Project 366 – Week 42

288/366
sunday afternoon,
the mall as amusement park
filled with families

289/366
hey, a man calls out
he’s just seen a coyote
running in the rain

290/366
someone underlined
the word ‘glistened,’ wrote in the
margin: shine brightly

291/366
on the left, rubble
and, for a moment, I am
disoriented

292/366
all you will want is
for your satisfactions to
outweigh your regrets

293/366
fingernail of moon
illuminating dark clouds
a Halloween sky

294/366
woken by sudden
pounding rainstorm pummeling
the roof with its fists

Photo Diary

This morning at The Happiness Project Gretchen Rubin wrote:

I wish I could tell my younger self: Make a photo diary before you leave this place! You think you won’t forget, but you will! Instead of taking photos of unusual sights, take a photo of the most usual sights. In the future, you’ll be a lot more interested in seeing a photo of your dorm-room closet or your laundromat than seeing a photo of the Louvre.

How about you? Do you ever wish you had photos from ordinary days in the past?

…and it’s been driving me nuts all day because I knew I’d written almost exactly the same thing once upon a time but I couldn’t find it—Snark Zone? no. AB article? no. Blog post? no. Random musings in some long-forgotten writing file? no. And then blam, just a few minutes ago, I realized what it was. First Communication paper I wrote back in 2005. Bingo, in the section titled “The Value of a Diary”:

Once, perusing an old photo album, I noticed I was spending more time looking at the background of the photos than the foreground, looking beyond the smiling faces to the bits and pieces of life accidentally captured in recording the “big” life moments. I suddenly felt that this record of the ordinary mundanity of life was significant—not only did it have an authenticity that the posed foreground did not, but it was important precisely because it would otherwise have been forgotten. Reading a diary is like noticing the background in old photos. It is a record of the things one did not fully notice when one was in the moment because they were just there.

Ok, now I can get back to work 🙂

Art Vandelay, Architect

I’m not sure what compelled me to do this now², but… I figured out my Myers-Briggs personality type. This is the general description of the difference between each of the 4 choices, with my preference in bold:

Favorite world: Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world? This is called Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I).

Information: Do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning? This is called Sensing (S) or Intuition (N).

Decisions: When making decisions, do you prefer to first look at logic and consistency or first look at the people and special circumstances? This is called Thinking (T) or Feeling (F).

Structure: In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options? This is called Judging (J) or Perceiving (P).

Based on those either/or choices, I’d be an INTP:

Seek to develop logical explanations for everything that interests them. Theoretical and abstract, interested more in ideas than in social interaction. Quiet, contained, flexible, and adaptable. Have unusual ability to focus in depth to solve problems in their area of interest. Skeptical, sometimes critical, always analytical.

So that sounded about right, but could it be that easy? Don’t people take tests to determine these things? So I found one. And the result was: INTP.

Introvert(67%) iNtuitive(88%) Thinking(50%) Perceiving(11)%

You have distinctive preference of Introversion over Extraversion (67%)

You have strong preference of Intuition over Sensing (88%)

You have moderate preference of Thinking over Feeling (50%)

You have slight preference of Perceiving over Judging (11%)¹

That site also offered this bit of info:

Generally, INTPs build successful careers in areas requiring quite intensive intellectual efforts and calling for creative approach. INTPs are often found in research, development and analytical departments. INTPs often make a very successful career in academia thanks to their strong and versatile way of thinking and originality.

You don’t say! 😉

Of course, me being me, I couldn’t stop there. And also, couldn’t help but question the accuracy of every category (except introvert, obvs.), as well as, you know, whether this was all too much woo-woo to be believed. More after the jump!

Continue reading →

Project 366 – Week 41

281/266
it’s thanksgiving eve
tomorrow is thanksgiving
being pedantic

282/266
outside everyone
is acting like it’s summer
on thanksgiving day

283/266
why is the sky brown?
today, a veil of brownish-
gray shrouds the mountains

284/266
on the bright side (heh)
gloomy days are awesome for
productivity

285/266
construction nail gun
goes snap snap snap snap plastic
flaps in the wind snap

286/266
is it too soon to
start complaining about it
being cold & dark?

