Bryce Moore's Blog, page 191

The More You Define Yourself, the More You Need to Defend Yourself

On my walk to work this morning (I park in the farthest lot on campus, so I can have a walk each day), I was thinking about the various ways I define myself. (I got a new BYU jacket for my birthday–thanks Dad!–and was wearing it for the first time, hence the train of thought.) If I had to define myself with various labels, these are the main labels I’d come up with, not necessarily in order:

Father
Son
Husband
Mormon
Librarian
Author
BYU Fan
Yankee Fan
Gamer
Board Game Geek
Magic the Gathering Player
Reader
Independent
Conservative
White
Male
Straight
American
Film Buff

It’s a fair number of labels, but honestly, I think that’s healthy. It spreads the load around. It means that I’m not unnecessarily tied up with any one particular definition. The thing is, when you define yourself by a label or category, then any time that label or category comes under attack, you feel like you’re being attacked personally. The more closely you define yourself by that category, the more you feel you’re attacked.

“Librarians will be history within a decade.” I see that, and the part of me that identifies as a librarian wants to argue it. I’m not going to be history. My job is important. That person is attacking me!

“Yankees fans are the worst fans in sports.” Again, when I read those claims, I stop thinking about the issue objectively, and I single myself out almost voluntarily. I have a chance to take personal offense at the claim. I am a Yankee fan, and that person said Yankee fans are terrible, therefore that person said I am terrible. The claws come out, and things go downhill from there.

One of the reasons I don’t think I get too bent out of shape over many issues is that I don’t strongly define myself by any of those labels. Yes, I’m Mormon, but I look around at plenty of other Mormons and realize that it’s a pretty big group. There’s a whole range of “Mormon,” and my personal approach to it is only one of many. That doesn’t mean that when someone says something like “Mormons are a bunch of brain-washed cultists,” that I don’t take umbrage, but it does help soften the blow.

Sure, I might have some knee jerk reactions to the various accusations lobbed around online against one or another of the definitions I give myself, but I’m generally able to take a step back after that initial response passes and see things from a more objective manner.

But the more I think and write about this topic, the more I see the flip side: the dangers of people making judgements based solely on labels. Unfortunately, this is what happens in everyday politics, and it’s one of the reasons our system is bogging down the way it is. We’re too ready to clump people together under broad terms: “the poor.” “Hispanics.” “Small business owners.”

I get a kick out of listening to the stock market reports each day and finding out what “the market” and “investors” thought of various different developments. If there’s unrest in an area of the world, “the market” responds by having a bad day in tech stocks or pharmaceuticals. I’m not saying these aren’t related, but if you listen to too much of this, you start to get a skewed picture of the world. There is no market. There’s no group of people who get together and talk about what’s going on, and then make decisions as a block. There’s a bunch of individuals who make decisions independently, and those small decisions can add up to generalizations that are on the whole, accurate.

i see a parallel between “the market” and the other labels politicians and newscasters like to use. They’ll say things like “Hispanics want ______” or “Small business owners are really only interested in ________.” Of course, some of these generalizations might be backed up by statistics, but they’re still just that: generalizations. They might work well on a broad level, but break down easily when it comes to individuals. This can cause two different problems. Sometimes individuals try to dismiss the broad generalizations. (“I’m a small business owner, and I don’t think that, so it must be wrong.”) Sometimes people try to apply those generalizations to individuals. (“You’re a small business owner, so you must think _____.”)

And as I discussed at the beginning, the more closely tied an individual is to a particular definition, the bigger the problems these misapplications of generalizations may become. Bottom line? It helps if everyone involved in the process keeps things in perspective. It also helps if everyone cuts one another a bit of slack. Of course, all of this goes out the window when it comes to issues that really matter. I don’t mean for this to apply to situations where people are being racially profiled or otherwise discriminated against. (Telling people in those cases to “give the other side some slack” is incredibly boneheaded.)

But for general internet use? I think it’s something that would help everyone a fair bit. And in day to day application, it’s something that has helped me be a generally happier person, with less stress and less grudges to keep track of. It’s good to belong to a community. It’s important, and it can help you out in many ways, but the more closely you tie yourself and your core identity to any one community, the more you open yourself up to a whole bunch of heartbreak and drama. Sometimes it’s worth it. Sometimes it isn’t.

Try to avoid the situations where it isn’t.

And with that, I’ve rambled on enough for a Friday. Happy weekend all. See you on the flip side!

