No.
(I get that search a lot. Just thought I'd save everyone some time.)
•
(I get that search a lot. Just thought I'd save everyone some time.)
•
Don't Sweat the Small Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of
Not far from my house is a coffee shop. Once a month, I host a karaoke night there. In exchange the owners give me tokens for free coffee, plus beers during the evening itself. My "hosting" duties include kicking things off with peculiar renditions of popular songs, and making puns between numbers by other singers.
If you're a married man in his 40s with kids, hosting karaoke in your neighborhood is among the most fun things you can do on a Saturday night. That sentence wants to sound pathetic, but it just can't. It's funner than movies. It's funner than bars. It's funner than the opera. It might not be funner than going to see live music by a great band, but it's closer and, instead of costing a boatload of money for a sitter and transportation and tickets and a kid-sized plastic cup of warm ginger ale with a splash of Old Grandad in, it pays you beer and coffee.
And it's good to hold the mic.
Small entertainments pack as much emotional grandeur as the big things; on some Saturdays you just need enough to cement social ties, put a pleasant tune in your head, give you a chuckle, let you show off a little, picture your life a little bigger. It doesn't all have to be big. It doesn't have to be grand. Where I live there are landscapes and monumental sculpture and the river to deliver grandeur — and not too far away is the glow of the city, to which we've been known to repair for big kicks. But most Saturdays, I only need so much. And the backyard delivers.
Tonight a guy asked to sing this song a capella. Nailed it.
Superstar.
•
If you're a married man in his 40s with kids, hosting karaoke in your neighborhood is among the most fun things you can do on a Saturday night. That sentence wants to sound pathetic, but it just can't. It's funner than movies. It's funner than bars. It's funner than the opera. It might not be funner than going to see live music by a great band, but it's closer and, instead of costing a boatload of money for a sitter and transportation and tickets and a kid-sized plastic cup of warm ginger ale with a splash of Old Grandad in, it pays you beer and coffee.
And it's good to hold the mic.
Small entertainments pack as much emotional grandeur as the big things; on some Saturdays you just need enough to cement social ties, put a pleasant tune in your head, give you a chuckle, let you show off a little, picture your life a little bigger. It doesn't all have to be big. It doesn't have to be grand. Where I live there are landscapes and monumental sculpture and the river to deliver grandeur — and not too far away is the glow of the city, to which we've been known to repair for big kicks. But most Saturdays, I only need so much. And the backyard delivers.
Tonight a guy asked to sing this song a capella. Nailed it.
Superstar.
•
Harvesting
A year and a half in the garden, and the harvest is modest but significant. I'm now blogging for our local food co-op, bringing the same mix of addlepated hilarity, aw-shucks sincerity, whimsical tomfoolery, plaid demonstrativeness, and pithy whining that you're used to from Exurbitude. I hope you'll stop in.
•
Summer's Here. Time to Perspire.
Life is hard. Avoiding it shouldn't have to be.
Maybe this sounds familiar. You arrive at work, boot up your computer, get coffee, hit the john, make some cereal, reboot your computer, get another coffee, eat your cereal, wash your bowl, check your personal email, check your RSS feeds, check Twitter, get another coffee, check your work email, realize you're late to a 10:00 meeting, attend the meeting, check your personal email, check Twitter, check your work email, launch Word, launch Excel, launch Adobe Acrobat, close Excel, open the Word document you were working on last, check your personal email, go to lunch.
And before you know it, the whole day may have gone by with you slaving away accomplishing things, no one thanking you, the world still on its axis, and at 4:48 or so, when you start to pack up, you think "why am I knocking myself out like this?"
There's a better way.
You can slow down.
You can get more from each moment.
And a new blog, Perspire About the Little Things, can show you how.
Instead of the scene I've just painted, imagine instead that you arrive at work and then spend a few minutes staring off into space, reliving the commute. Instead of rushing to boot up your computer, maybe you take five minutes to retrace the steps your career has taken to get you to this point -- 9:05 on a Tuesday, seething over a cluttered desk, about to switch on your electronic overlord for another mind-numbing eight hour shift churning out money for other people. Or you take a little time to reflect on how the clerk at the little coffee stand put the lid on with the sip-flap directly over the seam in the cup...why do they always do that? Are they trying to make it dribble?
When you truly focus your attention on little things like these, time takes on new character. It passes more quickly, but you get less done. No more leaping from task to task like a chinchilla on bennies. No more rushing from room to room in your mind trying to straighten tottering piles of stacked information about products and services you don't understand. No. You are focused. Deliberate. Intentional.
Because Perspire gives you the tools you need to choose how you'll kill time. Simple tips, succinctly communicated. When you start reading Perspire About the Little Things regularly and put just one or two strategies into practice, you'll be amazed at the change you'll experience. And if you incorporate them all, you'll change your whole identity.
You'll never again have to wonder where the day went, or why the report on the Jenkins account still isn't up to date, or who was your biggest enemy at summer camp that one year. Because you Perspired, you'll always know where you stand, and you'll be able to look back at the blank periods in your day -- in your week, in your year -- and know that you decided how they should be spent.
On the little things.
You have the power to change. Start today, and check back on Tuesdays and Fridays.
•
Maybe this sounds familiar. You arrive at work, boot up your computer, get coffee, hit the john, make some cereal, reboot your computer, get another coffee, eat your cereal, wash your bowl, check your personal email, check your RSS feeds, check Twitter, get another coffee, check your work email, realize you're late to a 10:00 meeting, attend the meeting, check your personal email, check Twitter, check your work email, launch Word, launch Excel, launch Adobe Acrobat, close Excel, open the Word document you were working on last, check your personal email, go to lunch.
And before you know it, the whole day may have gone by with you slaving away accomplishing things, no one thanking you, the world still on its axis, and at 4:48 or so, when you start to pack up, you think "why am I knocking myself out like this?"