287/266
the rain stops but the
humidity remains; sweat
seeps from every pore.

Fall 2012 – Week 6

What I did this¹ week:

Scanned 6 chapters.
Printed 6 chapters, holepunched, added to binder.
Completed 4 author biographies.
Set up templates for all the books I currently have (22) + 2nd books for some of the authors (4).
Worked on pruning book list (down to 170 from 220 — aiming for ~100).
Partially filled in chapter data for 1 book.

Trying not to feel discouraged about how long it’s going to take to compile all the book data. My plan is to do about 100 books, ~10 for each of the 10 years. That seems like a good sample size, but ack, right now it feels like it’s going to take forever. It won’t, but… Oh well, if I just keep doing a little each day, I’ll get there eventually, right?

Timely post from this morning: Just one thing.

¹Technically, last week, I know. Didn’t get around to posting on the weekend.

15: The Long Fall

The Long Fall by Walter Mosley

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

View all my reviews

From the library book sale, Spring 2012:

This is the first book of a new series set in present-day New York City. It’s narrated by the main character, private investigator Leonid Trotter (LT) McGill:

“Leonid? What kind of name is that for a black man?”

“My father was a Communist. He tried to cut me from the same red cloth. He believed in living with everybody but his family. McGill is my slave name. That’s why I got to do business with fools like you.”

The Long Fall (13)

Because it’s a new series, there’s a lot of establishing of background and setting and character going on. I liked Leonid as a narrator. He’s intriguingly flawed (he has a criminal past, which he’s trying to leave behind) and has an interesting dynamic going on with the secondary characters, especially his dysfunctional family and Aura, the woman with whom he has complicated relationship. However, there were a lot of minor characters that were less developed who were hard to keep track of. So many names! As characters reappear in subsequent books and become more familiar, this should be less of an issue, but it was a problem here.

The Long Fall has a very classic, hardboiled detective feel even though it’s contemporary and Leonid doesn’t shy away from current technology. His personal assistant, Zephyra, calls herself a ‘telephonic and computer personal assistant’ — she works from home making reservations, answering calls & the like for 10-12 clients who she charges $1500/month. Erm, that’s a pretty good job if it’s real. Is it? For 180-216k a year I’ll make your reservations for you. Damn. Life. I’m doing it wrong.

Anyway, the story is that Leonid has been hired to find four men. His client, ostensibly another detective, only knows their teenage street names. He finds the first three easily—one dead, one in prison, one awaiting trial (this is on page 4; it’s not a spoiler)—but has more difficulty with the fourth. The story starts just when he thinks he’s found him and as he’s starting to have suspicions about the motivations and legitimacy of the person who hired him.

I like Mosley’s writing style. You can see the potential for the series in this book. This was a good story, but I think subsequent ones, as Leonid and the other characters develop, will be even better.

Project 366 – Week 40

274/366
still sunny but the
leaves are turning yellow orange
red brown anyway

275/366
and in the midst of
the sawing and hammering,
a house-builder sings

276/366
I guess smokers are
more resistant to the cold
than the rest of us

277/366
waking with windows
closed against chilliness for
the first time since spring

278/366
switching to capris
officially entering
fall running season

279/366
telemarketers,
here’s a pro-tip: do not call
at 3:12 am

280/366
temperature drops
complementary colors
bloom orange against blue

Fall 2012 – Week 5

What I did this week:

Updated Goodreads & Worldcat lists.
Completed 10 author bios.
Continued refining biography template and dissertation project.
Already I can see some variation in level of social media participation, join dates, etc. so that’s good. Means there will be something to compare.
I follow Scrivener on Twitter and I happened to see a tweet about displaying images in the corkboard instead of the index card—great tip! Started adding author photos for the author pages + book covers for the book pages.
Was thinking about possible differences in m/f use of social media/blogging and that might be an area to explore.

I’m loving using Scrivener for this. I feel so organized because everything is in one project rather than scattered all over the place. Also, I’ve set up my templates for data compilation as appendixes, so when I’m done compiling data, my appendixes will be done. I feel like I’m actually making progress on a daily basis (just do a little bit each day) and thinking of how much work I won’t have to do later makes me happy 🙂

Here’s what it looks like so far: