possibilities

Put page numbers on both edges of the page

I just read a journal paper with the coolest feature: the page number on each page appeared in both the lower lefthand corner and the lower righthand corner. This meant that when I printed it out double-sided and stapled the corner, the page number was visible in the outside corner of every page despite the fact that the article happened to begin on an even-numbered page. (The benefit is smaller —but still beneficial— even when single-sided, as long as the pages wind up stapled or bound.)

Why do people answer phones at ring's end?

Why do many people, when answering a land line, stand there waiting for it to ring once more so they can answer it at the end of a ring? Do they think that is the way you have to use a phone? Are they trying to impress the caller with the neatness of segueing immediately from a full ring into the greeting? (Do they not realise that the ringing and the ringback are not generally in phase?)

I'd like to understand. I've wondered for years. It particularly annoys me when I see employees behaving this way when taking calls from customers. It seems to me a waste of time all around.

Plain phrasing to replace sarcasm

Several years ago I decided not to speak sarcastically. At the time it was because I thought sarcasm is often hurtful and not worth it. In recent years my thinking has shifted more to that communication is hard enough even when all parties try to say just what they mean, let alone other than what they mean. Even so, the hurtfulness alone of sarcasm is enough to pass on it.

Sarcasm is yet a chief mode of expression in our culture, and I haven't excised it completely from my speech. Just now it occurred to me to wonder whether complete excision would be possible, and I've decided to try.

I'm going to try to suppress every sarcastic utterance, decide whether the underlying thought is worthy of expression, and then if so state it phrased plainly. Wish me luck! (Join me?)

Swing travel moratorium

I'm taking a break from swing travel. For 66 days from 12 November through 16 January I will only dance on Fridays in Gainesville; I'm not going to travel anywhere to dance.

Preferably, I won't travel anywhere for any reason at all.

Let the 56-day countdown to the moratorium begin.

19 hours of sleep

So, I ended up sleeping for over 19 hours, which is a greatly new record for me. (Previously 14 hours I think, on the conclusion of college.) I guess All Bal really requires a lot of you. That was the first event I've ever been to where dancers much better than me were sitting about rubbing and talking about their feet, ankles, and knees; and I was in the exact same boat. (Swing dancing is really abusive to the body; apparently Bal more so than general.)

On waking, I walked to our sliding glass doors. It felt so good to use my body! I guessed it should after lying still for 19 hours. Nicely, my knees and foot tendons feel fantastic. I guessed I recuperated. Then after being up for over two hours, I took my first sip of water. I had wanted just a sip, but after tasting it it I thought, oh, my goodness!, and imbibed the remainder therewith.

I've got to remember how reinitialising it is to sleep for such an extended spell.

On waking though it did feel like somebody had grabbed hold of the time axis and yanked it a day across my frame. One of my roommates annoyed me by starting up conversation with me. I realised that my annoyance came because from my perspective I had just spent a lot more time talking with him than I had meant to, delaying my rest; from his perspective nearly a day had passed since last we'd spoken.

Whoa! These women aren't follows...

Swing dancers are really broken. Coming off of an intense weekend, my warped perspective is hitting up against normal people's (?) reality (?).

The first sign was at the airport when the conversation of two fellow attendees and me recalling the events of the weekend (and those upcoming) drove others away from us at the terminal.

Changing planes now at the Atlanta airport on a Monday morning, I was absolutely amazed at the number of follows about! No, wait, those aren't follows, those are women normal women. Probably not interested in following. (Not interested in following!?! (But definitely potential follows, right?))

I've experienced this unwarp before, but it's still really odd each time. When all you've seen is follows for 3.5 days, the disinterest and unfamiliarity of most people with our passion is disorienting. I guess it's particularly weird after a weekend of Balboa, to think that most women would be greatly put off to think of a stranger standing right up against them in short order for three whole minutes. If you know what I'm talking about, you'll be nodding along with this text. If you're normal, you're going to have to think about whether this is crazy. (It's really odd being so keenly aware of the presence and structure of each woman's body and so completely oblivious to the presence of men. Focus!)

One of the DJs, Frankie Hagan, had mentioned after playing a polka or waltz, I forget which, (at a late night Bal dance), "Normal people are sleeping. Do you think they suppose that somewhere in America people are polkaing at 5 AM?" There was a general feeling that we were doing our part. Some of us were joking later about whether we nutso late night dancers were safeguarding this minority art form for the future or whether society rather had some protection in our sequestering.

All I can really envision at this moment is how phenomenal it will feel to hit the sack at the crack of noon.

I'm done whining

Yesterday is the last day I will ever have whined. It's insipid, exceedingly low-awareness and disempowering. I'm done.

How to reduce overhead in bookreading (and skip out on books not making the cut)

It's amazing how success strategies become so automatic and basic that it's hard to remember what it was like when a particular technique seemed silly.

Just now I was about to make use of a few minutes before Pilates starts to continue where I had left off in a book. It flitted across my mind how useful it is that I have a Post-it Page Marker marking exactly where to pick up. I spend no time trying to figure out where I was or what I was thinking. The focus is incredible, but I wouldn't have believed what a difference it makes until I tried it.