Family Pictures

I hinted on Facebook a month or so ago that we’d just taken family pictures in medieval garb in downtown Trencin, and that I’d share them with you when I got them. Well, I have them, and today is an insanely busy day, so it seems like a perfect candidate for a “Show Pictures Instead of Writing a Post” day. These are just a few. I’ll be sharing more on Facebook tomorrow or soon thereafter. Denisa and I are very happy with how they turned out, which is good, because we’re not exactly “Get dressed up and hang around town for a photoshoot” sort of people.

Enjoy!

 

The Wire 1:1 and 1:2

Last week I introduced the concept: I’m rewatching all the episodes of The Wire (two per week), and posting my reviews and thoughts of them here on my blog. All part of a reading program we’re running at my university. This week marks the first real entry into the series, so let’s launch right into it!

Season 1, Episode 1

I’ll be honest. This isn’t a smashing start to the series. In fact, I generally found it to be way too . . . normal. It seems like a fairly straightforward police procedural, hitting many of the same well-worn beats as other shows, except with more swearing and some occasional nudity. Not exactly an auspicious start to the show. I wouldn’t be surprised if many people had heard great things about The Wire, and then were disappointed when this is all they got in the first episode. In retrospect, knowing the end of the series from the beginning, some of these decisions do make a bit more sense, though that’s typically a risky move to make.

Then again, looking more closely at the episode, some thing stand out to me. First of all is the amount of time the episode devoted to establishing some of the characters. We’ve got McNulty and Bunk, Kima, Carver and Herc, Rawls, the Judge, Bubs–the list goes on and on. This is a sprawling series, with big ambitions right from the get go. In a typical police procedural, we’ll meet some of the characters, but they’re developed over time. The murder of the week is the focus. This episode starts with a murder and ends with a murder, but they’re more back story than anything else. Opportunities for us to learn more about the characters than to watch what they’re doing.

The opening scene with McNulty talking about Snotboogie? I loved that scene, right down to the way it ends. “Got to. This America, man.” That seems to sum up a lot of what the show ends up analyzing: people who know that something is a bad idea, yet do it anyway, and the people who let them get away with it, because America. It’s not just people, either. Institutions do the same thing throughout the show, as you’ll see. (I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying that, though I will do my best in these responses to steer clear of spoilers. You’re safe with me, if this is your first time through the show.)

Because the episode introduces so many characters so quickly, it’s easy to just assume this is a police procedural. In actuality, it’s introducing all those characters because it isn’t a police procedural. The characters each get enough time for us to see a caricature of who they are. The druggie. The drunk cop. The tough. The smart crook. It sets those caricatures in place so they can be explored, elaborated, and deconstructed through the course of the show. Our library’s reading program theme is “Your Story Matters,” and that’s definitely at play in these episodes. It’s easy to try and classify someone by labels and stereotypes, but the Wire will soon prove that such classifications are worthless.

Rating: 7/10: more understandable in hindsight, but still not a fantastic start to the show. Some glimpses of greatness, but not enough to raise the whole episode above mediocre.

Season 1, Episode 2

Now this is more like it. One of the things I like most about The Wire is how the show plays against common tropes. There are no “good guys” and “bad guys” in this show. There are only people, and people are both good and bad at the same time. So on the one hand, you have a great conversation with the drug dealers in the Pit talking about chicken McNuggets (reminiscent of the McDonald’s debate in Pulp Fiction), and on the other, you have three moronic cops go pick a fight in the middle of the night and end up blinding a boy in one eye. The bad guys do normal things, the good guys do terrible things.

The Wire presents a reality constrained by . . . reality. Budgets. Manpower. Attention span. Publicity. Political campaigns. And it uses all those elements to make observations about them through the course of the show.

The stereotypes I was talking about in the first episode continue here, for the most part. We have the good cops and the bad cops. The smart ones and the dumb ones. Sure, the dumb ones are portrayed as quite a bit dumber (with worse end results) than the dumb ones in your normal cop show or movie, but it’s easy to tell who you’re supposed to root for and who you’re supposed to dislike. Meanwhile, the drug dealers are humanized to a point none of the cops get the luxury of: Avon is shown hugging kids and giving back to the community, for example.

I think some of what makes this episode begin to click better for me is that it shows what was going on in the first episode. There’s still no plot of the week. No murder that’s tied up and resolved by the end. And so I stop judging it by television episode rules and start watching it more from a cinematic, overarching plot mindset. The Wire played a big part in evolving TV to where we are today, and it didn’t stumble into that by accident. It consciously made the choice to play big, right from the beginning.

