Lost in Translation

Havi has been talking a lot recently about Monsters – the parts of yourself that are holding you in a stuck pattern. Havi encourages addressing your monsters, identifying with them, seeing what they need, and helping them see what you need. As part of my progress toward Life On My Terms, I’ve wanted to address my monsters for a while, and today I got the opportunity to do that. I woke up this morning believing that my monsters were goblins, part of a tiny but teeming army, all gnashing their teeth and bearing spears. After listening to Havi’s Habits Detective recording this afternoon, I became convinced that what I was really seeing were just the foot soldiers – each of them a part of the stuckness but under the control of a General – and that the General was the Monster with whom I needed to deal.

I was expecting to have a conversation with my Goblin General when I sat down this evening. I started sketching my Monster – part of engaging these monsters is visualizing them – and I was surprised.

Hello, Monsters, I said. “Monsters”. Because: I see three of you. All three had little goblins scurrying around below them, carrying out orders.

The first was – is – me, but colossal. A parody of overweight. Hand in a bowl of popcorn and candy, too heavy to even sit up, having to look over his massive stomach to meet my gaze. You’re how I see myself, I said. You want to protect me from disappointment.

He nodded, with effort. “Look, giving up isn’t so bad. You get to relax all the time. You get to eat tasty food. And you’re still alive, right? I mean, you’ve lived through everything so far. Why not assume that’ll hold?”

I turned my attention to the second. He was me, too, but just a head, with no body, floating next to the first. I’d thought I’d recognized his expression out of the corner of my eye, but when I really looked I realized I was mistaken. I thought he was angry, passing judgment, telling me how awful I was. Instead he was worried, eyebrows raised, brow furrowed a little, his frown one of compassion rather than upset. You’re trying to protect me too, I said, just in a different way.

“Do you really want to put your work out in front of everybody?” he asked. “You don’t really think it’s any good, so why should you think anyone else will think so? And since you don’t think you’re improving, you’re probably right. No sense in continuing to practice if you’re not going to get any better.”

I looked at the third. This was difficult, because he was a long way off. He was recognizably me even at that distance, but the me I’d like to be in my wildest dreams – successful, thinner, and happy. You’re trying to protect me by staying away from me, I called out.

He shouted back: “It’s such a long way to your goals, and you’ll have to move so slowly to get here. It’s so much easier and pleasant to stay where you are; I’m just trying to save you effort. And you remember how much you dislike driving long distances? Getting here is even harder than that.”

I sighed, and spoke so they could all hear me. O my Monster Selves, I said, thank you for trying to protect me. I know that you want me to be happy and you’re just doing your jobs. It’s hard for you to see me try and fail.

But I need something from you: I need to move forward. I need to get going again. I need to start taking risks and putting myself out there and getting things done.

Self-Image Monster, I said, I won’t live through becoming you. I am already dangerously unhealthy. I need to change in order to live. Instead of encouraging me to give up, would you please protect me by reminding me that that’s not how I want to be?

The first monster nodded again. “But,” he said, “you have to make me a promise. I want to change too. I’m your self-image and if you can’t live being me, then I can’t live being me either. I want to change.” I agreed.

I turned to the second. Concerned Monster, I need you to drive me to improve instead of discouraging me. Help me keep moving forward by helping me recognize what I have left to do. You’re good at seeing my shortcomings; help me turn them into successes instead.

The Concerned Monster was recalcitrant. “You’ll still get laughed at and judged,” he said. “You’ll still get hurt.”

Let’s give it a trial, then, I told him. Until the end of the month. If nothing horrible has happened, then we’ll keep going.

“Okay,” he said, “but only if I get to decide what counts as horrible.”

I turned to the third and pulled out a megaphone. Future Monster, I am willing to move as slowly as you need me to, if you will help me by standing still, so that I know that my journey has an end. When I reach you I promise that you can move away again so I have something new to aim for. I won’t stop just because I’ve reached you.

He said nothing, but a green sign popped up next to me. It had “Future Me: ?? Miles” written on it in white Futurist lettering. I took that as a positive sign.

