Nicotine Addiction Is a Monster

For real.

Addiction to cigarettes is a monster in my mind. Whenever it’s awake it attacks me. That’s all it knows. It will fight and fight. The two ways to defeat it are to give it the smoke it wants or let it rip me apart until it’s too tired to muster anything more than plaintive, feeble jabs. The trick is this thing’s got stamina. It’ll fight for years; until I die. It’s always in there.

I can keep putting it to bed with just one more smoke, “just this time”. But it never ends. It stirs itself awake every time a friend heads for the door. Every time someone lights up in a movie. Every time I get two beers in me. There’s no way to hit back so I’ll just have to lean on the ropes and let it slug away until I’m numb. I’ll just refuse to give it what it’s fighting for, even though it’s kicking my ass anytime I even recognize that it exists. There’s no surrender. This is a rabid animal. A monster. It’s tasted blood and all there is to do is tire it.

I can do it. It’s got stamina but I have heart. I know what’s right and I know I’ve been wrong. So here we go: I’m kicking the habit. No more smoking. No new packs. No bumming. No excuses.

Moonlighting

I should say right off that this is one of those blog posts that could spark an urban legend by getting its author, me, canned. But probably not.

I’ve taken a second job. It seems in a year I’ve gone from hating all forms of work to filling every day of the week with someone else’s idea of how I can be useful. Honestly, I kinda like it this way.

These two jobs are polar opposites. On weekdays I’m using my left brain, making courageous decisions, managing others and myself, attending meetings, and taking on a lot of responsibilities. On weekends I’m standing in one place making sure people can get into a building.

What’s so nice about that, you ask? Well, for one thing, every full weekend I work is another hundred dollars off the debt. Snowflaked! The debt is starting to look pretty feeble. At this rate I’ll be back at zero before my wedding in February.

On top of that, I’d been looking for a way to tell the world that I need roughly 16 hours a week to just be somewhere with my thoughts and a pen and paper. At 20 lines an hour, I’ll be able to crank out 320 lines of poetry every weekend. And now that I’ve got a little momentum, 20 lines an hour bursts out of me pretty easily.

Yeah, I’ll miss lazy weekends. There will be times when I feel cranky and defeated. I’ll ask myself why I’ve done this. But then I’ll add up my debts and see how they’ve dwindled. I’ll flip through my notebook and see the way all those lines are flush in the left margin and zigzag on the right, the way a big long poem is supposed to. And when my goals are met and people ask where I found the wherewithal I’ll say it wasn’t easy. I’ll say I worked two jobs.

NY Times Correction

Have you guys seen this?  The Times wrote a piece on Walter Cronkite that had pretty much a bazillion factual errors in it, then printed an apology, which I’ve quoted below.

I couldn’t believe this:

An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite’s career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite’s coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. Walter Cronkite never wrestled two bears at once. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. Bears are not the same genus as Martians.  “The CBS Evening News” overtook “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. Also, a bear weighing in excess of 600 pounds would not be able to cross America on foot in the span of a few hours. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents’ reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Mr. Cronkite’s mother was not a halfbear. Bears cannot lay eggs. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of “The CBS Evening News” in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Bears actually do love honey. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International. Finally, it has been confirmed that several bears were indeed harmed in the process of writing Ms. Stanley’s appraisal.

What a bunch of jerks!

Phil’s Intolerably Long Productivity Update

There’s a fine line between fine-tuning the productivity tools you’ve got established to increase your output, and actually putting stuff out there in the world.  Or maybe it’s not a fine line so much as it can be easy to plan how much ass you’re going to kick in a day or a week and then never getting around to kicking any actual ass.  I’ve struggled with this for a time.

I write lists and put cards on walls in an earnest effort to get my goals out there in a concrete, highly visible, and most likely fun-to-use system.  It’s true; I get a kick out of tracking my progress in pretty much any area of my life.  I can tell you how far away I am from clocking 10,000 of onstage performance.  I can recite how many pushups I did last week and how many I plan on being able to do by the end of next week.  These things are like candy to me.

There’s a gray mish-mosh, though, that hit me at the beginning of this productivity-geek evolution.  And it evidently happens all the time.  If I could line up my false starts and unchecked lists of goals end-to-end, they’d reach to Pusan from Seoul.  That doesn’t seem astronomical but remember that my handwriting is like tiny.  I’d tell myself what needed to get done, and go about not doing any of it.  I think in my case, and possibly in a lot of cases, it was an instance of putting the productivity cart in front of the actually-being-productive horse.  For me, that horse had still not left the stable.  Productivity tools, it seems, are most effective for people who just need a way to organize the massive output they’re already generating.

Well, maybe.  I mean, I eventually got productive and when I did I was glad to have been tinkering with all these inbox systems and reminders and index cards.  These days it takes a lot for me to feel overwhelmed and  I think it’s because I got into the habit of listing every plate I had spinning before I had any plates to even spin.

Right.  So, there’s that.  Now, what do I have to show for it?  Well, my inbox at work was at zero when I left the office on Friday.  It always is.  If you’re one of those people who reads that and says it’d be impossible for you to get yourself set up like that, know that I felt the same way.  But also know that I love, love, love having an empty inbox way more than I dreaded, dreaded, dreaded getting it cleared that first insurmountable time.  (Apologies if my stylistic liberty taken in that previous sentence was unnecessary, unnecessary, unnecessary.)  Do it.

Some things come to me at work that are not big enough to warrant a whole email each.  I do QA testing for a lot of individual products all at the same time, and they have a sort of insidious way of adding up.  To keep track of all these tasks, I’ve been using David Seah’s Task Order Up! templates which I painstakingly printed on index cards while watching The Office.  There’s a big stack of them at my desk and they’re perfect for writing one task each, a deadline for that task, and hours logged on each task.  Before they’re finished I keep them up in front of me using one of those ticket rails they have in diners, and when I’m done with a task I get to impale out on one of those spikes they have wherever they also have a ticket rail.  I guess you could look at that and say I’m eccentric or obsessed.  Yeah, fine, whatever.  It’s a fun system for me, it adds a tactile component to a not-at-all tactile profession, and there’s nothing wrong with having a lot of outranking coworkers thinking you’re obsessed with your work.

Finally, and most recently, I’ve begun filling in the circles on this bad boy: the whitehatblackbox Keeping Focus Form.  If you’ve clicked through (and, indeed, if you’ve read this far) you understand how this thing works.  I’ve got columns filled in for Fitness, Paying Off the Debt, and Writing the Song.  If I exercise and eat well, I fill in a circle.  If I snowflake a few bucks into the credit card fire, I fill in a circle.  If I write 20 lines of poetry, I fill in a circle.  I like it so far.  It definitely helps me remember how much of a jerk I am if I spend a whole day doing nothing toward any of these goals.  I think I’m going to fill in a fourth column for Decluttering.

So, yeah, those are my weapons at the moment.  I can go into other methods I use like “12+3*4” and Harnessing the Beast but you’ve heard it all before.  The sum of it all is that I’m pretty happy with myself right now.  I’m getting things done in the same time that I would’ve gotten a lot of nothing done and, really, I’m not missing the nothingness as much as I thought I would.  It only takes a relatively small stretch of days to establish a habit, and I can see the benefit of writing, exercising, and saving habitually.  How could I miss it?  It’s all written out and tacked up in front of me.

Writing the Song Takes Time

I got to thinking about National Novel Writers’ Month in November (NaNoWriMo.org) and how it applied to my next book.  That program is appealing to me because I love counting my progress in tangible measures.  When you sign up for NaNoWriMo you get 30 days to write a 50,000-word novel.  It’s simple and yet mind-harmingly daunting.

Until I considered the math today, I looked at 20 lines in a day as fierce progress toward completing this book-length poem I’m working on.  20 lines certainly feels like a lot of work.  Each line has an average of 8 words in it.  If I wanted to meet the NaNoWriMo standard and top 50,000 words in a month, I’d need to do 1,667 words every day.  That’s like 209 lines!

Clearly, it’s time to raise my expectations.

As an aside for you purists, there is a camp the lobbies against the counting of steps in artistic progress.  The fear is that it stifles the magic.  I don’t feel that applies to me.  I’m looking at this project as more of a translation than a straight-up novel.  When Dryden was translating the Aeneid you can bet he counted his progress at the end of every day by considering how much further he had left to go.  I’m like the artistic director for a film shoot.  I use every shot to express a specific vision through placement of lights and camera.  But when we’ve run out of script, my work is done.  It’s possible to see the end on its way toward the present.

Personally, I’ve got miles and miles left to go.  Time to get cracking and write the song already.

Take My Books Reminder

Some of you may remember my quest to declutter/pay my bills by giving away my books for unsuggested donations.  I just wanted to keep that balloon aloft as it were and remind all y’all that you can still take my books from me for whatever you can afford, even if it is nothing.  I really just don’t want all these books anymore.  Find the list here:

http://thephilwells.wordpress.com/books/

While we’re at it, if you can think of any other reason to send me boatloads of money, I’m open to those ideas as well.  I may or may not dance for quarters.  It depends on how many quarters you’ve got.

I’m Doing Solo Improv On Saturday, July 18

It’s true!

It looks like my partner J Hobart B will be out of town for the next round of the Queen of Sharks CHOMPetition, which is SATURDAY, JULY 18 at 7 PM.

