It's probably nuts to think that, and I'll probably end up getting talked out of all this by the end of tomorrow. A part of me wants to get talked out of it, to be encouraged and told, even if it's a lie, that I can and will finish by the 19th. The other part of me wants to be told what I really want to hear, that everything will be fine if I take some extra time and concentrate on other stuff for a while. I guess either way, I just want someone to tell me that everything's going to be OK, and I want it to be true.

I've been running this seemingly lose-lose situation by various people today, basically looking for reassurance, because to be honest, I'm a very confused emotional weakling right now. A girl at school told me "No one will be disappointed in you" if I don't finish on time. It might not sound like much, but I was unbelievably touched by that, and if there hadn't been so many other people around I would have let myself burst into tears.

The only thing that gave me hope was a nugget of wisdom from a friend who has proved to be the most unfailing moral compass I know (and I seek advice, shall we say, pathologically). He has talked me through many an ethical dilemma, from what to eat to how to frame my thesis, and talked me down from many a ledge, whether he believes it or not. I will now stop being wishy-washy. Anyhow, I told him about all of this and as always, he had some good advice. I wrote it down:

Things to do:

1. Write a crap thesis
2. Edit it

So therein lies The Plan 3.0: I am going to sit my lazy ass down and write something (as soon as I'm done with this final procrastiatory blog post). It will not matter how crappy it is, it will only matter that it's a comprehensive skeleton draft of my thesis. Then I will edit it. This will hopefully give me some momentum, which I certainly lack right now. I will let the chips fall where they may with the deadlines and the other stuff, at least until I get that done.

The issue, I guess, is not whether I have a finished thesis by April 19th, but whether I commit myself to finishing at all. In my head I am committed, but without some actual product to back it up, mental committent will not be enough. The actual product doesn't have to be perfect or polished or even a whole chapter, but I realize I have to produce something. I've definitely decided to produce things before, with varying degrees of success, but I think, and sincerely hope, that this Crap Thesis idea might be concrete enough to work.

So I'm off to do, um, that. If I can get out of this funk, everyone will benefit. I'll have a better outlook on life and everyone else will get a break from reading this solipsistic crap I keep writing.

the plan: update

a paper tacked to my bulletin board says the following:

Week of March 18

• NO CLEANING
• NO POINTLESS EMAILS
• NO UNNECESSARY PHONE CALLS
• NO RESD
• NO SOCIALIZING
• NO COOKING
• NO PROCRASTINATING

this week, not only did I clean my house, but I went so far as to completely disassemble my vacuum cleaner, clean every single one of its five thousand tiny parts, put it back together and vacuum every vacuumable space. Amanda's mother is right, they don't make vacuums like they used to. I also went to RESD several times, socialized excessively, cooked, composted, blogged, emailed, sledded, napped, puttered, and talked on the phone for no apparent reason. There are still two huge piles of mystery papers cluttering my desk, and six of my seven tape-recorded interviews remain untranscribed. I guess "Week of March 25" is going to be the one...

the plan

a few days ago I caught up with my friend Kelly from college; she had a baby a few months ago and I've been so bad at keeping in touch with her lately. She lives kind of far away, in exotic Deluxbury, and it's tough for us to see each other since she had the baby (which doesn't explain why I can't seem to find time to talk to her on the phone, but anyways...)

Sometimes I feel like we have less in common since she's "settled down," she's got lots of adult things to deal with while my life is unfettered by marriage, homeowning, baby-raising, etc. Besides the occasional pang of guilt for being incredibly irresponsible and short-sighted most of the time, I'm pretty much happy with that - I just really really wish I could procrastinate less.

