"Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts"

I ran across this article on Friday and saved it as a draft post to write about when the clutter of the week had cleared from my mind at least a little. It’s Saturday night, we’ve got Dartanian playing on the stereo, and I’m holding a truly great cup of decaf coffee, so here goes:

My summary: we* now have more access to more information than ever before. That sounds great, but what no one predicted in the internet’s early years was that more access to information would also lead to taking less of that information in in depth. Interestingly, as we lose the skill of in-depth information processing, we become expert skimmers. This may be good or it may be bad, but it is a distinct and measurable change.

Comments & anecdotes:

On Tuesday evening I met T at our usual coffeeshop. We talked each other through our latest plot developments and T commented that she’d started yet another disconnected piece of writing. “I’m too scattered,” she said. “I spend all day at work jumping around from project to project. I can’t focus.”

I spent two hours at work on Friday working my way through a couple hundred emails. I sorted them into ‘Actions’ I need to take, projects where I’m ‘Waiting’ for someone else to do something, and some I just trashed. A few I filed in ‘Read,’ and spent another two hours attempting to do exactly that while camped out in the massage chair in the lobby. Every time I hit something longer than a single screenful of text, I found myself sighing and flipping back to my Inbox to see if there was anything new.

Friday night I spent two hours with my drafting board, figuring out the proportions for an Ikea hack I’m working on.

Earlier this year I did some reading about the so-called ‘flow state’ of concentration, where you get so involved in something that you lose track of time and become entirely ‘present in the moment.’ You’re not thinking about why you’re doing what you’re doing, or what you need to do next or failed to do yesterday. This is one of my most enjoyable ways to work, whether it’s for my day job or not, and my reliance on it probably explains why I instinctively assume that rewiring my brain for skimming would be a bad change to fall victim to.

Neal Stephenson reportedly claims that all fiction can be written in Emacs; Stephen King says that if you don’t have time to read, then you don’t have time to write. The guru of Getting Things Done exhorts us all to make lists of all the little nagging questions and to-dos, getting them out of your head and freeing up space for the ‘flow state.’

There’s a way that fits together, but right now I’m too scattered to see what it is. If you can see it, maybe you haven’t been skimming.


*We: this isn’t explicitly called out in the article, but in this context ‘we’ can only mean heavily internet-based cultures. These are mostly Western, and in the US I suspect mostly coastal. It would be interesting to see how cellphones compare.... The effect is probably magnified for so-called ‘knowledge workers’ such as yours truly, which makes me wonder whether that job description will in 10 years seem ironic or prophetic.

...and no, I didn't keep The Vegetarian Epicure

I was tempted, I admit, but I eventually decided that since I’d end up editing most of the recipes pretty heavily, it was easier to just write down the best titles and use them as an idea list. There’s only so much bookshelf space I’m willing to give to period pieces, and Betty Crocker’s Picture Cookbook has dibs.

Housework June 22-28: do I do anything that isn't food-related?

The list of housework items below leads me to believe that no, I do not. Things are a bit skewed at the moment, though, because my guy is in the middle of going through a bunch of his stuff (5k books - I am not exaggerating) and since they are in stacks all over the floor, I’m suppressing what would otherwise be a powerful urge to mop. As it is, I’m wearing slippers indoors because the floors are slightly gritty (you wanted to know that, didn’t you?) - less the result of real neglect and more a reflection that since it’s summer, we tramp in and out a lot from the back yard.

Soon this will all be resolved - or at least that’s what I’m telling myself.

June 28: 3.5 hours
I always spend more time on housework on the weekends - partly because I cook, partly because I garden, and partly because I like going through things and throwing them out (you would think this would mean I have nothing left, but no).

1. 1.5 hour: French toast with fresh plums for breakfast, and two loads of dishes
2. 1 hour: going through my three-inch-high stack of old Cook’s Illustrated while chanting my cooking-magazine mantra: “You don’t need the hard copy! That’s why you have an online subscription!”
3. .5 hour: rescuing the wisteria, cilantro, and fuschia from crispy sunstroke death in too-small pots
4. .25 hour: dinner prep: leftover vegetable soup from two days ago plus a frozen pizza contributed by my guy

June 27: . 5 hours
My guy went out by himself to a David Sedaris book-signing, so I got self-indulgent for dinner and ate a bowl of straight pasta sauce. Yummmmm.....OK, I also had some of it on toast with mozzarella. Grand total: 15 minutes. I’m sure I also put something away (mail?) so chalk that up for another 15 minutes. No time on breakfast prep due to the awesomeness of Donut Friday, which my friend B was kind enough to put on Calendar so I’d actually remember to go.

June 26: .5 hours
... all of which was spent making bruschetta.

June 25: 1 hour
Made vegetable soup from scratch. It rocked, in spite of my initial skepticism of shredded carrots and grits (grits?!) in soup. This was my first recipe from Jacques Pepin’s Fast Food My Way, which for years I’d thought was actually my guy’s cookbook rather than mine. The flaws in my mid-term memory leave me wondering how I get anything done at all; the cookbook is actually inscribed to me (it was a gift), so there really shouldn’t have been any doubt about whose it was.

