Hello world, what a week I'm having. I've been so so productive. Starting just two days ago I re-did all my passwords, starting from the throwaway stuff to the top level items. You gotta change your passwords at least once a year and although I'm a bit late, I suddenly got in a panic that I would be hacked soon. No mas!
Then in a flurry of activity I committed to paying actual rent in New York -- for a two or three month span at least -- and that means I have to go now. Heat or no heat, I'll be in New York by September. That will also coincide nicely with some friends arriving (or re-arriving) to New York so even though the summer is fading away, nothing is better than fall in the city right? I am already saying things like "Man, September and October went by so fast!"
And on things checked off the to-do list, you can't discount the back and forth I've been having with my Mom about work stuff, which has resulted in a flaring up of our old dynamic. The one where I tell her not to worry and she tells me she won't. Yet that just increases her worries. "Why is Jon not stressed out about this? I must go find out!" And then we both lose our patience and go sliding into useless anger. I don't believe in stress alright?
They say that you can tell how well a guy will treat his girlfriend by how he treats his mother. Well, if this is any indication, nobody should ever date me. When I argue, I like to go straight for the throat. If I'm gonna get all riled up about it why bother trying to ram through understanding? Go for the win, go for the gold, that is the American way.
A few months ago I instituted a "just email it to me" policy for my mom regarding work reminders. She's too used to coming when I'm in the middle of something and telling me something she just thought about. Only instead of a task like "take out the garbage," this could actually be relevant. And since I'm buried in something, I forget because I'm not paying attention and that leads to dramatics soon after.
The lesson here is that sometimes, even with family, email is the answer. Actually, email is almost always the answer. This is why "must have Gmail" is (always and still) on my dating requirements list.
Wednesday and Thursday I spent playing basketball and re-learning WordPress. What I discovered from the last time I mucked around with backend WP is that it's just as simple/hard as I recall. It's come a long way since 2005-ish though.
I sang the praises of Jessica Hische the other day, and indeed she's inspiring, but it was watching the video of a talk she gave that really got through to me. In the talk she counsels her fellow designers to just "grab the reins and fucking do it," in regards to learning the HTML/CSS/Javascript stuff they need.
You don't need to master coding, but learn as much as you can and don't be lazy. Even if it takes three weeks, once you get the basics down, you'll build from there. Then if you need to bring in the professionals, go for it. (In fact her philosophy is to always use the professionals.) But keep your skills increasing and eventually you'll D.I.Y.
Technically I've been mucking around with copy and paste HTML for over a decade. I've gotten better but I still can't do anything from scratch. Even if I learned one tag per week, I'd have mastered HTML by now if I had taken the time out to properly learn it versus just slap shit together over and over. It's about efficiency. I can do a site, but it'll take me ten times longer than someone who knows exactly what to get into.
I think this "grab the reins and fucking do it" applies to everything else pretty much. Finding someone else to do it for you is hit-or-miss. When in doubt, just learn it. That goes across the board. Except for handyman work. I'm still outsourcing that. Dirt is gross.
Jessica also talked about how college is supposed to instill the desire to learn. Yes it's most often perverted into "get knowledge, go out and make shit," but fundamentally college is about learning to love learning. The joy of it. I'm pretty sure nobody actually did that. Tell me if your college experience was different. By junior year people are generally locked in and no longer taking credit courses about dinosaurs and cultural anthropology.
Part of the reason I left Michigan with a semester left was because I'd lost all interest in what I was supposed to be studying -- philosophy. Most of my time was spent in the computer lab cutting dance show videos, fiddling around with websites, doodling with Photoshop and Illustrator. It didn't occur to me that I wanted to do these things at any high level so I just learned enough to make do. Instead I should have just gravitated toward taking some of those classes. Or better yet, screw the classes and just learn it, because that's one thing you can definitely learn on your own: computer stuff.
Another part of Jessica's ethos is that "the work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life." While I don't totally agree, there is a great point in there. Chase projects that you like to do, especially if you're in the position of not being forced to monetize them. Shit you actually enjoy doing will be of higher quality, even if not on the bottom line.
This is different than "do what you love" I think. Everyone would do what they love, duh. But sometimes you love it because you don't have to do it. I think she's talking about just doing what you enjoy, even if it doesn't make money. The money, or acclaim, will come. That's what I got out of researching Jessica anyway.
I've also decided to stop caring if my hyphens (mosty for compound words) are in the right place. Who cares! No longer will I live under the tyranny of Merriam-Webster. It's my party and I'll hyphen if I want to, hyphen if I want to.
The other part of the reason I left college early was because I never went to class and I was too into having fun instead of being responsible. Oops, $120K, down the drain.
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