I was complaining to Kelly about my time-wasting habit, which used to be something we had in common. In college we both wound up with majors that required us to produce mass quantities of writing every week, which is pretty much kryptonite to severe procrastinators. The two of us seemed to constantly be one-upping each other in that department: if one of us said "I've got a 30-page paper to write, I haven't even started it, and it's already two days late," the other would come back with somthing like "yeah, well I've got a 40-page paper to write, I haven't even started it or done the reading, it's already three days late, and I haven't slept in 72 hours." And unfortunately, it would be true. We were consistently behind, asking for extensions after papers were already late, never able to catch up. We never did our reading and we were always stressed out, pulling all-nighters and writing exclusively in long, cracked-out jags. When we graduated, and it was a miracle that we did, I was pretty sure I never wanted to write another word.

Proving that the gods are indeed crazy, Kelly and I both wound up writing for a living, more or less. The other day on the phone when we started to commiserate about the evil that is The Deadline, I told Kelly how hopeless I felt about my whole thesis problem, how I was pretty sure I'd never figure out how to "get work done" like normal people. Then she dropped a bomb on me, telling me that she had quit procrastinating and had the solution. I was shocked to hear that my former partner in crimes of laziness had quit - it was like a knife to my heart to feel like I was now officially the only one with this, um, malaise?

Apparently Kelly's epiphany came when a coworker told her something very simple like "worry today doesn't solve work tomorrow," which somehow snapped her out of her decade-long procrastination funk. She didn't really elaborate on her exact strategy for quitting, but the fact that she did it, if only for a week so far, gave me a lot of hope for my own situation. More importantly, it made me realize that just how much the 'worrying' can hold me hostage - the dread of the blank page, the paralyzing fear of never finishing...

When I got off the phone with Kelly I felt ready to get all serious about work...and then I checked my email. Out of, say, twenty emails, five were spam and fifteen were completely pointless. Emails from people I talk to or see almost every day, useless communications that someone decided to CC me on, ridiculous forwards about guardian angels. Normally I would read each of these emails and reply to the majority of them, even though it would actually be faster to get in the car, drive to school or wherever, see these people in person, have a five-minute conversation and be done with it. So I decided to delete all of my non-essential emails, and it was so f-ing liberating. I can't believe it never occurred to me before, how much of my time I waste emailing, how much of other people's time I waste, and how much they waste my time.

I had a similar revelation a few weeks ago regarding my cell phone, and pretty much stopped picking up the phone altogether unless I knew exactly why the person was calling and really wanted to talk to them. That was really liberating too, but poorly executed. A normal person not picking up the phone is probably screening their calls and listening to the voicemails later on. Once I accumulated four or five messages, however, it just seemed too daunting to even listen to them, so I didn't...for like two weeks. As it turns out I missed out on some pretty important stuff, not to mention the fact that everyone started to hate me. People kept asking if I was avoiding them, and I was a little embarassed - but you can't just tell someone they're not worth your time, even if it's totally true. I'm addicted to human interaction in all its forms, but it's something I just have to lay off if I'm ever going to graduate.

Anyhow, the point of all of this is that I am going to take advantage of all these lessons I've learned recently and I'm putting them together in a new plan to quit procrastinating. This is a two-pronged approach, combining two strategies I've tried before to no avail: getting over the fear and living under a rock. I know from many past experiences that neither of these works for me on its own, but I'm hoping that together they'll create some kind of wondrously fruitful chemical reaction in my brain. So this week, my mantra is "over fear, under rock," and I plan to repeat it ad nauseum whenever I feel the urge to procrastinate.

On that note, I've been writing this post for a while now and I'm sure I could find a better use of my time. I'm not saying I will, but I could... I'll probably just go to sleep, I'm exhausted from a long day of green cleaning and talking to people, two things I'm not allowing myself to do for the next four days. I'm off to the little Walden Pond that exists only in my mind, where I plan to be very hermit-like, very self-absorbed, and very productive this week. So if you call me and I don't pick up the phone, rest assured, it's not you, it's me.

ode

you may recall that while I was working on my thesis proposal in the fall, I procrastinated for a few hours one night by blogging a lengthy list of songs that I've adopted as anthems of school-related stress. if you don't recall (and honestly, why would you?) and don't feel like procrastinating yourself/reading that whole thing, here's a summary:

