Posts Tagged ‘productivity’

18
May
22:52

The Real Problem of Being Organized

Yes I know, this is old news, getting organized did not make me happy. I thought it would, but I was wrong. Now I’m both unfit for society and at the same time creatively challenged. Creatively challenged, and I do mean that. There does seem to be a certain state of mind that “Adi is a creative person”, but really, I haven’t really created anything.

It’s also to do with not being able to sit down still. I should probably be taking ritalin, but apparently it was never prescribed to me for other reasons. Maybe to do with my Tourettes Syndrome, as my mom once said or otherwise. I do certainly believe that it should have been.

My attention span is very short even when it comes tasks I otherwise enjoy doing. Getting myself away from stimulants doesn’t seem to help much as I just get bored and start thinking all sorts of stuff.

It’s horrible. I come up with amazing hypotheses about human nature, the universe, etc. and yet they all boil down to just being plain dangerous. Dangerous thoughts.

When I sit down to write about those things however, I end up, again, losing concentration, disinterested, unmotivated or otherwise just at a general lack of things to say after some point.

Trying to sit down and force myself to write this post is in itself a challenge.

Last night I found myself wandering around town for about two hours. I was trying to make myself walking into gay bars, to no avail. If there’s nobody pushing me, it’s not going to be done, period. Even if I want it, need it, or otherwise – if there’s no person to directly tell me what to do – I just won’t be able to make myself do it.

I guess to some extent it was also for my own sake, going to gay bars (or trying for that matter) but the main idea was to try to complete my social anthropology paper, which requires me to do fieldwork.

Maybe it was a poor choice of subject, but I couldn’t think of anything else. I ended up choosing something which:

  • I know I should have done
  • Which I don’t do on a regular basis
  • or otherwise

  • which I’ve never done
  • and which I wish to do

The problem is, I walk up there, and the moment I see the door, I do a 180 and retrace my steps.

That’s when it occurred to me, that I really have a serious problem. An emotional block. A fear of crowded places. Something about them, and I wish I knew what it is, makes me feel subconsciously incompatible and neglected, and in turn I will resort to confining myself somewhere away from “real live people.”

I had a vague notion that I can’t walk into those places on my own and therefor tried to ask a friend for help. She accepted, and so we were supposed to meet with two others at Nørreport station, 20:00. Terribly early, even for me. But then again, they just wanted to check the place out. As long as I walk through the door, fine by me. I can make a few notes, write some paragraph and come up with something to fit the data like a good Pith-Helmet wearing anthropologist.

I practically ran to Nørreport, and surprisingly enough, arrived on time.

Funny thing is, the moment the little yellow LEDs around the door opening button, I received a message saying: “I’ll be late.”

Be late, I don’t mind.

Another person came at that point. He was actually on time. He told me, in these very words, “when [she] says she’ll be there at 8, she means she’ll be out of the house at 8.” And there’s your problem. While I’m rushing to get my things together, make sure I catch the bus on time and so on, she simply did not care.

That was not the time to get angry, not yet. The rest came, 20 minutes late, and we started walking towards “Dunkel.” On our way there, we saw Jailhouse and Masken. Unfortunately, Dunkel was closed.

Now, instead of being – excuse me for using this word in the same sentence with those irresponsible children – practical; they went back to Nørreport station to see “the others.” The others were of course more irresponsible teenagers with alcohol problems.

I couldn’t stand it any longer, and at Gammel Torv I simply made the decision to just go on my own and try to do some fieldwork somewhere.

And that’s how I ended up on the streets for two hours.

I eventually gave up and decided to just start walking aimlessly, ending up on Kultorvet, as that friend who originally wanted me to go out finally managed to get in contact with me. I took the plunge and laid the cards on the table – which I don’t do very often. I said that I have a problem, that if I don’t get pushed to do things I just won’t do them, and that I need help. Quite literally, I asked for help. To be perfectly honest, it doesn’t happen very often that I actually ask for help and not imply it or otherwise.

“Just come to the Austrian Bar.” She explained me how to get there, and I went.

Of course, they won’t let me get in, having only my diplomat ID and not much besides. Not much I was willing to show at any rate. I tried calling her, to no avail. 15 minutes later, she walks out voluntarily without me being reaching her phone (not because I wasn’t trying).

The next 30 minutes we spent switching between arbitrary modes, goals and targets:

  • “Where’s Person X?”
  • “Where should we go?” (my opinion was of course not taken into account)
  • My pleas to have someone push me around
  • Dealing with the bouncer over at Retro

The resolution about where to go after long sessions of argument was of course: No resolution.

This whole absolute failure in management, organization and fucking common sense made me think. I would have been doing just that had it not been for the fact that I now knew how to organize myself. I could no longer fit in the group because I simply could not stand the lack of authority and structure as well as the general mood of indecision.

I don’t actually belong with them, I figured. Will I ever go out again? I might as well, but probably not with these guys, and most certainly not with a group of more than 3 people including myself.

