Baby Steps

I love my housemate. He’s a terrific listener and offers marvelous insights. In college, he was a member of the cross country team and has maintained his conditioning. This commitment taught him a lot, it seems, and I’m now the beneficiary of a big pearl of wisdom.

He and I were talking about this mutual acquaintance of ours, and I mentioned how she talked about working out. He was a little surprised, and said, I didn’t think that her body looked like the type of a person who makes working out a regular part of her life. He said that he can tell by looking at a person how committed he/she is to working out. He said, for a lot of people, they work out for a little while, super hard core for a couple of weeks, and then they flame out. I jumped the gun and correctly guessed that he could tell that I was such a person.

I was fascinated by this concept because it seemed to speak to a larger issue in my life… the inability to completely follow through on personal improvement plans. This whole three days’ focus series is a way for me to be focused on being productive. To this point, I’ve had success with the three days’ focus series because it has ensured that I, at the very least, start projects. I find this to be an effective method, especially for little projects that can be completed, largely, in three days’ time. However…

The last three days’ focus project was to focus on playing the piano. I’d said that I wanted to achieve 15 hours of practice time towards that magical 10,000-hour target which, when achieved, would probably put me at the level of piano mastery (note that I’m not saying virtuosity). In looking at my progress, I tabulated 2 hours and 15 minutes. Now, if I took the measurements and compared them to my goal, surely I would consider this last project a failure. But, I don’t, and it’s because of my conversation with my housemate.

You see, in that discussion, Housemate mentioned that, to really make something a part of your life, you want to start out small and simply commit to it. I played piano on each of the three days. If I make the piano playing a daily thing, then, perhaps, some days, I’ll practice much more than 25 or 50 minutes. If I tabulate those times, perhaps by the end of the year I’ll be close to 1,000 hours. Perhaps, in coming years, I’ll commit even more and reach 10,000 hours after 5 or 6 years. At that time, I’ll still be in my early thirties, and have the rest of my life to let the keys help me to go wherever I want to go!

In speaking of going wherever I want to go, today I started a new three days’ focus project. The reader may recall that one of my earlier entries was “Clutter Confrontation,” in which I described my attempts to de-clutter my bedroom, making it more livable. I made moderate progress at the time, and now I’m going whole hog. I’ve hauled 98% of the boxes of junk out of my bedroom and started asking myself questions like “What can I do with this?” “Is there somewhere in my house that this can belong?” I feel that working on this project and organizing the junque (misspelling intentional. Junque refers to junk that isn’t worthless… it’s just in the way) will enable me to move about the world more freely. I have no plans to settle permanently in Salina, and, when I do move, I want my move to be relatively stress-free, and having control over my possessions will make that much more likely. So, for today, tomorrow, and the next day, I’m doing battle with my past that I might have a more stress free future. ¡Olé!

Three Days' Focus Interlude: Who is my audience?

Writers produce more effective writing when they keep their audience in mind. Well, more specifically, when they write to the audience. My goal is to produce effective writing. If I’m going to do this, I must not only write with plenty of voice, edit myself to have effective use of conventions, etc., but must also write to the audience.

The thing is that my goal with the “Three Days’ Focus” personal improvement plan and the accompanying editorials is, well, to learn to focus. So, it seems to me that, rather than just saying “I’m trying to write in a good journalistic style” or “I’m writing to anyone who likes to read introspective literature,” I think that I should write to a specific person, whether real or imaginary.

So, what is the appeal in doing this? Frankly, I think that it’s an appeal of personal taste. Consider how historically exciting it is when one reads what Lincoln wrote to his wife, or your mother to your father in old love letters. You get to put yourself immediately in the personal and empathetic mindset of reading. It’s similar to how much popular intrigue books like Harry Potter have. In these books, seemingly half the literature is dialogue. Reading plays, too, is exciting; the reader can picture him/herself in the scene. “Open letter to [some person]”-type literature (Morris’s “Open Letter to a Christian Nation,” and Living Colour’s “Open Letter to a Landlord” are powerful examples of this medium. I’m going to try, for a while, to write thus. So, for example, and I’m not sure at this point who the particular audience member will be, you might see a passage like:

Therefore, Marvin (Marvin is my M&M dispenser), the reason that I have decided to make the next three days’ focus project a song to my grandma is because….

Or, perhaps, I don’t need to name the person out loud (figuratively speaking). Perhaps, as the writer, I simply need to keep that person in mind.

