Oddments of High Unimportance

I think of negative thoughts and emotions, rather, as signals telling you to make adjustments to your attitude, your work habits. In that sense, and that sense alone, they are valuable.

2011 begins much better, in many ways, than did 2010. At this time last year, I was involved in helping to put on some events that scared me and my companions witless. My vacation time had been spent working on a paper so I could finish an incomplete. I had a full load of classes ahead of me and still no clear idea of what I was doing. January 2010 would finish with me at probably my lowest point of the entire year, wondering what had gone wrong.

The year evened out. I had the support and help of good friends and advisors and decided to leave the PhD program and finish my masters. I ticked off that earlier incomplete, staggered through the rest of the semester (which included a statistics class -- blearrrgghh) with only one incomplete, and helped execute a weeklong conference that, by all accounts, went very well.

I spent the summer finishing an incomplete from the spring (I wish I could have written that paper faster, but...). I spent the fall executing a hard-copy, hand-delivered questionnaire to my neighborhood and taking a Chekhov course that was a long, cool drink of water, and for which I wrote one of my best-ever papers.

I read, in the book Dirty Words of Wisdom, a good quote from Alanis Morrisette, that everyone has times when they go through s--- and that you always get through them. So don't worry about them. Nice thought, though it's hard to keep that perspective when reality bombards you with reasons not to get up in the morning. One of the things I learned this year were various tools to help me get through those times so that I can make it to the other side.

Other learnings:

• Accountability gets me up in the morning. Knowing people are depending on me, or that I've committed to a deadline, spurs me to get stuff done. Filthy dirty deadlines -- hate 'em, but they work.
• My mentor, The Unclassifiable Cassidy, advised to commit to the deadline before you're ready -- it's the only way to make sure you get the work done. If you wait till you have the data analyzed, the conference will have already taken place. In other words: you'll never be ready, so just get on with it.
• This means, setting personal or arbitrary deadlines for yourself can work too, if I make them personal enough. For my questionnaire, I knew they needed it to be delivered at least 2 weeks before Thanksgiving, because once the holidays started people would be too busy to respond. For my Chekhov paper, I aimed to have it done the weekend before it was due and so worked on it bit by bit over several weeks (one of the few times I've done such a thing). This turned out to be a good thing, as I had two great insights occur to me in the shower the day before the paper was due; I spent that evening bolstering the paper with those insights and it really strengthened the whole thing.
• This means, relatedly, disassociating the deadline from the project's completion, as explained by Cal at Study Hacks. He recommends starting on a project within 24 hours of receiving the assignment. I must admit, I like the idea.
• My advisor last year had a few core principles that stick in my ind, even if I've not fully adopted them. Among them: it takes as much time to do a big project as it does a small project, so go for the bigger win - make the effort mean something. She also emphasized that no one ever told her what to do; she had to decide what were her priorities and what she wanted to accomplish with her energy, time, and career. It's about being independent rather than being a student -- or an employee.
• I need structure. When I don't have structure (as expressed by deadlines, accountability) then I flounder and flop and end the day feeling worse rather than better. This, although there's often a voice within that screams not to be chained by these dreary and boring rules. I have not worked out trade negotiations between these voices yet, but it's coming.
• It has to be the journey and the destination. I heard several times during my year in the academic vineyard, that if some part of you isn't perversely enjoying at least some of what you're going through, then that isn't the job for you. I'm all for delayed gratification, but it needs to come sooner rather than later in some form.

I ended 2010 way more upbeat then when I started. I spent my Christmas break reading a wonderful book and not even checking my email. There is still, at the back of my head, that niggling puritanical whisper "but you aren't accomplishing anything." I begin 2011 less sure of my path -- say what you will about the academic experience, it's run by the calendar and the pace ensure you're productive. I certainly never wrote or created as much in a short period of time as I did while working full-time and going to school. (In fact, I see now that the academic expectations of research, teaching, publications, and service formally externalizes what employees are always told to do -- but rarely do -- in their careers: work hard, network, be active in your professional association, keep your resume updated.)

I am joining with a few other people in creating a mastermind group, admitting which in public makes me feel like I'm coming out of the closet as a Kenny G fan or Republican or something equally shunned by society as simple-brained and noxious. Still, 2010 taught me that my old ways of believing and living were not enough to cope with the stress of what I went through. I want to experiment with and play with new methods to express (and maybe form) new beliefs.