It’s not that much fun unless you drink. Problem is, I can drink at home and get 3 times more work done than by hanging out with these guys. I genuinely hate society.

Ridiculous how I managed to write this thing. Problem is I’m supposed to do about five other things at the moment.

I really like to have control over who I’m actually around. There are certain people I dislike, and simply don’t want around me. This definition somehow comes to include pretty much all of the people I know with the exception of suppose 3-5 people.

I need a holiday, I need the company of certain people (one in particular), I need to get away from those I don’t like.

I know I can’t lock myself up in some wrench down in Jylland with all the people I want to be around, and that’s exactly what bothers me. When it so happens that I ask for help, nothing happens. It’s all the same whether or not I take part in it. I’m not committing suicide just yet, I still have a book to write, whenever I get down to doing it, and there’s maybe one person out there whom I promised I won’t do just that, and I, unlike some people, do keep promises.

21
Mar
20:18

The Perils of Organization

Tenth grade was the worst two years (edit: yes, two years) of my life. It completely alienated me from others, and made me consider suicide. Which I never actually committed, evidently, I’m here blogging myself to death. Ta-da.

Organization is not a learned “skill.” It’s not a “skill” to begin with. It’s about spending time dealing with bureaucracy and the paper-hell in advance. In my experience, it saves practically no time whatsoever.

Unfortunately, I seem to have this self destructive tendency to work great under pressure. If Dushkin works great under pressure, Dushkin will try to push self to edge, Dushkin will create stress for Dushkin to finish work. In other words, I procrastinate on purpose.

“Know thyself” my ass. It’s obviously self-destructive, and mazochistic. One of my incompatible wishes somewhere down in my id, to only work under pressure.

Organization detached me from the rest of the world. You start reading self improvement books, working on things in pieces, and the next thing you know, there’s a distance between you and the rest of the world and you just can’t do anything about it. A thin membrane will seperate you from your peers, parents, “community” and friends. “Sorry, can’t talk now, I’m busy.”

By decompressing your work, you leave yourself practically no time to do other things which are, probably, more important. When you do have the time, you will realize that your “friends” have already gotten into the habbit of not inviting you to social gatherings (of whatever nature.)

Reversing the situation is theoretically impossible. For instance, my birthday “party.” I invited various people, out of which two people came, and one uninvited guest, another one arrived an hour and a half late and insisted on leavingbecome midnight for a total of about 1 hour of actually doing anything. The other three decided it’ll be a great idea to go smoke pot, although I made it very clear that I have no interest in it. The whole thing ended at around 11:40 pm.

I timed it, phoned all the parties that needed to be phoned, passed emails around, begged, and wrote everything down. When it came to the practical stage, nothing went as planned.

It crossed a certain line when I began planning social interaction and trying to make sense of my world using the calendar. After two very long phone calls with BlueCoffee, I finally began to snap out of this organization-overdrive.

There is, I would say, no correlation between organization and saving time. Some of us just work slower, some are less able to isolate themselves from their environment.

It basically became very clear to me what I really wanted to do with myself and how to stop this organization madness. Unfortunately, without it, my grades are starting to slip. I might be a “better person”. I do find myself facing my incompatible wishes and slowly my super-ego dissolving and making less descisions. The former view, which accepted self-help books, now rejects standards, ideas, laws and roles and substitutes it with something else.

At the same time, I can’t convince myself of all sorts of things. The result of less self discipline. I also find it much harder to read, listen to records all the way through and stick to a single task.

My advice, don’t “get organized”! Your superiors are going to go nuts, but at least you don’t sell yourself to the whole bureaucracy.

Actually, I’m quite sick of organization. All I really want is just to run around aimlessly in grassy meadows and not think about anything. Society is all about normalization. Not very pleasant.

21
Nov
12:17

Automatically set X display to client machine when SSHing

At home I have a server running Linux and a MacBook.

Every now and then, I want to run an X11 program. VNC takes up my whole screen, and therefor it’s counter productive, but there’s another way.

Mac OS X has an optional X11 server. After installing it, programs could connect to it and coexist in the Aqua environment.

The thing is that while my server doesn’t change IP, my MacBook does, since I often alternate between wi-fi and ethernet, and even then I can’t be bothered to set it every time. So basically, the IP always changes.

For this purpose, I made this useful script. I’ve tested it on zsh, but it should work in Bash as well, I believe. I put the following lines in my .zshrc:

if [ $SSH_CLIENT ]
then
export DISPLAY=`echo $SSH_CLIENT | sed 's/ [0-9]* [0-9]*$//'`:0
fi

Basically, if the variable $SSH_CLIENT is defined, it takes that variable, nips the last two figures (one being the source port and the other being the destination port), which leaves us only with the IP of the machine we’re SSHing from. Pretty useful. Now all you need to do is put xhost the_ip, where the_ip is the IP of the machine you want to connect to you, in your .xinitrc to automatically allow it to connect to you.

It werks!