The little goblin armies had scattered. They were nowhere to be seen.

I got up and opened my eyes, and here I am.

Your thoughts

Like Havi, I’m practicing asking for what I want. Here’s what I’d like to receive in the comments:

• Your experiences with your monsters.
• Support and friendly chatter.

What I don’t want:

• Criticism of my methods or results.
• Other kinds of thrown shoes.
• Shoulds, judgment, and other kinds of negative thoughts.
• Non-productive “advice”.

Thanks for reading!

An odd thought I had today in the shower:

1. Imagine yourself as you want to be. (This does not need to be concrete.)
2. Envision the kinds of problems that the person you want to be has to deal with.
3. Deal with a few of those problems.

It’s an odd exercise, and I don’t know if it works, but it seems like it ought to at least get you partway into the mindset of the person you want to be.

Written and drawn over the course of two hours today. Consciously minimal cleaning-up.

I’ve decided to adopt a new model for goal-setting, because resolutions and concrete goals just aren’t doing it for me. I still haven’t figured out – a month and a half in – how I want this year to pan out, but I do have some things I’d like to change and things I’d like to do.

I’m taking a three-prong approach to this, because it seems like the most logical way to go about it. All of the below start with “I want to…”, but they’re divided into sections according to their function.

Intentions

These are aspects of myself that I’ve decided I want to change, or actions that I want to take. They’re not endpoints; they’re processes and beginnings. (You might recall my issues with process, and focusing on these is a way to work on that.) They’re roughly analogous to Havi’s “My commitment” section in her Very Personal Ads. My current intentions are that I want to

• improve my posture;
• exercise more frequently;
• eat better (by which I mean both higher-quality food and food that’s better for me);
• do at least one thing each day that makes me actively happy;
• spend at least one hour each day learning a new skill;
• spend less time in front of the computer; and
• write more often.

Desires

On my paper list, this went under the heading “What I Want”, but I figured for the formal writeup it’d be better to have a consistent naming scheme. These are the desired results of the intentions. They’re deliberately vague, to represent that this is, in fact, a process; I’ll never be done improving. I can’t just get to 180 pounds, say, and decide that okay, I’m done that agenda item; by keeping my desires nebulous, I’m reminding myself to keep moving forward.

As a result of my intentions, I want to

• feel healthier, lighter, and more active;
• improve my skill in things I actually enjoy doing;
• be generally happier with myself and my life; and
• help my family be happier with me and with their lives.

Milestones

These are concrete, but they’re not goals; a goal implies an endpoint. Rather, they’re signals that I’m moving ahead in my intentions and achieving my desires.

In the pursuit of my intentions and desires, I want to

• release a Flash game;
• finish 10,000 words on a single writing project;
• have someone commission art from me; and
• hold a brief conversation in a modern non-English language.

Your thoughts

Like Havi, I’m practicing asking for what I want.

What I’d like to receive in the comments:

• Your intentions, desires, and milestones.
• Thoughts on how I could start on my intentions.
• General support.

What I don’t want:

• To quote Havi, practical concerns (“you realize you need X because…”).
• Negative thoughts.
• Shoulds.
• Judgment.
• Non-productive “advice”.

Thanks for reading!

i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires

why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense

plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves

and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity

but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself

- Don Marquis, The Lesson of the Moth

I sit on the horns of a dilemma.

On the one hand, I want to write a blog that provides actual value and has readers who are there for the content.

On the other hand, I want a place to talk about the issues I’m dealing with.

Lost In Translation is, sadly, kind of a middle ground, and suffering for it. On the one hand, I feel somewhat safe talking about my issues here, because frankly, I don’t have a lot of readers and so I’m relatively insulated from shoe-throwing. On the other hand, I feel like I should be providing value with my blog, and so I tone down the discussion of issues (and often don’t discuss them at all). On the gripping hand, I never post any content that’s not All About Me because I feel like anyone who came here, saw that, and then went back into the archives and saw just me and my subscription would be disappointed and frustrated.

