Recently, I had a conversation–pillow talk, really–with my girlfriend of many years, where I stated something that had been bouncing around in my head for some time about us. Well, actually, it was mostly about myself and her in contrast. I told her: “I’m a great big ball of id, and you’re my superego.” She agreed. A few weeks later, at a birthday dinner for a good friend, I made a similar observation about him and his relationship with his wife. Both of them were quite quick to agree.

For anyone not familiar with the concepts of id, ego, and superego, I will put forth the best explanation I have ever heard. It came via another good friend, the wonderful and hilarious Batya Wittenberg. It is very simple, is written in script form, and involves cheesecake.

Id: Hungry…
Ego: There’s some cheesecake in the fridge.
Id: Cheesecake…
Superego: We can’t have that cheesecake. It’s not ours.
Id: Cheesecake!
Ego: Well, we have money. We can buy some cheesecake.
Id: Cheesecake!
Superego: Cheesecake is not a healthy lunch!
Id: Cheesecake!
Ego: Cheesecake!
Superego: Fine… Cheesecake. Ya happy?

Essentially, the id is your base desires or the lizard brain [1], the superego is the conscience, and the ego sort of balances the two out. In the above example, it leans towards the id’s side of things, but that’s not a requirement.

So, to wrench this back from Freudian Psychology 101 to something more grounded, I describe myself as a “big ball of id” because it is true. When left to my own devices–and as an adult living alone, I am left to my own devices almost all the time–I will often choose the option that is best going to satisfy my id. When the alarm clock goes off in the morning, I hit the snooze button and curl back under the covers for a few more precious minutes. [2] If there’s a sink full of dirty dishes and I can’t make something for dinner, I order out. If I order out, I order a pizza instead of something moderately healthy. Instead of saving money, I sometimes make rash, impulse buys. [3]

I’m not exactly happy about this sort of thing–my own failures at self-control, not the external balance of my girlfriend as superego–and that is why I’ve been seeking to develop a superego in myself. This is a gradual process to be sure, like all forms of self-improvement. It’s also a process prone to failure. All it takes, one thinks, is one misstep, one moment of weakness, and you’ll have to start over from scratch–so why even bother? In other words: fear of imperfection leads to paralysis. The expectation of perfection is, in many ways, a built in escape clause. This quote from The Paleo Solution puts it succinctly.

When I’m faced with the understanding that my superego has failed me, I’ve taken to repeating a rather Buddhist statement: “The path is always there.” To go into Buddhism 101, The Path, aka The Noble Eightfold Path, is a series of life choices that will lead towards enlightenment. I’m no Buddhist, so I use “the path”–lower case intentional–in a more general sense, the execution of any sort of long-term, high-impact choice one makes in life. The path is always there. You can step off the path, you can go miles off, get hopelessly lost, and wander barefoot in the desert for forty years, but the path will remain, and you can always find your way back.

This is a hard, hard, hard concept to grasp. Failure is seen by many to be a permanent state. I blame report cards. That F you got in first quarter English goes on your Permanent Record, or so they say. [4] You failed, and therefore you shall be forever branded as “The Failure,” right? Guaranteed, inside of a decade, or less, nobody will remember your failure except you, much as nobody will remember you getting a boner when standing in front of Ms. Grundy’s classroom in 5th Grade. But, that path is still there. It’s always there, and what happens when you step off the path will affect the journey once you return. It can keep you from going off the path again, or at least from going off the path in the same way. [5] As long as you keep getting back on the path, you’ll find it easier and easier to stay on it, and staying on the path allows you to make it through The Gap.

Ira Glass, of This American Life fame, coined the term The Gap to describe the difference between an artist’s work, and the quality the artist wants it to be. Glass explains it a lot better himself. The only way to bridge the gap is to keep doing the work, until it really is good enough. There’s an excellent book I am reading called Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell, which discusses the factors around success. One of the key factors is experience. The more time you spend doing a thing, eventually, the better you will be at the thing. Gladwell pegs the amount of time needed to become an expert at any particular thing at 10,000 hours. That is a lot of time. But, if you put the work in, and rack up those hours like so much Exp, you really can level up.

