Posts tagged as “We Call It Living”

Following up recent posts about things taking longer than you think.

Trying to do cleanup, laundry, and organization before starting my next task? I predicted “a few minutes”. It took a bleeding hour.

I need hours at a time to get coding done. I need focus. 

I don’t need to be interrupted by rescuing a cat from the rain! 

But you have to anyway. Argh!

Time tracking (I use Clockify), if done pretty rigorously, can really dispel some illusions about how much work we can get done in a short amount of time - and, conversely, about all we did do in that block of time that didn’t feel productive. 

Case in point: I’ve already done 6 hours of stuff today that wasn’t on my agenda for today. And all this stuff “needed” to get done - at least for a normal, human interpretation of the word “need”. 

I feel the need to qualify that as I’ve been through cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), an evidence-based approach to dealing with stress, and while it is wonderful, it does have some intellectually dishonest components, like throwing out “need” language.

I get it — there are things we think we “need” that we really don’t — but some of the therapists I worked with pushed that to an extreme that didn’t make sense. Sure, you don’t “need” to breathe, but if you don’t, you’ll pass out and/or die. 

So, yes, the stuff “needed” to get done in the normal, human sense of the word. I mean, sure, you could throw out all your clothes instead of doing laundry and order new ones online, but that would neither be efficient nor sustainable.

But more directly, some of that was organizing my files for my current active projects, some of which I did indeed need to pull up and organize in order to take the next steps on those projects. 

Funny how our busy-beaver selves sometimes try to convince ourselves that certain things don’t “need” to be done … but if we don’t do them, we won’t get anything done. 

Or the cat will have to stay in the rain.

-the Centaur

P.S. And this post took another 15-30 minutes, as I came back to it later.

Pictured: the bottom coming out. It was short, but it was a hell of a rainstorm.

SO! Working on The Neurodiversiverse led me to writing again, and writing those stories led me to Devon Price’s Unmasking Autism, which in turn led me to realize I have undiagnosed social anxiety disorder with autistic / ADHD / OCD tendencies.

“Unmasking” is an important process that autistic people can elect to undergo where they stop putting so much effort into conforming to neurotypical expectations - “masking” - and start building a life which is built around how their bodies and minds work.

While unmasking can be risky, with a real threat to life, limb or livelihood even for autistics who are privileged, much less people from other disadvantaged groups, it often comes with great benefits - not just to mental health, but physical well being.

But, if you know one autistic person, then you know one autistic person, and advice that helps one autistic person may not help another. So I found some of Price’s advice to be helpful - even as I had to subvert it for my own use case.

In particular, one thing many autistic people who are stressed out by trying to keep up with neurotypical expectations of cleanliness is to stop worrying so much about it. The thinking goes, if it stresses you out to put clothes in a hamper, who cares? Just change clothes in the same place and let them pile until you take them to the laundry.

But what I realized is that I was unconsciously doing this - letting mail, dishes, or laundry (cleaned or dirty) pile up until I had enough spoons to deal with it. My thinking went, if I am doing my work and keeping the lights on, who cares if the mail piles up for a few weeks? I’ll get to it when I deliver what I am responsible for.

But what I realized was, this was hurting me. The bigger the piles were, the more intimidating they became, and the more I put off dealing with them - a vicious cycle. But when I finally was forced to deal with one of the piles, I found myself infinitely MORE stressed than I was taking care of things a step at a time.

A habit I had adopted to deal with one aspect of my undiagnosed neurodivergence - a possibly autistic avoidance of organizing chores in favor of focus on work that kept the lights on - was really messing with another aspect of my mental makeup: an obsessive-compulsive need to have everything organized and in its place.

I went through this before with the library where I’m typing this; it used to be so disorganized that I didn’t want to spend time here, but once it was organized, I loved spending time here. So I am rewarded to expend this effort.

So, in an effort to go easier on myself, I have started being harder on myself about piles. Not letting them grow; dealing with them right away, before they become intimidating. The hope is, if I can keep the space around me organized, maybe the stress I feel about dealing with piles will fade away, and I can really focus on the work I want to.

Let’s see how it goes.

-the CentaurPictured: The afternoon lunch-and-read habit, featuring Unmasking Autism.

So, my “blog buffer” enabled me to spend most of Tuesday focusing on work and writing. (And even doing a little game playing in Infinite Craft.) When I crashed out, I remembered, “oh, I need to blog” … but checked my blogroll, and saw that the buffer had posted for me. So I instead got to turn in early and get some much-needed sleep.

I’m going to need to catch up today and tomorrow, of course, trying to get four posts in two days so I have time to chill out over the weekend and focus on editing the rough draft of Spectral Iron and the returning stories on The Neurodiversiverse. But it sure is easier to keep a commitment when you plan ahead to make sure you fulfill that commitment than it is to commit without thought and hope that muddling through with “hard work and discipline” will somehow manage the job that should be done by actual thinking.

-the Centaur

Pictured: breakfast at Nose Dive, one of the many places in downtown Greenville where it is impossible to eat breakfast on Sunday morning without an hour wait - unless you reserve ahead.

