Monday Minis #1

I’m experimenting this week – rather than my usual style of long winded stream of consciousness crap, I’ll instead be grabbing a handful of assorted topics and ideas, and trying my… not best… averagest? to be brief on each.

Let’s get rolling with

* Motivation
It’s something I struggle with a lot, and while I don’t have any life changing “quick fix” life hack nonsense that’s allowed me to conquer my shortcomings once and for all, I have noticed something that’s helped me a little recently. Task adjacency. I don’t want to do the dishes, but I might hang out in the kitchen either doing something specific (maek borgor), or just dicking around on my phone. Eventually, a stray particle of energy finds itself propelling me over to the sink. “I need a fork”, “Oh, this plate isn’t so bad, this’ll just take a sec”, or even something like “this huge mixing bowl takes up most of the space – if I move that to the side, the rest of the task doesn’t look so bad.”

So far, results are minor but trending upwards.

* Anger management
I suffered from real bad anger issues for most of my teen years, and it’s been a hard habit to break. I tried mindfulness exercises, forcing myself to laugh, forcing myself to “thank the universe” for hardships rather than assigning blame. Nothing so far has really taken hold… but I have been at least conscious of the early stages of getting angry and attempting to derail it via a combo of these little tricks seems to be at least blunting the impact a little?

* Shitty motorists
I’m no saint, and while I’m aware of the popular trivia nugget that “most people consider themselves above average drivers”, I feel like I could comfortably claim that I am on the sunny side of average. Even taking into account that just in regular daily like, humans will filter out the expected/mundane, and hyper focus on slights and mistakes, and that we’re only really noticing drivers at their worst and all that. I broadly follow the rules – keep to the limit, adequate signalling, good reflexes. I’m not trying to claim a spot in the, like, top 1% or anything, but just the sheer volume of people I notice making consistent(-ish… at least as long as they’re nearby) errors and indulging bad habits… it can’t just be confirmation bias.

* On having house guests
As a confirmed and all things considered fairly content introvert, I don’t enjoy people being in my personal space, or in the same room as my personal space… or even really sharing a 100m radius (unless I want or need something, in which case, you get your ass over to me right NOW! No, I’m not going to give any outward signal to show I wish to interact, don’t be silly!). So when it came to be, recently, that we had friends(*) over for lunch, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it.

But honestly, it all turned out alright. I managed to con my way into semi-seclusion for a while (thanks, deceptively alert but acting sleepy toddler!), so the social battery was only mostly depleted instead of needing to go into energy debt for it. The clean up however… okay, granted, 4 of the guests were children plied with way too much sugar… more than a little bit annoying. If I enjoyed having people over it’d be more tolerable… but I’ll deal with it

* High standards?
Leading to the underlying theme behind most of these mini topics… am I just too exacting? Do I demand too much of myself and others?

Yeah, absolutely.

But like… I don’t think it’s a sin to desire a personal bubble that’s up to my satisfaction. The house isn’t even all that clean, and I have so much hoarded crap just lying around. But all that isn’t a “Problem” for me – the house functions well enough. I can mostly accomplish all the basic tasks I need doing every day. I don’t get overtly crappy and all if people don’t measure up to my ideals… that wouldn’t be very fair. Live and let live (on the surface… but I’d be super happy if y’all could clean up after yourselves for once : p )