There’s probably 5 minutes in there to pour a bowl of cereal for breakfast, too.

June 24: .5 hour
Was out late with T for our weekly commiseration about attempting to write while holding down a full time job. Topic for discussion: how damn hard it is to keep focus when your whole day is spent skimming, rather than focusing on, data and stories.

June 23: 0 hours
Which matches up nicely with going out to see Sex and the City with a good girlfriend, which is how I spent my evening. Really no one should do housework on a day when they go to see Sex and the City.

June 22: 2 hours
Split up somehow between picking plums from the trees in the yard, a couple of loads of dishes, and making breakfast and dinner.

"If you have passed a joint around before dinner..."

I recently looked at my cookbook shelf and realized it needed pruning: not all the cookbooks fit on the shelf, so they're in a bunch of miscellaneous piles. I hate miscellaneous piles. Something had to go. The question was, what? Clearly I must keep the Gourmet cookbook and the Santa Monica Farmers Market cookbook; I use those all the time. Clearly I must also keep the Betty Crocker cookbook from the '40s because where else can you get two-tone sketches of wasp-waisted women in shirt-dresses & heels, cooking enormous turkeys while pondering whether a story about a kitten up a tree is appropriate for mealtime discussion? The Joy of Cooking is a staple and I learned to cook from the New Vegetarian Epicure, so those both had to stay. When I want something particularly interesting I turn to the Turtle Bay or one of several New Mexico cookbooks, so those had to stay too. 

Eventually I spotted the original Vegetarian Epicure. Once upon a time I bought this because I liked the New Vegetarian Epicure so much - but I have never actually made anything out of the original Vegetarian Epicure (except for cornbread, and that was in college). It seemed like a reasonable candidate. I took it into the backyard to read through it and consider whether my cooking repertoire would be seriously hampered by its disappearance. And that's when I ran across the quote that forms the title of this post: 

"If you have passed a joint around before dinner to sharpen gustatory perceptions, you most likely will pass another one after dinner, and everyone knows what that will do - the blind munchies may strike at any time."

This is embedded deep within the otherwise-completely-serious chapter on how to design menus. It forms the backbone of the author's argument for why you need to have a two-hours-after-dinner course in case anyone gets hungry again. 

Not only that, but about half the soup recipes call for 1 1/2 cups of heavy cream. And there's a Roquefort Mousse that lists the ingredients as "2 envelops gelatin | 1 cup light cream | 3 eggs | 10 oz Roquefort cheese | 1/2 cup heavy cream." 

I think the '70s must have been much, much, MUCH stranger than any of us born too late to remember them clearly realize.* 

* Yes, I know, I was born in the '70s, but my focus was more on my sandbox and blocks at that point, so it doesn't count for purposes of this post.  

Housework June 21: 3 hours

I know, huge jump. Here's how it breaks down: 

1 hour: general kitchen-cleaning-up + breakfast-making (tea, toast, fruit). Yeah, that's a long time, but there were a bunch of piled-up dishes kind of everywhere. 

2 hours: more kitchen-cleaning-up + dinner-making (curried cauliflower & sweet pea soup, with a side of sauteed beets with lime; very yummy, but the first time I'd made either one so it took forever). Then after dinner I decided this was a good time to clean all the counters, the stove, the pans I didn't get around to earlier, etc. I may be overestimating slightly but not much. 

What's not included: the hour and a half or so my guy and I spent figuring out what pieces of art we want to hang. We've been in the house a year and a half so it seemed like a good time to sort out our interior decor :) Also not included: the time I spent in the yard mulling over why exactly the gardeners saw fit to remove my grapevine, while leaving intact the giant palm-like shrub with sharp poky fronds which extends threateningly halfway across the front walk. Yeah, I know, that's what you get for such a lazy, bourgeois setup as having gardeners, but it's not my choice; we rent, remember, so it's a property management co thing. If it was up to me I wouldn't have a gardener. I'd have one of those no-electric-power push lawnmowers and develop an incredibly buff upper body by manicuring our tiny lawn half to death.  

Housework June 20: 15 minutes

... which I don't actually remember so I'm estimating. I think I put away some laundry. I had breakfast at work since it was Donut Friday (mmm, donuts) and then dinner out in Half Moon Bay since it was The First Day of Summer. The First Day of Summer meant that my guy was ridiculously miserable in town - he hates heat - and I get cold easily, so I figured the hot weather would be right in the middle if we headed to the beach. For the record, it was perfect. I also love that the Half Moon Bay Brewing Co allows dogs on their patio. It seems so friendly.  

It occurs to me that if I ate at home more often there'd be a hell of a lot more housework. And that people with kids generally eat at home more often, since (I assume) packing the kids up to a restaurant is a pain, and anyway they might scream once they got there. I have no kids + I eat out a lot, therefore minimal housework. 