Something that stands out at this point in the show: how The System is as much a character as any actor in the episode. All the higher up are focused on keeping things running smoothly and covering themselves whenever and however possible. None of them are crooked in an “I’m working for the drug dealers” sort of way, but they certainly aren’t working to try and uphold any lofty ideals. We look down at them for it because that’s what we’ve been conditioned to do. But are they really that bad? Any worse than the coroner who calmly munches on yogurt next to a dead body? Not really. They’ve got a job, they’re used to the System, and they’re not going to let idiots like McNulty try and get out of that system.

Then there’s the way it ends: with Daniels (who we’re clearly supposed to think of as a good guy) not just telling the three knucklehead cops to lie, but detailing how to lie so they can get out of the mess they got themselves into. A kid gets blinded in one eye because of these guys, and they’re going to get off without so much as a slap on the wrist, publicly, because who is the world going to believe? Three police, or one random kid? It’s not fair, but life isn’t fair.

And neither is The Wire. Get used to it, folks.

Rating: 9/10: Maybe more of an 8.5, but I’m feeling generous.

Humanizing Yourself to Your Kids

For the past five or six years, I’ve made a point of telling my kids stories about what happened to me on my mission. I did this as part of a conscious effort to make sure they know what a mission is like, and to encourage them to want to go on one themselves. My mission did so much for me. It was challenging (felt impossible at times), but stretched me in so many ways, and it came at a key time in my life. Nothing quite like learning compassion by being forced to go out and talk to people on the street or in their homes. You see so many different points of view. Yes, it’s possible to ignore them all and return unchanged, but that’s not what happened to me.

Anyway.

Earlier this week, I felt like something was missing with my kids. TRC had said a few things that led me to believe he thought I was great at everything, and that I never had problems doing anything. (Nice to have him look up to me, but this is a mindset that can cause an awful lot of problems down the road.) So I’d been contemplating ways to get around that. I think the natural instinct is to sit your kid down and say, “I’m not perfect. I’ve struggled with a lot of things over the years. I was once a kid just like you.” But the problem with that approach is it violates the fundamental rule of “show don’t tell.”

I’ve outlined this rule on the blog before. It’s typically used in writing, but I lobby for its universal application. Tell a group of people that you’re really smart, and their first instinct is to argue that claim. We can’t help it. We’ve been conditioned by modern society to be skeptical. “Smart, huh?” we say. “Prove it.” On the other hand, if you go out and show your smarts by doing smart things, then people come to the conclusion on their own. “He’s really smart.”

It’s a much better approach to actually convincing people of something. (An approach I wish politicians would take note of.)

Simply telling my kids that I was once just like they were is going to bring out the skeptic in them. It’ll just be a line they ignore. Showing them I was once just like they were . . .

So yesterday, after talking the idea over with Denisa, I instituted a new set of stories: stories about Mom and Dad when they were kids. I didn’t preface it with a “this is to prove to you we were once just like you are now” talk. Just said that I realized we’d been missing out on a whole bunch of stories. DC and TRC were really excited. We started off by telling some stories about how we chose which instruments to play in school, and the conversation just sort of rambled on from there. It helped that I digitized all the home videos my mom has of me growing up, and so after the stories, we could adjourn to the living room and watch some of those movies together.

All in all, it was a great success. The kids loved it, even commenting afterwards how much fun it had been, and how they want to do it again soon. I’m not looking for any overnight changes, but I can’t help but think that if we sustain this, it will give Denisa and me some street cred when the time comes to answer other questions. Harder questions like “How do you deal with mean people at school?” or “How do you talk to girls.”

Always planning ahead, am I . . .

Writing Update

It’s been a while (again) since I gave an update on what I’m up to in the world of writing, so I thought I’d correct that today (as I’m going up to Bangor for a library meeting the whole day, and am looking for something to write about in advance.)

