Zemanta

I've downloaded a Firefox plug-in from Zemanta. Apparently it makes adding pictures and links to blog posts simple, intuitive and fun. So far it's not done anything - but on the other hand I'm typing this at work, and the network is currently very slow, so maybe I'll just save this to draft and give it another go later.

Update: now at home, two days later, and all I've got is a pale orange rectangle next to the Blogger composition area. I am officially underwhelmed.

Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts

Go here. Watch the video clips. Watch the TV programmes (starts 9pm 22nd April, BBC3).

Nothing else to say about this.

Self-Improvement

I have discovered a great way to put off addressing personal issues: read about how to deal with personal issues. Your local library or bookshop will have dozens, if not hundreds of titles on improving your relationships, your emotional intelligence, your productivity; if you start looking online you'll never get to the end of all the web pages and blog posts about self-improvement, from the stirring and inspiring to the wacky and plagiarised. You can find quotations, exhortations, bullet points and diagrams, podcasts, animations and fifteen-step guides, all pointing you towards the new, improved and all-around better you. And if you think it's not for you, think again: everybody can benefit! And if you're not sure you deserve all these riches: you are a beautiful, unique and worthwhile person. And if it's all a bit too scary: hey, just feel the fear and do it anyway!

There is no alternative to the idea that I must want my life to improve. Why wouldn't I? I can overcome (with help) my fear and low self-esteem, improve my energy levels and de-clutter my life, until I no longer have any reason or excuse not to make my life better and better.

Don't get me wrong. Lots of this stuff is useful, and most of the time I'd like to feel better and happier. Some of the time I'd even be prepared to work for that goal. But sitting and thinking about how great my life could be, or how great it ought to be, is as unproductive and unhelpful as thinking how miserable my life is; sitting looking at cookery books when you're hungry doesn't fill your stomach.

Because all the major problems of the world have been sorted

This just makes me sad.

Theodore Roosevelt

Another pointed Roosevelt quotation: “If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.”

I've been reading a couple of Art of Manliness articles (here and here) about Roosevelt, and I have to say I do like his style. I'd heard the story before of him being shot in the chest, reassuring himself that it wasn't going to be fatal and going on to give a 90 minute speech, but although I agree with the commenter on one of the articles that it "makes me tired just reading about him", he's a pretty darn inspirational guy.

The Procrastinator's Creed

1. I believe that if anything is worth doing, it would have been done already.
2. I shall never move quickly, except to avoid more work or find excuses.
3. I will never rush into a job without a lifetime of consideration.
4. I shall meet all of my deadlines directly in proportion to the amount of bodily injury I could expect to receive from missing them.
5. I firmly believe that tomorrow holds the possibility for new technologies, astounding discoveries, and a reprieve from my obligations.
6. I truly believe that all deadlines are unreasonable regardless of the amount of time given.
7. I shall never forget that the probability of a miracle, though infinitesmally small, is not exactly zero.
8. If at first I don't succeed, there is always next year.
9. I shall always decide not to decide, unless of course I decide to change my mind.
10. I shall always begin, start, initiate, take the first step, and/or write the first word, when I get around to it.
11. I obey the law of inverse excuses which demands that the greater the task to be done, the more insignificant the work that must be done prior to beginning the greater task.
12. I know that the work cycle is not plan/start/finish, but is wait/plan/plan.
13. I will never put off until tomorrow, what I can forget about forever.
14. I will become a member of the ancient Order of Two-Headed Turtles (the Procrastinator's Society) if they ever get it organized.

Discovered on Wisdomquotes.com

Cheap GPS

From XKCD

++ Out Of Brain Error ++

Went over to the library to borrow some CDs. Thought, "It's a lovely day, I'll leave my coat in the office." Walked over to the library. It was, indeed, lovely weather. Got to the library. Returned last week's CDs. Browsed round the shelves. Thought "It's a lovely day, so I left my coat in the office... with my library card in the pocket."