There's a better way.
You can slow down.
You can get more from each moment.
And a new blog, Perspire About the Little Things, can show you how.
Instead of the scene I've just painted, imagine instead that you arrive at work and then spend a few minutes staring off into space, reliving the commute. Instead of rushing to boot up your computer, maybe you take five minutes to retrace the steps your career has taken to get you to this point -- 9:05 on a Tuesday, seething over a cluttered desk, about to switch on your electronic overlord for another mind-numbing eight hour shift churning out money for other people. Or you take a little time to reflect on how the clerk at the little coffee stand put the lid on with the sip-flap directly over the seam in the cup...why do they always do that? Are they trying to make it dribble?
When you truly focus your attention on little things like these, time takes on new character. It passes more quickly, but you get less done. No more leaping from task to task like a chinchilla on bennies. No more rushing from room to room in your mind trying to straighten tottering piles of stacked information about products and services you don't understand. No. You are focused. Deliberate. Intentional.
Because Perspire gives you the tools you need to choose how you'll kill time. Simple tips, succinctly communicated. When you start reading Perspire About the Little Things regularly and put just one or two strategies into practice, you'll be amazed at the change you'll experience. And if you incorporate them all, you'll change your whole identity.
You'll never again have to wonder where the day went, or why the report on the Jenkins account still isn't up to date, or who was your biggest enemy at summer camp that one year. Because you Perspired, you'll always know where you stand, and you'll be able to look back at the blank periods in your day -- in your week, in your year -- and know that you decided how they should be spent.
On the little things.
You have the power to change. Start today, and check back on Tuesdays and Fridays.
•
Someone please write this up, film it, send link
I just had a thought that a funny skit or short film would be a fantasy setting with a typical group of adventurers on some kind of quest. The characters would have strange, major quirks, like one guy's inordinately proud of his ornate shield, one seems to be obviously planning to kill everyone else and steal their gold, but no one seems to mind particularly. They butcher everything that crosses their path, and they feel a great sense of accomplishment each time something dies by their swords. Everything they kill is carrying or guarding some gold coins, which they pick up and carry along, eventually staggering. Slowly anachronisms would be revealed, in speech, in events, in accoutrements. Maybe there's one female character, and they all keep making fun of her until she gets mad and stabs one of them, not fatally, at which point they become extremely contrite. And of course, haha, it's eventually revealed that they're D&D characters.
I had this idea because I used to play a Ranger who had a cloak lined with pockets in which he kept a variety of important things -- gunpowder, spices, tobacco, spell ingredients -- I had this list of fifty items. It was like a medieval fly-fishing vest. As I was reading about Gary Gygax, I thought of how this supposedly formidable, silent warrior, Rogan (who was named well before Rogaine, by the way) would look in real life, striding along, bulging pockets all over the place, his trousers sagging with all the things in his pockets, rattling, smelling funny.
•
I had this idea because I used to play a Ranger who had a cloak lined with pockets in which he kept a variety of important things -- gunpowder, spices, tobacco, spell ingredients -- I had this list of fifty items. It was like a medieval fly-fishing vest. As I was reading about Gary Gygax, I thought of how this supposedly formidable, silent warrior, Rogan (who was named well before Rogaine, by the way) would look in real life, striding along, bulging pockets all over the place, his trousers sagging with all the things in his pockets, rattling, smelling funny.
•
Cult-Like Programs I've Embraced, Part V: Don't Sweat the Small Stuff (and It's All Small Stuff)
In my old office I had a corner filled with black and white pictures of Men of Character. Arranged so that my head was positioned in the center of the group, when viewed from the door, were portraits of Hunter Thompson, Johnny Cash, Allen Ginsberg, my kid, and a tiny shot of a guy with a Big Toothy Grin and a slightly too-intense, almost forced, look of sheer ecstasy on his face. That last was Richard Carlson, author of Don't Sweat the Small Stuff (and It's All Small Stuff).
And here we go, go ahead, roll your eyes -- beliiieeeeeeve me, you're not rolling your eyes any more than I did when I walked into the downstairs part of Shakespeare & Co. back in '02-'03(?), followed the alphabet to the right shelf, thumbed past all the ultra-specialized Don't Sweat volumes, and settled on the classic. My own eyes had rolled so far up into my head that scoff-atometers a block away in the Derision Lab at Hunter College began sneering and saying "Puh-leeeze" and they weren't even turned on.
Weighing down one shoulder, as I walked to the cash register with that slim, brown, vaguely victorian-looking volume, were Stewart Smalley, Oprah Winfrey, someone saying "You go, girl!" and lots of kitty-cats and doilies. On the other shoulder was a feral wolverine of anxiety staring at my Adam's apple and licking its chops.
I decided to go with the Emo geeks on the other shoulder, and paid for the book.
My self-help reading is not that extensive. And I've never bought one of those for-dummies books. (Aside: I heard a funny George Carlin joke the other day on the radio. To paraphrase: "How come people buy self-help books, but they're written by someone else? That's not self-help. That's help.") But I was in the midst of a confluence of existential crises and I wanted a list of things to do that would make me feel better. If this was delivered in a somewhat smarmy, tooth-achingly earnest style, with lots of exclamation points punctuating dozens of little revelations, all the better.
Whew, I thought on the subway later. Just what I was hoping for! I read the thing deliberately over the next week.
Here's the power of Don't Sweat. You're every day running full-tilt into some particular problem, feeling, situation, or cycle. Over and over. There's no way out of it. It's driving you to [insert addictive behavior here]. I mean, dude, you're freaking out. So you pick up this book, and you flip through looking for the part that says "Here's how to stop having your particular problem," but there is no such chapter. It doesn't do that. Nor is it all vague like "Dude? Why'nt you just relax?" Instead Dr. Carlson lays out a series of 100 exercises, some physical, some mental, some procedural (for lack of a better term) that don't have anything to do with your problem. Shit! you think. Wrong book! But you've bought it, so you read it, and you find one of the little techniques that will inconvenience you the least, and you try it.