I’m actually finding myself in a bit of a wealth of projects to work on at the moment, and I’m doing my best not to stress about them all too much. Here’s what I have on:

MEMORY THIEF revision. I got the first past revision notes from my editor right before I left for Slovakia. Didn’t touch writing at all while I was away, but I’ve been hitting it hard since I came back. This revision is actually a fair bit more extensive than I’d initially thought it would be. I’m eliminating a character for about 2/3rds of the book, overhauling the climax, elaborating on several new layers to the magic system, and more. I’ve also got a deadline of October 9th. It’s different writing with a firm deadline, mainly because there are some things on the checklist that I don’t know how to estimate how long it will take me to complete them. (When I’m writing new material, it’s straightforward. Get to 1,000 words, and then I know I’ve done enough for the day. That doesn’t work right now.) I think I’m getting close to being done, actually. I believe I know how I want the climax to play out now, and all that’s left is to check that, write it, write a new denouement, and then go over everything for consistency. And I still have three weeks to get that done.
OUR LADY revision. I’ve gotten the notes from both of my agents on this revision, and I’ll be going to that as soon as MEMORY THIEF is done. This one wasn’t too bad (from what I remember), so i don’t anticipate it taking me too long to finish. In an ideal world, I’d like to get OUR LADY out on submission before the end of the year. I think that’s doable, but I need to end up with a quality draft for that to happen. The good news? One agent started his feedback by saying “I think this is probably my favorite of your books so far.” Those are good words to hear from an agent.
BOOK BINDER’S CURSE revision. The book that was formerly known as my Peter Pan adaptation. I’ve gotten some feedback from a number of beta readers, and there’s some major work to be done on this one. I’ll head on to that when I’m done with OUR LADY. I’ll need to reread the book, read over the feedback, and come up with a plan of attack. It needs quite a bit of help.
MAGIC AT 30,000 FEET revision. I haven’t touched this one since I finished the first draft. I’ll need to read the book through and see how it turned out, then revise it to get it to a point where it’s ready for beta readers to give me some feedback.
Second MEMORY THIEF revision. Once my editor has had a chance to read my revision, I’m sure there will be more revisions in store for me. Hopefully not as extensive, but one never knows. The revision I’m working on now involved me making changes, then making changes to those changes that affected unchanged parts . . . it can get pretty messy, pretty fast. And we still haven’t addressed smaller stuff like wordsmithing, etc.
SECRET NEW PROJECT. If I’m really good and get all of those revisions done, then I get to move onto actual new writing, something I haven’t done in quite some time. I have a new book plotted and ready to go, but I’ve been waiting to get to it until I have some room to breathe. I hate starting a new book and then putting it down in the middle.

Phew! No wonder I feel like there’s a lot going on. Really, I’ll feel good about things once I can get past the deadlines. If I can get a book out on submission, then I’ll have bought me some time to get another one ready for submission next year. One a year. That’s the goal.

Wish me luck!

Into the Woods: The Hollywood Version

I finally got around to watching the new version of Into the Woods the other night. It had been a movie I’d thought about seeing in the theaters, just because I love the musical so much, but that never came together, and so I missed it. I’ve seen the filmed Broadway version many times, and it was actually the first musical I saw on Broadway back during its original run with Burnadette Peters, so it’s one I have a fair bit of history with.

How would it fare in the adaptation process?

In some ways, it fared very well. In others, not so much. Which is pretty much in line with what I’d heard going into it. That said, I have to start out with a big disclaimer: because I’m such a fan of the original, I think in many ways it was impossible for me to really love this adaptation. It was inevitable that I would be comparing it to the thing I loved, and any change or difference would be, by definition, “not the thing I love.”

That’s a hard way to start out a viewing experience.

That said, I still felt like there were a few areas where the adaptation fell short. First and foremost? Running time. I get that musicals are longer than family movies, and so they felt the need to shorten things down for a movie version, but the bulk of that shortening came at the expense of the second act, which is where the meat of the musical really lies. For the first act, most everything is present and accounted for (except the narrator, which I’ll get to in a moment). But the second act just felt rushed. There was no real way for all the characters to get what they wanted and then appreciate it. Instead, they got what they wanted, paused for a second, and the second giant showed up.

There was no need to do this.

It would have been just as simple to have them all come home from their adventures, have them be happy, and fade to a “one year later” title. Why does this matter? It matters because the movie tried to make this story into one single plot arc, instead of two separate ones that mirror each other and give us more insight into both of them. The first act of Into the Woods is all about the fairy tale endings. The second act is all about what comes next. In the movie? It’s all a jumbled mess, which is a shame.

it’s a principle that can also be seen by the lack of any real reprise of a song. Again, Sondheim has songs show up more than once for a reason. The reprise contrasts with the first, bringing new meaning to the work. Into the Woods shows up at the beginning of each act, because going into the woods is different each time. The Princes’ Agony songs tell us a good deal more about the Princes than is possible through simple plot. I could go on about this, but I don’t have time.

