From the Deltoid to the DMZ…

I spent Friday night, and the bit of Saturday morning between the gym, the community clean-up and the much-anticipated arrival of Mrs Towers, pulling documents out of plastic pockets and either recycling or re-filing them.

It was satisfying, in the way de-cluttering always is cathartic; in the way that a visit to a large stationery store always holds out the promise of the new, organised you.

Bugger me if I am not suffering for it now.  My right shoulder is throbbing.  Why? It took me a while, because I am not very bright.  And I have precisely nooooo training in human anatomy, physiology and kinesthesiology, no sireee.

I’ve overused my deltoid (that’s the one that, once your arm is about 20 degrees out from your body to the side, lifts the arm up. It’s the v-shaped one at the top of your arm, one of the vanity muscles body builders like.)  If it’s knackered, there are a few “trick movements” that you can do. That’s kind of what I am reduced to.

If only I could find a way of tying this particular act of stupidity to my abiding ecological concerns.  If only there were an analogy, something about doing relentless, prolonged, repetitive but pleasurable/useful actions that you don’t realise are going to cause you a lot of pain in the longer term. Something about coming up with some work-arounds which will soon in themselves fail, leaving you – as Ford Prefect said of Earth – “mostly ‘armless.“

Wait, wait. No, it’s gone…

McStalinist Ogres

“With all social media campaigns, we include contingency plans should the conversation not go as planned,” Mr Wion said.

Riiiiight…. “planned conversations”?   When a state does that shit, everyone says “propaganda.”  Business does it, it’s “free speech”.

Diners hijack McDonald’s Twitter Campaign
Tim Bradshaw and Alan Rappeport
in the Financial Times

 

People who reflect, and people who, um don’t

There are two kinds of people on this third rock from the sun.

Those capable of private (and, gasp, public reflection).  People who can answer straightforward questions, like, um…

What training or mentoring is available for volunteers who want to get involved with making [the event] happen?

What specific lessons are you acting on that you learnt from previous years?

And those who won’t. Or probably can’t.

That is all.

Books bought to read in my copious free time…

Sigh.  Are there 12 step programmes for bookaholics?  Maybe I should buy some …  no, wait.

Horace The Complete Odes and Epodes (one of them Penguin Classics)

Cath Staincliffe Dead Wrong 1998 ‘tec novel set in sunny Mcr.

Dave Haslam Manchester, England: the story of the pop cult city”

Four quid in total, but that’s Not The Point, is it?

I shouldn’t be allowed out.  I really shouldn’t.

Smart women

A topic I know something about, since Mrs Towers is one of them, and my collaborator on The Project is another.  And on reflection, many of the previous women who tolerated my presence in their lives/beds were very smart (“with,” I can hear readers mutter, “one obvious common blindspot.”)

Do I mean academic?  Meh.  You can be whipsmart and not academic. And you can be academic and mind-dessicatingly dull in a Gradgrind kind of way.

I mean, smart.  Looks fade; everyone’s body (male, female etc) heads south.  Having a cultivated  brain – at least until the dementia kicks in – means having fresh perspectives, interesting things to talk about and do.  I really cannot understand (or sympathise) with people who want – or aspire to – trophy wife one-more-facelift-and-she’ll-be-needing-to-shave status.   Why lobotomise yourself and stick mattress foam in your tits?  Why tolerate a society that encourages  that to half its members?  Alarming. Obscene.

Yes, I know, “post-material values” and all that. I’ve read my Inglehart.  But the whole smart women are way cool thing goes back a bit further than the 70s…

Now I am wittering, so I  shall say “that is all.”

Embracing, remembrance

How will we be remembered? (And for how long?)

How does that differ from how we want to be remembered?  Is that how you live a life, anyhow – worried about posterity,  and the current/future good opinion of others?

At any rate, that second path  doesn’t appear (to me)  to be how I am living my life.  But wtf do I know?

A hug to those who need it.  They know who they are right now.

How to protect your ego and avoid feedback

It is crucial to retaliate immediately. Don’t give your brittle intellectual honesty any time to muster its forces.*

Under no circumstances send an email or post a comment along the lines of “Thanks for your detailed critique. I rarely get that, and it’s a bit overwhelming. Given some of the things are quite precise and critical, my ego is flaring up. Rather than respond now, I am going to ponder for a couple of days. I am posting this to let you know I did read what you wrote, and will give a considered response within a few days.”
This would be FATAL to your secure view of yourself, and you would then have to follow through on self-reflection. No, no, no.

