[Mad Hatter]

39 minutes ago, Tanktimus the Encourager said:

Keeping it simple here. Metrics mean next to nothing to me when it's really a feeling I want.

[sylph]

2 hours ago, Mad Hatter said:

Today I also successed. I painted and spent a lot of time outside

Definitely sounds like success to me.

[Harriet]

21 hours ago, Mad Hatter said:

 

 

 

Excellent, excellent. I was teasing, by the way. I think it's a good idea. If unwanted obligations have blasted your soul's creative soil with the icy breath of despair,  wringing achievements from you while withering with frost the innate motivational fertility of the inner earth, then you just need time to thaw again. Things will unfurl and begin to grow again by themselves.

[WhiteGhost]

On 9/9/2022 at 3:21 AM, Mad Hatter said:

Today was a success! Except for the part where I discovered my towel rack was leaking and had to hurry to the hardware store way too early in the morning. Botched the tape job to seal it up but it held up surprisingly well until the maintenance guy came over. Such adult.

 

On a more fun note I started drawing again! Last Friday I went to a life drawing class which was really fun but really hard. The poses started at 4 minutes and went down to 30 seconds. Man, I was sweating. 😆 But I loved the tempo and the live feedback. Since the poses are so quick I could immediately try to incorporate the teacher's pointers in the next drawing. He was also very encouraging and spotted what I did nicely among the garbage. 😛 I'll definitely go back next month, and I'm determined to suck a little less next time. So I'm practicing.

 

In the afternoon I went climbing and I had such a blast! I keep forgetting how fun climbing is. We were only two people today, neither of us had been climbing for a few weeks and we burned out at record speed. 😆 The feeling when I really, really want to keep climbing, but my body is shutting me down hard is so frustrating! But I climbed well and I'm quite pleased that I'm maintaining a 6b-ish-depending-on-climb level despite my poor showing.

 

In other news - I finally fixed my squeaky skateboard trucks! And now I feel like such an idiot. As expected, it turned out to be a super easy 10 minute job, and it took me FOUR months. 😭 I basically lost the entire season because of procrastination. FOUR MONTHS! 

So you fixed your towel rack, went to a drawing class, went climbing, AND fixed your skateboard...

 

Maybe you should give up more often  

[Mad Hatter]

On 9/10/2022 at 10:20 PM, sarakingdom said:

For me, a lot of that is prioritising it. Like, with so many necessary things to grind through, prioritising something optional or voluntary or fun, even when it's easy, just doesn't happen as often. Sure, it's five minutes, but look at all this other stuff waiting in the queue.

 

This is an interesting challenge, because I think I have trained myself not to do the things I want to do,  so that Important Things Get Done, but with the side effect that neither thing gets done if I'm not really forcing myself to do things.

Except, I have embarrassingly few things in my queue. 😛  With an average of ~1 item on my daily todo list there isn't even enough things to prioritize. 😄

 

Having said that, work is one Huge Important Thing (by necessity, not choice) and for me it saps energy like crazy. Now that I only work two days a week it's even more noticeable. I tend to have one day where I'm actually working and even though my workload is not even that high I am done afterwards. The other day of the week I'm booooooored and it saps my brain juice in a different but equally bad way. It makes me think that a lot of the solution simply boils down to having enough energy and mental space to do things in the first place! The Important vs Fun equation is simply not fair when work already occupies the biggest energy slot by far.

[Mad Hatter]

On 9/11/2022 at 7:14 PM, Harriet said:

Excellent, excellent. I was teasing, by the way. I think it's a good idea. If unwanted obligations have blasted your soul's creative soil with the icy breath of despair,  wringing achievements from you while withering with frost the innate motivational fertility of the inner earth, then you just need time to thaw again. Things will unfurl and begin to grow again by themselves.

I know. 😛 

 

Very poetically put indeed. 😀

 

6 hours ago, WhiteGhost said:

So you fixed your towel rack, went to a drawing class, went climbing, AND fixed your skateboard...

 

Maybe you should give up more often  

About time too. 😛 

[Mad Hatter]

Sunday was good. I think. I actually can't remember what I did, except I had pole and it was awesome as per usual. I'm getting excited because I'm finally seeing progress! There's fewer and fewer offensive movements, and occasionally I even see things that look... not bad. And the more dancing (vs frantically trying to remember the next move) I'm doing the more fun it gets. 😊

 

Afterwards I stayed on for handstand class and my balance was great. I also made progress on the mindfuck exercise my teacher challenged me with - doing a 360 degree turn. This is using a wall but I wonder if the wall doesn't make it more challenging. Of course the balance is much easier but it gets so confusing to understand where I am in space. Super fun though, and this time I managed almost 180 degrees before collapsing hard on my ass to everyone's entertainment. 😆

 

On Monday I had work. It sucked. I was also super tired despite sleeping for 10 hours. 😮

 

Today is trending in the same direction except I woke up at 5 am... 