And then next day you're walking to work from the subway and you're overcome with the usual rage and remembering some event from junior high and nothing has changed. So that afternoon at lunch you read some more and you find another technique that sounds doable and has nothing to do with your problem and that night you try that one. And so on. One day you realize you haven't thought about that particular problem in a couple of days. Even though you've been in the same situation, with the same people, facing the same challenges, and your junior high past hasn't changed either. Somehow the edge -- the anxiety-producing, rage-building, time-consuming, goal-diverting edge -- has been dulled.
It worked for me. I needed a way to attack my problems laterally, because years of smashing face-on into stuff had proven counterproductive. As with any of the cult-like programs I've embraced, feeling better by reading this book required a certain drinking of a certain amount of Kool-Aid. It required believing that such a book could help, which belief in turn led to a certain commitment to practicing Dr. Carlson's recommendations, which do, in fact, work.
And a year or two later, that's why his face ended up on my wall. When he died unexpectedly -- young, from a heart attack, on a plane from San Francisco to New York -- it was a little confusing. Because of his age (45) and his apparent calm. The obvious gag -- that maybe he died from the ironic buildup of pent-up steam -- had no allure for me. I can only assume that he felt like a success when it was his time to go. And even if, as my cynicism sometimes suggests, he was a marketing genius first and a quasi-buddhist do-gooder second, at least his marketing efforts went toward something useful. RIP, Richard Carlson.
That ended heavy. Tomorrow, yardwork!
•
And here we go, go ahead, roll your eyes -- beliiieeeeeeve me, you're not rolling your eyes any more than I did when I walked into the downstairs part of Shakespeare & Co. back in '02-'03(?), followed the alphabet to the right shelf, thumbed past all the ultra-specialized Don't Sweat volumes, and settled on the classic. My own eyes had rolled so far up into my head that scoff-atometers a block away in the Derision Lab at Hunter College began sneering and saying "Puh-leeeze" and they weren't even turned on.
Weighing down one shoulder, as I walked to the cash register with that slim, brown, vaguely victorian-looking volume, were Stewart Smalley, Oprah Winfrey, someone saying "You go, girl!" and lots of kitty-cats and doilies. On the other shoulder was a feral wolverine of anxiety staring at my Adam's apple and licking its chops.
I decided to go with the Emo geeks on the other shoulder, and paid for the book.
My self-help reading is not that extensive. And I've never bought one of those for-dummies books. (Aside: I heard a funny George Carlin joke the other day on the radio. To paraphrase: "How come people buy self-help books, but they're written by someone else? That's not self-help. That's help.") But I was in the midst of a confluence of existential crises and I wanted a list of things to do that would make me feel better. If this was delivered in a somewhat smarmy, tooth-achingly earnest style, with lots of exclamation points punctuating dozens of little revelations, all the better.
Whew, I thought on the subway later. Just what I was hoping for! I read the thing deliberately over the next week.
Here's the power of Don't Sweat. You're every day running full-tilt into some particular problem, feeling, situation, or cycle. Over and over. There's no way out of it. It's driving you to [insert addictive behavior here]. I mean, dude, you're freaking out. So you pick up this book, and you flip through looking for the part that says "Here's how to stop having your particular problem," but there is no such chapter. It doesn't do that. Nor is it all vague like "Dude? Why'nt you just relax?" Instead Dr. Carlson lays out a series of 100 exercises, some physical, some mental, some procedural (for lack of a better term) that don't have anything to do with your problem. Shit! you think. Wrong book! But you've bought it, so you read it, and you find one of the little techniques that will inconvenience you the least, and you try it.
And then next day you're walking to work from the subway and you're overcome with the usual rage and remembering some event from junior high and nothing has changed. So that afternoon at lunch you read some more and you find another technique that sounds doable and has nothing to do with your problem and that night you try that one. And so on. One day you realize you haven't thought about that particular problem in a couple of days. Even though you've been in the same situation, with the same people, facing the same challenges, and your junior high past hasn't changed either. Somehow the edge -- the anxiety-producing, rage-building, time-consuming, goal-diverting edge -- has been dulled.
It worked for me. I needed a way to attack my problems laterally, because years of smashing face-on into stuff had proven counterproductive. As with any of the cult-like programs I've embraced, feeling better by reading this book required a certain drinking of a certain amount of Kool-Aid. It required believing that such a book could help, which belief in turn led to a certain commitment to practicing Dr. Carlson's recommendations, which do, in fact, work.
And a year or two later, that's why his face ended up on my wall. When he died unexpectedly -- young, from a heart attack, on a plane from San Francisco to New York -- it was a little confusing. Because of his age (45) and his apparent calm. The obvious gag -- that maybe he died from the ironic buildup of pent-up steam -- had no allure for me. I can only assume that he felt like a success when it was his time to go. And even if, as my cynicism sometimes suggests, he was a marketing genius first and a quasi-buddhist do-gooder second, at least his marketing efforts went toward something useful. RIP, Richard Carlson.
That ended heavy. Tomorrow, yardwork!
•
Aaaaarrrgh!
Cult-Like Programs I've Embraced, Part IV: Fine, Harry Potter, Okay? OKAY!?
Harry stood and dusted off his Quidditch robes. He peered at me through his cracked glasses.
"So, you're the one," he said. "You finished me."
"That's right, Potter," I sneered, my whitish-blond hair pulled back from my forehead. "All seven books."
"That's great," he muttered, and said something in Pig Latin. But without his wand, he was powerless.
