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Life

That time I opened a tea tin with a hammer

In case you didn’t know, I love tea. Despite the self-imposed tea-buying hiatus for the majority of this year, I finally bought more tea. To be specific, I spotted a 24 Days of Tea advent calendar from a DavidsTea store in San Francisco. Those things went out of stock on the website in hours, and the closest store to Atlanta is Chicago, so I handed over some money and a calendar became mine.

I was a good Sushi. I let the tea sit and didn’t open any of them until yesterday, December first. After getting home from my Thanksgiving weekend, I cracked open the advent calendar with a tiny 1 on it and was rewarded with my tea of the day: Forever Nuts, a fruit and nut blend that I heard turned water into a beautiful reddish pink.

Sweet, right? I got to work opening the tiny (but very cute) tin. Note the words “got to work”. See, here’s how the process should have gone. Step one: open tin. Step two. Brew tea. Step three: profit.

Here’s how it really went.

Step one: Attempt to pop tin open, but the lid is practically glued on.

Step two: Attempt to unscrew the lid, thinking it’s one of those tins you have to unscrew, but nothing budges. Grab one of those rubber grips and try. Nothing moves.

Step three: Repeat steps one and two a few more times until it’s pretty clear the lid isn’t budging. Start to suspect the thing really is glued on.

Step four: Tweet your frustrations, then repeat steps one and two. You know how complaining about an annoyance sometimes makes it go away? If only it were that easy.

Step five: To Google! Look up ways to unseal a container, even though you’re already familiar wtih most of the tips. Try steps one and two again for good measure.

Step six: Grab a knife and stab the top plastic part of the jar. Manage to get a cut or two in there, but nowhere near enough to scoop out any tea. Try steps one and two again. You know, just in case.

Step seven: Bang up the sides of the container. Try steps one and two again. Tweet again.

Step eight: Refusing to accept defeat, grab a hammer and hammer the sides of the tin until it finally budges. Enjoy tea and hope to any gods listening that the other 23 days aren’t like this.

#24daysoftea: Now with hammers!

I earned that tea. I just don’t want to waste half an hour of my life on opening the others.

Categories
Life

Decatur Book Festival 2014

Atlanta has so much going on over Labor Day weekend, and chances are if you’re interested in something, you can find a thing for it. I spent Friday hanging out with out-of-town friends at Dragon*Con, and yesterday afternoon was reservewd for the Decatur Book Festival. Since I blogged about last year’s festival, it seemed appropriate to blog this year’s as well.

Like last year, there was one thing in particular I really wanted to see. This time it was John Scalzi’s Lock In book launch. Since it wasn’t until 4:15pm and I live nearby, I piddled around at home during the morning, fixed lunch at home, and headed over after lunch.

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Life

Social shenanigans with high school friends

A few weeks ago I mentioned getting together with a couple of high school friends. I had a lot of fun and like to think they did too.

But there were still some things about this get-together that struck me. This is absolutely not an attack toward those people, just something I’ve been thinking about lately.

See, these two friends went to the same college–the same school a decent number of classmates went to. They even roomed together for awhile and interacted with a lot of folks from high school.

Where things get weirder is one of those friends is dating a high school classmates, one from a different high school social circle. What this means is that they have stories from the last nine years involving people we all know. Sure, there are folks I don’t know, but there are quite a few I do as well, and hearing all that talk about how they’ve changed is simultaneously neat and creepy.

Meanwhile all my stories involve people they don’t know because I actively took the path of making sure I knew no one from school when looking at colleges. So they involve a lot of “a few folks and I…” or “that one time I…” as opposed to some of the “we” and explaining who the other people involved were. That doesn’t leave me innocent. Quite the opposite, really; I’ve mentioned things another person in the group and I did when talking in a group.

This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily. Just something I observed (and will probably notice more of) when hanging out with these people.

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Life

Why I stopped lifeblogging so much

Way back in 2001 I started a blog on Diaryland. Blogging wasn’t quite as big as it is now, and I poured my heart out into it. All my high school dramas, angsts, and achievements appeared there, and this being the early 2000s, there was even a guestbook for visitors to sign. While most of my entries consisted of everyday life, there was the occasional pensive entry, and sometimes I actually wrote things that weren’t about my everyday life or online quizzes. (The latter made me sick and tired of “What X are you?” quizzes that were popular a few months back, which were also popular in my early blogging days.)

I moved from Diaryland to Xanga to LiveJournal to this site, almost coinciding with going from high school to college and beyond. Back then, my life was interesting to write about. I interacted with lots of people on a daily basis thanks to being in school, in classes, in a tutoring job with others my age. The interactions were, if not noteworthy for future self, idea launchers for blog posts and stories.

That isn’t to say that I don’t interact now. I do. But working remotely means a lot of that conversation, even with friends, is online. Remember those IM logs people would post for blog posts? I did that occasionally, whether for better or worse.

