Practicalities of Living Life in a Hard Season, Part Two: High Sensitivity

Part One was the beginning of my issues and my problem, with just a taste of solution.

Then there's this more recent link from Modern Mrs. Darcy, "Self-care for the highly sensitive parent."  Oh yes. Yes, yes.

Or how about I just live at Multnomah Falls?
That should work, right??

Add being highly sensitive into the stressful mix I described in the last post. That's great. Just what I needed. Tell me again why I'm supposed to be myself, with my own particular strengths and weaknesses, instead of being someone else? Someone else's strengths sound so much better... heh. Um.

Almost two months after I wrote most of these words, I sit at my computer editing, and remember words I highlighted earlier today in A Million Little Ways by Emily P. Freeman.

"A few weeks ago, I cried while reading a food blog. It wasn't because I was so hungry or

WorkFlowy Sharing Hub

In October I discovered WorkFlowy, and slowly but surely fell in love.

Um, maybe not that slowly. Soon it replaced a couple other things I'd been using.

It's deceptively simple. Like your first sheet of paper. Almost too flexible, but if you've used a more structured task or note-taking app before, much of the structure can be reproduced.

As far as "notebooks" or projects and sub-projects, it has infinite nesting, which I love. That, combined with tagging, makes it pretty powerful.

But anyway, my objective isn't really to sell you on it. See, WorkFlowy's free version is limited. It goes by how many new items you can add every month, starting out at 250. But if you share WorkFlowy and someone else signs up using your link, you both get another 250 every month.

November Lessons

Back at the beginning of July I participated in a linkup with "Fifteen Things I Learned in June." It is, of course, kind of a regular thing. A monthly linkup. And I'm participating again! Finally! Here's the linkup at Chatting at the Sky, "Let's Share What We Learned in November."

From the serious to the silly, here's a taste of my November:

1) I need to limit my choices, duh! Sorry, it might be more "duh" to me than to you... it's a personality thing. I'm easily overwhelmed by decisions and things. My reminder/flash of revelation came courtesy of Modern Mrs. Darcy (also a strong INFP, yay!), in this post, "Concrete changes I've made because of MBTI and enneagram insights."

The question, now, is just how to go about limiting my choices... I can get so exhausted by decisions and I have so many options I want to keep open, even deciding how to limit the choices is difficult! There are so many things I want to do! How do I build routines that take that into account? Routines to change up the routines? I feel like I need a template for a template for a template. Yes, I know I'm ridiculous.

Related, but not quite the same:

2) Better to progress than to not act because you're trying to make the perfect choice. I guess I already knew this, but I attempted to take it to heart this month. I think. If I'm remembering right. Hey, I'm including it in November, okay? It's my post and I'll include this if I want to. So there.

Um. I mean, I've heard in a few places recently, like the book Quiet, that our society values action over careful decision too highly, and those of us who sit around contemplating really have something unique to offer, and often make better decisions.

Sure, but I've got it bad, and I can take forever just on daily minutiae. This is to help me dial back. (Er, dial back on the pondering, not the acting.)

3) I have a tendency to either run from myself (With books! Facebook! Twitter! Blogs! TV!) or attempt to control every last thing about myself (Plans! Schedules! Goals! Rules!). I swing back and forth between the two.

(Yes, even though I'm an INFP I have a bit of J in me, too -- I do like schedules and rules and things. At least... in theory. I love the idea of them. Carrying them out not so much. But oh, how I can dream!)

When my desires turn to addictions turn to digging myself into scary holes, I become so terrified of myself I try to plan and box myself into perfection. (Spoiler: doesn't work.) Two different kinds of running, really, and two different types of lying to myself.

I don't want to do that anymore. I want to be present, here, now. I want to show up and face my life. All the clichés! They're cliché for a reason. There are some things I should try to plan for (see above, about limiting my choices), but I don't want to plan all the things because I'm afraid of any desire or emotion poking out.