"So..." I said.
"Well, yup," he answered, standing there in my kitchen, kind of looking around at the missing baseboards and such. "What'd you think of the end?" he asked. "The part where—"
"Enough!" I bellowed, dust and dead bugs shaking down from the light fixture we hadn't cleaned since early summer. "Don't give anything away, anyone could be reading this."
"Uhh...can I ask how old you are?"
"None of your damn business, half-blood," I snarled, my wand-hand itching. Harry sat down in one of the mismatched chairs. I saw his eyes wander to the television remote control.
"It won't help you, Potter," I told him, coolly, my unnaturally high voice piercing the relative quiet of the dishwasher's rumble. "You have to have the cable box on first, and besides, it's Thursday..."
The young wizard's eyes brightened, but he quickly supressed his excitement. I was instantly suspicious. "What?" I said loudly. "What is it?"
"Nothing," he said, one eye half-closed to better see through his glasses. The lightning-shaped scar on his forehead was turning red. "It's just that—"
"Well, Potter?" I could wait all night for his confession.
"I was just thinking now that you and your wife have finished those books and all...umm, I think Grey's Anatomy's on tonight."
I knew when I was beaten. My Muggle wife came down, they settled in front of the TV, and I went to the garage to find my old blanket and read The Hobbit.
•
"So, you're the one," he said. "You finished me."
"That's right, Potter," I sneered, my whitish-blond hair pulled back from my forehead. "All seven books."
"That's great," he muttered, and said something in Pig Latin. But without his wand, he was powerless.
"So..." I said.
"Well, yup," he answered, standing there in my kitchen, kind of looking around at the missing baseboards and such. "What'd you think of the end?" he asked. "The part where—"
"Enough!" I bellowed, dust and dead bugs shaking down from the light fixture we hadn't cleaned since early summer. "Don't give anything away, anyone could be reading this."
"Uhh...can I ask how old you are?"
"None of your damn business, half-blood," I snarled, my wand-hand itching. Harry sat down in one of the mismatched chairs. I saw his eyes wander to the television remote control.
"It won't help you, Potter," I told him, coolly, my unnaturally high voice piercing the relative quiet of the dishwasher's rumble. "You have to have the cable box on first, and besides, it's Thursday..."
The young wizard's eyes brightened, but he quickly supressed his excitement. I was instantly suspicious. "What?" I said loudly. "What is it?"
"Nothing," he said, one eye half-closed to better see through his glasses. The lightning-shaped scar on his forehead was turning red. "It's just that—"
"Well, Potter?" I could wait all night for his confession.
"I was just thinking now that you and your wife have finished those books and all...umm, I think Grey's Anatomy's on tonight."
I knew when I was beaten. My Muggle wife came down, they settled in front of the TV, and I went to the garage to find my old blanket and read The Hobbit.
•
Cult-Like Programs I've Embraced, Part III: The Kerry-Edwards Campaign
November 6, 2004
The speaker was a 68-year old Army veteran who had served two years in the 1950s and was proud of it. He was a middle-class working man, a grandfather, a husband, a senior citizen. He was probably a churchgoer. I stood in his driveway in Bedford, Ohio, listening.
“He’s a punk,” he was saying. Almost beside himself, he was trapped between a desire to make clear his disgust for George Bush and a wish not to be brought to low language. “This guy? He’s a scumbag.” He looked uncomfortable having to speak this way. “The middle class is paying the taxes and fighting the war. A deserter. And he says John Kerry didn’t serve honorably? This guy’s a deserter, and deserters used to get shot.”
His grandson graduated from one of the top electrical engineering programs in the country; of twenty graduates, only two had gotten jobs. His grandchildren range in age from 24 down to 14. “If those kids want to go to Canada, I’ll drive ’em.”
We stood alongside a trim and modest suburban house on a clear, windy fall day, the day before the election. I was rapt. Label me (an East Coast editor for a British auction house) if you want, but I dare you to call this guy an “elitist,” or whatever it is they’re calling Kerry supporters now. Call him a bullshit-spotter. Call him a man of honor, someone with an understanding of hard work – not the kind you see other people do on television, but the kind you do yourself. He had my instant respect: sincerity, sensitivity, and above all, anger, came off him in waves. Call him what he is: a patriot.
I had come to Ohio on my own hook, getting up early one morning to drive from New York City’s far-northern suburbs to Cleveland. The ACT office there needed canvassers, and I had done some work in that line in 1991. That had been Thursday, October 28; my intention had been to return home on Sunday to catch my son’s first real Halloween. Instead, I was drawn in.
The intensity of the work was part of it, but the Cause overlaid the entire experience. No task was too mundane. Nothing was extraneous. Not once did I hear someone turn down a job. And in us all — New Yorkers, Californians, Ohioans, celebrity phone-bankers — there shone a joyous light, the knowledge of Doing Right so clear and so keen that it leapt from our eyes and our brows and our fingers as we sorted and packed and studied and clipped, and finally as we ushered the righteous walkers out the door and into the streets. When the training room was empty, we followed them out and brought the light forth ourselves.
The details of the work are important. When I walked in and reported for duty, as it were, someone took me aside and gave me a stack of forms to alphabetize. The beautiful thing, the architectural thing, about this job was its place in the scheme. I was sorting forms filled out by phone bankers who had spoken with potential volunteers and logged their contact information and availability. My forms held contact information for those volunteers who had been left messages and who would call back to obtain their confirmed assignment for the massive voter outreach effort that would happen over the weekend and through Tuesday. In the Cleveland area, about 2,000 canvassers and phone bankers were expected, with a target of reaching some 150,000 households. These forms had to be in order so that when the return-call hotline rang, Ken, the volunteer assigned to it, could find the caller swiftly and finalize their assignment.
