Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2009

The treachery of tethers…

Ceci n’est pas un vacance – that could be my personal variant on Magritte’s This is not a pipe.

I’m in Vancouver, and it’s supposed to be a break from my island exile, but digital tethers ensure that I’m plugged into all the usual concerns.

Earlier today I wrote a blog post for Johnson Street Bridge dot ORG, called Heritage value, once more. It’s about how the City of Victoria is ignoring an important heritage assessment, which states that the bridge has “significant heritage value.”

And as usual, there are plenty of other digital tethers to ensure the hiatus isn’t a complete break. But it’s still fun.

Vancouver is a riot, and I do love it. But it’s a funny town – it talks a big green game, for example. And a lot of it is green – but holy cow, is the oh-not-so-green car culture ever alive and well here. I mean in particular a car culture driven (sorry, bad pun) by young men (very young men), who – through lucky breaks (ahem) or inheritance – possess cars that are worth a small fortune (say, $80,000), and who enjoy nothing more than to parade their vehicles through downtown, parking them in front of brightly-lit shops so that those of us out for an evening stroll can admire the buff metal and languid embodiment of all that privilege.

There’s also an unbridled aggression (again, mostly coming from younger male drivers, especially if they’re driving costly cars) against the tightness of the core city: its density and its traffic congestion. Lots of aggressive driving, which is pretty comical to watch, especially if you’re familiar with driving mores in truly densely populated areas. Naturally, the young men are frustrated at every pinch point (i.e. corner, traffic light, pedestrian crossing – you name it).

Car culture in Vancouver shows how much the city is still inbetween – but what a glorious inbetween it is. It’s beautiful, fresh, energetic.

Tonight, I ambled through Holt Renfrew (we don’t have a Holt Renfrew in Victoria, sadly). The Vancouver store is quite beautiful – sort of like an Apple store for clothes: white on white decor, with jewel-colored objects of desire in stark but seductive contrast. Very tasty.

I found myself drawn to one mannequin, dressed all in Fendi. I admired the tattered scarf tied around its neck, but did a double-take when I saw the price tag for the shabby-chic piece of cloth (nearly $300). The mannequin wore a woven jacket that I thought looked really sharp; I walked to the rack where 2 or 3 of the same jacket hung. The price? $3,550.

I considered licking the jacket’s lapel or sleeve, because an object basically so utilitarian (and a not especially couture one, to boot), yet so expensive, struck me as some kind of fetish. I thought, I bet there’s some kind of primitive impulse that would justify ingesting or incorporating this absurdly magical object that’s capable of commanding such a high price …but then my reason got the better of me, and I held my tongue. Literally.

But it made me wonder whether I should get out my sewing machine and run something up. Three thousand five hundred and fifty dollars is an awful lot of money for a simple little …coat.

But so is $80,000 for a car that merely travels on the same roads as everyone else.

Cutting through clutter, or, unity is overrated

Advice on getting organized isn’t hard to find these days – it seems every other person has clutteritis and needs a feng shui intervention. I’m not immune to the lure of the organized life either: were I able to arrive at an oasis of oversight, it would feel like coming to my true home.

… I think.

Yes, I think it would. Perhaps.

Here’s the rub: my indecisiveness points to a larger problem, and it has to do with trauma (lower case “t” – nothing major, really, but just compelling enough for me).

Some months ago, I invested in a copy of Regina Leeds’s One Year to an Organized Life: From Your Closets to Your Finances, the Week-by-Week Guide to Getting Completely Organized for Good. Leeds is a Zen Organizer, which I think is a philosophy somewhat akin to the ancient Roman notion of a healthy mind in a healthy body, except that in this case the healthy mind is to reside in a healthy environment, namely organized space.

Makes sense to me. The reason Leeds’s approach seems to work for me a bit better than others I’ve tried to implement is precisely because of her savvy psychological insights into why we become pack-rats or late-nicks or lost in the clutter (er, detritus, really) of our physical lives.

Most organizing books assume that you’ve always been a slob, and that the new advice dished out by the book in hand will open your eyes, and change your ways. Leeds understands that some people have decades of slob-dom under their belt (to the point where for some it really is how they’ve “always” been), but she also writes about those of us who used to be organized, laser-like and filled with the energy of the eternally driven, but to whom something happened to derail us.

And she wants to help us get back on track, taking us gently and psychologically by the hand, from room to room until the job is done.