Start your insta-reply with a ritualistic “thank you for your critique” sentence. You then get some high moral ground (even though everybody knows your “thanks” are a manoeuvre).

As they used to say in the CIA, Admit Nothing, Deny Everything, Make Counter-Accusations.

Admit that mistakes were made, but not by you. For example, if the event under discussion started late, do NOT say “As the speaker, I could and should have prompted the chair to get things moving. I will do so in future.”

Make excuses about how you didn’t complete your presentation until shortly before the start time. Do NOT say “In future, I will take responsibility for my time management and get things sorted in advance.” Do NOT say “In future, I will ask the chair to give me a five minute warning, and then will wrap up on time.”

Strawmen are your friend. If someone has said that a presentation went on too long and had too many slides, answer as if they have taken an extremist “opposed to ALL powerpoint on principle” position.

Make vague references to “well documented importance” without reflecting on how your presentation may not have met the basic standards that are, um, important.

Dismiss the person who has written the critique as either not expert or not relevant. A sentence like “Somebody from your background was not really my target audience” should do the trick nicely.

Dismiss the person who has written the critique as incompetent. Point to a factual error in the critique, without considering how, if someone with English as a first language who was taking contemporaneous notes got it wrong, then the depth of misunderstanding among people with English as a second (or third?) language who were NOT taking contemporaneous notes might conceivably be a smidgen higher.

Cite every single people who told you they had a good time. Ignore the fact that they may well have been obeying social norms, just being polite, or have Stockholm Syndrome. Do not reflect on how many of the people you didn’t speak to were pissed off.

* And if your comment doesn’t go up immediately, send it again. The evil critics do not have day jobs (how do you know? Well, just guess), and are obviously imperialist colonialists who can dish it out but can’t take it.

The banality of path dependency

The banality I refer to is this post, so it will be as short as Mrs Towers.

I always cycle the same way out of town. That’s my autopilot. Today, because a light was red, because I was bored, I turned left early and…

much much quicker. Fewer lights, fewer cars, shorter distance.

How many other Better Ways of Being and Doing do I miss because my groove is a rut? And how to systematically experiment?

Not evil, just wrong

Two events today. Both had massive potential to be inspiring, invigorating, connecting. Both failed.

And – and here is where I may be getting a sliver of understanding and compassion (soon to be suppressed so I can more conveniently express outrage and exasperation, no doubt) – neither of them fell victim to the dynamic of people particularly determined to impose Their Vision. In fact, the people running both events have, I am sure, a genuinely-felt horror of anti-participative formats. I know one of them a bit, and they are sincere, energetic and kind.

But ego-foddering is what they delivered. They aren’t evil. They weren’t setting out to ego-fodder. And yet the end result was – at least for the portions I was at (I left the first for the second, and law-of-two-feeted it from that in order to continue my love affair… with the Financial Times, on the stepper.) deeply distressing.

So why did it happen? Our old friends comfort and habits, I think. It’s easy to have one person stand at the front and talk. It’s what we expect that the audience expects. And we are usually right. And it means we don’t have to risk innovation, to move outside our comfort zones and spend serious time and energy thinking about meeting dynamics. So, it’s easy and familiar. Just one problem – it doesn’t work.

The first meeting was sparsely attended. Well, it’s a Saturday, and folks have other commitments (shopping for groceries, ferrying children to sports events, visiting elderly parents etc etc). But it was ALSO an important annual event in this group’s life. I personally think the reaping is happening for previous meetings poor design…

The second meeting I am still too upset about to trust myself to write clearly and fairly. I will say this much – what a tragically tragically wasted opportunity. There was REAL diversity – of age, of culture, of “life experience” – in a room. Young white middle class males were genuinely in the minority. Meeting, mingling and learning would have been immense if, as could easily have happened, the meeting had been consciously designed, and that design carried through. Instead we got death-by-powerpointed. More on this meeting another time. Perhaps. If I ever calm down enough. (Actually, it’s not anger. It’s just a heavy heavy sadness. Am I becoming resigned?)

The urge to purge

Today I had a quiet afternoon at work, without the normal commitments. And did I spend my time writing the “endstate” document that I’ve been brewing? Or the quick and easy policy documents/pro formas that need doing?

No, I purged. I started clearing out ring binders and hang files and the sheer physicality and instant gratification of it kept me going long after I meant to stop, should have stopped.

We do what feels good. If we can do enough of what feels good in “the right direction”, I suppose we take a non-random walk in the rough direction of where we want to go…

On Monday, I’ll be glad of having done the clean-up. For now, I think “great, but that rare 90 minutes could have been better spent.”

Purger’s remorse, obviously…