Not long afterward, I was loaned out to the AFL-CIO, and thence to the NAACP, for a foray into the center of Cleveland to remedy attempts to suppress the black vote. Cloaked in a yellow “NAACP Voter Protection” jacket, I walked streets with alternating patches of well-kept yards, boarded-up windows and street-hardened dogs, knocking on doors and handing out Voters’ Bills of Rights. Everyone I spoke to planned to vote (the guy with three tattooed tears on one cheek sitting on the porch with the boarded up door seemed agreeable, at least), and they knew that forces were at work to take away their rights. That was evident in the thick metal gates through which we spoke. As darkness fell the blue flicker of TVs maintained its own twilight. Most everyone watched with the lights off there.
Every job was like that – its impact was incremental, but its necessity was evident. Over the course of the next days I performed dozens of discrete tasks, from data entry to raiding AAA for road maps to moving tables, ferrying messages and carrying food. At one point I was placed in charge of a team of volunteers creating canvass packets assembly-line style, highly reminiscent of my first post-college temp assignment. The meat and potatoes of my Ohio stint, however, was canvasser training.
Thirteen years earlier I had worked out of NYPIRG’s Albany office as a canvasser — at 22, I was among the older crew members. Filling in one day for the assistant canvas director, I cleaned the office and roused the troops with a briefing on Fear, which, combined with my generally successful neighborhood outings, landed me the assistant director job on through the summer and into the fall. Here in Ohio I was back again, trained by mid-20s SEIU organizers to motivate volunteers, to touch every sympathetic voter in a 10-mile radius. It felt powerful, and on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday I would train and then go out myself, full of this astouding reservoir of belief.
The place I visited was not unlike Queens, but politicized, earnest, proud and American. I learned that the electoral map trumpeted by the media is a fiction. I fell in love with Ohio. On my map, the state is Red, but Ohio is no more Red than Orange County, New York is Blue. Blue and Red are just different names for Black and White, and to see the world that way is to deny not just the subtleties of your country, but to deny your spirit the richness of its full potential. Look no further than this Bedford man in his working-man’s driveway, speaking his mind with huge conviction and true emotion, forced — by a deeply-held knowledge of what is right — to denigrate the President. The pain of it was heartbreaking, and the yearning for a respectable presidency never felt so real to me.
Bush doesn’t matter, of course. Our efforts will one day be shown to have saved the world in some unlooked-for way. Perhaps we activated someone in some inner-city neighborhood; maybe someone’s child looked after one of us as we left her house and wondered why we walked; maybe my angry friend’s grandsons will refuse the offer of a ride to Canada and will instead lead a march on Washington. Maybe displaying hope was enough. Regardless, in the continuing struggle against injustice, poverty, corporate control of government, environmental destruction, and enforced religion, no effort is a waste, no task is unimportant, and no voice should be silent.
•
The speaker was a 68-year old Army veteran who had served two years in the 1950s and was proud of it. He was a middle-class working man, a grandfather, a husband, a senior citizen. He was probably a churchgoer. I stood in his driveway in Bedford, Ohio, listening.
“He’s a punk,” he was saying. Almost beside himself, he was trapped between a desire to make clear his disgust for George Bush and a wish not to be brought to low language. “This guy? He’s a scumbag.” He looked uncomfortable having to speak this way. “The middle class is paying the taxes and fighting the war. A deserter. And he says John Kerry didn’t serve honorably? This guy’s a deserter, and deserters used to get shot.”
His grandson graduated from one of the top electrical engineering programs in the country; of twenty graduates, only two had gotten jobs. His grandchildren range in age from 24 down to 14. “If those kids want to go to Canada, I’ll drive ’em.”
We stood alongside a trim and modest suburban house on a clear, windy fall day, the day before the election. I was rapt. Label me (an East Coast editor for a British auction house) if you want, but I dare you to call this guy an “elitist,” or whatever it is they’re calling Kerry supporters now. Call him a bullshit-spotter. Call him a man of honor, someone with an understanding of hard work – not the kind you see other people do on television, but the kind you do yourself. He had my instant respect: sincerity, sensitivity, and above all, anger, came off him in waves. Call him what he is: a patriot.
I had come to Ohio on my own hook, getting up early one morning to drive from New York City’s far-northern suburbs to Cleveland. The ACT office there needed canvassers, and I had done some work in that line in 1991. That had been Thursday, October 28; my intention had been to return home on Sunday to catch my son’s first real Halloween. Instead, I was drawn in.
The intensity of the work was part of it, but the Cause overlaid the entire experience. No task was too mundane. Nothing was extraneous. Not once did I hear someone turn down a job. And in us all — New Yorkers, Californians, Ohioans, celebrity phone-bankers — there shone a joyous light, the knowledge of Doing Right so clear and so keen that it leapt from our eyes and our brows and our fingers as we sorted and packed and studied and clipped, and finally as we ushered the righteous walkers out the door and into the streets. When the training room was empty, we followed them out and brought the light forth ourselves.
The details of the work are important. When I walked in and reported for duty, as it were, someone took me aside and gave me a stack of forms to alphabetize. The beautiful thing, the architectural thing, about this job was its place in the scheme. I was sorting forms filled out by phone bankers who had spoken with potential volunteers and logged their contact information and availability. My forms held contact information for those volunteers who had been left messages and who would call back to obtain their confirmed assignment for the massive voter outreach effort that would happen over the weekend and through Tuesday. In the Cleveland area, about 2,000 canvassers and phone bankers were expected, with a target of reaching some 150,000 households. These forms had to be in order so that when the return-call hotline rang, Ken, the volunteer assigned to it, could find the caller swiftly and finalize their assignment.