Ira Glass’s Gap, however, is often not bridged by the artist because they don’t put in the hours. They don’t put in the hours because they get frustrated at their lack of accomplishment. It doesn’t take a huge mental leap to see how that could happen. Artistry in anything is a skill, and skill acquisition works in a pretty standard way, expressed well via the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition. The leap from Novice to Advanced Beginner doesn’t take much work. From Advanced Beginner to Competent is a bit more. To move further up, though, it’s going to take a lot of time investment and effort, and if you’re expecting immediate gratification, disappointment is inevitable–and the id wants immediate gratification. Which brings us back around to the superego. Without the superego, without that better self that inspires us to get back on the path and start walking the line again, we sink back into the mode of the id and the lizard brain, and we know where that leads.

As an artist, and as a person stuggling for self-improvement, it’s important to take my mistakes, my failures in context. Those five simple words: “The path is always there,” are grounding, refocusing, and put my mind back on the task at hand–I think the technical term for this is “centering”. What is best about those words is that they’re non-judgmental. There’s no anger behind it. “Hey! Dumbass! The path is back that way!” wouldn’t quite have the same effect, after all. Why be angry? Why rage at the inevitable? With this, I can pick myself up, set myself to rights, and get on my way back down the path, strengthening my nacent superego as I go.

At work, there’s been a thought that keeps popping up in my mind like a bubble under a sheet of poorly-applied wallpaper: “I need to spend less time at work and more time on the work.” This is not to say I haven’t been spending time on the work–it’s what I’m doing right now. The problem is that various factors and obligations have forced me to work in little fits and starts whenever there is a moment or two of free time–lunch breaks, weekends, et cetera–and with whatever tools are at hand. In recent weeks, this has ranged from my computer and keyboard, to my iPhones, to pen and Post-It notes just to have something written down. Naturally, this leads to having bits of project scattered all willy-nilly between notebooks, text files, scraps of paper, and cards in Scrivener…

It’s sub-optimal to be sure, but at least I am doing the work, and the last couple weeks have been more productive than the last year. Beyond posting on SansPoint, I’ve churned out five articles for Kittysneezes, have a sixth in progress, and thrown my hat in the ring to write for Popshifter. It’s a burst of productivity that’s unusual for me. To give you a rough idea, I’ve written nearly 7,000 words in the last two weeks. Meanwhile, in three years of work on my novel, I’ve only just hit the 30,000 word mark. And it’s not enough. If I had more time not allocated to those things which pay my bills, I could devote more time to the work.

As it is, I’ve developed a slightly idiosyncratic workflow to my writing. The majority of it is based around nvALT, a super-neat little app that provides a database of plain text files. Anything I think of ends up (presumably) in nvALT, either transcribed from a notebook, or created directly. I can add and modify those documents on my iPhone via Dropbox and a whole holy host of text editing apps. I’ve taken to using Notesy, but I’ve cast eyes at a few others lately. I don’t need to sing the praises of plain text, as others have done it so much better. While I haven’t suffered the compatibility issues of a gigantic archive of documents in proprietary formats, I have lost work, and thank the gods for Dropbox, and the ability to have everything automatically saved in the cloud.

As I primarily write for the web, I use a variant of Markdown, specifically MultiMarkdown–exclusively for its support for footnotes. [1] I use Markdown/MultiMarkdown for its easy exportability to HTML, but the potential is there for me to turn it into any format needed, whether it’s a Word document, LaTeX… thing… or some other thing to make the text look pretty. I’ve even taken to writing the novel in Markdown–and my handwritten notes. My brain simply formats in it. Once you start, you’ll never go back..