I've set myself a deadline of January 31 to have my masters paper drafted, with the data entered and crunched, and the literature updated. It's an aggressive schedule and it's the kind of spur I need to get things done. Even if I'm not finished, I'll have accomplished more than if I'd waited for the mood to strike me.

Other goals for the year include finding work, making some money, networking, raking the leaves, cleaning my office closets from 4 years of neglect, etc. As I look at my calendar book for January, and think about what I need/want to do, I want to see how much benevolent pressure I can put on myself such that I get done what I want without stressing out too much. Journey and destination.

Another tool I plan to use is Christine Kane's Word of the Year. I've not gone through her worksheet, but I want this year's word to be ACTION. As I look back over 2010, much of my distress was caused by my worrying over a problem, journaling about it, brooding, sitting and looking out the bus window while morosely spinning dark futures about it, when only a few minutes of action was enough to dispel about 90 percent of the gloom. Taking action -- even and especially -- when I don't feel like it, is what I want 2011 to be about. I want to look back on 2011 and marvel at all that I did, all the people I met, all the things I wrote, and wonder at how I did it all while feeling on top of things the whole time.

Of course, there may be a problem with FOCUS or CLARITY. If I take action on all things, large and small, won't that dissipate my effectiveness? Maybe, but that's a problem to deal with when I'm actioning all over the place (and it's something I hope the mastermind group would help me to rein in).

Today, for example, I have 5 things written down that I'd like to accomplish by the end of the day (writing a blog post is one of them), yet I see that the dishes need to be washed and the clothes need to be put away. Do I put them on my list? Do the other more important things first? Whoa, Sparky, slow down. Those are my thought processes running amuck again, and not serving me. The thing to do is simply to take action -- wash the dishes, put away the clothes, clean my desk, take a nap, even. Don't let my thinking get in the way of taking action.

Here's to 2011.

The first, from an emotional, Buddhist perspective, and the second, from the productive academic's perspective. Both emphasize being mindful of when you're in the state of boredom and how to use that as a cue to put the mind in a more curious, awake state.

I like Jonathan's summation of the problem:

Boredom is like pain, it tells us that something is wrong and requires a change.

>> Later on the same shoot, Blake and I were sitting on the beach at his estate in Malibu (for which he charged the studio ridiculous location fees. He knew all the tricks.)

We were talking about power in Hollywood, and I asked him, “How much power do you have?” ’

“What do you think?” he asked, gesturing up the hill to his house where Julie Andrews was waiting, to the Masereti in the driveway, and five acres of the most exclusive real estate in L.A.

“I have it all,” he said. “Guaranteed greenlights, name above the title, final cut, final budget approval, approval over advertising and marketing, final approval on casting … all of it.”

“And what has it cost you to get that?” I asked him.

“My health,” he said. “Countless hours on the couch. Drug addiction and multiple times in rehab. Ulcers. My first marriage. My peace of mind.”

“And has it been worth it?” I asked.

“You know,” he said, “I ask myself that all the time. And I find, to my horror, that I cannot say yes.”

So what does work? Here are some techniques Professor Wiseman has found in his study that are effective at helping people reach their goals:

1) Breaking goals down into small steps, then rewarding themselves when each stage has passed.

2) Telling friends about what they were trying to achieve.

3) Reminding themselves of the benefits of obtaining their goal.

4) Charting their progress.

Not that quasi-friends are entirely bad. Sociologists have shown that “weak ties” are as crucial to the flourishing of social networks as strong ones; more quasi-friends probably also means more job opportunities, and more chance of making real friends, or meeting the love of your life. Perhaps all we need is some kind of technological fix, to display a message under every chipper status update, and as a permanent subtitle on numerous television shows: “Don’t forget: this person is barely holding things together.”

That’s the most beautiful thing that I like about boxing: you can take a punch. The biggest thing about taking a punch is your ego reacts and there’s no better spiritual lesson than trying to not pay attention to your ego’s reaction. That’s what takes people out of the fight half the time. They get hit and half the reaction is your ego is saying, I cannot believe that person just lit me up, how humiliating. And what a fighter has to do and what Micky does and what these guys do, whether it’s a prison thing or a crime or a drug episode, is they kind of just go. [He mimes ducking and getting up.]

I'm currently writing a final paper for my Chekhov class (which has been WONDERFUL). My teacher and I agreed that it would be a good exercise for me to dig really deep into a single story rather than try to survey a batch of stories to prove some conjecture or other. As a writer of fiction myself, I was more interested in reverse-engineering a story to see how Chekhov constructed it.