 

[Mad Hatter]

 

[Elastigirl]

All the awesome progress! And yay for trying the 360 handstand, and for providing entertainment for the class!

[Waanie]

On 9/13/2022 at 12:57 PM, Mad Hatter said:

Afterwards I stayed on for handstand class and my balance was great. I also made progress on the mindfuck exercise my teacher challenged me with - doing a 360 degree turn. This is using a wall but I wonder if the wall doesn't make it more challenging. Of course the balance is much easier but it gets so confusing to understand where I am in space. Super fun though, and this time I managed almost 180 degrees before collapsing hard on my ass to everyone's entertainment. 😆

From what I remember, this is easiest when you have a somewhat competent spotter, but the wall does not make it that much harder. The trick is to be able to put all your weight on one hand, which seems to be something I'm currently not strong enough to do 😅.

[KB Girl]

*poke*

[Tobbe]

 

[Mad Hatter]

On 9/14/2022 at 4:19 PM, Waanie said:

From what I remember, this is easiest when you have a somewhat competent spotter, but the wall does not make it that much harder. The trick is to be able to put all your weight on one hand, which seems to be something I'm currently not strong enough to do 😅.

The wall confuses me, it messes with my proprioception! I also hate getting spotted for the same reason.  

 

On 9/19/2022 at 12:04 AM, KB Girl said:

*poke*

👋

 

On 9/19/2022 at 12:41 PM, Tobbe said:

Is this how the kids do it? 💀💀💀🤡🤡🤡💩💩

[Mad Hatter]

Hello! Sorry for being MIA. I ended up in a loop of not having anything interesting to report and then getting overwhelmed by all the things I missed. I'm still mostly being lazy, which I don't like because it feels like time is whooshing by stupidly quickly and soon I won't get paid for being lazy. 😛 I've been reading and playing games (one in Spanish though!) and drawing and doing pole. Which is not bad, but I want to skew the ratios a bit and do more of the latter and less of the former. 🙂

 

Do you have any favorite non-fiction books?

[WhiteGhost]

On 9/25/2022 at 2:45 PM, Mad Hatter said:

Which is not bad, but I want to skew the ratios a bit and do more of the latter and less of the former.

Good luck getting your ratios resolved.  Although getting paid to be lazy is probably something worth taking full advantage of  

[Waanie]

On 9/25/2022 at 8:45 AM, Mad Hatter said:

Sorry for being MIA. I ended up in a loop of not having anything interesting to report and then getting overwhelmed by all the things I missed.

This sounds like a pattern I know... Which is why my main quest this challenge is to just keep showing up one way or another .

 

On 9/25/2022 at 8:45 AM, Mad Hatter said:

Do you have any favorite non-fiction books?

My favourite is in Dutch, so that's not so useful for you. Is there any topic you'd like to read about? On the productivity side, I think that "atomic habits" is one of the better ones in its series. A book that's on my "to-read" list that I'm looking forward to is "invisible women"; I do like her podcast. I'm currently reading "Immune" by Philipp Dettmer, which is a great and accessible introduction to the immune system. You could also check out the books of Randall Monroe (known of xkcd) if that's your style.

[KB Girl]

On 9/25/2022 at 8:45 AM, Mad Hatter said:

Do you have any favorite non-fiction books?

Sapiens, but you've probably read that.. 

I just got 'tough' from catalyst athletics guy, havent read it yet but am intrigued. 

 

[Mad Hatter]

On 9/26/2022 at 4:15 PM, WhiteGhost said:

Good luck getting your ratios resolved.  Although getting paid to be lazy is probably something worth taking full advantage of  

Oh it's glorious! 😆

 

On 9/26/2022 at 6:42 PM, Waanie said:

This sounds like a pattern I know... Which is why my main quest this challenge is to just keep showing up one way or another .

 

My favourite is in Dutch, so that's not so useful for you. Is there any topic you'd like to read about? On the productivity side, I think that "atomic habits" is one of the better ones in its series. A book that's on my "to-read" list that I'm looking forward to is "invisible women"; I do like her podcast. I'm currently reading "Immune" by Philipp Dettmer, which is a great and accessible introduction to the immune system. You could also check out the books of Randall Monroe (known of xkcd) if that's your style.

Heh why does it feels like I'm getting my own great advice thrown back in my face. 😜

 

No particular topics, I'm definitely willing to try things I wouldn't normally pick up! 

 

Not useful but still curious - what's the Dutch book about? 🙂

Invisible Woman is on my hold list - again! I waited for 6+ months and when it arrived I was in one of my phases where I'm unable to read anything. Now I'm waiting again...

