Just another manic Monday

Hahaha. Well, I'm done worrying about the ambition thing for now. I just had a perfect illustration of how and why goals don't always work for me, on Monday, when I went to see Flea the financial advisor. He and I had set some "goals" for me a few years ago, and those goals have been left in the dust... and frankly, I find that motivating. It's fun to be out ahead.

Later that night I also finished something I originally planned to spend a year on, after almost exactly nine months (cue the pregnancy jokes!), and that one was an ambitious project/goal indeed. I started it with LOTS of skills still necessary to acquire along the way.

People should, and probably have a moral obligation to, know what works for them. I have a growing belief that my style works for me. For one thing, since I do apply myself assiduously to improving the things I'm working on, I'm not sure what difference it would make for me to have longer-term goals. I stick with things anyway. And, not to burst into song or anything, but all one can ever do anyway is what you can do today. Now is when we live.

I don't know why I feel so driven to clarify myself, lately, given that it doesn't work very well. :)

Sympathy cards, obsession with clarity

Whew... my uncle died this past weekend and I just sent out the final two sympathy cards to his immediate family members (my aunt, three cousins). I'm glad that's done... writing those things is hard, but these days when it comes to family etiquette I just do what my mother tells me.

As long as I'm struggling to explain myself, I want to clarify something I said here about my friends M&G (I thought I said their lives were like a work of art -- actually I said the way they live is like an art form). I found out later that one of my friends thought I was saying they were perfect, and that really bothered me. NO, ABSOLUTELY NOT. They actually drop a million things on the proverbial floor, they eat things on an ordinary day that I wouldn't generally eat, and they overoptimize certain things like crazy people. What I meant with the art comment is that their lives seem very LIMITED, but so well-done within those very narrow constraints that I have to respect them. I think they do two things really well that impress me, three things really well total (one of them is also a strength of my own, so it's not impressive. ;)).

It kind of fascinates me because I have talked recently, too, about only doing the N things that matter and not the other ones. The perennial question is always, how large can N be before you're doing everything half-assed? M&G have arranged things, whether purposely or not, to a much smaller N than I've ever seriously considered, and they've chosen things to focus on that are almost entirely different from mine. I'm sad that what I said the first time didn't convey this very well.

Bah, humbug. English, we've had a long and good relationship but you are disappointing me tonight. I am going to focus again on Python, which I'm learning now and seems really elegant, and on the lovely present I got from my friend Chia this morning... a huge amount of handspun laceweight yarn whose colors are begging for a closeup photo this weekend.