It’s important to note, however, that I‘m not writing this way because of someone, as Dante wrote the Divine Comedy because he couldn’t get over his obsession with Beatrice; I’m not writing to a muse. I’m writing this for myself to a particular person so that that person might know me. Johnnny Rzeznik, in the iconic pop rock hit “Iris,” wrote “I don’t want the world to see me/Cuz I don’t think that they’d [sic] understand/When everything’s made to be broken/I just want you to know who I am.” In this exercise, you could say that I’m writing of my personal progress to this particular audience member in order to build the relationship. This isn’t a method of persuasion; it’s a method of relationship- and self-building.

So, who is my addressee?

I feel that it would be very short-sighted, or at least potentially trivial, to write to a love interest. More to the point, I think that it would be hard to resist the urge to impress a love interest. I think that there is a part of me that is a teenage boy who is willing, potentially, to do almost anything kosher in order to get the sweet-smiling, kind, confident girl to notice him… A guy is likely to do things out of character just to seem cool or unique. For me, I’d rather stay true to myself and make more of a conscious effort to produce quality content than to stumble onto quality content by accident. I think that I’m more likely to impress a love interest if I do the best that I can at what I do… this blog, appropriately, being a potential part of that. Yay, me!

Picking a person gives me pause. It feels like a very powerful choice. Jumping off of a cliff is easier with a battle cry. The selection of my addressee is my battle cry.

Do I write to someone famous who can help me to achieve my dreams by giving me advice from his/her success? If I did, I’d probably write to Charlie Daniels, Johnny Rzeznik and Alice Cooper because some combination of their music is probably something like I would/will write. But, that’s not really my style. I prefer to try to do the little things right and let success follow from there.

This isn’t getting me anywhere. It looks like I’ve fallen into the trap of over-thinking myself and nearly falling into the secondary, and worse, inaction trap. I’m not going to let myself fail. Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll compromise with myself that I’ll not be married to this choice… If I change my mind later, I’ll roll with it. So, here I go…

I’m now writing this blog to my siblings.

The reasons are too many to count, but the biggest one is that my mom has two wishes for us, her children. I can’t honor one of them, but I will do my best to honor the second, and that is that my siblings and I should be friends. In order to be friends with people, they have to know you. Here goes. To “yuce guys,” this blog’s for you. It’s to you.

To those of you who’re kind enough to listen in, you’re welcome here, indeed invited. Hopefully, this audience selection makes your read better from now on.

Brain Shower

This entry was delayed by the death and burial of my grandmother, a very special woman to whom I was very close.

The last three days’ focus was to work on a poem.

Result: I enjoyed the brainstorming stage of writing the poem. I’m technically still in the brainstorming stage. When I began with my three-days’-focus series, I promised myself that I would not be too hard on myself for an unfinished project. And to that I hold.

The trouble, for me, in any creative work, is that, sometimes, I just have to make a choice, and I cannot expect every choice to be perfect. I pursue perfection, yet I know that I won’t achieve it.

The question for me will become, when I make it past the brainstorming stage, can I come up with something coherent that says what I want to say.

The next three days’ focus project: work on exercises that are in my piano book. I took four years of lessons at KWU, and, I’ll admit, I never really practiced. I think that I passed because my instructor was more interested that I understand the concepts of playing… that, and, at least during my lessons, I was able to do what she wanted me to do. At the time that I was a music major at KWU, the program was still building and solidifying. Does this excuse my lack of proficiency? No, certainly not. I was more concerned with my class attendance (the skill of commitment-keeping) and my emotional growth, social growth, and involvedness than I was with actually building skills. College, it seems, for me was a 3.75-year foray into learning how to think… I recount with embarrassment how it always seems like I know a fair amount of things, but I can do hardly anything.

There is a difference between intelligence and smartness. To illustrate this, I go back to a conversation with one of my college instructors. This conversation took place about six months ago. The professor said to me, in a tone of comfort (necessary because I was coping with mistreatment at the time), that I was “pretty smart,” and at, at the time, this didn’t make sense to me. “Pretty smart? I’ve had people complimenting my intelligence all my life! You’re just downplaying it because I’m not good at what you do, because I don’t have the skills and didn’t succeed all that much.” It was moronic to think this… Perhaps, if I’d had guts and said this thought out loud, I might’ve learned faster the difference that I now understand. This particular instructor is also a coach, and the activity that he coaches requires not that people be intelligent, but that they be smart. Smartness, then, is intelligence in action. By this definition, I’m not very smart. I have the intelligence to learn smarts, but I need to focus and practice in order to obtain these smarts.

