Personal

My Dad’s Stories and His Idea Of Urgent

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At the time of me sitting down to write this post it’s been about seven months since my dad passed away. Just dictating that sentence got me choked up for second. I finally feel comfortable enough to start writing a few little stories I’ve been wanting to tell about my dad. I jotted down a bunch of ideas in January and I hope to remember more of them. Some stand on my mind more than others. Here goes.

My dad was a physicians assistant. Since I was pretty little he had worked in an emergency room. He loved the excitement of a good trauma. From every indication he was really good at it also. Being trained in medicine and working in an emergency room you tend to gauge or triage things differently than someone who probably doesn’t save lives for a living.

When someone would ask him to do something, usually my mom and claim that it was urgent to him. His response would be something like how badly are you bleeding? If the answer was not a lot or not at all then he would reply that is not urgent.

So basically to him unless you’re bleeding it’s not urgent. To take it a step further he said on several occasions that you’re not really bleeding unless blood shooting across the room and splattering on a wall somewhere. He was basically describing an aortic bleed.

That was my dad. He was pretty black-and-white on those kind of things. Of course I knew exactly where I stood when you needed him to make an urgent priority call.

News Relapse

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I have been pretty good at avoiding the news since early July. Today I had my second big relapse. The first one was due to someone at work who will remain nameless. This time I went on Facebook for a specific reason. I significantly decreased my Facebook usage but I said i wasn’t going to shut down Facebook all together. Going on my news feed for 5 minutes today got me exposed to a whole bunch of bad news stories that I then felt i needed to read. That just made me sad.

I think i need to step up my social media avoidance to keep me from seeing the news. Of course an Onion post I saw got me wondering what it was making fun of. Then I had M tell me the real story and i was sad so even satire is potentially dangerous now a days!

A Regular

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I achieved a major milestone today. I officially became a regular at the Canary Wharf Starbucks I goto when going to the office in Canary Wharf. The lady taking orders remembered my name. You could see her struggle a bit trying to guess my order but then she knew my name. Another lady taking orders has been almost remembering for a week or two. You could tell by her facial expressions that she is trying and then is like a ha when i tell her what i want to order.

I guess we have been here long enough that I earned this nonsensical milestone. I am still proud.

My “Real” News Cleanse

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Recently I have started to look at things that I spend time on that don’t make me happy.  The first thing I gravitated towards was social media. I recently wrote about that in my detox plan for it. The next thing that ended up on my very short list was the news.

Over the years I have written several times about my love hate relationship with the news.  These two entries from August & September 2005 one from 2005.  Another one from 2012. As a young kid I used to watch it and be fascinated by it. By my late 20s I was jaded by the 24-hour news cycle. I spent the better part of the last 20 years avoiding and then binging on the news. The only exception is tech news. I’ve been pretty consistently reading that. Tech news usually doesn’t depress me and it helps me stay current in my profession.

With all that’s going on in the world today I’m not getting very much positive out of reading the news every day. I have kept doing it because I want to stay informed. When I read several different sources talking about how I statistically would be happier not reading it I thought about ignorance is bliss. It is. In this case there’s really not much I can do when I read headlines.  So what do I get out of it? I want to be informed however is being informed worth being miserable? I’ve tried being miserably informed for a while and it does not feel like working so I will try ignorant happiness.

Practically speaking when I have a coffee or eat lunch or commute I browse headlines via RSS feeds. I also read a few key websites.  Even after curating down what sources I look at each day I am still depressed by what I read on general news sites.

The habit I plan to change is to stop looking at news sites altogether. As a start I will also cut out the vast majority of the RSS feeds I read. I will still look at some technology, productivity, mindfulness, and entertainment (Sci-Fi) sites. It’s hard to go cold turkey so I will keep looking at those since I find them interesting. The technology sites also help in staying current with the industry or so I keep telling myself.

