The to-do list I can’t get done

1. Find previous to-do list

2. When #1 fails, recreate previous to-do list

3. Find place to keep to-do list that is more effective than previous spot.

4. Actually check to-do list to make its existence useful.

 

It’s good to have a job that doesn’t pay

I’ve been writing at a decent clip in spurts this summer, but none of it is appearing here, which is rather odd and makes me long to return to the blog more regularly. When the summer job dropped on me I produced a couple pieces and sent them into a pair of magazines for publication consideration. In my effort to woo these publications I kept them off my blog until the pieces are rejected. That’s kind of the same reason I haven’t published on my blog the final paper I wrote for my graduate school internship/project, though I’m darn proud of it (and though it exists as a .pdf on my portfolio). That thing has had its review completed at the journal where I submitted it, but it is still seeping through the process.

In my search for journals in need of writing, I read a handful of submission guidelines for a number of publications where I thought I fit. A few readings in, my conclusion was that I don’t fit. All the purity of the topic and the importance of my voice diminished before the target audience and format; I do not begrudge these publications their marketing strategies, but neither do I desire to create their cookie cutter content.

I’d rather write here, working on my personal reflections and experimenting with my own style, than write there, holding myself back in attempts to produce something that will sell.

There it is, the light that reveals the invisible ink: sell. Selling is the only reason I’d write “there” instead of here or instead of working on my family book (a project to which I happily contributed 1,000 words this evening while Sammy slept on my lap). In actuality, selling is a fine idea in principle. I’d love to rake in a few bucks to help fund the basement reconstruction and mold-removal, but I’d like to make sure I don’t earn those pennies there by sacrificing my work here.

In a response to my note about Sammy’s birth, a good friend of mine complimented my writing by asserting, “You should be a writer!” Of course I gladly accept the compliment (however unearned), but I am tempted to reply to her with a bit of contradiction. I want to tell her what I need to remind myself as I write:

“I am a writer; I just don’t get paid for it.”

Thanks for reading.

 

What’s so different?

Having a boy is going to be a greatly different experience for me. For one thing, changing diapers is a more intense experience: I’m not used to having a loaded weapon pointed at me while I clean things up.

 

The quick story of our baby’s birth

Just thought I’d post a bit of the official word that on Wednesday night my wife gave birth to our third child. She had been having contractions about 10 minutes apart all day but sometime before dinner they moved to about 6 minutes apart.

We put Gramma and Grampa on alert before dinner and told Ellen and Annie that Mommy might have to go to the hospital. They were as excited as you would expect, and later when K confirmed with Ellen that surely she would be going in, Ellen began running in all directions yelling out and bursting with noise. The highlight of this was when she would run over to Mommy, who had been kneeling to talk to her, and yell into her belly, “Baby Buddles! You’re going to come out tonight!”

The rest moved a bit quickly. After driving to the hospital and walking around the parking lot, contractions had hit 3 minute intervals. As K stood in pain outside the emergency room doors I noted the time was 8:25. We went in while the lady at the desk received some training in how to admit women in labor and asked us all the important questions (”Are you still at 1925 Fillmore Street?” What, may I ask, is the point of pre-registering if we have to go through all this?). At 8:45 we were in the delivery room, where the nurses checked K and got her situated on the bed. About two minutes after 9:00 K’s water broke exploded and then somewhere around 5-7 minutes past 9:00 the doctor arrived, which meant she could push. By 9:16, our newest little baby emerged. Once again, it was quick but painful, though K has said that this time she was able to enjoy the process more thoroughly because she was able to focus more on the end result (the baby) instead of the pain.

With the baby out, I was fixated watching the hands, face, and feet, when my wife suddenly said, “It’s a boy.” Anyone could have detected the clear sense of marvel in her voice. Her comment snapped my attention to his male features, and I suddenly realized the oddity of it all. We have a boy? How weird.

Anyway, he was 7 pounds, 4 ounces and 19 ¼ inches long.

We have named him Samuel Curtis. We originally liked the name Samuel out of strong admiration for the priest and prophet of 1 and 2 Samuel, but the more we learn of the name, the more we like it. The etymology tags Samuel as meaning “The name [of God] is El” which in itself means little to me (El? What’s that?) but it means a whole bunch more when I realize that such a name refers to the power of God and ascribes that power to Him. Thus, in 1Samuel 1, when Hannah declares her son’s name Samuel and states “I have asked him of the Lord,” the name and her comment are especially emphasizing the power of God and his ability and willingness to answer prayer. The short version of the story, then, is that his name is Samuel, because God is powerful.

Curtis means “courteous” and hopefully having two older sisters will lead to our Samuel Curtis being marked by this trait. The trait certainly fits Kiersten’s father, who is the reason we have chosen the name for little Sammy.

Ellen and Annie are bubbling with excitement. They have colds but Ellen is washing her hands practically every 10 minutes so she can touch Baby Sammy. Annie does everything to Sammy that Ellen does, sometimes at the same time, which of course leads to some intimidating piles of love. They’ll learn quickly what is okay, we’re sure, but Sammy is also learning quickly that he is loved.