The gist of making my writing method work is based around a card from Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies: “Not building a wall; making a brick”. It’s a handy way to think about writing projects, especially in conjunction with Scrivener and nvALT. If I’m working on the novel, for example, I can bang out anything from a full scene to a short snippet or phrase that could spawn something larger. In nvALT, I have novel-related files as small as 21 words, and as long as 700. [2] These will go into Scrivener and worked into the larger structure, or even become chapters of their own, depending on length.

Even for shorter works, like blog posts and articles, the “making a brick” approach works well. I am free to jump around and work on sections as the inspiration comes to me. I don’t necessarily write linearly, and being able to dash off a clever sentence, short paragraph, or even just jot down an idea for a future, well, anything, is helpful beyond belief. For those shorter works, I generally don’t use Scrivener, but compose text in a combination of nvALT, TextMate, and/or Notesy, depending on location, level of concentration, etc. When I’m just working on little pieces of things at my machine, nvALT is where I do the writing, while TextMate is used for when I’m working on something more deeply.

The last piece of my workflow is something I only recently started doing. I am not sure where I actually got the idea from, but I think it was Episode 23 of Hypercritical. [3] When I am done the draft of a piece, I will preview the final Markdown text, and run it though OS X’s built in text-to-speech processor. Hearing my writing read aloud allows me to catch a lot of simple errors that will blow past my eyes, as well as get an idea of how the text flows. In the short time I’ve used it, it’s saved me from posting something with a grievous error multiple times.

This is all just what works for me. I would love to be able to work in a more focused manner, keeping everything centralized and not live in four or five different modes of writing–but as long as the writing gets done, it doesn’t make a lick of difference in the end. Looking back at the work done in such a short frame of time makes me happy to know it has been done. I look forward to doing more and making more. Starting is great, but every day you have to start again.

I have no depth perception.[1] Well, next to none. I know if something is far away, if it’s near, or somewhere in between, but don’t ask for anything more exact than that. When turning corners, there’s a 50% chance I will bump the wall if it’s a tight turn. I have walked into parking meters, though that is more likely to be from my own obliviousness then ocular issues. The reason I have no depth perception is because my left eye may as well be vestigial. If I close it, I lose some peripheral vision, but the position of objects does not change. I remember being stymied by an experiment on Mr. Wizard where a girl was asked to close one eye, and then the other, and say where an object was. My eyes didn’t work like that!

Doctors call(ed) it a lazy eye. [2] From first through third grade I had to wear an eyepatch over my right eye in the hopes of correcting it. It didn’t work. I ended up being “the kid with the eye patch”. First they had me wear adhesive eye patches, the kind that looked like giant Band-Aids. I wore those through most of first and second grade. Eventually, they gave me a proper eyepatch, black on the outside, green felt on the inside. In my patch, and Catholic school uniform of a canary yellow shirt, navy blue tie and pants, and dress shoes, I looked like the world’s lamest pirate. To top all of this off, I also suffer from pretty atrocious nearsightedness in my right eye, the eye I primarily see out of. My near-useless left eye is farsighted. Mix all of this up with some serious astigmatism, and you have my eyesight in all of its messed up glory.

With my lack of depth perception, making eye contact is extraordinarily difficult. If you were to see what I see, you would see 90% of my field of vision from my right eye. If I’m looking directly at you, odds are it looks as if I’m looking slightly to the left of your head. I really think this unnerves people. It takes a conscious effort to adjust the position of my head so that I’m centered up with yours, and it will slip. I could extrapolate from this a number of things related to my difficulty in face-to-face social interactions and so forth, but it’s probably not so simple.

Having vision this simply messed up denies you things. Sports were never a skill of mine, and especially anything that involved catching, throwing, or hitting things. I was a chronic whiffer in stickball, missed every shot in basketball, and failed to catch any passes in football. The only sport I excelled in my youth was dodgeball–largely because I did my damnedest to get far out of the way when the ball came anywhere in my vicinity. I also had a slight affinity for street hockey [3] as a defenseman–largely because I was large and could throw my weight into people. However, it was clear from early on that playing sports–at least the team sports, or the kind that involved small objects in motion–was not going to be a large part of my future. Other doors have been closed. I will never be a fighter pilot, or an astronaut, or indeed follow any sort of career path that will require (near) perfect vision.