Now, about that narrator . . .  The movie’s use of narration was completely superfluous, as is so often the case with narration. It was there to tell us things we already knew. The whole point of a narrator in the original is to bring more of the fairy tale feeling to the scene, and then to riff and deconstruct that in the second act. None of that made the transition to the movie. Instead, we had an idiotic narrator telling us things about fairy tales everyone already knows. It was a serious irritant throughout, and I didn’t even get the self satisfaction of seeing him get killed.

Woe is me.

There are other nits I could pick. (Why have the baker’s father show up in the second act just for a moment, but still not do the No More number?) but I won’t. I actually enjoyed a good deal of the movie, despite what this review makes it sound like. The singing was well done, Streep did a solid job as the witch (though she was no Bernadette), the acting was good, the effects were superb. Overall, I walked away from the movie mainly wishing they could have taken the time to adapt the whole musical, instead of just the Cliffsnotes version of it.

Which is probably a sign that (as I said to begin with) I love the original far too much for me to properly appreciate the movie. Such is life.

7 out of 10 for me.

What did you think?

Rewatch The Wire with Me

Howdy folks, and welcome to yet another new experiment. For the 2015-2016 academic year, my library is doing a reading program. Basically, we pick a book for the campus to read each year, and then we come up with as many different ways to interact with that book as we can. This year’s book is The Other Wes Moore. Check it out if you have a chance. It tells the true story of two boys named Wes Moore who grew up in Baltimore. One went on to become a Rhodes Scholar. The other went to prison for murder.

As I was reading the book, I couldn’t help but see the similarities between it and one of my favorite television shows of all time: The Wire. The show depicts the drug trade in Baltimore and the police whose job it is to bring those drug dealers to justice. At least, that’s what it starts out as. But by the end of the series, you realize it was about much more than that. It’s a snapshot of the entire city of Baltimore: its schools, politicians, police, lawyers, businessmen, workers, history, and future. Watching the show in its entirety helped me understand a lot of the problems facing our society. I know that sounds a bit corny, but it’s true.

When we first were brainstorming ideas for our reading program, one I wanted to do was a film series. Show a number of related movies and have discussions about them afterward. After I’d read the book and thought about it, I decided I wanted to try something different. In an ideal world, we’d do a public viewing of The Wire, but we don’t have the licensing rights to do that. (My library does have the complete series in our holdings, but it’s limited to private performance.)

But these days, you can watch The Wire an Amazon for free if you’re a Prime subscriber. The DVDs are widely available. If you subscribe to HBO, you can see the series that way too. I’ve put all five seasons on reserve at my library (well, the third one’s checked out, but it’ll be back in the fold soon enough). If you’re local, you can come watch them here at the library for free anytime we’re open.

So my thought is this: each week, I’m going to watch two episodes of the show, starting with the first, ending with the last. And each Wednesday, I’m going to be back here to post my ideas and thoughts about the episodes. What I liked about them, what I didn’t, what they made me think about. Whatever. Ideally, you all can chime in with your thoughts, and we can have a discussion about the show that way.

However, I have to put in a disclaimer. This is very much an adult show. It’s not going to be like my Downton Abbey responses. This is HBO. There’s language, violence, and sex in this series. If that makes you uncomfortable, feel free to skip reading my Wednesday posts for the next 9 months or so. But I do believe this show is excellent and worth a re-watch. My suggestion would be to approach it from an academic point of view. Think of this show as the text for a class at the college level. There will be some things that make you uncomfortable, yes. But the best classes I took weren’t the ones that just taught me what I already thought or already knew.

Anyway. If you’ve been looking for an excuse to get into this show (having heard about how many people love it and how incredible it is), then look no further. I hope a number of you will come along with me on this. I’m excited for the process. If you have any questions, ask away. Otherwise, watch the first two episodes this week, and join me next week for our first discussion.

Happy watching!

Whence the Remake Hate?

Yesterday, the big movie news I came across was that Mary Poppins is getting a remake/sequel. Rob Marshall and the team behind Into the Woods is setting its eyes on portraying the continued adventures of the Banks family, 20 years after the first movie took place. (Will it be all about how Michael is now a jerk of a father, and he needs Mary to come straighten him out? I hope not. That seems a bit too . . . obvious.) But regardless of who’s making it or what it’s about, what spawned this blog post was me seeing how many people are up in arms about it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m usually right there with those people. Why remake movies that are already awesome in their own right? Why not just let people watch the originals?

