I’ve started (again) trying to handle less, while simultaneously finishing more. one big thing, three medium things, and five little things daily.
My big things the past few days have been dealing with tasks that should have been dealt with weeks ago, if not months…
The medium things are things that are pressing, but have only recently come in. The five little things are quite easy and manageable.
The trick is to not do the five little tasks, and maybe add more, rather than doing the large one.
It’s okay to have bad ideas. I wish I could say that no idea is a bad one. But that’s just not true. A number of ideas are absolutely terrible.
And that’s okay. That’s what we have to learn.
In the pursuit of making something meaningful, you might come up with a thousand ideas that are complete trash.
In the ideating stage, just thinking up something should be fun. Otherwise, you could discouraged.
Don’t think about whether it’s possible to pull off, or whether it will make money.
I took a course on innovation – a long time ago. And one of the first activities was to come up with ten non-traditional uses for a paperclip.
Didn’t have to be good. Didn’t have to be practical. Just ten uses that weren’t clipping paper.
Getting your brain to shift gears allows you to think of things that might change the world.
Partly I’m still thinking of Hadestown. Partly, I read a passage from Mark Twain’s On Writing and Publishing, and I’ve been thinking of language.
Here: “There had been no death before the case of Cornelius Lean which had arisen and terminated in death since the special rules had been drawn up.”
I know every single one of those words. I understand their meaning. In their totality, though, it’s as if I’m staring at a blank wall.
Now Twain,I think, felt the same way. He had read that in a morning paper, and went on to say, “By the context I know what it means, but you are without that light and will be sure to get out of it a meaning which the writer of it was not intending to convey.”
Nope, Mark, I got no meaning out of it at all. My only guess is that a century ago, the meaning would have been much less obtuse.
And I was thinking that, as language changes, how much of a writer’s meaning do we lose?
There can be modern translations, sure, but then we also find ourselves at the mercy of the translator. Not that we should need English translated, mind you, but give Shakespeare a cold reading, and if your not familiar with the poetry, you’ll be probably end up lost.
Part of my writing tends to be dedicated to self-analysis. We all think about it, I believe… Why we do certain things, and not others. What led us to those choices.
A little introspection is a good thing.
Too much can lead to decision paralysis. If we’ve made the wrong choice – or believe we had – we are more inclined to think we’ll choose poorly again.
So, in a away – it’s beneficial to think like a goldfish. Not that they actually have a three-second memory, but you get the gist.
What about aggregation?
Let’s say you actually do want to receive a daily, weekly, or monthly notice of something. Something that, when compiled, is a lot easier to look at than going to each individual reference.
So, who does it well?
Here’s the thing. Everyone is selling you something. The stores are. The media is. Every newsletter, podcast, film, tv show, blog. All of it. It’s selling you. Even me.
Does it mean it’s not worth it? Not necessarily. But knowing that everyone is selling you on something could, possibly, give you an edge in decision making. You should decide, is this worth it.
If your life is set up to minimize decision-making except for the utmost critical, you can give full attention to important matters and let the inconsequential slip by.
Case in point. I receive, on average, a shit-ton of email every day.
Why? I don’t know. Newsletters. Sales. Events. People wanting to contact me. People wanting money. People wanting time.
It all comes down to time and money.
Now, if I unsubscribe from unwanted senders – no small task in and of itself – that will keep them from diverting my attention, regardless of how little attention it actually commands.
Thus, I’ve reallocated a small sliver of my time. Rather, I’ve freed it up, to reallocate somewhere else. Something that might provide me with more significant returns.
What can I say about this? First of all, I don’t see a lot of musicals recorded for screen. I was excited about this one. And Six, coming later this year.
Plus, it’s good to see them, as it will (hopefully) encourage further recordings, thus bringing the art form to broader audiences.
I had listened to the album, but never seen the show. I know that they celebrated ten years earlier this year, around the same time I was in New York. But I was occupied with other productions, and didn’t make it. There is a tour coming around, so I might see it on stage then.
One part of Hadestown will always be tied up with the time of my life that it premiered. I was in a somewhat unstable state, and the story of Orpheus and Eurydice sort of messed with my head a bit.
However, I worked my way through it, and eventually, when I was hosting a radio program on the arts, I’d play excerpts from the album every now and again.
I don’t know if people are taught Greek mythology as much any more. When I was in school, I read Hamilton’s Mythology and Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces.
In college as well, for one of the writing or film classes, we had to read Aristotle’s Poetics and Vogler’s Writer’s Journey.
So, Orpheus loved Eurydice and, according to myth, on their wedding day, as she walked a field in wedded bliss, a viper bit her and she died.
In Anais Mitchell’s adaptation, she imagines the story in one place, near the railway station to Hell. And it’s here that the lovers meet, in cold and desperate times, as Hades has grown jealous, and rarely lets his wife Persephone leave, and not for long.
So, plenty of backstory that the audience has to be given, in the form of song and storytelling. The songs are great. André de Shields as Hermes is phenomenal, and a joy to watch.
Eva Noblezada as well, and Reeve Carney has a great voice, though occasionally he looks surprised to find himself on stage.
I didn’t care for the theater’s sound system, or maybe it was actually the balance on the DCP – digital cinema package. Hard to tell. But some show stopping numbers ended up not being, well, show-stopping.
The auditorium was fairly full, though, and had about as much after movie chatter as The Odyssey, so I take that as a good sign.
I’ll likely add this to my limited collection of filmed performances on my shelves when it gets a physical release.
In looking at goals I’ve set for myself, it’s figuring out what can I balance to ensure that I’m working towards each of them? What’s distracting me from those goals?
First and foremost, the smartphone. What is the phone even for? It sucks you in. The emails. The accounts. The stupid notifications that pop up. But are they stupid, or are we?
Looking through an old journal, found something that, after my friend’s comment, made me laugh.
From an undated entry in journal Oct ’13 – Oct ’14:
“I need to be writing. All of my days are spent w/ wasting time. Being time-poor, mostly of my own doing. Even at the office, my motivation wanes so quickly. I look forward to the show’s end, where I can try to reclaim some of my lost life.”
Looks like it’s a struggle I’ve had now over ten years, and most likely longer.
When you set a goal, it’s easy to view the whole goal. When after toiling for however long, you look at the goal, and it’s still far off – you may think of abandoning your goal.
But if you notice the distance from where you started, that may be all the motivation you need to keep going.
Michael's Musings 