When I was first learning about computers, I asked my dad what the difference between RAM and Memory/Storage was. He said that both were memory the same way both a table and a pantry are storage. He said that RAM was like a table; it was your working surface and the place you put everything you need right now. Storage was like the pantry, in that was everything that you need for the future and also where you put stuff you aren’t working on right now (like you’d clean off the table and put stuff back in the pantry).
Right now my personal mental pantry is full, the doors won’t shut all the way, and to clean off my table I’m going to probably need to just tip that shit into a dump truck.
I’ve been talking with a friend about closing circles. I have way too many open circles – too many tabs open in my mental browser, things that aren’t complete, aren’t finished, and because of that I’m feeling scattered and distracted and irritated and just like there are too many things on my table. So many things that I don’t have space to do any actual work because I just keep moving things around on the table trying to FIND space. And we all know that’s my physical life as well as my mental one – how many times have I said “I tried to do this today but had to do these fifteen other things first to get to where I could do the one thing”?!
It feels like…. ok, you know how you write down a to-do list/brain dump kind of thing, everything that needs to be done? I do that all the time and it’s really helpful especially for crossing things off and feeling accomplished. But recently, for me, even if I write stuff down I’m not letting it go, mentally. I’m still balancing it all on the cluttered table that’s my brain. I don’t know why but I feel like I can’t put anything down – I think maybe it’s because for so long now, if I try to make a plan or accomplish a thing, life gets in the way and other things happen that impede me finishing that thing. An example would be hiring someone to work on my house, and they show up and take my money, but don’t actually finish any of the work (or do what they do finish, well). So now not only am I mad at that person (and mad at myself for hiring them) but I still have to find someone to keep working on the house. Meanwhile, every day I walk through doors with no trim, or the screen door that doesn’t have a door closer on it gets ripped out of my hands by the wind, or I have older people come over who have trouble with my stairs because of not having a handrail… and I walk by a dozen other things that aren’t finished.
Do you ever walk past a cat who’s sitting on something at about your shoulder level, and they reach out a paw and snag your shirt and it throws off your stride? Walking past a bunch of stuff that’s not finished snags my brain like that. And it throws me off balance and I have to flail around a bit.
So my challenge to myself over the next few weeks is to close some circles. Complete some circuits. Not just minimize some tabs but close them. Even if what I have to do is minimize all but one tab, just to focus on that one to be able to close it.
I thought this last week my assignment to myself would be to finish the post-rat cleanup of the studio:
- finish taking everything off shelves, cleaning those shelves, and putting everything back in a more organized collection
- put all the studio doom boxes in the middle of the floor and spend a couple of movies going through everything
- mercilessly throw away anything else contaminated with rat feces that I might find
- make sure the areas under where the ceiling in the studio needs to be repaired are open and cleared for ladders for when my Repair Goddesses are ready for that stage of work
But.
Hahahaha.
The day I decided that, I also heard from the Kiln Repair man, who had his schedule open up and let me know at about 8 that night that he could come out that next morning and work on my kiln. Fuck yeah.
It actually took two days, and I will talk about it in another post later, but it meant that I didn’t get any post rat cleanup done last week but I did get a large custom order almost ready – it just needs to be fired in my now working Big Geek, and I can do that tomorrow, and get the order mailed out Wednesday. And that order was something that kept snagging my mind and distracting me. Like a tab open on your computer and it’s playing music but you can’t find what on the page to hit to make it stop.
Now the kiln is fixed, so that’s one tab closed. And my custom order is almost done, so that’s another tab closed. And I finally have people that I trust doing good work on my house, so that’s at the very least a tab that’s minimized and no longer needs to be worried about – and let me tell you, after so many years of frustratingly unfinished house stuff, that feels unreal!
So if the tabs I close this week are
- finishing that custom order and getting it in the mail
- finishing a chapter for Patreon
I will be a happy feral raccoon.