So I’m confused: I know I’m a bit weird, but I stopped to think about the supposedly "weird" way that I do things and I genuinely do not understand how “normal” people manage it.

So what you see above is my collection of genre T-shirts. I love genre T-shirts and wear them most of the year - as my shirt in the summer, and as my undershirt in the winter.

I used to think this collection was excessive; most of the other people I know don’t have near as many themed shirts, just a collection of normal clothes.

But I started pulling on that thread (ha, ha) a bit and it just didn’t make sense to me.

SO what you see there is something like 300-500 shirts in my closet. I didn’t count them all, but I estimated by counting a few piles and extrapolating by the number of piles.

But if you wear a shirt every day, this is only enough shirts for roughly a year. And I know from *ahem* considerable experience now that even rarely worn old T-shirts, which are typically made from better fabric than modern T-shirts, last at most 20-30 years.

Now, between science fiction conventions, travel, and very occasional clothes shopping, I purchase maaaaybe 10 or so T-shirts per year, which I thought was an excessive habit.

But over 20-30 years, this adds up again to 300 shirts … so by the time that I’ve worn out all the shirts in my collection, I will have purchased enough shirts to fill it up again.

Now the conundrum: most of the people I know don’t buy a lot of t-shirts, and they don’t have a huge library of clothes. So how are they not wearing through all their clothes all the time?

Now, I know my wife buys a lot of clothes (mostly at Goodwill), but she’s power tool girl, and her clothes rapidly get worn out or covered with paint and later used as rags.

But the friends that I know who DON’T seem to buy that many clothes ALSO have a similar strategy. One of them called it “the circle of shirts”: First it’s a nice T-shirt, then it’s an undershirt, then it’s a gym shirt, then it’s a yard shirt, then it’s a rag.

But if people don’t have a huge library of shirts, and they’re not buying a buttload t-shirts, why aren’t they going around in tattered rags all the time?

What do “normal” people do? Go to Target and buy white T-shirts every week, as the six pairs of shirts and undies that they have rapidly disintegrate from the rotation?

I genuinely don't get it.

-the Centaur

Pictured: my collection of T-shirts, some of which do eventually get retired from wear.

According to legend, the man who built this house died in this courtyard. Well, technically, he's the man who oversaw its most recent renovation; the core of the house is almost 75 years old, and on plans for the renovations we found in an old drawer, the courtyard appears to have been a swimming pool. Regardless, when he passed, this big, rambling old house soon became too large for his widow, who moved out, leaving it empty for quite a while, enabling us to get it for a steal during the pandemic.

While we wouldn't have turned down a swimming pool - we were actually more concerned with getting away from the drought and the fires and the burning than we were about where we were moving to, other than "big enough for an art studio and a library" - we much prefer the courtyard, which we've started calling "The French Quarter." But the excellent design of this house - architecturally, most of the windows have an excellent view, and the landscaping slopes away from the house almost everywhere to keep it dry - has a few minor warts on it, including the courtyard: under the overhangs, nothing will live.

The feature that keeps the water away from the house - the landscaping and the big sofits - makes it hard for anything smaller than a bush to live. When we moved in, and put in that little sitting area using paving stones and chairs from my late mother's old garden, I dug up the monkey grass where I put in the paving stones, and used it to fill in the areas you now see filled with rocks. That grass lasted about a season, and by the next year, you couldn't even tell anything had been planted there. It was just dust and weeds, and even the weeds frankly weren't doing too well themselves and could have used a watering.

So, kind of in desperation, we hit on the idea of putting in more stream stone as a kind of a border, which the former owners had put around the fountain. This is something our termite folks have actually been asking us to do around the whole house to create a barrier, but we decided to get started here.

And I guess the surprise is that this stopgap effort looks really good. We sort of expected that it would have looked better than scraggly weeds and dead dirt, but, actually, it looks REALLY good, as if it was always supposed to have had a stone border around the outside.

I guess my point, if I did have one, is that sometimes you do things that you have to in order to patch a problem, but if you pick the right patch, sometimes it seems like it was on purpose.

-the Centaur

Pictured: um, well, I think I said it.

... it's still one of the worst feelings in the world to turn back the sheets at the end of a long day, only to realize you hadn't blogged or posted your drawing. I had a good excuse yesterday - my wife and I were actually out at a coffeehouse, working on our art, when we had a sudden emergency and had to go home.

I had just finished my drawing and was about to snapshot it so I could post it, but instead threw the notebook into my bookbag, packed it up, and drove us home. Disaster was averted, fortunately, but the rest of the day was go-go-go, until finally, exhausted, I went to turn in and then went ... oh, shit. I didn't blog.

Fortunately, I didn't have to go back to the drawing board. But it did flip over to tomorrow while I was posting ... so, next day's post, here we come.

-the Centaur

Pictured: A jerky shot of me trying to document my wife's computer setup for reference.

Three stories, wood deck, well positioned near major streams and paths. Serious inquiries only.

-the Centaur