Put Immune on the list - sounds fun! 

xkdc is awesome but I've never read any of the books. I'll definitely check them out!

Atomic Habits I've read, and decided that while great for most people, for some people his messaging is borderline toxic. I'll save the rant for later, but right now I only want to read books that don't feel judgmental, don't tell me how I should live my life and definitely don't tell me that I need to be more productive.

 

22 hours ago, KB Girl said:

Sapiens, but you've probably read that.. 

I just got 'tough' from catalyst athletics guy, havent read it yet but am intrigued. 

I haven't! I've gotten the recommendation a few times but never at the right time. It was wildly popular, but I've also heard a lot of criticisms about it, that there's a lot of scientific sounding make belief that it's heavily coloured by the author's moralistic values? Maybe I should pick up the graphic novel. 😄

 

Let me know what you think of Tough! Based on the description I can both see that it could be interesting or that I'd want to punch the author in the face. 😛 

[Mad Hatter]

Alright let's do the showing up thing.

 

On Sunday I went to my first hard style class. It's a class which goes fast and hard and scared me a bit because my memory is shite and so's my cardio. 😛 But I survived and it was a lot of fun! Though I can tell it's going to get quite intense! 😅 I'm not used to doing tricks in heels and at speed. 

 

After that I had my regular class, and it was the first day of the choreo that my teacher has roped me into perform. I'm... not convinced. It's technically an "easy" choreo but it feels like it's made for targeting all the things that look bad on me or I find difficult. 😬 

 

Yesterday sucked because I had to work and I got sucked into a data problem again and I was deaded for the rest of the day. 

 

Today was very up and down. By 10am I wanted to quit. I spent 20 minutes looking for my keys. I checked all my pockets and all my bags and all my everything. And of course the keys were in fact in... my pocket. But it took me that long to realize that I was wearing a cardigan with pockets and not the sweatshirt I could've sworn I was wearing. So yeah. Great start. 

 

Then an incident at work royally pissed me off, but on the plus side it made me feel great about leaving the company! 😉 We had a meeting about said data problem, but instead of people listening properly to my findings this is what happened. One person resorted to fucking mansplaining what I should be doing, and had obviously already done. (At least he apologized when I pointed this out to him.) While my boss essentially took over the whole thing without really taking into account what I've already done. Not only that but he also dismissed my ideas of what could be happening. And not just mine but also my colleague's (who incidentally is also leaving and I'm thrilled for him!) Because my boss thinks it's pointless to speculate about what's going wrong since he thinks that the raw data (that we don't even have) will magically show him what's going wrong. Which doesn't make any sense. How will you know what to query if you don't have any ideas about what to ask? 🙄 Anyhow, I got into a shitty mood for a while, but then I realized that this is great. Since my opinions, ideas and detailed knowledge of the product are clearly not valued, and since my boss is taking over the analysis, I can guilt free skip my inconvenient Thursday meetings (in which he's contributed exactly nothing for the past year). But this is entirely his problem now. I have 10 days/one month to go, and my plan is to do nothing except for answering direct questions. 

 

On another positive note, the side of adrenaline from getting angry boosted my energy levels and I felt good enough to go climbing! I had a really fun session, and at the end we played with a boulder, eliminating holds (from 9 to 3, not bad!) and trying to climb it in a bunch of stupid different ways. Super fun! I want to do that again, it's really fun and a great alternative for the times when there's nothing but impossible climbs left.

[Tobbe]

Saw this on Facebook and thought of you

 

 

Translation

 

TODO

* Wake up late

* Fuck it all

* Go back to sleep

[Mad Hatter]

22 hours ago, Tobbe said:

Saw this on Facebook and thought of you

 

 

Translation

 

TODO

* Wake up late

* Fuck it all

* Go back to sleep

You know this would've been a perfect summary - a few months ago. Now I DO want to do things!  Except work. Because stupid.

[Mad Hatter]

Had a really hard time getting going today and most of the day went by in a haze. I went to the library to pick up some books and then I walked to a coffee shop and read for a while. And that's about it?

 

In the afternoon I had pole. Before the class I felt a bit blah because I felt fat and like none of my pole clothes fit properly, on top of Sunday's confidence drop. But after class one of the students came up to me and said that I looked super sexy in my outfit especially when I danced. 🤩 Yay, I'm not a goblin! 😆  We had a substitute teacher today and it was nice to do a very simple one-off choreo for a change, where I didn't have to focus so much on the moves but on the dancing and music. Feeling a bit better now.

 

The tech class sucked though. Ok no it didn't, but I couldn't do any of the tricks I was trying and those days are not fun. 😛 

[Elastigirl]

Glad the day turned out better than it started. 

[sylph]

Heyo! Hope you're well.

[sarakingdom]