5. Hallelujah (Leonard Cohen): thesis proposal
4. Only Living Boy in New York (Simon and Garfunkel): quantitative research methods
3. Wooden Ships (CSNY): "What is Psychedelia?" paper
2. Trouble (Ray LaMontagne): Honduras Incident
1. Naive Melody (Talking Heads): undergrad thesis

I've been sitting here for hours working on a stupid f-ing column about stupid f-ing community university partnerships for a really stupid f-ing newspaper. today was a beautiful day and there were certainly more fun things I could have been doing. Craig and Lydia went hiking, Roo Roo et al went to a St. Patrick's Day festival at the Harpoon brewery, but I'm not bitter. much.

But I digress. I've been listening to The Arcade Fire a bit obsessively lately, in the car, in the house, at school. I've even found myself wearing my iPod while I wander around aimlessly from place to place, which I something I never do (let me clarify: I almost never listen to my iPod while wandering, but I wander all the time. I also enjoy puttering, meandering, idling, lazing, and putzing.) This one song "Wake Up" has been really speaking to me during my most recent existential crises. A few choice lines:

someone told me not to cry
but now that I'm older
and my heart's colder
I can see that it's a lie.

children wake up
hold your mistake up

good stuff, I think this song is well on its way to acheiving a top spot in the list of songs of painful significance. I don't know if it will stand the test of time and become my master's thesis song... There's a lot of time left until it's due, and surely a lot of new and painful experiences that will happen between now and then, a lot of new songs that could potentially overtake this one. so I don't really know what they "meant" to say in this song, but I've been assigning it my own meaning, as I like to do, in order to assign meaning to my own existence, whose meaning I'm always doubting. I have now said the word "meaning" so many times that it's beginning to lose its, uh, meaning.

again, I digress. so I'm currently working on holding my own mistakes up, as in recognizing them and trying to learn from them. For example, should I be writing this right now, or should I be transcribing interviews? Past experiences would indicate that I'll be a lot happier tomorrow if I can go to the beach and wiggle my toes around in the sand. However, if I continue blogging and not working, I'll be forced to spend tomorrow wiggling my toes around in my slippers while I do schoolwork at home and look out the window, all bitter like I am now. So I have held my past mistakes up, and now I'm holding my current mistake up and recognizing that I totally suck? and doing something about it?

I wish it were that simple, but I think there's some other variable beyond holding up my mistakes. I know pretty much exactly what they are, and exactly how to act so I don't repeat the same mistakes over and over, but something is missing. It's not that I don't have the motivation to do anything, because there are certain things I can finish right away. But when it comes to the things that are most important to my future happiness, like finishing my thesis on time to graduate, I'll find any distraction to avoid it.

In college I had a very similar issue with my undergrad thesis. It got to the point where I went to see the school psychologist, who theorized that I couldn't seem to finish, or really even start, my thesis because I didn't "really want to graduate." I liked my life in college so much that I was subconsciously trying to prolong it, not understanding that in the end it was a self-destuctive plan. That explanation would have seemed pretty sensible, had he not followed it up with the recommendation that I get laid more often. F-ing creep.

In the end, I didn't get laid, but I did finish my thesis. And it SUCKED. ASS. I shudder to think that it's printed and bound, available to any human being who walks into the Trinity library. I thank the Lord every day that I wrote it in Spanish, thus reducing the number of people that would be able to read it if they tried. While I only spent a few months really invested in that thesis, however, I've been obsessed with my master's thesis topic for well over a year now, and up until now, it's the biggest and most important project I've undertaken on any topic.

