Ego! Ego! Ego!

It’s a good thing that there’s no wrong way to do the lists, because boy howdy have I not been following my plan — to do it every day. OH WELL.

Much to my annoyance, I had a draft for days 17-20, but it has vanished into the ether. Guess I will try to recreate them from memory!

Day 17: People I want to be like when I grow up

There are a lot of people I admire greatly, but I have finally started feeling like an adult, so my actual answer is pretty short:

• Myself

I want to be like my own self when I grow up. So my job is figuring out what that means, and I’ve been working on it really hard for a long time. Now, at 36, I am finally starting to feel like I know what that means.

Day 18: Where I take out of town guests

Oooo good times! In the SF Bay Area:

• The Winchester Mystery House
• Alcatraz
• Big Basin

In Portland:

• Portland Japanese Garden
• International Rose Test Garden
• Lan Su Chinese Garden
• Powell’s City of Books

Day 19: “Pins” to try

I don’t really use Pinterest enough to do this list.

Day 20: When I was your age

Oh man. So if the target audience is, say, a high schooler:

• I didn’t have internet access because the internet barely even existed.
• I didn’t have a cellphone for basically the same reason.
• I used a typewriter for my essays and lab reports, not a computer (I did that for my frosh year of college, too)

Day 21: The perfect _____________ involves _____________

Oh man, I could probably do this list forEVER.

• The perfect day involves reading
• The perfect life involves cats
• The perfect evening involves tasty food/drink and good friends
• The perfect weekend involves sleeping in
• The perfect video game involves a lot of humor, or at least a light tone

Day 22: This week’s playlist

I listen to music so rarely these days that I guess I will have to use my podcast playlist!

• Elemental Castings
• Fucking WHile Feminist
• The Bugle
• A Matter of Taste
• Wild Crazy Meaningful Life
• The Nerdist
• Welcome to Night Vale

Day 23: It’s time for ….

• A nap.
• Lunch.
• Cards Against Humanity!

Day 24: Best ways to show love

Well, this depends on the person, really. If the person in question is me, the best ways to show (me) love:

• Ask me questions about my day/activities/cats/whatever. Be interested in what I’m up to!
• Remembering what I like and letting me know when you see something I’d like that’s on sale or something.
• Doing or saying something to let me know you were thinking about me when we weren’t together.

Basically just letting me know I’m important. Insecure attachment style + (mostly controlled) Impostor Complex = needs lots of reassurance. :)

Day 25: Songs I’ll record for my album

Oh man. Going by the songs I love performing for karaoke or Rock Band and/or sing along with loudest on the rare occasions I listen to music:

• War Pigs, Black Sabbath
• Master Exploder, Tenacious D
• Tommy the Cat, Primus
• The Antipop, Primus
• Kitty, Presidents of the United States of America
• Hate to say I Told You So, The Hives
• Go Right Ahead, The Hives
• Come On, The Hives
• Rebel Grrl, Bikini Kill

There’d be Dethklok on here if I could do the vocals properly. But I can’t, so no ‘klok. Woe.

I also have a dream of fronting an all-gal band that only does covers of songs written/performed by men about women that are creepy as shit. That playlist:

• I Gotcha, Joe Tex
• Treat Me Nice, Elvis Presley
• Under My Thumb, The Rolling Stones
• Are You Gonna Be My Girl, Jet
• Run for Your Life, The Beatles

That’s a list that could be a LOT longer, but I haven’t been keeping it up to date. Time to change that, I think! Putting it into Evernote so I can add things as I think of them. :D

Day 26: Make up your own holidays

Weirdly, this is giving me a lot of trouble. I really like the holidays we have already!

• Love Your Bookstore Day! Everyone goes to a local bookstore and buys a book. This is celebrated at least once a month.

Day 27: Go to meals/recipes when I have guests

•  Mongolian Beef
• Ordering pizza

I know, I’m such a thrilling host.

Day 28: I feel my best when

I feel my best physically when…

• I’ve been getting 9 hours of sleep a night
• I’ve been exercising regularly and eating well
• I’ve been doing yoga regularly

I feel my best mentally when…

• I’ve just finished Aikido class
• I’m doing sitting practice every day
• I’m getting quality time with one of the cats.

Day 29: Favorite local businesses

Oh this one’s easy.

• Powell’s (I go to the one on Hawthorne the most often, but prefer the City of Books downtown)
• Coalition Brewing Co
• Artemisia
• Deschutes

I know I’m forgetting some but just can’t think of them. Argh.

Day 30: Historical figures I would like to meet

• John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
• Jesus
• The Buddha
• Gerald Gardner
• Oscar Wilde (preferably via time machine so I could convince him either to dump Bosie before all that shit went down or talk him out of the libel suit)
• Ada Lovelace
• Hypatia

Again, I know I’m forgetting some. Very annoying.

And there we are! Done.

Busybusybusy. Started this yesterday, then got distracted by shit and left off around Day 9. Pfah!

