Serious as a heart attack

27 comments

1. Oh cool. You have moviepass.

   1. They harvest me.

2. I did Couch to 5k a few years ago. It was surprisingly easy and enjoyable. Sadly, I’ve since done 5k to Couch + booze + Netflix + fourth meal. That has also been surprisingly easy and enjoyable, even if depressing in the cold light of day.

   Anyway, I’m planning to get back into the pool again. I have some underwater headphones and a waterproof ipod, and listening to podcasts makes laps a lot less boring…though I have to turn up the volume super high just to hear the words above the sound of water rushing past my head. I guess if I had to choose between losing my heart or my ears, I’d choose the latter. Haven’t worked out the QALY on that yet.

3. The book. Write another chapter. You can do it.

4. Promise yourself NO ZERO DAYS.

   No matter what, do something for your book each day. Sit down and write for 10 minutes, not for us, for you.

   Doesn’t have to be good. Just do it. It’s just 10 minutes. Everything else can wait, it’s just 10 minutes. Do it in the toilet if that’s the only place you can make the time.

   At the end of 10 minutes decide whether to do another 15 minutes. If you do great. If not that’s great too. You made sure it was not a zero day. The day is a success and you are on your way.

   We believe in you.

   1. Thank you.

   2. This method helps get the juices flowing. I have to say it didn’t do a huge amount for me in terms of quality content, but that’s okay. It helps loosen your fingers and build the habit.

      What has worked for me is Google Keep and Google Docs on my phone. Google Keep is where I write down ideas that come to me when I’m out, or with family, or some other situation. It’s a hell of a lot easier than a notebook and pen, or storing them in your head until you get to a laptop.

      Google Docs is for when I want to put something in my manuscript real quick. I do all my writing in Google Docs (with periodic backups on my personal laptop). So I can write if I’m at work and have a free half hour, when I’m at home, when I’m out, and even when I’m on my phone (although this is more for very quick things).

      NaNoWriMo helped to. National Novel Writing Month, which I believe is November, brings people together and challenges them to write a ‘novel’ in a month. It emphasizes quantity over quality of course, aiming for 50k words in the month which is very ambitious. But again, helps get over that mental block. It helped me – I’m writing a book (well, a series…) and was stuck on ~40k words for about a year. I tried to do NaNoWriMo and did 20k words that month. But over the next 4 months (March now) I hit 95k. Yes it’s a long book, but that doesn’t matter. I feel pretty chuffed about it.

      Like Dr. Duh said, we believe in you (and are happy to give feedback!)

5. Dammit Tim, that was beautiful. I love it when you go non-Arsenal

6. You are inspiring me to write. Thanks, Tim.

7. I have done nothing but eat since our last match. I am only at 8000 steps today according to my phone’s pedometer app. I don’t care.

   1. What are you eating? I’m mostly on the egg-yellows diet.

      1. OK. Are you messing with me? I’m going to have to look that yellow thing up. I eat pretty well. Lots of fresh veggies, hardly any red meat, not too many carbs. It’s just that I over eat the good stuff making it bad stuff because of the sheer quantity of the good stuff I ingest.

         I contain multitudes. Just like Walt Whitman but alas no splendid beard.

         1. I think he’s joking. Though I suppose in my ignorance I may be unaware of a new high cholesterol diet that’s all the rage now…

         2. God, you’re gross.

            My diet is basically a cheeseburger with extra lettuce, onions, pickles, and tomatoes.

8. ”
   I should develop my skills before they find out that I’m just another Gen X fraud
   a white guy who got his job
   because he is and was a white guy
   ”

   that struck a cord in a real haunting way. I work hard but feel like a fraud too. My 14 year ols daughter is learning Ruby in school.

   We’re the generation who grew up through the big bang of technology. I remember when no one i knew had a pc. We thought we were riding the wave of technological advance. But it has accelerated past us so quickly. Now kids are learning statistical modelling using prgramming techniques, grew in a world where ipads and smartphones and digital fingerprint scanners are a given, and schools have, ever so belatedy, brought programming into early year syllabus.

   For a while we were ths kids of the future, young in a new computing era. I’m not even 40 yet and i feel like I’m sprinting to keep up!