And yet I don’t really want to start Yet Another Blog, because it’s already hard enough keeping up with two.

Back to the horns for now.

I’ve been staring at this blank pagetext-entry box all day – seriously, I opened the tab at 8:45 AM and haven’t closed it since – and I can’t start writing because I’m scared that I’ll write the wrong thing or say it in the wrong way.

The irony of this will become apparent in a moment.

I’ve been struggling with a lack of motivation for years. In the best-case scenarios, I get projects started but I can’t get them finished, except for the most trivial tasks like washing dishes. Most of the time, my ideas don’t even make it off the drawing board, and it’s not for lack of quality of the ideas – it’s that I just can’t get going on them. For a long time, I thought it was related to fear of failure – but I don’t so much fear failure as expect it. A while back, one friend suggested that it was fear of success, that I was sabotaging myself because I was scared of what would happen if I followed through. But I don’t think that’s it either – I yearn for success. I actively want to be successful.

I think what’s actually happening is that I’m afraid of the process.

I’m afraid that I’ll screw it up – not that the end result will be bad, but that my method for getting to the end result will be bad. I’ll do something wrong and the whole thing will have been for naught and everyone will laugh at me, or I’ll leave a step out, or I’ll go with an outmoded model of how things are to be done and not realize it. It’s not about trying and failing – it’s about trying wrong.

Which is why this post has been so hard to write. What if I’m doing it wrong? What if there’s a Right Way to write posts like this and I don’t know about it? What if…

Hey, nobody said fears have to be rational.

Anyway. At this point I feel like one of those stereotypical City Slickers who shows up for a safari with three suitcases full of everything they could ever possibly need, plus additional stuff strapped on just in case. What I need is to convince myself that moving forward is more important than knowing the map perfectly. That’s not to say that I’m going to strike out completely unprepared – but I need to figure out that I don’t need to be prepared for every eventuality either. Most of the time, there aren’t actually any tigers anyway.

It occurred to me today that I’d never satisfactorily answered this question to anybody, even though I’ve been asked many times. Unfortunately, that’s because it’s a two-part answer and requires a logical leap.

The first part is Ether.

To understand this you need to go back a little over a hundred years. Physicists of the 19th century were struggling to understand how light got from the sun to the Earth, and why it behaved the way it did; the belief that light was a particle explained many of its behaviors (like reflection) but not others (like refraction). To explain this, scientists proposed a medium through which light traveled, the luminiferous aether. Invisible and omnipresent, it allowed light to travel through what was otherwise assumed to be a vacuum, and faster-than-light propagation of waves caused by the light explained the odd non-particle behaviors.

Naturally, Einstein showed up in the early 20th century and screwed the whole thing up with Special Relativity, but that’s neither here nor there.

In the mid-70s, engineers at Xerox developed a computer-networking protocol that was superior both in speed and in usability to the then-prevalent but highly-proprietary Token Ring and Token Bus systems. Unlike the Token systems, each system on Xerox’s network could see each other system, regardless of whether the systems were linked serially (that is, each computer hooked to the next in sequence, like elephants in a row, trunk-to-tail), hubwise (a central core into which each computer hooked, like an octopus), or otherwise. The new networking protocol, in effect, allowed the computers to pretend that there was an invisible, pervasive medium surrounding them, through which they could propagate messages to other systems, much like the sun propagated light to the planets.

In a fit of pique, the Xerox engineers (who were now working with Digital and Intel to finalize the standard) named their protocol after the luminiferous aether, and thus Ethernet – the networking protocol by which the vast majority of local internet nodes communicate – was born.

The second part is jammer, and although it’s a lot simpler to explain, I’ll wager that fewer of the people who read this will have run across the origin of this part before.

To understand this part, we need to go back to the late Age of Sail, just before the advent of steamships. There were two major classes of shipping vessels then: the clippers, which held a smaller cargo and were less maneuverable but were much faster, and the windjammers, which were larger and slower, but carried more cargo, were more maneuverable, and – speed aside – were generally more capable ships than the clippers. (Both of these, sadly, were displaced by steamships, which – unlike clippers and windjammers, which were both sailing ships – were not reliant on the wind to get from point A to point B.)