Beyond the time I've already invested in researching, talking about, and practicing green cleaning, it's something that I'm fairly certain I could devote the rest of my life to. This is going to sound extraordinarily lame, but I care about green cleaning too much to let my first published writing about it to be crap. Yes, I actually think that my weird-ass love for green cleaning is what's holding me back. I'm reminded of an awesome but little-known Talking Heads song called "Sax and Violins" (yes, they could have made the title's allusion a little less flagrant, but whatever, they're the Talking Heads and they don't subscribe to 'subtle'. Plus, there really is a saxophone playing in the song. Kind of. Anyways...)

wooden heads
furniture with legs
for sale

love keeps us together
love will drive us insane

So yeah, the jist of it is that I love green cleaning too much to ever let it go, to ever 'finish' writing about it. And this love is, as it were, driving me insane. The funny thing is, there are people in my program with the exact opposite problem: they are so disillusioned with their topic that they also find themselves unable to finish writing, whether because they think the topic is a problem with no solution or because they have come to think it's something that just doesn't matter.

While I'm certainly disillusioned with the process, with having to write and prove myself and all that, and I'm certainly not getting anywhere by writing about it instead of writing about IT, the essence of my problem is that I'm too obsessed with my thesis and too optimistic about my topic, not too indifferent. In the end, while it might be self-destructive or psychotic or just plain weird, I think I'd much rather keep it that way.

on tardiness and human suffering

so I originally wrote this haiku almost a year ago, but much like Moby Dick or War and Peace, it is (unfortunately) just as relevant today as it was the day it was written:

data collection
Satan invented grad school
I'll sleep when I'm dead

weirdly enough, I'd kill to be in the situation I was in when I wrote that back in May. At the time I thought things couldn't get worse, but I was oh so wrong. unbeknownst to me, I was actually ahead of the game - I had done at least ten interviews, I was reading green cleaning stuff every day and really staying on top of the policy developments. By some accounts, I was "overacheiving." Well, I sure showed them.

I basically took an extended vacation from my thesis all summer and then started a new, more dangerous period of thesis latency right after I defended my proposal. in, uh, november. thank GOD one of my professors, my beloved Uncle Bill, snapped me out of it a few weeks ago by giving me a fake assignment and holding me to the fake deadline. my other professor/thesis supervisor/boss/everything had tried to go the "no pressure, I know you are going to do a great job" route, but I found it way too eay to focus on all the other stuff we were working on.

it makes me a little nervous that I need to be lied to to get motivated to do things on time. it isn't just my thesis, or even just schoolwork. my boss tells me that our monthly newspaper deadline is the second Tuesday, when secretly it's Wednesday. my friends will occasionally tell me something starts at, say, 9 o'clock, hoping I'll make it there by 10. most of all, I lie to myself, or at least I try. all of my clocks are set fast, and not just a little. I even mix it up so as to trick myself as much as possible: the clock in my car is 33 minutes fast, my alarm clock is 25 minutes fast, and my Super Loud alarm clock (the one I keep 15 feet away from my bed, hoping in vain that it will get me out of bed, which it doesn't because I've learned to sleep through it) is 31 minutes fast. I am still consistently 5 minutes late to things like important appointments, usually about 15 minutes late to regular appointments, and I shudder to think what my average lateness to social events is.

but I digress (I think my tendency to digress, both in my own head and in person has a lot to do with why I can't do anything on time). see? I just digressed again! I think "anyhow" is one of the most common words in my everyday vernacular. Anyhow, the point here is that I suck at getting things done and I'm NEVER going to finish my thesis on time to graduate in June.

I have a few interviews scheduled, which is great, but I know myself too well to think I'll be able to transcribe everything and analyze it, or whatever, and get it all down and perfected in a month. It pisses me off to no end that I even have to write this thing. All the information is up here (picture me pointing at my head), so why do I have to write it down? I'm so f-ing sick of having to prove myself to the f-ing academic community. In the time it's taking me to write this thing, I could have organized 50 janitors, made 500 bottles of my special all-purpose green surface cleaner, and proselytized to 5000 consumers. I need to be out disseminating, not inside glued to my computer. It's making me very bitter, and I hate to become disillusioned with something I love so much.

So my first interview of this second round is tomorrow, and I'm hoping it will reenergize me and give me some of that momentum back. I need to go to bed now, or else I'll oversleep and be late. I know what you're thinking, I'm probably going to be late anyways. It might be true, but I can't plan on it...