The sooner we all get microchips implanted in our heads the better.

Work, necessity of

I saw a card yesterday that said "So you hate your job? Did you know there's a support group for that? It's called 'Everyone'. We meet at the bar." It quite amused me, and reminded me that not enjoying work is not a sign of underlying pathology (if everybody has the same pathology, that's referred to as 'being human'.) Along with my recent thoughts on procrastination I've also been thinking about how I feel about work in general. Now I have to admit that I've never been convinced by statements about the nobility of work; generally I tend to see the advantages of not doing anything much. But, to get all dialectical for a moment, it is possible that I've learned my attitude to inactivity by growing up in a society where work is the norm and time off is to be prized, and by living in a small house with many children, where there is never a shortage of things that need doing. So sitting around not doing much isn't necessarily good in itself, but seems an attractive proposition when contrasted with doing lots and lots all the time. Somewhere along the line I think I slipped over into doing-nothing-much-is-a-good-thing-in-itself land, where leisure, rest and downright indolence are an alternative to work, rather than a complement to work.

This seems important in a way that's hard to pin down.

In Bridge to Terabithia there's a quote that's attributed to Teddy Roosevelt: "Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." Work worth doing? Gosh, define that. Worth doing by whose standards? If mine, then does anyone else have to agree with me? If not mine, then is that really the "best prize"? And I've not even got started on "working hard". So I would love to dismiss statements like this as the kind of propaganda that keeps the proletariat enslaved, but there is something that it stirs in me, something that suggests maybe I was created to work, that happiness is not sitting by a stream all day, not even sitting there until I feel completely ready to go and get on with the working week, but is maybe closer to sitting by a stream on one day, after enough of the work for the week has been done.

Procrastination

I'm becoming increasingly fed up with myself for not getting things done. There are lots of reasons behind this, which is one of the things I've been talking about in counselling sessions recently (which may be why I'm getting more frustrated about it), but more often than not it comes down to a simple choice not to do something. There may be all kinds of payoffs for inaction (or alternative, displacement action) and there may be complex and longstanding learned behaviours at work; it may well be the case that I choose not to do something that will be boring or unpleasant; still when the moment comes when I could do something, I make the choice not to do it.

Maybe I should use this blog (or now that I'm into microblogging, use Twitter) to record some successes - things I actually get done - and give myself some positive reinforcement.

Twitter

You may noticed from the sidebar that I've started using Twitter. I'd put off using it because I really didn't see the point; I still don't see any point to it, but it both fun and incredibly addictive.

Agree with God

In a Scriptorium essay, Fred Sanders defines confession of sins as "agreeing with God". I have to say I quite like this idea: God already knows our sins, and has made the once-for-all sacrifice on the cross for their forgiveness. Confessing (like prayer, or spiritual discipline) is not primarily about "making up" after falling out with God, or beating ourselves up about how bad we are. It's about seeing ourselves and the world in a way that's closer to the way God sees us, which is what the Kingdom is about.

Zude

Since I read and watched Robert Scoble talking about Zude, I've been trying it out. I'm sure that if I knew more about how bits of the web work, I could do more with it, but I'm happy enough with what I've been able to do to take the step of setting up a new home page that I will now use in my hotmail signature file (does anyone ever click on that?) and my website address when commenting on blogs.

UPDATE: What I really want is to be able to import my Google Reader feeds into a "work" page on Zude, so that I can have one site for work and home, but that doesn't seem to be very easy (at least not for me).

Charity makes you feel good

...according to this item from the BBC

Joy and service

I'm sure that there is a deep and profound joy to be found in serving others, but it's hard to find it in the act of unblocking toilets, particularly when you can't seem to rid your hands of the smell of other people's faeces.

Ambivalence

From Google Reader, an ambivalent use of the word "they":

In case you can't read it on the picture above, it says: "Many hospitals across England report having to turn away women in labour last year because they were full".