Combining the two gives us Etherjammer: a large, flexible, maneuverable ship that plies the open Ethernet; not the fastest ship in the fleet, but adaptable and able to deal with a wide array of tasks.

(Yes, it’s a metaphor.)

I didn’t mean my last post to impugn Pam or Charlie. I think they’re great people and I went to great lengths to make sure my readers (all two of them) knew that. Like I said in the last post, I believe very strongly that Pam and Charlie are trustworthy and respectable people who won’t abuse the list of addresses they’ve collected. It’s just that their sign-up form was what brought the topic to hand. I apologize if I led anyone to believe that Pam and Charlie are less than trustworthy or that I have less than complete respect for them.

1. Today I signed up for Pam Slim and Charlie Gilkey’s free teleclass, “Thinking Big, Acting Small”. It’s a promo for their Lift-Off Retreat for small business owners, and since I know (at least, know of) and respect both Pam and Charlie, I signed up.

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2. Lots of people, including Holly, use a company called AWeber to manage their email mailing lists. It’s fast, full-featured, and reliable, and I see no reason not to use it, assuming that you can afford the monthly fee. (Right at the moment they’re running a promotion that gives you the first month for $1, cancel anytime – and I’m not getting anything for telling you that, by the way.) It automates most of the work for you. All you have to do is set up the list with their system and then send out emails, and they deal with the rest. They’ll even give you a form that you can put on your website; when people fill the form out, they get added to your mailing list. Easy, no work, as my friend Mickey is wont to say.

AWeber also does a good job of keeping track of who’s signed up for your mailing lists and when they signed up – and you can make as many lists as you want, and put the subscribers from one list into another list, such that you can have superlists and sublists and huge varieties of functionality regarding how readers get their information from you.

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3. Perhaps you can see where I’m going with this.

Since AWeber does a good job of handling subscriber lists, it makes a certain degree of sense to use their services in other areas where you want to keep track of who’s signed up for something you’re offering. In this case, Pam and Charlie decided that an AWeber list would be a good way to keep track of the people who have signed up for their free class. When you fill out the sign-up form on their website, you’re taken through to AWeber, which puts you on the compassion09 subscription list and sends you a confirmation email, and then, once you’ve confirmed, another email with details for the class.

This is all well and good.

Except that nowhere on their page about the class, or in either the confirmation email or the details email, do Pam and Charlie tell you that what you’re really doing is signing up for a mailing list. It’s all about signing up for the teleclass. To most people, that means “give me the details, let me attend, then disappear”. If Pam and Charlie start sending follow-up emails, they’re going to come as a surprise. The only reason I knew about it was because I have experience with AWeber and because I’ve been burned by signing up for teleclasses when they were just an excuse to get me on an email marketing list.

I did a quick poll on Twitter: “Show of hands: if someone gives you their email address, is it cool to sign them up for an email list w/o saying that’s what you’re doing?” The universal response was “absolutely not”. I tend to agree. It’s neither honest nor ethical to place someone on a mailing list without their knowledge or consent. That’s what spammers do.

I don’t know what Pam and Charlie are going to do with the email addresses they’ve collected. I really want it to be true that their intent really, truly is to just use them to send out information about the call and then destroy the list when they’re finished, because I trust them. But I’ve been burned before by people I thought I trusted, and since they’re using a mailing list to collect the information, and given that AWeber had a security leak a few weeks ago, it really behooves them – and anyone else using a mailing list as a back-end for teleclass/ebook/etc. sign-up – to put a disclaimer on their page: “By filling this out, you’re signing up for a mailing list. Don’t worry, it’s just how we’re keeping track of who’s signed up for the class. As soon as the class is over, the mailing list goes away.” If you think people aren’t going to sign up if they see it’s a mailing list, find another way to do the sign-ups. Honesty is the only way here, guys, and omission is just as big a lie as commission in this case.