That said, these things don’t bother me. Limitations are something everyone has to work with and work around to some degree. No one is capable of everything. If pressed to draw a lesson from this musing about vision and limitations, I think it would be just that. Don’t worry about the things that you can’t do because of an external limitation, and don’t even worry about the limitation if it’s out of your control. Worry about those things you can control and can change. The tricky bit is knowing which is which. [4] The trickier bit is actually making the changes you can.

A little over a year ago, I lost my job. Actually, it was taken from me, not that I wasn’t more than willing to be rid of it. It wasn’t a job I liked, or was even any good at.[1] They let me go just before lunch, so I was given a nice send off from my coworkers at a nearby bar.[2] A few months later, when I saw a few of my former coworkers again, the conversation turned to the job, and I expressed my dislike of the place and how glad I was to be rid of it–while still searching for a new gig. One coworker mentioned that I seemed pretty heartbroken at the time. I remember that day. I was nervous, shaky, confused–and by the end of lunch, a bit drunk. I attribute my reaction less to heartbreak and more at the shock of freedom. That day, I was an animal, born and raised in a zoo, now being released and seeing the plains of the Serengeti for the first time. It was pure, animalistic fear of my newfound freedom.

What some would imagine were the biggest fears could be easily addressed. I could get Unemployment, and I had a part time job I could use for extra money. Since the handwriting had been on the wall for months, I had already been working on my résumé and searching for opportunities. I was ready, or so I thought. In fact, I was ready for more than just finding another 9-to–5. I would use my downtime productively: finish my novel, pick up some freelance web design work, and lay the foundation for my eventual severing of ties with the idea of working for “the man”.

Fast forward about eleven months, and I hadn’t accomplished a thing. All I had were two job interviews, no prospects, and a ticking timer to the day my Unemployment benefits stopped.

Not long after that point, I was working full-time again, now in the lucrative world of civil service clerical work. It’s not a dream by any stretch of the imagination, but I find it far more tolerable than my previous job. Yet, I feel as though I’ve driven into a cul-de-sac. Consider again, the zoo animal metaphor released upon the mighty Serengeti. The fear can be most adequately explained with two words: option overload. In short, having the option of everything quickly lead to paralysis.[3] Taking the job I have now, at least has restored the bottom tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and dispelled that specific existential fear endemic to the long-term unemployed, but at what cost?

The preceding is a rather long-winded prelude to something more personal. As I counted down the days to rejoining the working world, an Internet Hero of mine, Merlin Mann started a new podcast, Back to Work, which does more-or-less what it says on the tin. The common theme in the first few episodes was that of getting started, getting finished, and actually making things. I listened, weekly, with Merlin and Dan providing a vitamin-infused dose of inspiration right in the middle of the work week. As I listened, I noticed there was been an itch they hadn’t scratched yet. The first few episodes of Back to Work had started from the assumption that the listener had committed to something, be it a personal project or a professional obligation. Where I felt a bit lost was less about getting started and more about knowing what to start on, especially on any sort of meta-level. Again, like the zoo animal, I was confused, and overwhelmed, and needed a prod to step out of my cage. So, I e-mailed Dan and Merlin asking for their advice, and providing the backstory.

It seemed to have struck a chord. The Monday before they record, Merlin sent me an e-mail indicating that he would be more than happy to turn the darn thing into an episode. I was floored. Now, I was no longer shouting into the void. The episode, “Vocational Wheel”, was surprising–inspirational, but useful too, and I’m not just saying that because it’s about me, at least in part. There’s a lot to take away from it, not the least being the stories Merlin and Dan share of their 20s, and a similar lack of direction. The discussion of Saturn’s return also hit home. It summarizes a feeling that I’ve had, mostly in the last year, but even before I lost my job, not only of desiring change but also finding motivation to change.