Hot baths always seem to reside in the middle, at least. Even though baths are so wonderful that they turn into something I "should" do, which normally brings the danger of the controlling-myself-to-death type of running, I can't seem to lie to myself in a hot bath. Though, I'll admit, I can compose overly optimistic future plans while soaking, even if I'm not actively running away from myself yet...

Great birthday. Thanks, Beth!

4) The Hyperbole and a Half book is SO. Awesome. It's like, one million awesome. Seriously. I think it might be the funniest book I've ever read. Plus there are serious bits that are also awesome. "Depression Part One" and "Depression Part Two" of course, though I already knew about those from her blog. And "This Is Why I'll Never Be an Adult." Classic. But also new ones (I think?) like "Motivation," and "Identity" Parts One and Two. I think. I can't double check right now because I've loaned the book out, but in some ways they struck me as sort of different takes on the issues surrounding "This Is Why I'll Never Be an Adult." As you might notice with #3, I can relate. Though again, different take. (And hers is better.) Similarities. They have them.

Also this song:



It came out in December, but that's okay, because I'm not counting it as something I learned. I'm just saying it relates to the other stuff. That's all. Don't judge.

5) I absolutely love Joss Whedon's version of Much Ado About Nothing. As it turns out, I had seen the play before, but it'd been quite a while. This was a magical way to be reintroduced to it. I've watched it just twice now, once with subtitles (because baby distractions); and it was even better the second time, with the subtitles (because Shakespeare). Oh, and watching it with the enthusiastic audience of a sister also helped. I DO love sharing things. Which makes the subtitles doubly helpful, as they probably helped Melanie's understanding too, thus the enthusiasm. Next I want to watch the commentary. I love the music, I pretty much love everything about it. Oh, and Amy Acker is brilliant. Many of the actors are, really, but Amy Acker, especially the "That I were a man" speech... *swoons*

Also great present. Thanks, John!

Technically, I watched this for the first time at the end of October, but I watched it a second time in November, so it counts. Because I didn't really learn how very much I loved it until the second time. Yeah.

Oh, and found this review of it later, while writing this post. Yup. In agreement.

6) I can actually publish blog posts on three days in a row! Woo! At least if I try to just make them short little posts. Of course, I might then only post up one more thing in the entire remaining month... Oops.

7) Taking a little partial break from the internet and such? Feels So. Good. Not checking one's phone, not reading blogs as much... I mean, I love blogs and such, I do. And I want to keep up with ALL THE BLOGS, which is impossible, and even when we talk about what I really mean, just keeping up with all the ones I like, it's still hard, because there's a LOT out there that I like. And I have a little girl, and etc. etc. But I am not quite exactly like some other textroverts I know -- unless I have some space away from the internet, it gets where I can't hear myself think anymore. There are too many voices in my head.

8) Baby (or maybe I should call her Toddler, now?) seems to like cats more than kittens. Huh. I guess it makes sense -- they're almost as big as she is. If I could see tigers up close, with no fear they'd hurt me, I guess I'd like that better, too.

9) Nirvana has an Android app now! "Enthusiastic cheer!"

10) Oh, how quickly a toddler can gain speed and comfort when she really starts to walk. Girl's getting fast. Also: Awwww! Kawaii desu yo!

Obligatory baby picture. Sorry it's not better. Did I mention she's fast?

11) We have a truly insane amount of onesies and rompers.

Board books for a sense of scale?

That isn't even all of them. There's a smaller stack of long-sleeved onesies behind that stack. There are more in the laundry hamper, and presumably more in the garage. Haven't finished going through all the boxes I'd packed away for when she'd be older, yet. She's older, now.

12) Stayed away from my baby for a whole entire night for the first time ever. It was... uncomfortable, still, as far as needing to pump a lot and it not being enough, but, ooh, it was worth it. Could have been better, as circumstances made it impossible for me to go to bed very early that night, but still. I woke up a few times, smiled, and went peacefully back to sleep. Bliss. Thanks for the birthday present, John!