Not long afterward, I was loaned out to the AFL-CIO, and thence to the NAACP, for a foray into the center of Cleveland to remedy attempts to suppress the black vote. Cloaked in a yellow “NAACP Voter Protection” jacket, I walked streets with alternating patches of well-kept yards, boarded-up windows and street-hardened dogs, knocking on doors and handing out Voters’ Bills of Rights. Everyone I spoke to planned to vote (the guy with three tattooed tears on one cheek sitting on the porch with the boarded up door seemed agreeable, at least), and they knew that forces were at work to take away their rights. That was evident in the thick metal gates through which we spoke. As darkness fell the blue flicker of TVs maintained its own twilight. Most everyone watched with the lights off there.
Every job was like that – its impact was incremental, but its necessity was evident. Over the course of the next days I performed dozens of discrete tasks, from data entry to raiding AAA for road maps to moving tables, ferrying messages and carrying food. At one point I was placed in charge of a team of volunteers creating canvass packets assembly-line style, highly reminiscent of my first post-college temp assignment. The meat and potatoes of my Ohio stint, however, was canvasser training.
Thirteen years earlier I had worked out of NYPIRG’s Albany office as a canvasser — at 22, I was among the older crew members. Filling in one day for the assistant canvas director, I cleaned the office and roused the troops with a briefing on Fear, which, combined with my generally successful neighborhood outings, landed me the assistant director job on through the summer and into the fall. Here in Ohio I was back again, trained by mid-20s SEIU organizers to motivate volunteers, to touch every sympathetic voter in a 10-mile radius. It felt powerful, and on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday I would train and then go out myself, full of this astouding reservoir of belief.
The place I visited was not unlike Queens, but politicized, earnest, proud and American. I learned that the electoral map trumpeted by the media is a fiction. I fell in love with Ohio. On my map, the state is Red, but Ohio is no more Red than Orange County, New York is Blue. Blue and Red are just different names for Black and White, and to see the world that way is to deny not just the subtleties of your country, but to deny your spirit the richness of its full potential. Look no further than this Bedford man in his working-man’s driveway, speaking his mind with huge conviction and true emotion, forced — by a deeply-held knowledge of what is right — to denigrate the President. The pain of it was heartbreaking, and the yearning for a respectable presidency never felt so real to me.
Bush doesn’t matter, of course. Our efforts will one day be shown to have saved the world in some unlooked-for way. Perhaps we activated someone in some inner-city neighborhood; maybe someone’s child looked after one of us as we left her house and wondered why we walked; maybe my angry friend’s grandsons will refuse the offer of a ride to Canada and will instead lead a march on Washington. Maybe displaying hope was enough. Regardless, in the continuing struggle against injustice, poverty, corporate control of government, environmental destruction, and enforced religion, no effort is a waste, no task is unimportant, and no voice should be silent.
•
Cult-Like Programs I’ve Embraced, Part II: Getting Things Done
Tacked to my office wall at work is a flowchart that never fails to elicit a chuckle from unbelievers. At the top it says “stuff,” and it points down from there.
To me, it’s a work of art. Encapsulated within that flowchart is a process for organizing the giant slurry of items – physical and mental – that takes up psychic space in my life. Subject your “stuff” to a series of bite-sized questions and easy decisions, and it transforms from a giant primordial stew of undifferentiated, anxiety-causing matter into a system of simple actions organized into a manageable number of easily-reviewed lists.
Such is the beauty of David Allen’s Getting Things Done. From chaos, order. From fear, hope. From a pile of crap shoved into drawers and sliding off of credenzas, to file cabinets, labelled shelves and designated spaces. Ahh.
A project-management consultant handed the book to a colleague, but I snatched it first. The title alone: Getting Things Done. Ahh. I started reading it and was skeptical at first, as anyone would be who has an Everest of tasks, a baby on the way, a house to sell and another to seek out and buy, and a hatred of deadlines that goes back generations. Who the hell has time for this kind of time-management consultantygobbledy—heeeeyyyy. This describes my problem perfectly!
Early in the book, Mr. Allen takes readers through a very simple experiment: 1) think of the one major project that is right this second most on your mind. Write it down. 2) Think of the outcome of that thing – what would make it “finished”? Write that down. 3) What is the next simple physical step necessary to get closer to completion? Write that down.
There. Didn’t that help, just a little?
That simple exercise started to convince me. I tore through the rest of the book, pulled my office to pieces and took two days to re-organize per David Allen’s recommendations. OMG. So great. Labels. Folders. Lists.
Ahhh.
The basic idea is to identify projects (a project is anything that requires more than one physical step to complete: everything from “launch the new website” to “get some baseboards in here” to “send sympathy card to Carol”), then break it down into its component tasks until you arrive at the very next physical step that needs to occur to bring it closer to completion (“email Paul to request hi-res images of premises,” “look up ‘handyman’ in phone book,” “buy sympathy card”). Then you write that action on a list. And when you’re in the context in which you can execute it (at the office, sitting within reach of the phonebook, driving past the Hallmark store), you do it.
It’s not much more complicated than that, although you have to work up to it. There are some basic premises:
To me, it’s a work of art. Encapsulated within that flowchart is a process for organizing the giant slurry of items – physical and mental – that takes up psychic space in my life. Subject your “stuff” to a series of bite-sized questions and easy decisions, and it transforms from a giant primordial stew of undifferentiated, anxiety-causing matter into a system of simple actions organized into a manageable number of easily-reviewed lists.
Such is the beauty of David Allen’s Getting Things Done. From chaos, order. From fear, hope. From a pile of crap shoved into drawers and sliding off of credenzas, to file cabinets, labelled shelves and designated spaces. Ahh.
A project-management consultant handed the book to a colleague, but I snatched it first. The title alone: Getting Things Done. Ahh. I started reading it and was skeptical at first, as anyone would be who has an Everest of tasks, a baby on the way, a house to sell and another to seek out and buy, and a hatred of deadlines that goes back generations. Who the hell has time for this kind of time-management consultantygobbledy—heeeeyyyy. This describes my problem perfectly!