That being the case I am going to perform a solo improvisational piece that will make you laugh and laugh and laugh and vote and laugh, but ONLY IF YOU ARE IN ATTENDANCE.

I’ll sum it up thusly:  If you want to see me perform my one-man improvised show, you must catch it at the Chompetition this Saturday, because it will never be performed again.

Five bucks, pals.  Five measly bucks.

And my mom will be in attendance.  You get to meet my mom.

Miss this if you’re a schmuck.

A Request For Techno-Criminals

Let’s find a way to pirate books.

Let’s face it; anyone can get any song or movie ever made for free.  Some people will tell you that this is as it should be and others will tell you that this  stunts the whole creative process.  Personally, I NEVER EVER ILLEGALLY DOWNLOAD MUSIC OR MOVIES.  But I can see how it would be appealling to one less interested in  adhering to the written rule of the law than I.

But I want books.  I get that you can burn an audiobook you borrowed from the library and walk around with it in your iPod.  I know you can download a whole  collection of eBook PDF’s from your less scrupulous buddies’ foldes in the shared drives at work.  That’s not what I’m talking about.

I want the open-source red-hat pioneers of the electronic gray market to spend some time offline and come up with a way to use the materials consumers have now, put a whole book in one end, and end up with a complete copy of that book on the other end.  Quickly.  In a way that cannot be detected.  Utilizing a method that I’m too stupid to have thought of but will make me feel even stupider once I see how simple it all was.  I  should not have to turn a page and then press a button for the process to proceed at any point.

“You liked that book?  Burn me a copy.”

“Hello, Borders staff person.  I need to return these 14 books I bought yesterday evening.”

“Virgil’s Aeneid is so good.  Too bad I can’t afford a copy for my teenage child.  Unless…”

I’m not saying  I would use this new machine/method/software/service for illicit purposes.  But I am saying illicit people are the only people  who would be willing to get a project like this done.

So, get on with it.

Atheists Are Dicks

For clarity’s sake, I’m not a deeply religious guy.  I don’t really do church or services or anything like that.  I was raised pretty much secular.  I think faith is a personal thing and should be practiced on a personal level.  I’m not a fundamentalist by any means.  I believe in evolution.  I know oil is dinosaur gunk that’s been rotting for millions of years.  I’m just barely a reform Jew, and even then it’s tenuous.

Right.  It pisses me off that there aren’t enough funny religious people to compete with the tidal wave of funny atheists out there.  George Carlin, David Cross, Bill Maher, Adam Carolla, the list goes on and on.  These are all smart people who are hilarious in my opinion, and their humor happens to be very anti-religion.  That’s fine.  A lot of it is really funny.  Comedians should be allowed to make  fun of whatever they want to make fun of.

But where are the quick-witted church-going artists who will defend their institutions?  I know there are funny religious people.  I’ve met them.  I’ve had drinks with them until the bar closed.  Why will no one go after atheists?

I’ve heard the argument that the material is too weak.  Religion is easy, atheism is not.  But I refuse to believe that.  What about the idea that atheists will make fun of the Bible but will endlessly quote pop science books by a bunch of asshole scientists who most of the time can’t get their stories  straight?  What about the fact that all these atheist douchebags make fun of Jesus all year but celebrate his birthday anyway just to put up a tree and exchange gifts.  How is  that not a compromise of morality?

Religious peoples have a backlog of beautiful tradition and stories and great people, and all these opportunistic, I’m-so-edgy, hip atheist fuckwads talk about is the Crusades and the Inquisition.  Well what about the fucking atom bomb?  That scientific marvel caused a lot of pain.  What about the official atheism of the Chinese government?  What, those guys aren’t considered a bureau of cuddly genius teddy bears?  Go figure.

But there I go blaming the atheists.  If those assholes want to decry prosyletization, molestation, war, and all  the rest while conveniently ignoring the charity, comfort, art, music, faith, human spirit, and handful of miracles offered by all religions then I am powerless to stop them.  In fact rants like this only fuel their fire.  Whatever. Atheists need to have fun while they can because really, life is much shorter for those guys.

But come on, religious people.  Quit turning the other cheek and start fucking entetaining your brethren already.  Let these uppity superior titfaces have it.  They’ve won over a significant portion of this generation.  Fighting fire with fire may be the only way to win ‘em back.

Umbrellas Suck

After it rains in the city, I like to walk around and spot the umbrellas that have been abandonded.  They’re always in such terrible condition that I have to wonder how it got so bad before the former owner ditched the mess I see before me.  I’ve lost or broken every umbrella I’ve ever had.  They’re flimsy.  They get the rest of my stuff wet.  It’s nearly impossible to look cool while holding an umbrella.

So, I say go without.  Just get wet.  Walk in the rain, you pansy.  What are you, made of salt?