Er, what I learned was that it's surprisingly uncomfortable still, but still awesome. I guess. I mean, I suspected as much, mostly. But hey, now I know!

13) WOW, is my girl introverted and sensitive. I mean, I knew that already, too, but it's rarely demonstrated with such high contrast as it was last Saturday.

My sister stayed the night, and Gracie hasn't seen her often, as she lives in Oregon. That morning as soon as Gracie woke up her emotions were all over the place, from joyful squeals to despairing cries. I thought at first she was on edge because of the stranger in the house, but no. In the middle of her crying we went out to the living room, she saw my sister on the couch, and... instant silence and calm neutrality while she observed the stranger. The edginess was just from being around the crowds of my extended family celebration for Thanksgiving on Friday. Recovery. She needs it.

14) Learned some things about intersectionality and what feminism looks like for people of color. I think I want to learn a lot more before I talk about it much here, though. Maybe I'll post a few links, soonish.

15) I'm better at Dutch Blitz (can also be played with regular playing cards under the name of Nertz, among many other names) than I used to be, many many Thanksgivings ago. Also, two-player is fun, provided game play is adjusted properly. If each person plays with two decks instead of one, you try to get rid of 20 cards instead of 10, with the assistance of five stacks instead of three.. yeah, it's fun. Also makes three-player seem pretty easy, as those five stacks make it feel like there's a ton of stuff to keep track of.

16) Not only is Toddler growing well now, as in the "Fifteen Things I Learned in June" post, but she even jumped up to the next growth curve, she's not on the very bottom line anymore! Woo!

Planning for Success at Work

There's a book I think you should read, What the Most Successful People Do at Work: A Short Guide to Making Over Your Career by Laura Vanderkam. It's the third in this series by her, and I recommend the other two as well: What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast: A Short Guide to Making Over Your Mornings--and Life and What the Most Successful People Do on the Weekend: A Short Guide to Making the Most of Your Days Off.

It's the third one, though, that came out recently, and that she's blogging about right now (yes, I also recommend her blog). And, most salient to me at the moment, she talked about and quoted me, as we've been emailing back and forth about a time makeover she was doing for me. You can go read about the importance of planning, here.

I'm not reviewing these books right now, that isn't the goal of this particular post; but I have to say, one of the things I love about them (and, again, her blog) is that they're very much based on real data. Here's what people actually do. Here's what actually seems to work. Here's how what people think they spend their time doing differs from what they actually do, as they discover when they keep time logs.

I'm logging my time again, third time I've done it now. I've decided I'd like to share this one publicly, but I'm not exactly live blogging it (it's not up yet, that link is to an example of a public time log, on Laura Vanderkam's site) -- I'd like to wait until I've added up totals before I write about each day, and that takes a little bit more time. [6/3/13 Edit: First day is up now, here.] (Though I recently discovered toggl, thanks to some blog comments, so I'm hoping it'll be faster now... just need to input the data, since I found the app after the fact.) But soon, I hope, I'll post the first day up here, my Wednesday of last week.

I don't want to bore you with details of my life just to hear myself talk, despite my blog's header. I'm hoping there are some things in my logs that could start some interesting conversations related to your lives, as much or as little as you'd like to share. I'm hoping that at the least sharing my logs can inspire you to track your time for a bit, too.

What do you think, want to join me in her challenges?

Book Review Tags

If you come to my blog instead of reading posts in an RSS reader, you may notice I've added an annoyingly long list of links to my sidebar, a list of "Book Reviews by Tags." I'm looking into getting it changed to its own separate page, like the "Book Reviews by Author" one, but so far I don't see a way to do that. As far as I can tell, Blogger will only allow gadgets to be added to all pages on a blog at once, not to specific ones. And without a gadget, I'd have to link to every single category and every single book by hand. That is not going to happen. Unh-uh. The mind boggles. Heh, I'm only about halfway through adding the tags to my book reviews as it is. I did "Book Reviews by Author" by hand, but there's just one author and one link per book -- so much easier!

