Setting up

I'm trying to set up a more professional work set up in my apartment. Typing from bed works great when I'm just pounding out crap for this blog, but when trying to write professionally and do things I give a shit about... well that's something different.

So I'm writing this at my actual desk, with a real and true keyboard plugged into my laptop. I'm sitting a swivel office chair and trying to take what I am doing more seriously.

This is serious, yo.

***

My phone interview went well. I should find out tomorrow if they want me to continue on in the hiring process.

My in-person interview went well. I should find out by the end of the week what the next step is.

I kind of want both jobs. One pays better than the other, the other is more interesting than the other, one has two days off a month, the other has four days off a month. Both come with three weeks vacation, neither have benefits, but one comes with a monthly transit pass.

So, we'll see. No job offer pending at this point.

***

My favourite contestant on The Voice:   Melanie

The contestant I think will win:               Terry

Most underrated:                                   Cassadee (yeah, I know...)

Most overrated:                                     Trevin

Total badass:                                         Nicholas

Joe's call on SuperBowl XLVII:             Houston v. NY Giants

My call on SuperBowl XLVII:               Denver v. NY Giants (because I LOVE sibling rivalry.)

***

Someday I'm going to have a desk that I like and is functional. Someday.

Progress

I spent from Thursday to Saturday with a couple hundred professional organizers.

I am kind of excited about the idea of joining them.

I'm starting a blog on organizing in the next month or so and will launch a business in the spring.

This is how it is supposed to be, I think.

I got some pretty cool swag, met some interesting people and I'm looking forward to next year's conference.

But I'm more excited about the ideas I got, the direction I was offered and the possibilities of where I could go with this.

I'm pretty excited but I can't say too much yet.

Sorting the bits and pieces

Unemployment is really, really, bad for me.

After realizing that every single great habit I had going hinged on my requirement to be awake, dressed, out of the house and on my best behaviour by 8 AM I am trying to resort my routine for not being required to go anywhere or do much of anything.

I have a great routine and schedule, don't get me wrong. And it works *great* in making sure I am a productive member of society. But getting the motivation to get up and do things when I don't have to... that's my stumbling point. I know this.

But there is good news!

The point where I notice it's getting bad is happening sooner. I've only been off work for three weeks. I'm aware of it and am now trying to right the ship as it were.

There is probably nothing worse than a hypocritical professional organizer.

I get anxiety just thinking about personally failing at what it is I really want to do.

***

The first step to any project is to gather together everything together and then start sorting - like with like - until there is a manageable pile of tasks or items to deal with.

I have my pile.

***

If anyone knows when and where the annual Calendar Club store is setting up before xmas in Vancouver (or  SkyTrain-able Burnaby) I could use the heads up.

Thnx.

Habits

For the past two years, at some point between Friday after dinner and Sunday evening as late as 9 PM, I turn my handbag upside down to empty the contents on to the middle of the bed.

I pull out the receipts for shredding or filing, re-sort the 20 or so items that live permanently in my purse and pack them back in their places and the weird debris that always shows up in the bottom of my bag stays on the bed.

Then I strip the bed and and change the sheets. Because clean sheets are a mitzvah. Well, I don't know if clean sheets are an actual commandment by god in any formal religion, but they are a necessary action for me in my secular world. Thou shalt have proper bedding!

***

Pillow fabric shopping was not enough motivation to get up on Saturday morning, but the Baltimore Ravens playing at 10 AM were reason enough for me to get up this morning.

***

I am completely engrossed in job hunting. I'm LinkedIn-ing, researching companies, going to staffing agencies, going to networking meetings, checking out government programs for the unemployed and considering joining a job club at the public library if one starts soon enough.

If I don't get a job in a couple of weeks I will lose my shit.

I have given up a lot of Facebook flash game time for this job search.

Bonkers

For the past couple of months I have gone walking on weekday mornings between 6:10 and 6:30 am. I walk the same route each day, for the most part because I walk for time  (not speed or distance) and I know that I can generally get around that route in my allotted 15 minutes. Almost every morning I end up interrupting the work of one of my neighbours.

She's an older Chinese woman. I hesitate to pin her age down any more than that because she could be anywhere from 50 to 90 and I could not tell. She's less than five feet tall and always wears a blue plaid lumber jacket just like we did in the grunge era.

When I say that she sweeps her sidewalk, that is understatement. She details those eight or so linear feet of concrete slabs with first a push broom, then a corn husk broom that has been worn down to a nub, then one of those little sweeper brushes that comes with its own little dust pan. She then trims the blades of grass that grow up to the walkway with a small pair of scissors.

And she does this every day.

I have no idea how the walk to her house and the public sidewalk out front of it gets so dirty every day, but evidently it does because she's there every morning shortly after 6 AM sweeping and sweeping like there is no tomorrow. She even gets down on her knees to use the little sweeper and dust pan.

At some point during our trip her next door neighbour took it upon themselves to tear their house down and pour a new foundation for a new one. There is topsoil, sand, gravel, bits of construction debris and other leaves and yard waste *everywhere* around the west side of her house.

She was sweeping the walk closest to her house on Monday when I went by so I didn't get to see how she would deal with all this destruction around her home, but when I went by on Tuesday there was a clear demarcation line on the sidewalk between the two houses.

Wednesday I caught her trimming the grass at the property line. This morning she was scrubbing the concrete  closest to the next door property with a bucket of water and a bristle brush.

I don't know that I have ever had that kind of free time.


PS: I up my walking time tomorrow to 20 minutes a day.

I have no word for "entrepreneur"

I really don't like working for the man I work for.

There, I said it. Out loud and on the internet.

It's not that I don't like the work. I'm good at the work. I am asked to do all sorts of things I like doing on a daily basis.

I just work in an inefficient way, using obsolete tools to produce material that looks dated and out of fashion.

And that makes me sad.

But what I do like is paycheques. Paycheques that are demonstrably larger than the EI cheques I was getting in June. They do things like pay the rent, allow me to put food in my belly, get my hair did and buy new sheets all the while keeping my husband able to get his second degree at university.

The Predict-a-Pen at Chapters told me that I should do the work to become a personal organizer before I do the writing classes. The Magic 8 Ball app I added to my phone confirmed the answer. So as soon as I know if my current job is permanent, I will start that process.

In the meantime, if anyone in Vancouver has an organizing job they would like free help with on an evening or weekend, let me know. I need some portfolio material and I'll work for free and in my spare time until the end of the year.

Huh, that's a decision I apparently just made. Weird.

Anyway... I don't know that I want to be self-employed, or at least not right now. I just know that I want desperately to do what I am good at for a living.

Fail...

...Fail again. Fail better.

                 - Samuel Beckett

You keep showing up. That is huge. 

                - My friend Erin

I have never spent much time trying to be perfect. I have, however, spent innumerable hours just trying to be good at something. I don't need to be, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to be, the gold medal winner or the Oscar winner, or the Nobel Prize winner.

I just want to be good at something that matters to someone other than me.

I love the great projects and hate the daily maintenance. I love it when my to-do list is full of things I only have to do *just this one time* and start changing the due dates on the things that I do every day or are part of my weekly or monthly routines.

Routines are SUPER GOOD for my mental health, and when I get overwhelmed by what to do next my routine list is the place where I set order from my chaos.

But I rebel. I ignore it. I do something more fun.

I stay up all night 'net surfing for tiaras. I read entire websites on stain removal. I use the "Explore" function on Google+. I do anything to avoid the unpleasant or uninteresting.

EXCEPT when I am at work. I do the boring, unpleasant, routine stuff first just to get it out of the way. Also, there is WAY more boring, unpleasant, routine stuff to do than there is interesting, fun, new stuff to do.

Coming to accept that life is very rarely a barrel of monkeys has been especially hard to do since I quit drinking like an asshole 19 years ago. This is how I become a grown-up, I guess.

(Ooo... lights just flickered and there's thunder outside. My battery is charging, so I should bail.)

Working on it.

I decided on the eve of my 38th birthday that I would not be the same person on the eve of my 39th birthday.

I've been trying for years now to change my life into something fabulous and awesome. Since the British Columbia Lottery Corporation has not yet seen fit to issue me the $50 million winning LottoMax ticket, I decided that this year I was just going to work with what I have got. And what I have got is not much.

After spending two weeks angsting over it, I finally figured out what I like to do. I'll probably never become rich doing any of it, but I might be able to do it just because I love doing it. I'll worry about making an income later.

Next week I am going to attend an information session on becoming a professional organizer. At this time I am not really interested in starting my own company, but in using the skills that I have with the skills that I will learn to pad my Executive Assistant resume. I am spending the summer working for my ex-boss it seems, and that place is the craziest mess of paper you have ever seen in your life. So I'll get some real-world-as-close-to-hoarding-as-I-am-willing-to-get experience.

Next week I am also going to talk to an educational counsellor at the community college around the corner from my house to see about some English writing classes to fix some of my grammar issues and other brutalizations of the English language I am sometimes wont to commit.

I am also taking part of my upcoming long weekend to write new product descriptions for my Etsy shop (though I am considering changing the shop name and there's nothing for sale at this time because I want to change everything) and I can show off the mad foto skilz of Donna. She did such an amazing job taking new photos of my completed works! I can't wait for you to see them.

In a nutshell, I'm going to try to figure out how to use what I like doing to help me not hate a whole bunch of things about my life. Like my job. Or lack thereof, as the case may be.

No idea if it will work, but I know that 50 weeks from now I will be glad I started two weeks ago. This is my jumping off point. The future is uncertain, I don't know if I'll be any good at any of it, but at least I know I am working on it.

There are monsters outside.

I turned 38 years old yesterday. For more than 10 years I have had this annual sulk about how my life didn't turn out like I planned; which is kind of rich coming from someone who never had a plan for her life in the first place.

Since my mid-20s I have had this obsession with trying to keep my personal monsters at bay with massive levels of organization. I blame a couple of years of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for starting it. I was not born organized, but I have learned it over the past 10-12 years. My sanity seems to hinge on it at times.

It started with endless written lists, then Flylady, and a WhoMi agenda, then GTD and Lifehacker (which is the church of my religion) and webapps like Remember the Milk and Toodledo. I got a Samsung S Glide and with my new Android phone, my obsession with Google Calendar and other awesome Google products I am very close to organizing my personal life paper-free.

My new favourite to-do list is Astrid.com which works on the web and syncs with the phone app. I use my Google account to login, so there's not another web account to remember. I heart it to the power of eleventy1. I use Calendar for appointments and events and WorkFlowy for lists of things I want to remember but can't necessary set into action at the time I remember them. I also have a notepad and pen with me at all times, and set the items I write down as either a to-do in Astrid, and appointment in Calendar or a list item in WorkFlowy at the end of each day.

But all of this organization obsession masks my real fear of being out of control (again). I know exactly what to do, and often schedule what time to do it just so I know when to do it.

What the monsters do is fuck with my motivation. What the monsters do is tell me that it doesn't matter what I do, if I am not exceptional at it - it's worthless. What the monsters do is help me check "complete" when it's not really done. They convince me to hit the snooze bar or reschedule to a more "convenient" time.

They enable me to believe that it's just not worth the time or effort because I am not good at anything and trying won't change that.

I woke up this morning without a feeling of dread for the first time in a month or so. I checked in with Lifehacker (as Saturday is my holy day, it seems) and clicked around and found a link to a post that linked to a site that led me to remember two things and decide another:

1. In a year I will wish I started today.
2. I can refocus and start again.
3. I decided to join DayZero.

I am going to try 101 Things in 1001 Days again. I only have 15 things on my list, but coming up with 101 things in about three hours seems a little... over-eager. But I have scheduled the time to do the things on my list and remind myself of my list. I'm making my list public because I have to be unafraid of failing and failing in public.

The monsters are still here. I can hear them laughing as I write this, because they think that I am not good enough to write, to create, and to get what I want and where I want to go.

I've already proved the monsters wrong. Only 499 blog posts to go.