Meet Beckett, a twoish year old husky (mix?) from the wonderful folks at PAWS Chicago. We got him Thursday night and he's been settling in very nicely. He's very friendly and a great runner, but also content to curl up on the carpet while we're around.
This is another one of his favorite positions:
It's too bad that we'll have to drop him off with a friend for Thanksgiving break already, but hopefully he won't forget us in the few days.
It's pretty exciting. Amanda has grown up with dogs her whole life, but this will be my (and a Thompson-Westra) first. He's going to be a great running buddy and loves to be around us. He's even got a few key commands down pretty solidly already. And it's nice to be greeted back from work with a happy puppy jumping up to say hi. We are investing in a good dog brush and lint roller for that lovely hair. The amount collected by the vacuum after its first run post-arrival could have been its own little dog.
I've been cleaning out my Gmail to-do list this morning of various links and pdfs that at one point would have seemed useful but don't any longer. I've tried a few different times to make it useful, the most successful of which has been the past year, off and on of course. I think it helps that Gmail is almost always open on my computer, so having the "tasks" staring back at me was an easy way not to overlook them.
If I'm not careful, the number of articles I find online and stash away for the time being will grow out of control very quickly. Likewise, I have to be careful what feeds I add to Google Reader. I'm not going to be able to read everything, but even with knowing that, having too many unread articles staring back at me can be overwhelming mentally (same reason why TED turned me off). Of course, too much information in lists (or too strong adherence to lists) can be paralyzing. In the best of situations, though, hopefully a list can help to organize thoughts, prioritize action, and remind you of what you could be doing.
I've read and heard some stuff about Getting Things Done and even know a couple people who try to implement it. I don't think it's for me, at least right now, but it did help to underscore the usefulness of getting ideas and tasks out of your head and onto any recording medium. There's always a lot to discover.
I had the idea to look into audio books before the long drive from Maine to DC, then DC to Chicago, this fall. I remembered that Audible had some kind of deal for listeners of This American Life, so I started poking around their collections and trying to remember a book I've been meaning to read for a long time. I knew about how long the drive would take (26 hours), so I hoping to find a book that would take about that long to listen to as well.
In the process of finding the perfect driving companion, though, I realized that the book length information could be used to compare the amount of time required to absorb different books. Now that I put that into words, it seems like less of a profound discovery than it felt like at the time. But with knowing how long it would take to listen to, say, War and Peace (61 hours), you could see how many times The Grapes of Wrath could fit into it (roughly three times). I find it hard, then, not to ask myself whether reading War and Peace one of these days is worth the opportunity cost of not reading three classics the length of The Grapes of Wrath. Although the amount of time it would take to listen to something is different than to read something, I assume that the ratio would be similar enough across works for comparison to work. For the record, I ended up listening to The Grapes of Wrath on my drive, thoroughly enjoying it.
Part of it might come down to how we conceptualize the units of media that we consume. For reading, the unit is most directly just the book (although the length of the book does help it feel weightier). The accomplishment of reading The Great Gatsby (less than 6 hours in our audio book metric) feels somehow on par with finishing The Brothers Karamazov (37 hours). It seems hard to make reading articles have the same mental weight as books. I could read The Economist cover to cover every week, taking in on average 100 pages of dense text per issue, but somehow my mental default seems to weigh that less than a comparably sized book. I'm constantly reading articles online, but that doesn't feel the same either. Does that mean I should read more books or try to care more about the number of pages read?
TV series versus movies can be tricky too. Watching an epic TV series like The Wire (60 hours) is, I'd argue, a good use of time, but with 60 hours you could probably watch every Werner Herzog film (I haven't tallied this). Watching The Wire for that period feels easier, I think because there's only one title, even if the length of that one title is enormous. But I'd hedge that in terms of satisfaction and literary self-actualization, Herzog is the better bet. There seems to be some kind of conceptual roadblock that biases us toward not making that comparison in terms of concrete time required, even though time is the most precious commodity any of us have.
Now, clearly, with both writing and film, comparing like this assumes that the unit of quality or information density is uniform across authors, forms, and works. It clearly isn't. Shorter works are fundamentally a different beast than longer ones, with different constraints and rewards. There is something beautiful about grappling with a single long work, enjoying slower or more complex character and plot development or exploration of ideas. A class on Dostoyevsky and a class on Hemingway are going to be fundamentally different, maybe too much for comparison.
I had a good Funemployment List going for the period I knew I was going to be unemployed this fall between DC and Chicago. Some of the stuff was pretty logistical, others were project-based. All in all, basically I wanted it to be a little way to make sure that I wasn't just sitting around all day with nothing to do. And it was very effective in helping me organize. A few things that I didn't get to I'd still like to do, such as listen to David Bowie's entire discography. Music can be difficult because it requires a set amount of time and, if you're really going to experience it, it can't just be in the background of three other tasks that you're doing concurrently.
"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then--to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn--pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theo-criticism and geography and history and economics--why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough."
At the end of the day, there is far too much to read, watch, hear, visit, experience, or learn. It's easy for a to-look-into list to spiral out of control because there will always be another thing interesting to explore. Having too much, though, is much better than the alternative.