At some point, I stopped writing about my life. Not just with the IM logs, but with lifeblogging as well. It wasn’t a sudden stop. My life eventually contained fewer interactions than during my school days, and writing yet another blog post saying “I looked for jobs and read some interesting things” became boring even for me. At a time when my life, quite frankly, wasn’t all that interesting, the things I wanted to share became links and thoughts and short observations. Part of this was because fewer people were lifeblogging in general, what with the arrivals of Facebook and Twitter and all those other sites that encourage shorter, more immediate updates. I’m active on Twitter and can attest to this.

But this kind of instant, bite-sized update doesn’t lend itself very well to truly keeping up with people. Sure, the big things get updates, and short-form updates are a good way to glimpse parts of one’s life that one may not ordinarily share. But takes a lot of putting together pieces to figure out if, say, someone hasn’t been doing so great, or if there are exciting plans in the works. The things we choose to share on social sites aren’t often major life events like what Facebook wants you to share. They’re bite-sized pieces that take more context to get a full picture of one’s life.

Sometimes I miss blogging about my life. I still keep a paper journal that contains what would normally be lifeblogging, a combination of feelings and events and other exciting things. And sometimes I ponder writing more about my life on here, especially for big events that would be of general interest to others. Who knows? Only time will tell.

Lifeblogging is dead. Long live lifeblogging.

Categories
Life

Sushi’s Adulting Sticker Chart

I have a lifestyle that gives me a lot of flexibility, a lot of interests, and only 24 hours in a day to pursue them. After working, reading, writing, and just about anything else, I don’t have much time for things like making sure my house isn’t a pigsty.

Since I live alone and no one else will clean my house for me, this is a problem. The house doesn’t clean itself and will only become clean if I put in the effort. I’m not a neat freak, but I do like some sense of order. And since the last few months in particular have seen me do less and less housework, I knew I needed to do something to motivate myself a little more.

There are already lots of ways to track one’s progress. One of my friends uses Beeminder, where you pay to continue tracking your progress if you get off track. (Okay, the first slip-up is free, but after that you pay up. The amount increases if you get off track more often.) I know a few folks who use HabitRPG, which turns your to-do lists into a game. (You get a character and everything.) And someone else alerted me to Epic Win, a habit-building game app for iOS. There are probably more out there.

All of these techniques are good–if their incentives/punishments motivate you. I used HabitRPG when it was brand new, and my main problem was actually logging into the site and marking my progress. That’s a lot of work for me. My ideal method, I eventually figured out, needed to stay in my line of vision all the time.

After a long discussion about my procrastination, motivation, and love of stickers, Sushi’s Adulting Sticker Chart was born.

Instead of giving myself a sticker for doing a major thing, I broke down the chores I tend to put off into small parts, then assigned points to them. The more effort and time the task takes, and the longer I tend to put that thing off, the more points it gets. The chart hangs next to my desk so it stares at me during the day.

Here’s what my list looks like:
* Wipe down and organize a surface (1)
* Clean the sink (1)
* Empty the sink (1)
* Unload the dishwasher (1)
* Sweep a floor (2)
* Vacuum a room (3)
* Take out trash (1)
* Take out recycling (1)
* Clean toilet (1)
* Clean bathtub (3)
* Wash one load of clothes (1)
* Dry one load of clothes (2)
* Fold one load of clothes (2)
* Check mail (1)
* Dispose of old papers/junk mail (2)
* Get groceries (3)
* Return all dirty clothes to laundry basket (1)
* Clean out a food-containing area (1)
* Clean/organize a pile of stuff (2)
* Make bed after washing sheets (2)
* Floss (1)

There’s also a separate list with things that need to be done less regularly, or items that I normally don’t have as much trouble doing, or items that I do have trouble doing but have been putting off for a long time. Think of this as a one-off to-do list. (In case you’re wondering, this post is two points since I haven’t updated in awhile.)

Next I added up all the points on my regular to-do list, divided by seven days in a week, and rounded down. This number is how many points I need to earn a sticker that day. My number happens to be four, which isn’t too difficult.

Sushi's Adulting Sticker Chart
The Sticker Calendar. Click for full size.

Every day I add up what I’ve done, and if those things give me four or more points total, that day gets a sticker. I started this on Thursday and have two stickers so far. Even two days in, the stickers have motivated me to earn my sticker for the day. If I’m one point short, surely I can do one small thing to earn the sticker.

The stickers themselves are great, but the real purpose of the sticker chart is to stop treating cleaning as an all-day thing. That might still happen sometimes, especially on laundry day when I have time. But training myself to do a little bit every day, even if those things feel really small, will go further than cleaning all the things once every few weeks.

Once I start doing smaller things regularly, the marathon cleaning days won’t be as exhausting, the house will be more organized, and I’ll have more time to do enjoyable things. And that’s the best thing of all.