Posts From the Lizard Brain

The Sum of It's Parts

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 22:22:43 -0400

I make a living meticulously fine-tuning small numbers and words so that they seamlessly combine into a larger whole. I create an ‘experiences’ by shifting pixels, a handful at a time, around on the screen. I spend hours and hours focused on this every week, and I continuously deliver finished projects.

Yet when it comes to projects in my non-job life, I feel woefully unprepared for the amount of time any one project will take. I sit down at my desk on the weekends, filled with the desire to create, and when I come up dumbfounded about where to start I get frustrated and overwhelmed at the sheer amount of work seeing anything through to completion would entail. These projects and ideas tend to just tumble around in my head, only getting bigger, scarier and more fantastical.

I forget that projects are the sum of their parts. All I can see in my head is the whole thing, the gigantic and dense landscape of complexity shines at me like headlights at night. I look at a blank page or an empty code buffer, and think: “Christ! How can I just this? In order for me to start, I first need to …” and is immediately followed by a lot of bullshit reasons I can’t do what I want, or I spend hours researching something that’s way outside the purview of actually writing line one.

Now, I’m almost at a stage where I’m taking a small project through to completion. I’m only finishing it because I promised it to someone. It took me longer than I thought, but it didn’t take forever. It’s not perfect, but it’s functional. It solves an immediate problem this person was having, and I can always go back and add to it or change it.

Success is just putting something together one piece at a time until it kind of resembles what’s in your head. There is no fanfare, no parade, and no one at the other end to gush about it. It just happens because you put your fingers on the keyboard and started moving them.

Comments now enabled.

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 14:17:04 -0400

FWIW.

Forgetting, Complaining, and making habits

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 10:46:16 -0400

Sometimes I complain (to myself) that I never finish anything. That I have a half million starts, and it all just sputters out. Often I forget about the things I started. Too consumed by starting new things, because maybe that will be ‘the thing’ that I can see through to completion this time.

I forget because I’m a creature of habit, and of laziness. I fall too easily into whatever groove I found for myself some years ago. It’s always easier to ponder about something than to do it. I need to create little carrots of motivation for myself to get anything done. Reminders, rewards, and physically placing objects in front of me as a kind of totem to inspire forward momentum. Most important of all, if I can do it as a routine, make it part of my day, it becomes habit, and I don’t think about it.

But sometimes motivation comes from others. People reminding you that you have at least one audience member sitting there, waiting for something to come to life. That things in your head have some value, and should come to bear.

On Plan B

Tue, 31 May 2011 19:10:21 -0400

#fuckplanb is currently making its way around Twitter (thanks @amandapalmer).

It’s a nice thought right? A lot of people find this sentiment ‘inspiring’. Fuck inspiration. When people hear this, they’re really thinking ‘Fuck my job!’, ‘Fuck my parents!’, or ‘Fuck my student loans!’. I’m not sure that’s what AFP meant.

Plan A requires you to have a plan. You can’t all be artists. Deciding to #fuckplanb has more to do with who you are than what you are doing. If you’re sitting in your office cube today, thinking ‘God, I really wish I could just #fuckplanb and write for a living’, then you’re thinking about it wrong.

I bet if I plucked five people from an office who said they desparetly wanted to be novelists, sat them at a computer, and told them to write, there’d be no end of whining and excuses from at least three of them.

#fuckplanb is not a short-circuit to your dreams.

Plan B is for when you fail, and need to spend time dusting yourself off. It’s the parachute that deploys after you’ve hit the ejector seat, Plan B is the part of your life where you recognize that you’re an adult, as have responsibilities to others.

Don’t #fuckplanb. Just make sure it doesn’t interfere too much with Plan A, which I assume consists of total world domination.

The End of the World

Fri, 20 May 2011 09:22:00 -0400

Dear Diary,

Today is May 20, 2011. Tomorrow, I’ve been told that the end of the world will come and those deemed holy enough will be miraculously whisked away to heaven, leaving the sinners and the heathens to suffer here on Earth amongst disasters of, well, biblical proportions.

I can only imagine the kind of anxiety this knowledge produces.

As someone who usually identifies as an atheist, I am guaranteed to be among the damned, and not concerned about it in the least. But I have to accept the fact that a number of people (greater than one), who truly honestly believe the Rapture will be here tomorrow.

What do you suppose they’ve spent the last week doing?. Did they go to work? Did they spend the time with their family? Play fetch with the dog one last time? Did they call their children’s school to excuse them for the impending doom of the world? Did they sit down to see the season finale Grey’s Anatomy?

What must it feel like to walk through the world knowing (certain, of course) that you are one of few, and that one day you will be teleported, Star Trek-style, up into heaven to avoid the floods, locusts and giant hole that will open up in the earth to swallow the damned.

How do you reconcile that in your head? Do you silently judge the world around you? Clearly that guy who cut you off on the expressway isn’t getting in, but does that mean you get to picture him dying in an earthquake or from plague?

And what about friends and family? You must know that your uncle Martin isn’t getting in, since he’s been living with his ‘roommate’ Bob for a few too many years. Neither is your best friend’s sister, who had her first child out of wedlock. Are you feeling a smug sense of satisfaction that you lived your life correctly, or are you terrified of losing your loved ones?

I don’t think I could handle that kind of pressure. Please, leave me here on Earth. I know this game, I can play it for a while longer.

Remember kids, hell is other people.