I knew I could like this book, even if it doesn’t turn into the magic wand that gets me my groove back, when I read on p.18:  “It’s powerful to understand the impetus for any change. Sometimes circumstances move us in positive directions. When they don’t, we want to take back the reins. We want to be the architect of our life, not a victim of circumstance.” In this passage Leeds was writing about those of us who were organized, but who then had something change on us. In my case, moving into the house I currently live in has been an unmitigated disaster. There’s no other way to describe it. We bought the house in a semi-demolished state from a man who owned it for about 18 months, just long enough to begin tearing out all the mistakes of the previous owner.

What that meant is that we found ourselves with a house that had 3 bathrooms partially torn out (not a single bathroom intact), with a kitchen that was a wreck, with wiring that was dangerous, with a roof that needed replacing, with load-bearing walls (both interior and exterior) that needed reinforcing (a steel beam in the kitchen where the house had sagged 2 inches because some idiot had removed interior load-bearing walls, and paralam on an exterior load-bearing wall where only 2×4s were holding up a 12-foot span), with plumbing that was literally held together with tape, with no insulation in the walls and no storm windows on the 17 (in words: seventeen!) 4′x5′ single pane windows, and with an attached “garage” whose double door frame had been chain-sawed out so that the previous owner’s son’s monster truck would fit through it.

We had problems finding contractors to work on the house. After we found one, we continued to stay in rented accommodations as long as possible – much longer than intended – with all our stuff packed up in boxes. Finally, we told the contractor that we had to move in – the house wasn’t finished yet, but after months and months of waiting, we couldn’t afford to keep renting.

When we moved in, it was a nightmare. We had 192 boxes of belongings – at least 1/3 of them were boxes with books. But there were no built-in bookcases anywhere in this relatively roomy house, and a carpenter was still crawling around the floor (and around all our boxes), installing baseboards. And so the boxes remained unpacked for several more months while the carpenter showed up on occasion to nail in another baseboard – and we slowly ran out of money. We did contract to have some bookcases built in, till finally, the books could be unpacked – in part. Something as simple as buying simple, stylish, and cheap bookcases, we found, was a challenge on “the island” since the concept of an IKEA is a Mainland thing, not to be found here. You have no idea how wonderful IKEA is for simple things like shelving until there isn’t an IKEA anywhere to be found.

Meanwhile, the garage was still a wreck, and still open to the street. Homeless people started sleeping in it, and we worried they’d set fires to keep warm – and possibly torch our house in the process (the garage is attached). Since the garage was open to the street, all the garden utensils ended up in the basement – along with all the junk that goes into basements. We don’t have an attic, and some “attic items” (like extra bedding materials) ended up migrating into the basement, too. Anyone who has any idea about organizing knows that this is the beginning of the end, because one cardinal rule of organizing is sorting: thou shalt not mix different stuff. But mix we did, and once we started, it was like being on a bender at a cocktail party, with one mixed drink after another.

Eventually, after several years of worrying about the people surreptitiously sleeping in our open garage, we bit the bullet and found the money to renovate the garage at last. Now the garage had a door (which kept the homeless from camping in the space), and I lugged the garden utensils into the garage – but all I was able to muster in my clutter-intoxicated stupor was to dump them on the floor.

I was too far gone. After all, years had now elapsed during which all of us – the spouse, the son, the daughter, and I – had worked continuously at home: the kids and I were homeschooling, the spouse was working from home, I worked (unpaid) from home, and so we were all at home, 24/7/365, utilizing every damn square inch of the house all the time. It was (is, still) a workhouse.

There was no such thing as “coming home” since we were here all the time. We never left. We slept here, ate here, worked here, cooked here, cleaned here, tidied here, laundered here, ironed here, groomed the dog here…

After a while, I seriously felt like dropping things where they fell. I was always the one trying to clean up after everyone, and the house felt like nothing but a giant work machine.

Last year, the son (then 17) started at university. He got out of the house. The daughter (then 14) left to attend a neighborhood high school for her senior year, so she got out of the house (and she’s off to university in Vancouver next month – so she’s really getting out of the house). That meant that I stopped homeschooling, but I was still (am still) working at / from home, as is the spouse. We haven’t yet …escaped.

But I’ve made some progress in clawing back a degree of organization, which in the first instance involves separation.

From the undifferentiated chaos of a constant home-life, which was a constant work-life, I’m separating things into discrete spheres. I feel that if I ever again want to do any real work – the sort that matters to me, the sort that’s driven by real energy and meaning – I will have to find separations. Spare me the group hugs -  unity, I find, is highly overrated. There’s time a-plenty to fall back into an undifferentiated nothingness once you’re dead.