Happy genes

An article by Reuters reports on a study that finds that half of the traits influencing our happiness are genetically determined. It goes on to say that

"People who are sociable, active, stable, hardworking and conscientious tend to be happier"

Hey, at least I'm stable. Well, fairly stable. Sometimes.

Damn.

Priorities

Compare the number of people who have a picture of their home, family or pets on their desk or computer at work, with the number of people who have a picture of their workplace or work colleagues on the wall at home.

Test post

This is just a test, playing around with humyo.com

You can't give away what you haven't got

I've been doing a lot of thinking recently but not a lot of writing, so this is me wanting to get at least a couple of thoughts down before I lose them.
I've been thinking about who owns my life; that is, who is in charge of it. Now I know that there are a lot of Christians (myself included) who would say, with a variable ratio of truth and hopefulness, "God is." Part of the problem is that it's often quite hard to put God in control of my life, even when I want to. I know that there's always a temptation to believe that I can make a better job of running my life than the omnipotent Creator Of The Universe could, but that's just pride and foolishness; I know that I resist letting God be truly in charge of some aspects of my life, like looking at the spreadsheet for the monthly finances and tweaking our giving so that the graph for the balance doesn't go south quite so fast, but that's just fear that God won't look after us (and some selfishness - shall I order pizza or give more to church?) What I've been thinking about are the areas that I really do want to give over to God, the things that well-meaning Christian friends tell me to "lay at the foot of the Cross." (As an aside, I've never yet asked "Erm... how do I do that, exactly", which may be the reason that nobody has ever told me exactly what laying something at the foot of the cross entails.) Anyway, there's a load of stuff that I would love to hand over to God, to give up, to put under his control, etc, but I don't seem to be able to do it, and I think that part of the reason that I can't give it to God is that it's not mine to give.
This is stuff that I'm still trying to think through, so this might not make a lot of sense, but it's based on ides about the areas of our life where we (through habit or upbringing or apathy) hand over control of ourselves to other people. As an example, consider a (completely fictional!) person who has low self-esteem. He doesn't think much of himself, and depends on what other people think of him - or, more accurately, what he thinks other people think of him. He puts a lot of time and effort into trying to create the right impression, and trying to work out what impression other people have received. If he goes to a Christian friend and talks about his chronic low self-esteem, that friend might advise him to give this issue over to God. And here's where I think the problem happens: my guess is that our fictional miserable man might come back to his Christian friend a week or a month later and say he's still finding life just as hard, and doesn't feel any better about himself. And my next guess is that this is because he has handed responsibility for his feelings to other people. How can he give something to God unless he owns it first? On the surface this is pretty basic: you can't give away something that doesn't belong to you, but the more I think about this, the more it seems applicable across a range of issues. How can you give your finances over to God if the bank/the balliffs/the people who decide prices at Tesco have more control over your finances than you do? How can you hand over your relationships if you still think that everything that happens in them is the other person's fault? Remember, making it all his/her fault is giving him/her all the power and responsibility; how can you hand over something you've already given away to someone else?
Now I'm sure that there are many people who genuinely have no control over the terrible things that happen to them, and I'm certain that God really is on the side of the oppressed, but I'm sure that for many of us middle-class, relatively wealthy and healthy Christians, there are a whole load of places where God has given us abilities and responsibilities that we have handed over to others and to the World, and then wonder why it's so hard to give them back to God.
Umm... I'm not sure how this goes from here. I know there's something about God giving us things so that we can give them back to him. Maybe the best example is the parable of the talents. The guy who hides his talent in the ground does so because he is "afraid"; he feels he has no control and so just buries his talent in the ground. I've heard this explained as a parable of how we must all use what God has given us, but perhaps there's also something about taking responsibility for what God has given us; being afraid and not taking responsibility means that we have nothing much to give back, and we lose what little we have. There's also something about the whole prosperity gospel thing, about the fact that God gives us stuff purely so that we can give them back to him, not so that we can hand ourselves over to the World's standards of wealth and comfort, but I think that that's enough for this post!