I neglected to mention this in my e-mail to Merlin and Dan, but a couple of years ago, I set up a good college friend of mine with a good friend from high school, who is now his wife. Last March, they discovered they were expecting a child. This got my college friend, who was notoriously slow to rouse, extraordinarily motivated to accomplish things. I was envious–not of him now having a wife and family–but of how having a wife and family lit a fire under his ass. The major motivating factor for me at the time was making sure I had something full-time before my Unemployment ran out. I made the buzzer shot, but it wasn’t anything special. I was motivated enough to get the necessary stuff done, but not motivated to get the cool stuff, the creative stuff done. Fear, it seems, is only enough of a motivator to end the fear.

What I took away most from “Vocational Wheel” was, beyond the sympathetic stories, the practical advice–and in the intervening weeks and months I have tried to take it to heart. It’s hard to get into a habit, but Merlin made a good point: “Everyone has three minutes a day to do something.”[4] I grabbed a leftover Moleskine notebook from my college days when I assumed that spending big money on a notebook would convince me to use it. (I didn’t.[5]) This essay is proof of the failure of that assumption–I started it in my notebook not long after the episode aired, and picked it up with this exact sentence almost four months later. There has been writing on other topics in the interim–bursts of work on my novel, some articles for Kittysneezes, and stabs at what I intend to make a long-term project of music journalism. Everything is a start.

There are still those questions that spawned my yelling into the void, and no podcast can truly answer them as they are more philosophical and rhetorical. As I try to figure out what to do with my life, they pop into my head–questions like “What motivates me to get up in the morning?” and “What would I do even if nobody paid me?” There’s a lot here that balances on the meaning of “work”, which has two potential meanings in this context. The first is work in the sense of “going to work”, something you have to do for the purpose of paying the bills. The value of that kind of work is that it pays the bills (one hopes). You sacrifice your x hours for y value of currency, and that is how you feed, clothe, and shelter yourself and your family. Certainly there is nothing wrong with that, and it is all the better if you quarantine work to that x hours. Certainly, I prefer to take that approach with what I do now.

The other way to view the question is in the focus of work as what one chooses to do of their own free will, whether it makes them money or not. Certainly, this definition places more value on “work” than currency can for the first. This is the world that professional artists and other creative types inhabit, wherein what they do is what they want to do. A professional artist does the work they choose to do, for them, and hopefully they make enough bread to keep it up. Even if they don’t, they probably still do the work, augmenting their artistic work with a straight job as in definition one.

What interests me is where these definitions intersect; e.g.: what can I do for a living, either for myself or someone else, that I would gladly do for free, or at least find fulfilling on more than a financial level? I know that I am the sort of person who is motivated by three things. The first is knowing that a job is done, the second is being mentally engaged in an activity that challenges me–something that is not repetitive or rote, and the third is having a sense of control over what I do and when. Of these, the third is where I am most flexible, especially since my unemployment experience showed that I am a terrible manager of myself–or perhaps the lesson to take from that is how to be my own boss, do the work, and take responsibility for myself. In either case, finding that nebulous intersection of work as means to and end and work as an end to itself is going to be the greatest challenge.[6] At least I am not going at it alone, and I am not the first to undertake it.

For my 27th birthday, I received, to my pleasant surprise, an Amazon Kindle. To my unpleasant surprise, said Kindle was a lemon with a bad battery, but it’s replacement ((Which was acquired painlessly, and shipped overnight, all for free, a testament to Amazon’s customer service.)) worked perfectly, and in less than a week, it has utterly changed my reading habits for the better. I’ve read more in that time frame than I had in the preceding two months—and not all of it digitally! I have to wonder why this little device had such a quick impact on my reading habits. I hope it’s not the novelty of it; I don’t think it’s the novelty, either. I think it’s the convenience factor, that this little slip of a gizmo, can be a book of any length and yet not have the imposition that comes with carrying—or even looking at—a gigantic brick of a book. I still recall the weight of the hardback copy of Gravity’s Rainbow I had checked out of the library in my shoulder bag back in college. Between that, Infinite Jest, and Pynchon’s Against the Day, I don’t think my shoulder will ever forgive me.