As far as being a musician goes, it’s quite embarrassing to sit down at a piano and not be able to do what my brain wants done. I have many of the piano concepts in my head, but that only makes me intelligent. It doesn’t make me piano-smart. I’m going to spend the next three days, starting tomorrow because tonight I’m covering a high school football game on the radio, working rather hard to build some piano smarts. They say that it takes about 10,000 hours of commitment to master something… I’m going to see if I can make it at least 15 hours closer to piano mastery.

Clutter Confrontation

Talk abou’chr floor space! Check this action out!

A moderate success in the second three days' focus project

My second three days’ focus project was to focus on arranging my room.

Report: I made considerable progress on the first day, and then didn’t accomplish anything the next two days. I did show off my progress to my housemate and his girlfriend, though. *sticks tongue out to the side obnoxiously*

How I progressed: This box of random j-u-n-q-u-e sat behind the door to my bedroom. Having sorted through it, I was able to play a game of rearrange-the-squares-to-make-the-picture in my room. I don’t have much shelf space, but I changed what I kept on the shelf and put storage containers closer together, near my closet. The end result is that I can now walk freely into my room. I can see my desk completely, there are probably 24 square feet of free floor space now, and I have easy access to my piano keyboard.

Looking forward, now, to the next three days: I will be celebrating my nephew’s first birthday tomorrow (Eight hours of driving are involved.), and I’m directing my church choir in the morning, so I’ll lose an entire day of progress (for a good reason.)

Unless…

I work on a poem.

I’ve realized that the beauty of poetry is, in part, that every word is carefully chosen. And, even though one can sit there, putting his/her thoughts in lines and rhyme words at the ends of those lines, there isn’t any depth, any gravity, to the work other than simple conversational idea communication. So, I think that my thoughts, pensamientos, need to be more carefully considered when I write poetry. My next three days’ focus project is to work on a poem dealing with the concept of how some things will never be. I will search for ways to express the profundities of what “neverness” means. The choosing of the right words should involve lots of brainstorming, structuring, and careful consideration. I don’t expect to “finish” the poem, but, perhaps, I’ll make a good start.

Crunch Time

The first three days’ focus ends, the new one pondered.

The first three days’ focus didn't turn out as well as it should've, but it is also wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been. The reality is that I managed to do core exercises each of the three days. I’m putting that one in the win column.

Predictably, or, to be honest, what I should’ve hypothesized would be a result, was that, in focusing on one thing for several days, I found myself more motivated to do other things. For example, I was thinking about making sure that I worked on my core muscles, yet I also started thinking about a yard project, read another 60 or so pages of a book, kept the kitchen clean, and wrote some more brainstormed ideas for a book that I’d like to write. So, if nothing else, these three days’ focus projects may set me up for continued success in doing all of the little things right. Heck, I even did some more thinking about a barbershop arrangement that I hope to write.

The question now becomes “What do I focus on for these next three days?” I think that I have my answer, and the answer comes from noticing inconveniences in my work-out time. I tend to not work out when I feel confined by space. Scratch that. I tend not to do ANY work when I’m confined or when there is the slightest hindrance to working on a project. My room, you see, is not very open because I have too much clutter. Clutter, though, is a problem not easily dealt with… For me, at least. I have found that I don’t like to start a project unless I can stay with it and get it completed. And, I don’t like to take things out of containers (I should have noted earlier that these containers contain all of the stuff that I describe as clutter; I’ve gotten better at not leaving clutter out in the open.

So, my conclusion is that the three days’ focus for Wednesday through Friday is going to be working on that stack of storage buckets so that I have more openness in my bedroom. Heck, maybe I’ll even do a few core exercises along the way if the principle of being more motivated to do other things while I work on a principle project continues to hold true. Turn on the music, Self, you’ve got three days of hard work ahead of you. Rock on.

Three Days’ Focus

Nothing like Orwell’s "Two Minutes Hate"

I called a friend of mine last night. He’s a visual artist. He’s got a sweet set-up in Lawrence, a little one bedroom apartment where he can produce, enjoy, and discover creative works. I wanted to ask him how he manages to focus on projects, get things done.

Somehow, though, it seems that the simple fact of calling him and thinking it out loud gave me an idea… well, that, and I went for a slow country drive. I took some Oreos with me. In any case, I called him because he seemed to be a person who could relate to my intentions. You see, there’re all sorts of projects that I want to do, poems that I want to write, songs, arrangements, physical conditioning, audio recordings, blogging, language learning. I feel like my problem is motivational and focus-related.

It’s like, once I get into a project, I can while away the hours and get a lot done, having a lot of fun and feeling in the zone. Yet, I tend to waste time just staring around the house trying to make up my mind what I’m going to do.

