The Gad About Town

The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 13 asks, “Quickly list five things you’d like to change in your life. Now, write a post about a day in your life once all five have been crossed off your to-do list.”
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There are websites for one to use to make to-do lists, apps for shopping lists (I own a not-very-smart phone, so I am outsider to the world of apps), websites on which you can compile top 10 lists with friends. After one creates an account and logs in, not one of these websites offers “get a notepad or a scrap of paper and a pen and start writing your list” as list item number one, so I guess they are serious.

I am not one to scoff at online office tools or their use. I no longer compose in longhand and type straight into WYSIWYG tools like, well, the WordPress composer here and other tools like 750 Words. I recently used an online website to create a legal document and get the required parties to e-sign it. Not one drop of ink was spilled. (I am so green my carbon footprint is a dot.) I have had an email account of one sort or another since 1986, starting with one I never used at college.

Further, there are online courses one can take to help one learn to create better or more “do-able” lists, lists that give one a sense of accomplishment because, with them, one crosses items off throughout the day, one spends more time crossing items off the list than actually doing the things on the list. Most of these courses offer as Rule Number One: Do not fill one’s shopping lists with one’s life ambitions. “1. Be more interesting. 2. Asparagus. 3. Read more. 4. Read ‘Ulysses.’ 5. Dishwasher detergent.” Keep it simple.

Lists of life plans or life changes are daunting, and too often in my life these have become scraps of paper left behind when I moved, unmodified except for the bleaching that long exposure to sunlight exerts on paper. Many of the things I would like to change in my life are things that I complain about but no one else seems to think of as issues. Should I have written this prompted post earlier today? Probably, as now I am rushing (which contributes to some bluntness) because I am going out to dinner and it is already late in the afternoon. But it is Saturday and there is college football to catch up on, I am reminded by the devil on my shoulder, the time-wasting devil me! And I have not checked my Twitter account in hours and I transact social business on there.

Our culture teaches us that we do not have enough, have not done enough. Whatever it is. This is not the same as “more-more-more,” but “is that all there is.” I promise that I will be revisiting this topic in a later, longer, post. (Is that all there is?)

For instance, my second thought upon waking is, “I am still tired. I don’t think I slept enough.” (The first is “Where am I?”) We are told that we are supposed to sleep eight solid hours a night, which is a number I last hit when I was an infant and someone was watching over me. This provides the side of me that is inclined to think that I am doing things wrong, everything wrong, with two notions: One, that I did not get to sleep early enough and need to do better at this, as if going to sleep is a task, and two, that I am lazy if I need more sleep.

(Please note that I last held a job in 2010. I am disabled. There are not a lot of demands on my time, and I make my own schedule as a result.)

So yes, there are five things I can list that I think would provide me with an improved, a qualitatively better, life if I worked on them and achieved them. The improvement would be that I would no longer be complaining to myself over a handful of things that I complain to myself over, not that these things were accomplished. A day spent not telling myself that I am lazy and at the same time feeling tired because I did not get “enough” sleep would be a sweet day. But I have quite sweet days most days anyway.

The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 12 asks, “Machines, appliances, and gadgets sometimes feel like they have their own personalities—from quirky cars to dignified food processors. What’s the most ‘human’ machine you own?” (I wrote a piece that touched on this earlier; this question gave me a chance to add some more thoughts to it.)
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In “The Li’l Guys,” I wrote that I believe some of my writing utensils are friends and some can not be trusted:

“I have a superstitious nature, something that I am loathe to admit to. Place two identical pens before me, give me a day or two to use them, and I will declare one a favorite, and the other? I will have held it perhaps once, but I will have felt something about it frustrating or ‘wrong,’ and left it alone. From then on, forever. I buy replacement pens even though I own many pens and have not been without a pen in decades. (The Zebra F-301 or G-301 model, for completeness’ sake. Black ink, 1.0 mm point size.)

“Pencils, too. I am probably the ideal Blackwing 602 customer, but I like money more. A 12-pack of the pencil will set a customer back approximately $20. That is a lot of money for a dozen pencils, eight of which I might very well ignore for forever in my writing tool superstition. So even though I have held a Blackwing 602 only one time so far in my life and I drooled over its swift action on the page, I have not purchased a set and I tell myself that it is because these are knockoffs made by a company that bought the naming rights and not the classic pencils themselves. Those, the original ones, pop up on eBay with an asking starting bid of $100 for two pencils. Yes, unused.”

(This listing is current as of September 12, 2014.)

If you ever hear about me spending more than one hundred dollars cash money on a pair of pencils, a couple dramatic changes must have happened in reality that you will have to bring me up-to-date about when you see me do this. First, wealth must have happened to me. Because if I have spent fifty bucks per writing device, the inner cash register that is always ringing in my head must have been disconnected. I had better be able to sell everything written or doodled or listed on a piece of paper written by my hands with one of those pencils clutched in it. I had better be able to find a cash buyer willing to buy the shavings in the sharpener from those pencils. Nothing can go to waste.

Second, the only way I could purchase those pencils would be if something else was disconnected in my mind: the thought that some pens or pencils work for me and some do not work for me, out of the same pack. The thing I confessed above. It is one thing to spend a few dollars on a bag of pens or a few more on a pair of Zebras, and discover that one pen is instantly my favorite and it gets used for everything while the rest sit unused forever in my desk, but what if I discover that neither of these $50 pencils “works” with me, does not “feel right.” This would be tragic, unbearably sad.

So I ascribe things like motives and intentions and feelings to inanimate objects like pens, pencils, and notebooks. Thus, I usually think of the world of machines as one in which I must fend for myself and keep looking for friends where I can find them. It is one thing to find the right pen, the pen that will be a partner for life while you ignore the rest from the same pack, but it is another to buy the “wrong” computer or big-ticket item. I have purchased the wrong computer and regretted it:

“My writing implement superstition has reared its head in my life with computers, though, sad to say for my wallet. At this point, it would take me longer than you have available for me to recount the number of computers, laptops, and handhelds I have owned. (I loved the Treo 90 and owned a half-dozen over the years, some of which felt right and some of which did not.) Some computers I became attached to like a beloved typewriter, others were only employed to go online and make sure I was still alive when I discovered that typing on them just didn’t ‘feel right.’ Four years ago I purchased a full-sized laptop on which I tried to write a book. Either the keyboard was built too sensitively or I typed on it like an orangutan, but it no longer produces the letter C. (One of the top 13 letters in our alphabet.) When the briefly popular Netbooks came out (the era lasted approximately six months in 2006), I bought an Acer. Upon learning that the full-size machine was resistant to writing, at least any words that needed the letter C, I returned to the Acer and discovered I was making more progress on that book project. It sat, happy to be employed, on top of the full-size laptop.”

One laptop, in a spiteful fit of pique, even started to shed keys on me, to prevent me from writing on it any longer: The backspace key came off. I could not correct anything. Everything I wrote had to be the final draft. It knew I did not like anything that I was writing on it anyway, so it took matters into its own hands. Like many of the pens in my desk that are still full of ink, my many very sharp and long pencils with clean erasers, and the composition books on which I have only written the date, it knew that I was never going to compose the Great American Anything with it. I no longer have that laptop, but I still have its backspace key, somewhere, to remind me to make friends with my tools.