I used to be one of those people just like you who thought, Augh, it doesn't take me any significant time to figure out where I was. If it takes you more than zero time, I'm spending more of my time actually reading than you are. And zero overhead makes many more small blocks of time usable. But, I'm smart enough not to need a crutch. I'm smart enough to direct my smarts elsewhere.

I place a page marker inside the cover of every book I'm reading or plan to read. Whenever I close a book which I plan to continue reading, I place a Post-it marker so that its lower edge is immediately above the line containing the start of the next sentence I have to read.

Knowing exactly where I left off is invaluable. As mentioned, I spend no time figuring out where to resume. I can use odd blocks of the smallest time — even a few seconds of otherwise dead time allow me to advance one sentence. The feeling of moving inexorably forward is empowering.

Before markers, I used to search forward and back a bit to recover where I was. I would either unintentionally (if I made a mistake) or intentionally (if my mind wandered back) re-read a couple of paragraphs. I used to think this opportunity to re-read and reconsider was time well spent, but now I think that the benefit of reading on outweighs. Honestly, most of my reconsideration was simply comfortable, not helpful. And, letting my subconcious process more breadth, I can later call my attention back to any depth I really need to get to.

The most significant benefit is that for the past several years I have been able to read dozens of books in parallel. Why is that desirable? Because when I stay in a single book, I 1) lose perspective as to how good or lousy it is, and 2) can fall prey to the childhood desire to "finish the book." With my task shifted from "finishing" to "picking up and deriving more value," the most useful task is always to pick up in the most important book to me at a moment. I feel no guilt in not persisting in reading a comparatively lousy book because I never sign up any more to reading discrete books.

It's a rare book now that I read more than 80% of the pages. Many books I don't read more than 20%. I feel no guilt. The many excellent "threads" I have about me at any time constitute quite a bar for incoming passages to rise above.

A tip: books which inspire multiple threads of thought (or pauses in execution, if it's somehow progressive) can certainly warrant multiple markers. Just stop viewing books as discrete tasks. Some great books, I stick five markers inside the front cover the moment I get them out of their Amazon box.

I love the wet look

My roommate commented that my hair "looks wet" — a look I sometimes go for by applying just enough gel to leave a slight surface slick and then going heavy on the super hold spritz. I prefer the wet look on low humidity days like today's mid-30%. He had seen me with the style earlier in the day but I guess he figured it was genuinely wet at that time; for it to still look wet hours later was then comment-worthy. I told him the look was intentional...

...and then that reminded me of my favourite lipstick ever. Girlfriends, I love Maybelline Wet Shine Diamonds Lipcolor. Buy some!! Lay it on! I still remember my jaw dropping when this stuff debuted in television ads nearly five years ago, and I am no less overcome today. Sex in a stick.

Some rudimentary thoughts on sensory exploits

I'm reading a book called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience which provides some quite interesting analysis of many concepts I've been turning over for the past couple years.

One passage of the book (the fourth paragraph of Chapter 5) strays a bit from what most of the rest of it means to me, but still alights on a topic I've been mulling recently:

Everything the body can do is potentially enjoyable. Yet many people ignore this capacity, and use their physical equipment as little as possible, leaving its ability to provide flow unexploited. When left undeveloped, the senses give us chaotic information: an untrained body moves in random and clumsy ways, an insensitive eye presents ugly or uninteresting sights, the unmusical ear mainly hears jarring noises, the coarse palate knows only insipid tastes.

I have considered before that the senses I inhabit the most are touch, hearing and smell. On reading the above passage, I identified strongly with the development of the body for purposeful and elegant movement and musicality for subtleties of sound, (and of course smell was not addressed at all), but felt apathetic towards uninterestingness of sights or insipidity of tastes.

Curiously, most of my friends have moved to big cities where they spend much of their social time pursuing fine dining. On a recent visit out west, my friend Dave ordered me my first ever meat prepared rarer than well done — it was medium or medium rare, I forget which. I was shocked, (especially as it was a burger, and I had never conceived of burgers being cooked any less through than well). It was a new experience for me, and while I totally missed out on the enjoyable burger tasting I'd anticipated, I had an entirely different one which lay open a possibility to me. Dave reacted with horror at always taking meat well done (quite as I am horrified at people who pump MP3s into their ears), telling me that there are subtleties of flavour that I will never taste if the meat is overdone. Since my visit with him and several other big city friends, I am genuinely considering ordering my next steak medium well — although of course it is not often that I even go to a restaurant of any fineness.

I wondered if it's a zero-sum game, where time spent developing sight or taste is time lost on the other three, in which case I'd rather stick with my present proclivities. Is there transference of refinement amoung the senses? I want dearly to touch and hear better, (and on the smelling front would like society to back off from assailing odour); inasmuch as developing the remaining senses would propel the former better (say, geometrically?) than attending them directly, that would be another way to expend my energies. But I don't know.