Early in the book, Mr. Allen takes readers through a very simple experiment: 1) think of the one major project that is right this second most on your mind. Write it down. 2) Think of the outcome of that thing – what would make it “finished”? Write that down. 3) What is the next simple physical step necessary to get closer to completion? Write that down.
There. Didn’t that help, just a little?
That simple exercise started to convince me. I tore through the rest of the book, pulled my office to pieces and took two days to re-organize per David Allen’s recommendations. OMG. So great. Labels. Folders. Lists.
Ahhh.
The basic idea is to identify projects (a project is anything that requires more than one physical step to complete: everything from “launch the new website” to “get some baseboards in here” to “send sympathy card to Carol”), then break it down into its component tasks until you arrive at the very next physical step that needs to occur to bring it closer to completion (“email Paul to request hi-res images of premises,” “look up ‘handyman’ in phone book,” “buy sympathy card”). Then you write that action on a list. And when you’re in the context in which you can execute it (at the office, sitting within reach of the phonebook, driving past the Hallmark store), you do it.
It’s not much more complicated than that, although you have to work up to it. There are some basic premises:
- you can’t do a project; you can only do the next step
- you can’t simultaneously think about two things at once
- you won’t garner peace of mind from your system unless you trust it implicitly, which means making sure it’s complete
- multi-level review, from a weekly detailed visit with your lists, to greater introspection about your longer-term goals, is crucial
In the initial process, you’ll physically collect everything that’s sitting in The Giant Inbox of Your Life (my title). That means your physical inboxes, your disorganized files, your email inbox, your broken and functional appliances, spare plastic forks and spoons, your wallet, the little wicker basket on the table at the bottom of the stairs, the kitchen junk drawer that catches the bank receipts you’re not sure whether to shred, the papers sliding off the credenza, all your office supplies and your poor, overburdened mind. Since we’re talking work and home, these are two separate processes, although they’ll both take less time than you fear. Once it’s all collected, you subject it to the flowchart I was talking about earlier. Ask “what is it?” “Is it actionable?” “Is it part of a multi-step process?” “What’s the next action?” “Should I do it, delegate it, or defer it?” Then make lists and start doing.
Here’s the cult-like part. This shit takes over your brain. As with Weight Watchers, Jesus and the first Matrix, everything gets viewed through the new prism. You look at piles of paper differently. When you’re discussing work — “work” is anything you want to change — you’re concentrating on the goals and the strategy, and always calculating “what’s the next action?” Pointless deadlines become suddenly transparent, because you learn to prioritize based not upon the calendar, but upon what tasks you can complete in your current context, what immediate "emergency" tasks require of you, and upon the status of delegated or dependent-upon-others tasks. David Allen’s review processes cause you to look at your activities from the crap on your desktop to your five-year goals to your self-identity and vision of yourself for your whole life. At one point, he describes sitting home with his wife and discreetly placing an action into her inbox (if you take my meaning). THAT one always causes unbelievers to laugh. And yet…it makes sense, if she’s watching Grey’s Anatomy or paying the bills, and you don’t want to forget the thing.
GTD is a demanding discipline. It becomes harder to juggle multiple tasks mentally, because you realize you can’t win. So you list. Your reflex becomes “get that on paper.” And while that sounds like a drag, it’s far easier than the Old Way You Practiced Before You Achieved GTD Wisdom. That way, you were suffering — beginning one task only to abandon it because you were neglecting the Important Stuff, panicking and rushing through things, angstily avoiding commencing work at all. This way, you have stepped off the wheel.
Alas, I am but a lowly acolyte. You can always be a better Scientologist, or a more loyal Moonie — so with GTD. It really requires new physical and mental habits that are hard to craft. Especially at home. So, often, instead of swimming placidly and productively in mid-stream, one with the flow of work, I flounder along at the edge, doing it half-right (which is far better than doing it all wrong), but feeling like I’ve got it all wrong.
And meanwhile, things get done.
GTD Online
Merlin Mann’s a Big Fan
•
Cult-Like Programs I’ve Embraced, Part I: Weight Watchers
The transformative event for me came about halfway through my first meeting. Surrounded by puffy women applauding one another for losing eight ounces, addressed by a relatively slim, excited older woman in extremely tight pants, I was about to lose my shit and leave. Like I’d left French class sophomore year, after six years of study: just up and left and never went back. This was not for me.
In 2001 I had taken stock and realized that I was at least 60 pounds overweight, pale, flabby, and tired easily. My digestive system was a nightmare; I ate nothing healthy, no matter how often I resolved to do so. My feet hurt. My knees hurt. I had had to go to physical therapy for weak ankles. My lower back was giving out alarming twinges. And I was only 32.
A confluence of events led me to Weight Watchers in January 2002. I woke up especially hung over and bloated one morning after a late night. My wife and I had started talking about having a baby. Murderers had attacked my city, and it occurred to me that life was too short to stay fat. A colleague was attending a nearby meeting and encouraged me to come with her. Another coworker, a man, had lost a lot of weight through the program the previous year. I went.
It was horrifying. Clapping, I thought, is not what I need. Little star stickers were not going to help me. And they talked incessantly about dessert – my problem was cheese and ribs and beer and General Tso’s chicken, not chocolate. Cake and cookies were for the weak. Even the way chocolate was talked about, with this faux reverence — an ironclad excuse masquerading as an object of worship in whose presence my bovine companions were powerless. When they mentioned it, I could hear the glutinous melted gunk blurring the consonants in the word itself…schawglit.