I know the typical arguments: remakes are nothing more than money grabs, hastily produced, shoddily acted and directed. Worse yet, fans of the original are required (for the rest of their lives) to note they’re talking about “the original, not the remake.”

But here’s the thing. Remaking a movie does nothing to the original. (Unless you’re up to some serious George Lucas level shenanigans, which is rare.) The original is still there, able to be viewed whenever someone wants. If anything, a remake generates more interest for the original. It exposes a whole new generation to the material, and they’re then free to search out the original at their leisure.

If they don’t search it out? So what. They weren’t likely to search it out anyway.

The more I think about the topic, the less I think the complainers have a leg to stand on. It’s just like people objecting to a book being adapted, or a book being poorly adapted. Nothing is taken away from the original. A bad remake or bad adaptation can help you understand more why you appreciated and loved the original to begin with.

(This is coming from a man who watched 14 different Huck Finn adaptations, each of them worse than the one before. In other words, I have a fair bit of history thinking about things like this.)

So what am I missing? Are there some solid arguments about the damage a bad remake can do to the original, other than it offending our tender sensibilities? Saying that it shouldn’t be done because Hollywood should produce more original content is also a non-starter for me. Hollywood is going to produce a fair bit of garbage no matter what. Accept that.

If someone wants to give a new stab at old material, more power to ‘em. I hope they come up with something brilliant.

Family Movie Review: The Secret of Roan Inish

Sometimes it takes a while for me to get around to watching a movie. I’m human. What can I say? In this case, it took 21 years. I remember hearing people saying good things about The Secret of Roan Inish back when it first came out in 1994. A movie about some girl in Ireland going to some island?

No thanks.

But the memory of good reviews hung around in the back of my head, and when the movie appeared in Netflix, I added it to the queue, thinking I might try it out on the kids at some point. (This is how it begins. A movie I didn’t want to see as a teenager is now a movie I decide to make my children watch. What’s wrong with that logic?) Thankfully, it turned out to be a wonderful movie, and one that the whole family enjoyed.

What’s to like? It’s beautiful, for one thing. And Irish. I was entertained just listening to the people talk and watching where they walked. Which is good, because it’s certainly not a fast paced movie. It runs on light mystery and fantasy, with a big heaping of character motivation thrown in for good measure. (Note: the accent did make things a bit more difficult for my seven year old daughter, who wasn’t sure what was going on from time to time. Even my 11 year old son had issues, but those were fixed by turning on the subtitles.)

Really, the movie seems to play out in almost a dream like state. A ten year old girl moves in with her grandparents and begins to learn more about the history of her family: how her brother disappeared, where they came from, and how they might have some magic in their family history.

It sounds like an after-school special, but it really is fantastic, and well worth your time. Since it’s over 20 years old, I have to assume many of you have already seen it, but if you haven’t, give it a whirl–don’t wait another 20 years to let it get past you. (The music is great too. Did I mention that? Because I should have.)

9 out of 10. Don’t miss it!

 

Ditching Digital for Print

I’ve been pretty darn busy these first few weeks of the semester. There’s a slew of things related to a new school year going on at work (at the university), and then a bunch of beginning of the school year activities with the kids, plus a writing deadline approaching, a work construction project about to begin, and general daily life activities all going on at once. It’s felt like I’ve been going from one task to another, with little in the way of pauses or breaks.

My typical approach to staying organized is to use a Google Task List to keep track of everything. That’s mirrored on my iPhone and iPad, and I can always know what things still need to be done. Once I complete something, I delete it from the list. Ideally, the list gets shorter, and life is good.

The problem the last week or two has been that the list hasn’t been getting any shorter. I’ve been adding new things to it faster than I’ve been subtracting old things. And nothing quite replicates the feeling of working your tail off each day, only to find out that it looks like you have more to do, not less.

With digital, it’s even worse, because there’s no real record of all the things I actually accomplished.

That’s why, for the past few days, I’ve ditched the Google Task List and gone with the good old fashioned pen and paper, instead. At the end of the day, I might still have a ton of work to do, but at the very least I can look at all the scribbled out things on the list and know that I worked hard. That I did get some things accomplished. I thrive on getting things done. It’s what motivates me to keep going. When that feeling is lost, I can start to flounder and feel adrift.

So pen and paper it is. And I’m going to bring this blog post to a close, because that’s one more thing on my list that I can scribble off for the day. Huzzah!

What do you do to keep track of your crazy?