Day 7: Favorite childhood games/tasks

• Playing the board games my folks have in the linen closet. Lots of Bookshelf games, whose names I do not now remember. Smess: The Ninny’s Chess. Monopoly.
• I played a lot of pretend, especially as Darth Vader to the neighbor kids’ Luke and Leia. Good times.
• SCA events
• Racing my pony around the arena and pretending to be Conan or pretending to be flying a spaceship with my crop as a joystick (pew pew pew!).

Day 8: How I feel today

Let’s do today today, rather than yesterday today.

• Tired. I haven’t been getting enough sleep. No good.
• Sore. Been skimping on my knee exercises, so they are achy.
• Anxious. Yay brain goblins.
• Pleased with myself – I’ve gotten a bunch done today and alos have been doing really well playing “Dishonored” lately. W00t!

Day 9: Keep calm and….

I’ve started finding all versions of this to be a bit twee. I really love the sentiment of the original (Keep Calm and Carry On), in large part because I love the way Britain handled WWII. The whole “fuck the Nazis, we will rebuild everything they knock down just as it was before, and if they knock it down again, we will rebuild it again. They don’t get to make permanent marks on our cities! We will have as-normal-as-possible lives, dammit!”

(I’m personally of the opinion that this is the attitude to have toward any sort of terrorist-style destruction. Letting the baddies change your city means letting them control you and make indelible marks you have to see every day. That gives them a lot of power, and I am not a fan of giving those unmitigated shitweasels anything.)

So, no list on this one. Or rather, a short list:

1. Keep Calm and Carry On

Day 10: If I Ruled the World

Bwah-haha! OK, assuming that I somehow was able to have the power to actually enforce shit but not in a fascist sort of way (I’m envisioning democracy at the local/state/national level, and I’d be the equivalent of the EU/UN, only not incompetent and powerless), here would be my priorities:

1. Every human has the right to the following:
   1. Food
   2. Water
   3. Healthcare
   4. Education (at least up through an Associates degree, if not a Bachelors, to include sex education as well as comprehensive health/drug education)
   5. Communication (e.g. the internet, cell towers, other infrastructure)
   6. Reasonable privacy (e.g. opting out of things must be respected, no unreasonable search/seizure, etc.)
   7. Control of their own body (e.g. legalizing most drugs, legalizing abortion, no laws against gay marriage or homosexuality in general, etc. Obviously this stops applying to felons, who have to go to jail, where I’d want them to still have the other rights, at least the basic first four)
2. Transition to sustainable power sources only asap — e.g., all new cars must run on electricity, all new buildings must have solar panels and other energy-efficient stuff, grants to building owners who want to put solar panels or bird-safe wind turbines on their buildings/parking lots, etc.)
   Note: all wind farms would be required to slow their turbines to a speed that’s safe for bats, raptors, and other wildlife. I’m okay with wind power when it’s not decimating endangered species.
3. Water conservation! Grants for installing gray-water systems, taxes on stupid shit like huge fountains and lawns in deserts, sliding scale water prices (so the less you use, the less you pay per gallon). There’d be a base amount available free to individuals’ homes/apartments, but beyond that, they’d start paying. Companies using water stupidly will pay through the nose, bigtime.
4. Organic food only. Most pesticides act on our bodies like hormones, and it is fucking up our shit big time.
5. Finding some way to encourage cities/individuals to archive things, and not digitally. Digital is too hard to keep updated as technologies change, and too susceptible to rain/EMP/crushing damage. I’m all for public libraries culling to keep their collections up to date, but someone somewhere should be archiving things. Ephemera, too. Like, all magazines should be sending copies to a handful of archives around the country, someone should be archiving comic zines and other zines, etc. This shit matters, people.

Can you tell I think about this a lot? Also that I have Very Strong Opinions?

Day 11: When I Need to Focus, I…

• Take a few deep breaths to center myself and become aware of my surroundings — ensuring that I’m fully present.
• If that doesn’t work well enough, there’s a technique whose provenance I cannot recall where you visualize a spinning ball behind your forehead, inside your brain, and it’s like a magnet, pulling all the fragments of your attention back from work/school/projects/whatever. Once they’re all sucked in and part of the ball, you take a deep breath and sink it down into your center. I also like to then take a layer of it and expand that layer out to be all around me, like a shield of attention which only allows things into my consciousness if they’re helpful, and doesn’t let my attention fritter away.
• Put on headphones with white noise and/or Mozart. I love SimplyNoise and SimplyRain for white noise, and often open them in multiple tabs so I can layer different noises over one another. It’s so good for blocking out people talking!
• Another useful tool is setting a timer for 5 minutes and making a list of every single open loop/distraction/stressor going on for me. After the timer goes off, then I list what I can do about each thing (often, the answer is nothing!). The things I can do become a to-do list, and the things I can’t do anything about get categorized into “welp, nothing I can do there!” and dismissed.