I chose a story we had not read called "On Official Business" (Garnett translation). On the surface, it's a story in which nothing happens except that people wind up as depressed and miserable as when they started. But on really picking the story apart to see how Chekhov wrote it -- the narrative techniques he uses, his deployment of imagery, sound, and repeated phrases -- well, it became a rather rich stew.

I thought, aha!, I will now be able to get this paper off my plate early and not have to worry about it late in the semester. Ha-ha! Not so! My first priority was to distribute a questionnaire to my neighborhood as part of my master's project, and the logistics of that proved surprisingly overwhelming. (As with almost all master's work, it isn't hard, it just takes lots of time.)

I started making notes per my favorite writing book, Thinking on Paper, and quickly had 8 pages. [1] Then I floundered around looking for some sort of structure that I could slot my ideas into, looking for headings that were "mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive," but found that approach just generated more text.

At this point (last night, in fact) I decided it was time to stem the flow and remind myself of some writing truths I picked up from here and there:

• If everything's important, nothing's important. This is a staple of technical writing. I was trying to put everything I knew into this paper, all of my notes -- with the effect that the really big points were getting lost.
• Kill your darlings. Faulkner's famous piece of writing advice. In my working life, whenever I've had trouble writing an article or column that I felt strongly about, deleting the text I loved best allowed the piece to fit neatly into its allotted word count and allowed the other ideas to fall naturally into place. I'm too in love with some of the points I'm making or the language I'm using.
• Create a title, just to get started. A title creates a focus for ideas; fiction writers or poets may pick a toneword or image or piece of music that expresses the effect they're after and that helps them choose the words and images that will cluster around it. I re-read the Chekhov story again, started making more notes, and hit on the title" "Dreams and Reality in Chekhov's 'On Official Business'". It's helping me decide what to leave out, which is as important as what I put in.
• Write more than you need. As the authors of Thinking on Paper say, use the words you have to attract the words you want. You're not under any obligation to use them.
• The sooner I get the first draft done, the more fun I have. Rewriting is re-thinking, revising and editing is more fun than squeezing out that first draft. When I re-read what I wrote, new phrases, new ideas, better choices come unbidden to my head.
• It's only supposed to be a 12-page paper, for crying out loud. But, I'd decided to let the paper be as long as it wants to be. I'm enjoying spending time on this project and discovering all the clues Chekhov put into the story. However, time and energy constraints -- and the patience of my professor -- should also be respected!

The blog Stupid Motivational Tricks has really smart, tough advice on the business of academic writing. One post very cogently said that you don't write a paper, you write for an hour. Just focus on this piece or this point for an hour or so, get that done, and then move to the next.

For this morning's writing session, I want to focus on the character Lzyhin and draw together some of the criticism related to his epiphany. In other writing sessions, I want to tackle the secondary characters, Chekhov's use of imagery and sound to create a netting that holds the story together, and the circularity of the story's beginning and ending. That's all way too much to write about in a short paper, even given 8 uninterrupted hours. But I can get each piece done and, as Jonathan Mayhew points out, even a mediocre week of writing ends in getting some writing done, and that's the bottom line.

[1] I created a PDF summarizing the book -- and other bits of writing advice -- in my first class at SILS in 2006. That historical provenance out of the way, here's a link to the PDF.

Alex has a wonderful essay up this week on the unexamined life vs the unlived life. I recognized so much of myself in his description of his early college self. And i would say it's only been fairly recently that I've decided to bias myself towards action -- even fidgety action -- over excessive rumination. (Just look up what "brown study" means.)

I think had Alex pushed farther, he would have probably detected fear prompting the defensive thinking posture he (we) adopted. Fear of rejection, fear of not being good enough, fear of not being perfect, fear of not being loved. There are damn few Socrates in the world whose motivations are not based on fear; for the rest of us, I think we adopt that intellectual camouflage and hope for the best.

And I loved this description of one of the risks we run by overindulging our penchant for thinking over a livelier balance between thought and action:

Believing advice is the greatest help we can provide others who are suffering. It’s not. The greatest gift we can provide others who are suffering is encouragement—encouragement that draws its power from our having experienced similar sufferings that we’ve overcome ourselves.

Anyway, his post reminded me for some reason of this wonderful Alexander Theroux quote from his novel Laura Warholic:

I decided at one point in my life that I never wanted to be anything that would not allow me to be anything else I wanted to be ... I ended up being nothing that I can currently identify, which I suppose means I got my wish.

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