Earthy laughter

…something about the voice and the image

They’re at odds, in a way.

Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt
Und das ist meine Welt, sonst keine…

Marlene Dietrich …very young

The island tax

In keeping with the title, this post has no links, no names, nothing: it’s an island subject.

The story: I have an opportunity to attend an interesting sold-out event in a very nearby city on “the mainland” (the US mainland, actually). One of the panelists at the event is offering to get me into the event – all I have to do is show up. Would I like to go? You bet – the event itself, the opportunity to network with the people there, and most of all the opportunity to meet the panelist (who happens to be a very interesting person) is enough to make anyone with half a brain want to go.

I think I have more than just half a brain, so…

Yet I won’t be going because it’s too expensive and logistically difficult to get there.

The island-ness of our island-ness is really hitting me hard these days, and I’m not liking it.

When we first moved back here, I scoffed at the notion of a fixed link (that is: a bridge to the mainland) because (I thought), why let everyone else have easy access to this place?

Alas, it works both ways: easy access also means …easy egress.

And that means circulation: entry and egress. I really believe in circulation. Lately, however, I’m at a stand-still. There’s no easy on or easy off here.

If I still lived in Boston and wanted to go to New York City, I could hop in a car and drive there, attend an evening event, and drive back. The stress of driving ~8 hours there and back in a single 24-hour period might take a year off my life, but financially it wouldn’t cost me more than gas. And it would be eminently do-able. (I did it once while studying for my connoisseurship exams at Harvard – I wanted desperately to see an exhibition at the Guggenheim, so the spouse and I set out at 5am for NYC, saw the show, and drove back. Easy-peasy, sort of.)

Here, to go to a city that’s actually closer (in mileage) than the Boston-New York City run, I’d have to figure out complex ferry schedules (and accept fares which run to a couple of hundred dollars, return fare, and otherwise involve many hours of travel time) or consider even more expensive airplane flights – either sea-planes or regular planes. In either case (planes and ferries), it’s impossible to go to a late evening event and come back that same night because the planes and ferries don’t run that late, so now we have to factor in hotel accommodation on top of the already significant travel costs.

If you plan a trip several weeks ahead of time, you can do it for a not entirely painful amount of money, but if it’s something that comes up unexpectedly, you can only do it if you’re prepared to throw money at it liberally. And so, unless you have money to throw at a thing, you don’t circulate. You stay put.

Do this for …oh, seven years or so (as I have) and you start to grow moss. And before you know it, you’re totally and utterly stuck.

Remember the milk (on working at home)

The other day Philip Greenspun wrote a provocative (that is, a typically iconoclastic) article, Universities and Economic Growth. It’s well-worth reading, so click through and take a look. (h/t @KathySierra)

I just want to use a small passage in that piece as a jumping off point for another observation that’s completely unrelated to Phil’s agenda. (In other words, this is a hijack.)

Apropos of universities, and of how today’s students use them, he wrote:

Focusing on homework has become much tougher. A modern dorm room has a television, Internet, youtube, instant messaging, email, phone, and video games. The students who get the most out of their four years in college are not those who are most able, but rather those with the best study habits.

No company would rely on this system for getting work done, despite the potential savings in having each employee work from home. Companies spend a fortune in commercial office space rent to create an environment with limited distractions and keep workers there for most of each day.

It’s that last sentence (”Companies spend a fortune in commercial office space rent to create an environment with limited distractions and keep workers there for most of each day.”) that really struck a nerve.

Readers of this blog know that I homeschooled my children. Today, I’m done with that – but until last summer, we were in the thick of it. For eight years, from 2000 until 2008, we – my son, my daughter, and I – worked at home (with field trips thrown in). Toward the end of that period, we did use BC Ministry of Education curricula, so it’s not the case that I had to invent unit studies for high school science or anything. But the homeschool culture (which basically means self-motivated work habits) continued.

That status quo changed last September when my then-17-year-old started his path on the B.Com program at UVic and my then-14-year-old started grade 12 at a neighborhood school (for the exotic experience). This coming September the now 18-year-old will enter his second year at UVic while the now 15-year-old will start her university studies at UBC. (Yes, you read that right, and no, I don’t want to hear any tut-tut-negative comments about radical acceleration. Tell it to someone else.)

About half a dozen years ago the spouse began working from home, too. So here we all were, 24/7/365, working at home – until last September, that is, when the kids went off to school. …Which left us grown-ups to continue the home-work slog.