That’s the story. Everyone is healthy and Sammy’s circumcision and slightly above average levels of Billy Rueben (jaundice) have made him mostly sleepy.

We’re taking enough pictures to piece together a solid play by play and I’ve made a handful of the pictures posted on Flickr public, so keep your eyes there if you’d like more.

I don’t know that I’ll be writing too much here since it’s so difficult to type with one hand, but I hope to dash off a few quick comments here and there through the summer, especially before I return to my summer world of furniture delivery.

Thanks for reading.

 

Baby!

This is Sammy. He’s got two big sisters and he better be tough, because Annie is not shy

 

It’s not my birthdays that make me feel old

Mommy: Ellen, you’re four years old, do you feel any different?

Ellen: Uh, huh. I feel older.

You’re not the only one, Ellen.

 

Hypercontent, meet your foe: A schedule

With my graduate school experience entering the application for degree stage (though there is that 4-hour competency exam and the portfolio defense, but I’m planning on being competent the day of the exam and the portfolio, if I do say so, seems defensible), I spent a bit of time considering how I might reacquire some of the habits of life that I used to enjoy. These habits are fairly basic and I narrowed them down to three priorities — reading, writing, and exercising. They’re my past-times, my staples, but in the weeks after my official coursework had ended, I still wasn’t doing any of them.

I couldn’t figure why for sure, but part of my theory is that for almost two years now I’ve had so much to do that I didn’t have to worry about being disciplined. When a moment freed up, I had no choice to slack. I had just one choice: work. Play with the girls when they’re awake, but after you put them to bed, back to work. Not that I did nothing else during that time; after all, I surely watched the Red Sox run through the playoffs last October, and I slipped a movie into the evening lineup every month or two. But mostly I did not get to choose what I read or to write what I truly wanted to write. And I can count on one hand the times I’ve exercised.

But with the margin comes room for choice, and here’s where I have to reinsert the discipline I’ve not needed. When the opening emerges, will I read some article on A List Apart about web design, or will I sit down with Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago? What I really want to do is sit down with Solzhenitsyn, but I wasn’t doing it.

Instead, I was scanning the Web, checking six thousand places for six thousand things, falling into the mode of reading which I seem to have downloaded like a virus with my Google Reader, the mode so astutely described by Nicholas Carr in his recent article in The Atlantic:

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf . . . “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.

At the end of this quote Maryanne Wolf states her concern that when we read this fast we are not making connections like we would with deep reading:

When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

I find her statement funny because when we technology people get too excited we act like the ability to link content together - hypertext - is a wonderful tool for helping the reader to connect ideas. But the reader doesn’t make those connections while reading, she makes them while reflecting; if we do not take the time to reflect, we do not connect. This means the ones who are connecting these bits of information are the bloggers, the ones who in stopping to write are stopping to read more deeply and to reflect on it.

Anyway, my point is that I am not interested in being a cursory reader and cursory thinker.

Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

I want to read deeply, and I am not ever going to agree with Google about what mental productivity is:

The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

I am productive when I am wise, I am wise when I dig deep, and I dig deep only when I read slowly and think clearly.

This is where I turned to my wife for a tip. She has turned to schedules as a solid salvation of her days with the girls. Routines allow her to do everything from minimize the nightmarish trips to Wal*Mart (Annie can’t make it in and out without crying) to grabbing a slice of personal time every afternoon (it’s a small slice, but she’ll take it). I figured I could use something like it, so I designed a weekly schedule. The schedule assigned a task for each of my nights, which are the times when the girls are asleep and I am able to do something grown-upy. It looked like this:

• Monday: write
• Tuesday: read and exercise
• Wednesday: write
• Thursday: read and exercise
• Friday: fun (or web design)
• Saturday: exercise and read/write or web design
• Sunday: read and study the Bible more than I have time for in my daily reading of it

I can read and exercise on the same day because we have a recumbent exercise bike, which allows us to read while we pedal. That was a very wise purchase for us.

Anyway, I began my life on a schedule on Tuesday, and it worked great until Thursday, when I stayed up talking with my wife until late and then washed the dishes until 10:00. I had begun exercising at 10:00 on Tuesday but then it kept me up past 11:00 and I dragged my tail all Wednesday, which meant that by Wednesday night when I had the chance to write all I could manage was to create a list of details for later use. So on Thursday I just read until 10:30 and went to sleep, figuring that my work delivering furniture (summer job) substituted as at least an anaerobic workout. Such conflicts continued into the weekend, and by Sunday my schedule and I were shot. This week — week 2 of my scheduled life — saw me read somewhere under 16 pages and write none.

Life after grad school is busier than I realized. I am finding that reading it great, but so is having clean dishes, and that writing is fun, but so is knowing that my checking account is balanced. I am not wasting my time online, but I am not magically finding more time.

I suppose I could attempt a modified schedule, perhaps with only one day of writing and one of reading each week; or perhaps I’ll have to abandon one of my web design projects. Whatever I do, I am determined to make it an intentional choice, one where I do not accidentally allow my time to slip away in an undisciplined heap of hyperlinks.

I hope you do the same, which means if this article inspires you to stop reading my blog, realize that I won’t be offended. I’d take it as the highest compliment you could pay me.

Thanks for reading.