So, here’s what I came up with. I’m going to focus on one project at a time. It’s going to be an intense 3-day focus of each project. If I get it done, great; if I don’t, that’s ok, too.

I’ve arrived at this idea because I’ve noticed that I got a lot more done when I have something demanding on which to focus. When I was reading a book recently, I felt that all that I wanted to do was to finish the book. It seemed that I could focus super hardcore for a couple of days. I’d like to build up my focus ability, though. So, I think that three days of focus presents a good challenge. Here goes. First project: physical conditioning. Working on the core muscles for the next three days. Game on. 365 days in a year, so 121 projects to complete. If I do 121 projects, it should be a helluva year.

Do we grieve as we should? Two stories that make me wonder...

Riding on a bus headed for Niagara Falls, having only dozed for maybe two hours from Junction City to Kansas City (MO), and having just enjoyed a delicious breakfast sandwich made by two men speaking that sonorous KCMO Black accent, I decided to listen to some music. But, the bus's Wi-Fi wasn't keeping up with Pandora, so I picked Tracy Lawrence and soon realized that I was in the mood for country ballads. What has followed so far was the rest of Tracy's ballads from his Greatest Hits, then "Straight Tequila Nights" by John Anderson, and now I'm on Blackhawk. When I got to Tracy's "Texas Tornado," I started to tear up... I began thinking of something that I had in the past, something that wasn't really right for me (which I had known for most of the duration) but that I still missed parts of. I remember that, when that relationship ended, or, more specifically, morphed (how often does a relationship truly "end?"), I was upset and hurt, and had some moisture in my eyes... ********************************** In the early 1980s, years before I was born, the maternal side of my family endured a catastrophic series of losses. In around two years, FOURTEEN of them died. Three of the four generations lost at least one member. My grandmother lost her husband to Parkinson's disease. My aunt and uncle lost two sons, one to drowning, one who had complications as an infant and died before his fourth month began. Around 20 years later, Grandma was driving her white Plymouth Breeze (she prefers red) to my cousin's basic training graduation. She doesn't remember how, but she must have fallen asleep. The crash broke a bone in almost every apendage. She survived, living to defy death again on her 80th birthday, four years later... but, she wasn't the same. She sat around all day, drugged up on varying degrees of pain killers, gaining so much weight that my mother began to insist that she pull herself up when someone proposed the taking of a picture... She, my mother, didn't want my youngest brother to remember his Grandma as an amorphous blob in an easy chair. In the Spring of 2009, my sister made up her mind to bring Grandma to live with her in Salina... To paraphrase, my sister said to my grandma, "You can go to free shows all the time, have your own house, and we'll even get you a cat!" Due to a combined effort from sister (40%), grandma (35%), and myself (25%), grandma has lost over 60 lbs. which on a woman of 5'1" is spectacular. We're hoping that she wins her war with myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) and hangs around for another 5-10 years. Her distinctive mannerisms have all returned, she does chores, and sure loves to chat. Once, I asked Grandma what in the world she was doing, what she was thinking about, all those years, 8 or 9, that she was just sitting in a chair... Of course, part of what she was doing was coping with pain, but she took me aback when she said, "I never really had a chance to grieve." "For Aunt Mary?" I asked, referring to her younger sister who died of a diabetes-related heart attack over 15 years ago. "Well, yes, but also for Daddy." (Grandma always forgets to which generation she's talking. She meant my grandfather.) She had struck me. "For GRANDPA?" I asked incredulously. "But that was in 1982!" "Well, I never really had a chance to mourn. Someone always needed me." "You held in all that pain for over 25 years?" Thirty years after the death of a grandfather he'll never know in this world, the grandson who bears his grandfather's first name as his middle, accented in a way that leads most people to pronounce it inappropriately upon first reading, a grandson who still signs everything with that big, loopy, capital "B.," rides on a bus to support his mother in the completion of her two-year certificate program in Spiritual Guidance. Perhaps, his reasons for holding in the sadness are steeped in latent bitterness, pride, and incredulousness, yet, still, he's been unable to completely move on. This sadness needs an outlet. I wonder... How often do we grieve as we should, mourning the losses in our life? How often do we let the sadness and hurt lie buried in our subconscious mind, hindering our emotional maturity? *************************** Dialogue from an episode of the TV show "Scrubs"... The surgeon's brother's wife left him, and the surgeon risks making his fiancè angry by taking his brother out for drinks. The brother asks what he's supposed to do, and Dr. Turk takes over: "Barkeep, I'm gonna need these two glasses, and that bottle of whisky. 'Scuse me, yes, my brother definitely needs to borrow your hat. And for the love of all that is holy! Will somebody please put on some country!"