Now that I’ve had ~10 months to decompress, at least from the intensity of being responsible for the day-to-day education of my children, the statement “Companies spend a fortune in commercial office space rent to create an environment with limited distractions and keep workers there for most of each day” really resonates with me.

People who commute and go to an office think that working at home in fuzzy slippers will be somehow liberating. Well, there’s a flip side to everything. Working at home all the time – not by yourself or just for yourself, but rather as part of a larger entity (say, a homeschooling family or a couple starting a business) – especially if it’s not very remunerative or lucrative (homeschooling is a financial drain, not a generator of income) can be really hard. I suppose it’s different if you make oodles of money and can get away from time to time. But if you don’t and you instead end up with more of the same (working at home), watch out: you can get to feeling stuck, and there’s nothing quite like that kind of stuckness.

Working at home isn’t like working in an office that you can leave behind. You don’t have tidy divisions between work and non-work, and sometimes the blurring lines get really blurry.

My dog won’t appreciate being left at home, but maybe I’ll try working in some third places this fall. On the other hand, if I use third places to do more work, it just means that I’m taking my work out of the home and into those other places, too.

My home (and homework) isn’t like a modern dorm room with “television, Internet, youtube, instant messaging, email, phone, and video games” as distractions. Over the last few years, my many home jobs have splintered into many more pieces, to the point that they themselves have become the distractions. In shepherding this machine that is the home and this project that was homeschooling and this partnership with my partner through years of home-work, it seems I have forgotten how to get my own work done.

In fact, I think I’ve forgotten what it was.

o_O

Sometimes someone will helpfully ask what I plan to do, now that the kids are heading out. It occurs to me that I have to remember something I forgot, not plan something I don’t know yet.

Clarifying what you want

I got to meet blogger Victoria Klassen through Twitter at several local tweetups, but I feel I really get to know her through her writing. Today she published a wonderful post, A Forrest Gump kinda interview…, based on customized interview questions sent to her by Raul Pacheco (aka Hummingbird604).

I was really impressed by the clarity of Victoria’s – or Tori’s – responses. Jealous, actually, since I seem to be in a hazy sort of funk where clarity stands no chance against the shadows. In particular, I thought her answer to question #2 (”Which element of communications is the one that makes you most passionate?”) was awesome:

Same thing that excited me most about being a journalist: the opportunity to explain difficult subjects to a lay person with accuracy.

She then goes on to describe the various topics she deals with in her professional life as a public servant …and, well, wow. Just go read her post.

And as if that isn’t enough, there’s her personal history, into which she gives readers some glimpses. It sounds like quite a life, with plenty of ups and downs. But as her blog’s name Samothrace indicates, she’s a marathoner who’s in the race for the long haul: clear-headed, authentic, role-modeling, and having fun. A winner, for sure.

Google business cards (but not in Canada)

If I still lived in the US, I could do free advertising for Google by getting some of these:

Myers-Briggs says I’ve changed

Change is good, right?

Prompted by Gotham Gal’s post about taking an online Myers-Briggs personality test, I decided to give the test another whirl.

I had taken it several years ago and got an INFP result – that’s Introversion, iNtuition, Feeling, Perception. (I wasn’t especially pleased with that, incidentally. Not for any particular reason, but because it struck me as fuzzy.)

Half a dozen years later, it seems I’ve decided that all that Feeling and Perceiving stuff is a luxury of youth (and money, of which I now have much much less than I did when I “was” an INFP).

The current result says I’m an INTJ – that’s Introversion, iNtuition, Thinking, Judgment. Yep, still introverted and intuitive (mebbe), but now thinking and judging a bit harder. My age is showing, perhaps?

The only thing I really like about this new assessment (as described here) is that “we” INTJ types are – drumroll, please – Masterminds.

Bwahahaha!

Time tread

Latterly battling a major case of the blues, I’m not helped by what locals refer to as “island time,” a peculiar warp-mode prevalent to Victoria. It eats initiative, lets responses (feedback) fall into the black hole of never-never-land, and generally bogs down any and all projects. The other day in the locker room, I overheard a young woman tell her friend that in Victoria we tread water. The implication was – and she spoke from experience, having worked in Asia and on The Mainland – that in other places all that activity of moving your legs about actually gets you somewhere.

Ok, that’s my grumpy mood in a nutshell. I’m treading water, too. It feels more and more like a really dumb thing to do.

In other news, I am catching up on a couple of things, including posting my FOCUS articles to my Scribd.com page. More on that later.