My husband and I have been watching a series of videos hosted by Dr. Stephen Meyer about Christian apologetics (link is to a website that markets the DVDs but not an affiliate link). Lots of really great stuff, but in this post I’m focusing on just one little throwaway line from the session we watched most recently: “Everybody’s bluffing.” Meyer had foolishly raised his hand in a lecture class at Cambridge University and
productivity
Where Will Your Month Go?
Sometimes I think that this blog wouldn’t have many entries if I didn’t do so much cribbing from other sources. Gretchen Rubin is a big crib, but another one is Laura Vanderkam, whom I’ve mentioned before. She’s quite a gal; I last wrote about her in this post about downtime. In addition to her quasi-daily blog posts she also sends out a weekly newsletter that sums up her week or gives ideas for the week or month to come, appropriately called “A Week’s Worth.” (The link is to the signup form.)
What’s Your Downtime Look Like?
I define “downtime” as time that isn’t directed to a specific task or end but is what I do when I take a break from my work. Usually I read something, these days from some news website or the other. Oh for the days when I just read books! That type of thing seems like a distant memory. I used to gobble up murder mysteries by the ton, and when I’d be eating lunch by myself at home and reading I’d keep on eating so that I could keep on reading. (This former habit may help explain why I used to weigh more than I do now.)
Fitting in Work Around Other Work
Well, I just spent at least half an hour trying to find a quotation from the British classicist Mary Beard about her writing and I haven’t been able to do so. It’s always a mistake to let a good idea go by and then have to hunt it down later. So I won’t be able to give you an exact quotation, but she said something like, “As I was sitting and working on my few sentences.” Mary Beard is one of my heroes; her book The Fires of Vesuvius is a true time-travel tool.
The Joy of Tackling a Big Project
My current Big Writing Project (BWP) is the finishing up of my commentaries on Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana for publication. I’ve been using the writing software Scrivener, as everybody who’s anybody says it’s magnificent. Well, I’d been finding it magnificently hard to use, to be honest. The final step in my project was the addition of images, and Scrivener just wasn’t cooperating. Until, suddenly, it was. I’m not sure what I did, but I think I had somehow created a table where I didn’t want one, and Scrivener was stubbornly following the
Gretchen Rubin’s New Book Is Here!
The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better (and Other People’s Live Better, Too) by Gretchen Rubin, 2017. Link is to the book’s page on the author’s website.
I have now done something for her books that I haven’t for anyone else I can think of: Buying them, in hardback, as soon as they come out. This is number four in her series on happiness, habits, and now . . . heuristics? I can’t come up with a third “h” word. It’s actually a deep dive into her theory about what she calls personality tendencies. I’ve read the sections that have to do most with my own tendencies: Obliger and Upholder, and gotten bogged down with the Questioner and Rebel sections. I’ll come back to them later.
Wearing the Iron Pants, Sticking to the Schedule, and Staying in the Chair
I don’t know if the muse is going to show up on any given day, but by golly, I’m going to be at my desk every day from 8 to 12 every morning in case she does.
Flannery O’Conner
Yep. Hard as it is to swallow, the only way I’m going to get any writing done is to sit in my chair and do it.
Anxiety Equals Adrenaline
Once again I’m mining the ideas of a podcast for my own posts, and today the nugget of wisdom, this one about anxiety, is from “Happier in Hollywood,” hosted by Liz Craft (who’s also on the “Happier” podcast) and her writing partner Sarah Fain. They are often prone to anxiety as they navigate the roller coaster of being TV writers living in LA. No one has a permanent job within a TV series, because no series is permanent. Let’s see—how long did “Monk” last? Seven years? Something like that. Most are much, much shorter. So you’re constantly having to prove yourself.
Cutting The Gordian Knot of Possessions
Another insight today from my latest podcast fave, “Need to Know.” More of a throwaway line as the podcast winds down than anything to do with the main subject of this episode. (The relevant section starts at 1:02:30.) Anyway, Mona Charen and Jay Nordlinger are talking about whether or not Mona will be hosting the podcast the next week as she’s in the midst of a move. Jay makes the point that in every society that’s been studied, one of several constants is that people hate to move.
The Joy of Competence
If I were to tell you about all the missteps we’ve had in our very simple renovation/remodel, this would be a very long post. Something seems to go wrong at every step of the way, whether it’s a mistake we make or one that a contractor makes. But we’re soldiering on. Today we finally get a working kitchen, as the (seemingly very competent) plumber is hooking up the faucet, garbage disposal and dishwasher. The countertops came in on Monday, and even though they didn’t give us as much