Anyway, despite how much space it's taking up in my sidebar, I like it. I'm hoping it will be helpful, that it'll be a handy way to find some other books that might interest you. Plus I just like tagging books for its own sake, and I'd like to have some native tags instead of the LibraryThing ones. Sorry about the "br:" at the beginning of all of them. Since Blogger doesn't have sub-labels, it was the only way to keep them all together (for my own sanity as I check the boxes to get the two gadgets to display either the book review tags or the regular labels) and to distinguish them from the regular tags/labels (because I might tag a post about "Suffering," and that isn't the same as tagging a book I review about "Suffering").

My book reviews from here on out won't have that section at the top telling you how I'd tag them in LibraryThing, those tags will just be with the regular labels down at the bottom of the post. But I'm not going to go back through all my old reviews and remove the LibraryThing tag section. That'd be silly. And I'm never silly.

In related news, I see I haven't actually written and posted a new book review here in almost two years! Yikes! Sorry about that! I knew it'd been a long time, but I didn't realize it was that long! I think I'll start posting some new ones soon. Any day now. Honest.

I'd started thinking of book reviews as much harder than other kinds of posts. (Not the reading part. I almost always do that obsessively, with only the sorts of exceptions that prove the rule.) I'll try to scale back on my perfectionism in that area, take them less seriously, and see if that helps. They ain't gonna be perfect anyway! And it's not like I won't still compulsively edit. There's a little room for slack, I think. Better than not posting any in two years (cue disgusted face).

Of course, there have also been other things on my plate, things that provided plenty of their own material to post about, like this and this. I suppose there's a reason the very last review I posted was of Home. Naahhh. Couldn't be. Um.

So, what do you think? Do you want to see more book reviews? Like the tags? Dislike them? Ideas on how to move them? Don't care and you're really not even sure why you're here? Can't believe I would spend so much of my time going on and on about this? Completely unrelated suggestions? Talk to me. Bonus points for commenting here instead of on my facebook page, so I don't look so lonely. :)

Alphabetized Book Reviews

averagecats.com: 3295 

I think I shall make alphabetized lists of my book reviews. One by author, one by title, like Sondy used to do for Sonderbooks. I like that better than a search box -- depending on the search technology, it can be hard to be sure you haven't missed a book, to prove a negative. It's pretty easy with alphabetization. I can never remember whether Alexander McCall Smith is properly filed under "M" or "S," but all I have to do is check both places.

I don't post nearly as many reviews as I mean to, and at times I go quite a while without adding any new ones, but nonetheless, it's not something I'm going to stop doing entirely any time soon. It makes sense to me to have them organized by a little more than a loose chronology ("loose" because it doesn't necessarily even correspond to the order I originally read the books, or when I started writing about them).

Oh, and I hadn't noticed, apparently blogspot now has a thing about publishing pages as well as posts. I was thinking that possibly the next two posts would be beginnings of lists, and I'd create links to them in my sidebar, then update those posts as I added reviews. A little clunky, but it seemed like the way to go, using a blogging website rather than an independent website. And I like blogspot. But I guess now I won't be doing that. Still linking to each review and alphabetizing it by hand, since I don't want to go through all the trouble of finding an easier way, but that shouldn't be that bad, especially once I'm done with the old reviews. Besides, I'm not working at a bookstore or a library right now. If I can't mess with my own book organization, I just might go crazy.

Of course, if you're reading this on facebook, you'd have to click the link to the original post for any of this to be relevant. Clearly you should do that. At least, you know, if you've heard of a book, you're not sure yet if you're intrigued enough to read it, and so you think, "I wonder what Marcy thinks of that book?  I wonder if she's written a review of it?  Does she think I should read it?  I should go check!"  Yeah... I mean, I know that happens to me all the time. Ooh, or if you want to buy a book and you remember that I reviewed it and that if you buy it on amazon and use my link to get to amazon and purchase said book I get a teeny bit of money. It's never happened yet, but it could, darn it. Especially with handy alphabetized lists for easier reference. Uh-huh.