9. Second Dr Duh.

   I made a promise to myself to write 250 words a day. Even just automatic writing. I publish to a daily wordpress blog that nobody else has the link to. Somehow publishing it, even to a blog that nobody else could possibly read, helps. Over a week I can scroll back through seven little discrete chunks of writing, some weird, some terrible, some good. Sometimes I rewrote the same bit sightly differently seven times but somehow I still see that I moved forwards.

   And there are some “shoulds” in there which are not really “should” but “I’d really like to…” Write a book and learn python at the same time you’re doing a full time job and writing a blog? It’s important to have goals but you’re not a machine, dude. Do the book. Small steps. Little every day. Do the next thing when you finished the first thing.

   1. And count me in to the fraud club.

      1. So, I’m not the only one feeling like a fraud. Comforting. My team and peers tell me that I’m OK but I don’t believe them. I’m just good at hiding my shortcomings.
         I don’t like the feeling that I’m a fraud but I like people who share it: no arrogance, no sense of entitlement, less ambition and, maybe, less workaholism, a wider set of interests…
         Many writers on this blog. Unsurprisingly considering the quality of many comments. I’m one too, but untalented. Unlike our host.
         I love this blog!

10. +1 for Python and R.
    Feeling sometimes the impostor syndrome too.
    I have a thesis to write,
    And I don’t know where to start.

    Please bring football back!

11. Kids these days are learning a heck of a lot that I never did, and R, Python and statistical modeling are a big plus (I’m a statistical modeler by profession, but it came a lot later in life).

    But this push towards computer literacy should not come at the expense of the humanities – ethics, logic, philosophy, history, and so on. I don’t know if they are – my kid is not school age yet – but the way we talk about how much kids are learning these days, we almost invariably focus on what programming languages they’re learning. That’s literacy, yes, but it is entirely focused on the skills they need for their generation, not the next, or those things that ought to be timeless. In a way, it’s not necessarily that education these days is so much better than your generation, it’s just that it meets the needs of today, as yours (possibly) met the needs of your day, and mine met the needs of mine (although my school sucked).

    1. Agree, and can confirm that the push towards STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and math) is huge at all levels, from elementary school to higher ed; and, unfortunately, it very much does come at the expense of the humanities, both in terms of funding and student involvement. Its impetus is essentially a neoliberal, measurable-results-only, cost-benefit-analysis model. The qualitative gains of the humanities can’t often be fit into that model, and so government and business (and hence education) funding to encourage these disciplines drops, and then follow the popular myths that you can’t get a job with a humanities degree, so students stop enrolling. It’s a vicious cycle, and the consequences are dire, particularly as technology develops at a rate faster than our ability to consider how it’s used, the latter activity being the scope of the humanities (and this STEM-first thinking ignores the fact that so much about being a human is about things that lie beyond the quantitative, such as love and suffering).

12. I love your blog because of your writing and then the quality of the comments. Asides facebook and twitter, I have not dropped 3 comments on any website in my life – except here. I love it even more when you go ‘outside the football box’. I have not read a non business book in 15 years but I will buy and read yours. This is excellent. Kudos

13. This poem makes me worry about you, Tim. The stream-of-consciousness nature of it is very 90’s gen-x angst, like something Cobain would write, and makes me think this is not just an artist’s rendition of a moment in time. You unwittingly list at least 4 cardinal symptoms of depression in that piece (maybe more if I looked hard enough). If these are your genuine feelings, then the biggest mistake you can make is assuming feeling like this is normal or denying that it’s happening to you. Reach out to me if you want to talk about it. Depression kills people because they don’t get help in time, because of the stigma. Here’s a link to a similar story:

    http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1716893?query=featured_secondary

    Sorry if I’m being hyper-vigilant but this is such a common problem in our society and single men are particularly susceptible.

    1. I think a huge contributing factor in causing depression in 2017-2018 is a being a Gooner.

    2. Thanks for your compassion. I’m fine. If I needed help, I would get it. I just have emotions.

14. Yes, this was my first impression upon reading your piece Tim and as much as I enjoyed it ,a small part of me felt you might be in a bit of trouble.

    Obviously I’m not very well equipped to judge these things and there are much smarter people on here than me to speak about it, but perhaps depression is what’s required for creative minds to reach their full potential since some of the best writers in history were well known for having to deal with it.
    Tolstoy , Fitzgerald and Poe and many others so maybe you’re well on your way to literary success.
    Good luck to you Tim.

    1. I’m fine. If I need help, I get it. I just have emotions.

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