Interesting. 

Housework June 19: 15 minutes

... which consists of pouring myself a bowl of cereal for breakfast & offloading the dishwasher. Not bad. Again, though, I had dinner out: an alumni thing for the University of York. This leads me to wonder why I find it sweet that York includes me in events, and annoying that Columbia asks me for money. Maybe I just answered my own question. York is so eager to get an alumni group going over here in the Wilds of the Western US that they're ridiculously excited when I respond to them in any way - whereas Columbia wants cash. Sigh. In contrast, York spotted my drinks and calamari at the Thirsty Bear: "It's on the Uni!" said with the big smile that always seems to accompany someone who doesn't often get to expense things and is just thrilled to have the chance. Sweet indeed. 

More thoughts after reading comments: 884 pages of housework instructions? Maybe I shouldn't admit it, but I didn't know it was possible to clean drains before they were clogged. What do you, pour down soap? That can't be right. I may not know what I'm doing but I have at least noticed that one of the primary ingredients in drain-clogs is soap scum. 

And multi-tasking housework is still housework; I'm not trying to optimize my life (that would be too much like work), I'm trying to figure out what it takes, measure the status quo before considering whether I care to adapt. 

One interview down, X to go

I wish I didn't have this nagging feeling that the value of X depends on how the first interview went. I mean, it seemed OK, but who can really tell from the interviewee's chair?

Housework June 18: zero hours :)

I had a rotten day at work yesterday (no, not bad news, just another stall), so I insisted on going out for Mexican food and margaritas for dinner, hence no cooking time. And curiously, the idea of tracking housework made the idea of emptying the dishwasher before I went to bed pretty damn unattractive, so I skipped it.

I also noticed another interesting stat in the same article: lesbian couples with kids (no data yet on gay men) do a total of 31 hours of housework per week - about a third less than straight couples. 

Wha... ?! Clearly the lesbians are on to something. 

So of course I brought this up with my guy over dinner. Our guesses: 1) women and men traditionally notice & care for different areas around the house, but a lot of housework isn't strictly required. So in a lesbian relationship, maybe the "guy" things just don't get done - which makes me really, really curious about gay male relationships and housework load! and 2) a lesbian couple is already outside society norms in some senses, so maybe it's easier to avoid getting your ego caught up in having a perfectly-kept house. 

Which leads to the question, what is housework? For purposes of tracking it, I'm figuring it's things I do in the house (or yard), which benefit both me and my guy. That ropes in cooking, cleaning, yardwork - but no errands, and no time spent setting up our various networking gadgetry needs which are totally gratuitous, really, and fun anyway. 

And for today's count (as yet incomplete of course): I spent 10 minutes emptying the dishwasher and pouring myself a bowl of cereal this morning....

Housework: are you *!?%$** kidding me? (part 1)

This weekend I read a New York Times Magazine article about couples who attempt to achieve 'equally shared parenting.' Ok, fine, that's nice - but what really stood out was this statistic: 

"the average wife does 31 hours of housework a week while the average husband does 14"

That's appalling from a gender-relations standpoint, it really is - but right now I'm not thinking about that. No, right now I'm thinking, "45 hours of housework PER WEEK?!" No matter how you divide it up that's just awful. That's more time than I spend at work. If I hired someone to do all that I'd be paying them overtime! 

And so I embark on an experiment. For the next week or so I'm going to track how much housework I actually do and report back here. And it had better not be 31 hours - or anything approaching that.

I might actually interview sometime ...

... because I just got approval to do interviews. This is the next to the last step on the transfer process (the last step being all the relevant people agreeing that the interviews plus resume etc look good enough for it all to go through). Keep your fingers crossed for me. 

And no, of course I don't know the timeframe! Why would I know a wacky thing like that? 

For all those who are wondering if this means I'm leaving my current Big Tech Company: nope, not at the moment. I've got lots of reasons to stay, the main one being that I like it here. All the talk of recruiters and resumes and interviews is just what our internal transfer process looks like. Makes you want to apply from outside, doesn't it? 

The black hole speaks

... and says I might know something by the end of next week. Gasp. Dare I believe it?

No, not really, no I don't. I'll believe it when I see it. But it was pretty funny that the recruiter actually referred to himself as a black hole, without my doing it for him!

Money shock

My guy and I did some financial planning this weekend (reallocating a 401k: such an exciting way to spend a Saturday morning!).

This morning, my brain still wrapped in numbers, I plugged some data into the crazy rent vs buy modeling spreadsheet one of the guys at work created and helpfully shared.

And for the very first time, the model shows that it might make sense to buy.

Wait, what?

I have no idea what to do with that. I've been happily using "it makes no financial sense to buy a house!!!" as the unassailable justification for my geographic commitment-phobia. If that's no longer the case, then [gasp] might it actually be time to think about where I want to live?

I dunno if I'm ready for that. Maybe AMT will make all the numbers change again, and I can procrastinate a little longer.