Devastingly Unhip

So I’ve spent the majority of the past 2 days sleeping, cleaning, doing laundry, and running errands. Yeah, I know how to party. It’s been good though. I needed sleep desperately. Have you heard of sleep dept? According to this researcher,

“Sleep debt is defined to be the amount of sleep taken less than the required daily amount. Every hour of sleep loss is registered and recorded by the brain as debt and becomes a cumulative process, disrupting a person’s homeostatic equilibrium. Let us assume that a particular person requires nine hours of daily sleep. If the individual sleeps for six hours per night for a period of one week, then a sleep debt of twenty one hours (7 days x 3 hrs/day = 21 hrs) will be accrued. With a larger sleep debt, a person will experience a greater tendency to fall asleep during the day.”

When I think of the number of all-nighters I’ve pulled over the years, I’m doubtful I’ll ever catch up, unless I take a year’s vacation and spend it sleeping. I thought for a moment about attempting to calculate my own sleep dept, but that’s far too mathematical for a Sunday afternoon. I’m only on my second cup of coffee, for heaven’s sake.

Sleep, although I sometimes hate to admit it, is a very good thing though, for the obvious reasons and because I think that my unconscious mind is a lot smarter than my conscious one. Frankly, my unconscious mind seems to think that I am a total idiot. (Probably true.) Without sleep, I lose that valuable unconscious processing time. It’s really hard to think things through with any sense of perspective when I’m sleep deprived. So, further justification for languishing in bed: it’s not only physically healthy, but mentally healthy as well. I think I’ll have a nap… except that I’m finally, finally not tired anymore. Just sort of groggy. Eh?

Cleaning is sort of impossible right now, because Drew recently sold the monster entertainment center that was taking up half of the living room in order to buy a flat screen. The new TV is lovely, but we haven’t yet selected new shelving and storage, so everything that was housed in the entertainment center is now homeless. However, I did find my glasses a couple of days ago while organizing a drawer, which I’m theoretically supposed to wear all the time (the glasses, not the drawer), especially when working on the computer or drawing or reading. So, I put them on, and wonder of wonders, I don’t have a constant headache, fancy that.

Regarding the errands, I’ve spent the waking hours of my past couple of days trying to get organized and manage all those silly, mundane little things that I hate doing and put off extensively, but that really need to get done. When I left corporate land (for the most part) I regrettably fell off the GTD bandwagon. David Allen’s Getting Things Done, while geeky to the extreme, is the only organization system that has ever worked for me, and it worked remarkably well when I was doing it. Mentorship and the grace of others played a big part in my progress from receptionist to marketing director, but I honestly believe that using GTD made it possible for me to do what I did in such a short time. It allowed me to be organized, execute ruthlessly (tasks, um, not people), and free up the mental energy to overcome any lack of education and experience in order to accomplish what was required.

What the hell happened? Where did kick-ass-and-take-names Amy go? Not that I want her back completely. The people who know me best (mom, my best friend since the seventh grade, etc.) have said things like, “But I like you better as an artist!” when I wax nostalgic about my abandoned marketing career. Or “You seem so full of life now.” And I agree with them. I don’t miss the Amy who spent long days in a cubicle, drug home work, read trade journals instead of literature, showed up to birthday parties still wearing corporate casual, and made happy hour at a chain restaurant the highlight of her social life. And apparently, after discussing this with some friends recently, I was even more neurotic then than I am now, something I wasn’t even aware of. I like the Amy who is trying different things, has broadened her activities and social circle, and has free time to work on creative projects. However, I do miss the Amy who was intensely focused, well organized, solving problems, socially adept, and just generally kickin’. (I sort of really miss things like spreadsheets and databases too, but I’m supposed to be an artist, shh, don’t tell.)

Basically, there’s no reason I guess why I shouldn’t apply things that I’m missing, like GTD, for example, to my life now. I was discussing the Getting Things Done philosophy with a friend and fellow devotee recently, and he reminded me that one of the most important and useful concepts is not what’s being accomplished, but the idea of “closing loops” in order to free up mental energy. And who wouldn’t benefit from that, regardless of career choice or lifestyle?

Long story short, I’ve been trying to get organized, but in a way that fits the life I have now. I used manage everything with online tools, but at that time I spent about 14 hours a day working in front of a computer screen. My life just isn’t like that now, so it’s the same principles, but more low-tech, portable, paper based, a la the infamous hipster pda. In other words, I bought a purse the right size for my notebook and things, a small datebook, threw in some fine tip pens and a pad of post-its. It’s not brain science or rocket surgery. I made a proper to-do list for the first time in… God knows. I actually did a few things, and crossed them off. How prosaic.

Hi, my name is Amy, and even though I still throw clothes on my bedroom floor at the age of 25, I secretly need structure, in a bad way. There, I said it.

Speaking of structure, since this post has already descended into complete dorksville, I may as well make it a full fledged dorkfest and quote Dune. I’ve been working through the Dune series upon recommendation from a friend, and I’ve finally gotten to the fourth book, God Emperor of Dune, which is the one he thought I’d actually be interested. And he is correct. The first book was entertaining, the second book was short, and the third book was good, but hard for me to get into. The fourth is so far more my style. This quote, near the beginning of the book, really struck me:

“Radicals always see matter in terms which are too simple - black and white, good and evil, them and us. By addressing complex matters in that way, they rip open a passage for chaos. The art of government as you call it, is the mastery of chaos.”

Yeah. I’ve never really been down with chaos. Or over simplification, for that matter. Although I find chaos theory interesting, actual chaos bothers me, which I’ve always considered somewhat of a weakness. This is probably why I’ve never really championed any overtly radical views, or adopted many causes. I always end arguing both sides of the issue, and I’m constantly called analytical.

Someone recently said that he thought I might be a structuralist, and while I knew what that was, I ended up looking it up to be sure. (I’m uneducated, remember?) It’s interesting. I can definitely understand why he said that. Of course, that, combines with the rest of things I’ve mentioned in this blog post, makes me devastatingly unhip, but that’s ok. With my glasses on, I can actually see.

Oh, and one final thought, regarding the ongoing debate about the future of technology, and the idea of communication online in general. In Philosophy Now, writer and neurologist Ray Tallis writes his response to the “increasing concern amongst a wide range of commentators that human nature is in the process of being irrevocably changed by technological advances.”

“Railway journeys and tabloid newspapers have not had the dire effects that were predicted. Even the most radically transformative technologies have not had the impact we might have expected. The dramatic electronification of everyday life that has taken place over the last few decades has not fundamentally altered the way we relate to each other. Love, jealousy, kindness, anxiety, hatred, ambition, bitterness, joy etc, still seem to have a remarkable family resemblance to the emotions people had in the 1930s. The low-grade bitchiness of office politics may be conducted more efficiently by email, but its essential character hasn’t changed. Teenagers communicating by mobile phones and texts and chat rooms and webcams still seem more like teenagers than nodes in an electronic network. I have to admit a little concern at what we might call the e-ttenuation of life, whereby people find it increasingly difficulty to be here now rather than dissipating themselves into an endless electronic elsewhere; but inner absence and wool-gathering is not entirely new, even if it is now electronically orchestrated. It just becomes more publicly visible.”