A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

Gurdgeiff said something very interesting by way of Ouspenski in his book “The Search for the Miraculous” or whatever the hell it’s called. (I dunno. I haven’t read the thing in 18 years. Maybe I’l pick it up again, maybe not. This quip stood out but most of it seemed like unforgivable drek.)

What he said, in essence, was that you have to be extraordinarily careful when you try to change. The massive web of interconnected stimuli action, attitude and reaction that make up your existence is more deeply intertwined than you are capable of imagining. The complete why and how of the way you exist and live your life in any particular regard can not really be determined.

So if you try to make sweeping habitual changes to your life, you have a very small chance of success. Smoking is a good habit to pick because it’s one I don’t indulge in, so I can freely make fun of those people.

If you were to try to stop smoking, you would have to change all the obvious oral stimulus/response comfort system. You’d have to recalibrate your bodies schedule on many levels. When do you break to smoke during the day, how does it impact your job? How do you tailor your job to your smoking habits and how is the dynamic tension of that interplay working. Then you have to think about the social aspect.

Who are your smoke buddies? How about friends? Do they smoke? Even if you get past the “will they be ok with you as a nonsmoker” you have to think about the level of social communication of smoking.

Watch a group of smokers sometime and stay far enough away that you can’t hear what they’re saying. You can tell an awful lot about who’s who by the patterns in which they puff, how they hold their cigarettes, etc. It’s really quite something.

So if you remove smoking, you have to readjust your conversational habits with those people.

On one hand, you could read all that and say “well those things need to be replaced with something else.” And while I suppose that’s within the realm of possibility, I can’t imagine anyone achieving it. Besides, there are an infinity of little tendrils that spin off from there that you’ll never be overtly conscious of.

The goal when you change a habit can not reasonably be to maintain the rest of the web of your existence the way it was but with one modification. You can’t achieve that. As soon as you make an intentional pull to your habits, things will start shifting around it.

It’s uncomfortable and strange. Weird problems crop up that seem like disruptions in your life that are “just bad timing” but in fact are things that are more tightly related than you realized.

What Gurdgeiff said was that these intentional changes must be made subtly and gradually. Give yourself time to shuffle and re-settle around what you’re trying to do. When you change too much, too radically you’re very liable to snap back completely.

This is on my mind because I’ve been rather impeccably dissatisfied with how I’m approaching this transition away from day trading (I did mention that right? Yeah, no more.)

The first thing that happens to me when my schedule isn’t pinned to the clock is that I start going to bed later and later and it rotates my schedule around the clock until I’m going to bed at about 3:00 and getting up at about 11. Now, that’s 8 hours sleep. It’s not like I start sleeping 14 hours a day.

But as much as I enjoy that pattern, it’s not particularly functional when you have to deal with the real world. See, it takes me a couple hours of revving up to attack the day. But by that time it’s pushing 2:30 in the afternoon. Most of the professional day is over. Things are winding up. Twitter is starting to get active.

And no matter how I slice it. Being “ready to go” by 2/2:30 in the afternoon is depressing. I know I’ve got 13 hours left, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like I’ve totally screwed off the day. As a result, I don’t get much of anything done. Then 6:00 comes and well… part of my head thinks of the day as being over anyway.

Bad cycle.

I’ve been trying to get to bed at about midnight. It took a couple weeks to perceive 1:00 am as “a bit too late.” But finally I’m looking at 11:30 pm as “time to wrap up.” But I couldn’t sleep.

I realized that heavy caffeine consumption well into the evening was most likely the culprit. Clearly I needed a cut off. So today I started with 5:00 being the cutoff time. No caffeine after 5. What that DIDN’T MEAN was to chug my last liter of diet dew at 4:56. But I’ll let it go for now.

So now I lay here in bed, it’s 12:25 and I’ve just typed a page of this and I’m pooped.

My plan is to keep this up for a while, then see what else I can add to it.

We’ll see how it goes.

It’s for cookies, bitch. Now where the fuck are they?

Sorry.  Couldn’t resist.  That site isn’t too weird, it’s 10 weird.

While I’ve largely retired from the practice, I used to build all my own computers. It’s not an awesome accomplishment, but it was fun and it felt pretty good to be working on something I bolted together.

Back then I used ASUS motherboards exclusively. This was partially because tccomputers.com (which has now been sucked up into cdw I think) featured them pretty largely in their “wonderful, therefore clearly had to be killed” part-picking ‘design your own box’ website.

I had used other boards early on (we’re talking about a total of a couple dozen machines over 5 years or so) and almost always had problems. So ASUS became my board company.

So when ASUS started putting out laptops and such I was thrilled. Their components always performed particularly well and the price point was quite reasonable, so I figured they’d (read: hoped) they’d follow through.

Well, fast forward to 2008 when the EEEs started really maturing. I picked up the 1000 (running linux) as a writing machine (no windows, no games, no distractions.) It’s got this great solid state drive, long battery life, small screen, and full size keyboard for my big ol’ mitts.

Eventually I was pretty careless and left it open at a party, down at knee level where there were several “5 and under”s. The price for my negligence was a broken keyboard.

I looked online for someplace I could take it in NYC (should’ve been an easy win) and found that DataVision, the last remaining “computer superstore” in midtown was on their “certified asus repairblahblah.”

I took it in to DataVision last week where I had to dodge throngs of remarkably smarmy salesmen to the repair desk. I opened the laptop up, explained the problem and the Indian gentleman behind the counter smiled and nodded at me while I went through showing him the bottom of the keycap (that it was broken, not just popped off) etc. When I was done he said “Oh, I’m sorry. We aren’t servicing asus netbooks here.”

“But it said on the ASUS website you were a cert…”
“Oh, that’s just for notebooks.”
“You just stood there and let…”
“Yes, I’m sorry. We are not servicing those…” Still smiling like he was getting a blowjob from his brother under the desk.

Rather than sending him to meet Brahma I packed everything up and walked away. The most rude thing I could manage was to simply not say another word. But I do still fantasize about how many times he’d flip in the air before hitting the ground if I hit him with a right uppercut to the jaw.

It took me a couple days of cooling off before pursuing the issue again because I’m like that. (Knowing it has kept me out of jail and many people out of the hospital.)

I just got off the phone with ASUS support and realized the error of my ways. I should’ve called them first. I dealt with two particularly helpful people: Dwayne and Lorraine. They both had mildly southern accents. They’re sending me a replacement keyboard in a couple days.

ASUS is one of those companies I put on a shelf next to Amazon. I’d pay more if I had to because they do what they do so well.

(ht: Kruiser)