I know that simply browsing articles even if they’re not stress inducing news articles is not good for me. I figure that what I proposed to do is a good transition. With the time I free up white like to spend it reading more books. I have a queue of them lined up. All I have to do is start reading them. The hardest part I think is building that new routine that doesn’t include looking at new sites & feeds. I almost by muscle memory will type in theguardian.co.uk when I have a spare minute. It is hard to stop myself. Instead I want to start taking spare time I have and use it to update my journal in Day One. Or something else more productive than reading news.  Once I get started I hope to cut down on the other things I plan to keep reading at first.  Over time I hope to transition those interests into books of the same topic instead of 2-5 minute articles.

As with my attempt to cut out social media or drastically reduce it only time will tell how successful I am. By the time this is posted I should hopefully have a routine down. Successful or not I hope to touch back on this topic in a few months to see how I did.

Going Sort of Cold Turkey on Social Media

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For a while now I’ve been focused on personal productivity. I consider myself pretty organized already.  I use personal kanban, organizing my thoughts in a database to track information.  I have been trying to journal.  Even with all that  I have also been serious about how to continue to improve on my productivity.  My dad always said work smarter not harder.

More recently over the past few months I have been reading a lot about mindfulness and ways to improve day-to-day happiness. It’s a fascinating topic.  It is surprising that I have noticed several general themes overlapping between what I’ve read about improving personal productivity and mindfulness.

The first thing universally accepted as a big time suck is reading and participating in social media. It also shockingly turns out to be something that generally doesn’t make people happy. Yet many of us still do it. In early 2017 I cut out my social media consumption almost completely. That of course coincided with my not logging into Facebook for months. When I started posting pictures on Facebook again I inevitably logged in to see if there were comments. That coincided with my return to blogging so I would login to also check on comments to those posts as well. I am at a point now where I know I shouldn’t be logging in and I feel like I’m about ready to just stop cold. I’ll keep writing and posting on my blog but reading Facebook feeds needs to go.

I use Twitter as well. Presently I’ve been using it keep tabs on some financial technology companies I am interested in. As much is that is using social media I find that I’m giving myself an exception by continuing to read that. It helps me stay on top of technical trends and that in turn helps me stay ahead in my career.

When I think about it I really do not get much out of looking at social media. There is a conversation here there with friends near and far that I cherish. Those are few and far between compared to all of the nonsense and polarizing news articles littering the cesspool of my newsfeed. The idea of Facebook and Twitter is great.  The in practice isn’t so much.  Besides not being productive I really am not much happier by engaging in it all. It is hard to understand why I keep doing it then.

I have been thinking about this all for a while now.  I am finally ready to action for myself.  What I’m going to  is simply stop. I am going to remove Facebook from my phone. I am not going to check my newsfeed. What I will keep doing is periodically checking some specific groups that are useful and that I contribute to. If I want to do that though I will need to do it from a computer.  I will also continue to review a few specific Twitter lists I’ve curated for keeping up on technology. I plan on keeping Twitter on my phone for now.  That’s it though. No trolling to see what others are doing. No commenting or replying to comments. And definitely no glancing at news articles or news headlines others garbage posts that litter my newsfeed.

What I hope to do instead is message friends more. I want to have direct conversations virtual or otherwise. At the time of this writing I hope to start this immediately.. By the time this gets published on my blog however it should be several weeks.  Hopefully by then I will have been successful.  I sure hope so.

In addition or along with this I have to address my news consumption. That’s the next habit I will write about Stay tuned, or not.

Independence Day or In England We Call It Wednesday

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Happy Birthday America.  Pictured in this post is me prior to moving to England.  My brother in law bought me that shirt since he wanted me to remember the country I come from.  At time of writing this post I am not sure if i am going to wear this shirt today.  That is the plan however.

Now I need to find a good place for BBQ for lunch.  I am pretty sure there will not be any fireworks for us today.

Mojitos Box is Open

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Mixology Tiki Bar

I keep forgetting we have fresh mint in our garden. Finally M reminded me while we were out so i could remember to get fresh Lime and club soda so I could try making Mojitos. We love them and it is one of the drinks i have been meaning to try at home. Our first two test drinks were both pretty good.

That means that Pandora / Mojitos box is open. I am told and can independently confirm we have a good supply of mint in the garden so my only limiting factor is how many limes we have on hand.

Now I have a good use for our Tiki glasses. Next up is trying to make Pims now that i got real British lemonade.