Sympathy cards, obsession with clarity
Jun. 3rd, 2009 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flexagonWhew... 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.
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.
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Date: 2009-06-04 01:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-04 01:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-04 02:02 pm (UTC)http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=15