Well, maybe it is the novelty, to an extent. This little device was made for reading and to be read upon. If I have a Kindle, I am going to have to read on it—it really is not good for anything else. So, if I am reading, I may as well read some of the physical books that I have on my shelf while I’m at it–the ones that have been patiently sitting and waiting for me to crack them open for the first time, or the ones that I opened, and then closed about a third of the way in lectio interruptus. After all, books on the Kindle aren’t free—for the most part—so, rather than repurchase books I already own, I’ll read them in hard copy. Still, to fully grasp why I feel my Kindle has reignited my love of reading, I should probably think about why I have not been reading.

The excuses I could come up with are myriad: too tired, too busy, too… Actually, I take that back. There’s only a couple excuses I’ve had for not reading, and the most obvious one is that I just don’t have the attention span. My last attempt at getting some real, good reading done, came about a month before I got my Kindle, slogging through the New Anchor Book of American Short Stories, with the logic that if I didn’t have the attention span for a novel, maybe short fiction would at least suffice for the time being. I made it through the first handful of stories, “Sea Oak” by George Saunders and “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” by by Wells Tower still resonated from the first read, but my progress was slow. Eventually, the book landed back on the shelf. ((Rather, it landed back on a table by my desk where stuff tends to end up.)) By comparison, within the first 24 hours of getting my Kindle set up, I got a copy of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, and tore through it in under a week. I also accomplished the same feat with a print version of Finding Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi—a book I started, then put down part way through.

Another benefit of the Kindle was using it to go through articles I had saved to Instapaper—a backlog of about 50 or so articles going back at least a year and a half. Instapaper is a brilliant service, but reading things on the web, with a bright screen, and so many shiny, distracting things proved to be a perpetually difficult prospect. Hence, the backlog. In my reading, I was pleasantly surprised by some of the things I had saved–articles on and by David Foster Wallace, a story about the resurgence of Jules Verne, Haruki Murakami’s musings on post-9/11 fiction… One article was author Alexander Chee writing about experience with e-books and rekindling his love of reading—both in print and digitally. “I was reading again in the way I’d always known… I wanted to cheer a little but I also didn’t want to disturb it either, and so instead I kept reading, which was perhaps the only right way to celebrate this. If I had in fact remapped my brain with my e-reader, which I suspected, the map I’d found had led me back here.” Upon reading the statement, I immediately understood and sympathized.

And all of those saved web articles, the copy of Rabbit, Run, a daily copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and almost any other book all appear, distraction-free, on a 6″ light gray screen with sharp text. I remember trying my hand at this “eBook” thing a while ago on my iPhone, and quickly being discouraged. The screen is too small, the options of things to do other than read was too large. That might be the crux of the biscuit: the Kindle is designed, from the ground up, to be a device for reading things. I can’t write on it. I can’t play games. I can’t go goofing off on Reddit, get sucked down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia, update Twitter, or try and hack it to do things it is not supposed to. ((Actually, I can do all of those things, but the Kindle is so bad at doing those things that it’s not worth the effort. I did, however, do a little software modification so that when it is turned off, the screen displays the words “Don’t Panic” in large, friendly letters.)) For all intents and purposes, the Kindle comes off as a unitasking device. When I pick it up, I am picking it up to read something—and I love to pick it up. True, though, I also love to pick up a real book, to actually flip pages rather than press buttons. There’s a visceral pleasure to an actual print book that the Kindle does not provide, and never can. Fortunately, I don’t have to choose one over the other. I am, however, more likely to cast a wary eye at any print book over a couple hundred pages, unless I can’t get it in the weightless etherial digital version. My shoulder has a long memory.