ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

Every playlist on Youtube finds its way to the Arctic Monkeys. I start off listening to gothic cabaret playlists thirty songs in the autoplay function will kick up Do You Want to Know? I realise it’s been a long time since I heard a Stiff Little Fingers song, and the algorithm works its way through The Clash and The Buzzcocks and The Sex Pistols before the next logical thing appears to be Do You Want to Know? as well. Leonard Cohen finds its way to the Arctic Monkeys. Jeff Buckley. Courtney Barnett. The Pixies. David Bowie. Hell, starting with Justin Timberlake or the fucking Spice Girls seems to do it. All of them end at the same place. I don’t particularly care for the Arctic Monkeys, but I have no way of telling the algorithm to stop it. And so every repeated play tells Youtube that it should bring that clip up a little more. I have no way to fight back against it. It is always there, like a replacement for the Rickroll that no-one has ever told me about.

Brisbane has, inexplicably, decided to be cold this evening. Well, not cold, but cool. Chilly enough that I sat out on my balcony in shorts and a t-shirt earlier this evening, intending to make notes while I read, and found myself retreating back into the muggy warmth of the living room. It will change its mind soon. We will all burn to a crisp before the day is done. Brisbane cannot help itself in the midst of summer. I was back at the day-job today, beginning the four-week countdown until I finish up my contract and transition into full-time study for the first time in twenty-odd years. I spent my lunch break trying to put together a draft post about productivity and time management, since the number of conversations I’ve had about my process has reached double-digits in the space of two weeks. It’s an incredibly hard topic to write about, because people mostly ask about the tools rather than the strategic process, and the strategic process is really the valuable bit. Learning how to think about projects, and break them down, and pay attention to the time I’ve got available rather than the time I think I’ve got. When you get right down to it, bullet journals and white boards and my obsession with Trello are just the equivalent of being given a hammer, and learning how to use a hammer is not the same thing as learning to build a house. It’s better than nothing if you need to

It’s six o’clock in the evening as I write this, sitting out on the balcony of my tiny apartment listening to the train line and the bird song and the upstairs neighbours drunkenly mispronouncing the words ‘mortar and pestle’ over and over as they talk on the phone. Which makes a nice change from the screaming argument on the street that kicked off the afternoon, reminding me why spending time inside the apartment generally trumps sitting out in the muggy summer heat. The wind is piking up and the clouds are hanging low. It doesn’t smell like rain yet, but the rain is coming later this week. This is how we start 2017. The rest of the day was exactly the kind of productive first day I always want out of a new year and never quite achieve. I wrote the first two scenes of a new novella draft; I read a bunch of things; I acquired new notebooks through nefarious means; I folded laundry; I washed dishes; I cooked food that required prep work and ingredients, rather than simply eating toast or throwing a vegetarian schnitzel into the oven. I am fretting about getting things done this year. I am wary of slipping into bad habits once I wrap up the current day-job and head off to do the PhD full-time. I know how easy it is to look at a day devoted entirely to study and writing, yet still do very little. My sole goal for 2017 is to guard

I think it’s Wednesday. It feels Wednesday-ish. I don’t know for sure because I’ve slipped into that blissful, holiday fugue where you lose track of days and time and schedules. I’ve watched a lot of television since finishing work for the Christmas break. I’ve finished reading a bunch of books. At random intervals, I leave the house to collect food and see the outside world and celebrate things. Today is pulling me out of that. Today I have read stories for friends and engaged with page proofs and generally started thinking about what’s going to happen when the holidays are over. I am preparing to rewrite a white-board and outline the projects that need to get done in January. Time to shake off the holiday inertia and reboot.

I’m rolling into plans for 2017 now that the broad strokes of the coming year have been defined. Planning things this late is weird for me – ordinarily I have ambitions and schedules and goals already mapped out in my head. I am burning through books that I’d left half-read, thinking through ways that I can start arranging notes, building a mental to-do list when it comes to my thesis topic so I’ve got some relatively clear research goals when the lights turn green and it’s time to go. December has become a weird, in-between state. I’m working out my contract on the current day-job, counting down the days until I can stop wearing real shoes and go back to my sneaker-clad existence. I’ve not yet started the thesis. Writing projects are scattered about, waiting to be corralled and planned. These are the ways I trick myself into thinking I can assert control over the universe. This morning I spent some quality time looking back at the tenets I tried to apply to 2016 and realising I did really well on two of them, okay on the third, and not so good on the fourth. I blame people far less for things that I watch or read. I don’t use the television as background noise as often, although I have slipped back into the habit of using social media while watching movies or NXT. I finished a handful of stories this year, but none of the bigger projects. And so I

Back in November I posted about going into a mild depressive episode. As many folks may have surmised from the Friday post a few weeks back, it turned out to be not-so-goddamn mild. I lost the first half of December to an incredibly irritating funk, which only really clicked as a more-than-mild depressive episode when a friend messaged me last week and asked how I was doing. At the time I’d just come home from a book launch, after what had already been a pretty kick-ass day at work, and I’d settled into my couch to cry for the third evening that week. I had not written anything creative for the better part of a month. I’d been cancelling or avoiding social events for two straight weeks. I was not sleeping properly. I avoided going to bed until very late in the AM, then woke up a few hours later. And since the friend who asked how I was doing is one of the handful of people where I don’t automatically try to answer with yeah, okay out of misguided defensive instincts and crushing self-stigma, there was a minute or so where I looked at everything that was happening and went oh, right, instead. I forget, sometimes, that this is still relatively new. That just being on antidepressants is not automatically going to fix every goddamn thing, and that just having a name for what’s happening is not automatically going to stop it from happening. It also doesn’t stop me