My cousin once tricked me — bait: job opportunity/switch: Amway meeting. They sat the new recruits in the front row and proceeded to attempt to break us down by asking if we wanted to get rich. That had been like this. Later, when I emerged with my psyche intact, he’d said “don’t think about it, just do it.” That was anathema to me.
I was fat, but I was no joiner. I was a dinosaur explainer, and I wore black clothing and lived in New York City. I’d traveled the country by car for six months. I’d read Atlas Shrugged AND A Fool’s Progress. I had a hip, hot wife in the record industry and we went to extremely cool shows. I was a cynical and proud atheist who hated sports and swore never to go to Disneyland. And above all I was young! What the hell was I doing in the room with the fat women salivating about doughnuts?
And then the transformative event: I let go. For one second. I shut off my brain and clapped, with a big smile on my face.
Why? Because nothing else had worked. I’d been gaining weight for ten years. I was miserable. If I thought I was too young to be in that room, I was certainly too young to keel over and die on a subway platform. And everyone said that Weight Watchers worked. So somewhere I found a switch and shut off the part of my brain that was saying “no.”
It was just enough for them to get their hooks into me.
That year, I transformed. I journaled, I counted my points, I drank water, I measured portions, I tried recipes received at meetings, I read the Getting Started book religiously and I attended my weekly meeting. I realized that I’d been reverentially saying General Tso’s schickun. I sat up front. I raised my hand a lot. And it worked. I immediately began losing weight.
Suddenly, running seemed possible. A natural complement to Weight Watchers. I started slowly during Week Five. After fifteen minutes on the treadmill, I knew one thing for certain: I was going to die. But I didn’t die that particular day, and I went back two days later. I started counting activity points.
By October I lost 68 pounds. Five years later, I go every week to keep it off.
The women — and some men — in that room are some of the bravest and dearest people I know, struggling against unimaginably deep-seated personal and cultural roadblocks, trying to find out if they’re real beneath the weight. They are, they are, they are. My leader from that first day has been one of the most – and you can imagine how using this word hurts a deeply independent and cynical thinker – inspiring people I’ve ever met. I mean, she helps people get well. How cool is that?
So I’m a convert, an acolyte, a Weight Watchers zombie who for a long time could only talk about POINTS and the POINTS system. Letting go that day was one of the hardest — and best — things I’ve ever done.
But I still don’t buy their products.
•
In 2001 I had taken stock and realized that I was at least 60 pounds overweight, pale, flabby, and tired easily. My digestive system was a nightmare; I ate nothing healthy, no matter how often I resolved to do so. My feet hurt. My knees hurt. I had had to go to physical therapy for weak ankles. My lower back was giving out alarming twinges. And I was only 32.
A confluence of events led me to Weight Watchers in January 2002. I woke up especially hung over and bloated one morning after a late night. My wife and I had started talking about having a baby. Murderers had attacked my city, and it occurred to me that life was too short to stay fat. A colleague was attending a nearby meeting and encouraged me to come with her. Another coworker, a man, had lost a lot of weight through the program the previous year. I went.
It was horrifying. Clapping, I thought, is not what I need. Little star stickers were not going to help me. And they talked incessantly about dessert – my problem was cheese and ribs and beer and General Tso’s chicken, not chocolate. Cake and cookies were for the weak. Even the way chocolate was talked about, with this faux reverence — an ironclad excuse masquerading as an object of worship in whose presence my bovine companions were powerless. When they mentioned it, I could hear the glutinous melted gunk blurring the consonants in the word itself…schawglit.
My cousin once tricked me — bait: job opportunity/switch: Amway meeting. They sat the new recruits in the front row and proceeded to attempt to break us down by asking if we wanted to get rich. That had been like this. Later, when I emerged with my psyche intact, he’d said “don’t think about it, just do it.” That was anathema to me.
I was fat, but I was no joiner. I was a dinosaur explainer, and I wore black clothing and lived in New York City. I’d traveled the country by car for six months. I’d read Atlas Shrugged AND A Fool’s Progress. I had a hip, hot wife in the record industry and we went to extremely cool shows. I was a cynical and proud atheist who hated sports and swore never to go to Disneyland. And above all I was young! What the hell was I doing in the room with the fat women salivating about doughnuts?
And then the transformative event: I let go. For one second. I shut off my brain and clapped, with a big smile on my face.
Why? Because nothing else had worked. I’d been gaining weight for ten years. I was miserable. If I thought I was too young to be in that room, I was certainly too young to keel over and die on a subway platform. And everyone said that Weight Watchers worked. So somewhere I found a switch and shut off the part of my brain that was saying “no.”
It was just enough for them to get their hooks into me.
That year, I transformed. I journaled, I counted my points, I drank water, I measured portions, I tried recipes received at meetings, I read the Getting Started book religiously and I attended my weekly meeting. I realized that I’d been reverentially saying General Tso’s schickun. I sat up front. I raised my hand a lot. And it worked. I immediately began losing weight.
Suddenly, running seemed possible. A natural complement to Weight Watchers. I started slowly during Week Five. After fifteen minutes on the treadmill, I knew one thing for certain: I was going to die. But I didn’t die that particular day, and I went back two days later. I started counting activity points.
By October I lost 68 pounds. Five years later, I go every week to keep it off.
The women — and some men — in that room are some of the bravest and dearest people I know, struggling against unimaginably deep-seated personal and cultural roadblocks, trying to find out if they’re real beneath the weight. They are, they are, they are. My leader from that first day has been one of the most – and you can imagine how using this word hurts a deeply independent and cynical thinker – inspiring people I’ve ever met. I mean, she helps people get well. How cool is that?
So I’m a convert, an acolyte, a Weight Watchers zombie who for a long time could only talk about POINTS and the POINTS system. Letting go that day was one of the hardest — and best — things I’ve ever done.
But I still don’t buy their products.
•