Limeworld.com » Life, The Universe and Everything

The Cult of Done Manifesto

Limegirl — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 16:07:02 +0000

Image by James Provost.

How FUCKING AWESOME is this? This is going to become my mantra, particularly if I’m doing something creative, and especially if it’s something I get twitchy and insecure and intimidated by it. The only thing that matters is the Cult of Done. It’s not perfect? Fuck it. It doesn’t matter, and it interferes with being Done. Everything really is a draft, so just get it Done.

2.) Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.

YES! Where was this list during my grade school days? Do you know how many reports and projects I either didn’t finish or procrastinated on because it wasn’t perfect? Fuck perfect. Done.

4.) Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.

Do you know how many times this should have been stapled to my forehead so I wouldn’t freak out and bail on challenging activities? This list needs to be inscribed on my genetic code, as I’m 99% sure that any offspring I have down the road are going to be just as neurotic and obsessed with perfection as I am. Six year-olds shouldn’t have panic attacks over reports on dinosaurs.

8.) Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.

This needs to be painted on the wall over my drawing table and etched on my camera. Maybe even tattooed on my arm.

10.) Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.

Anytime I’m in school, this should be something I recite to myself daily. There have been so many times where I’ve made myself sick with worry over failure, and 99% of the time it was completely unnecessary. I still do it.

Okay, enough being excited about ideas. I’m off to get shit DONE.

Found via Brandon Stone.

Addendum

Limegirl — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 19:56:20 +0000

I’ve decided that minimally displaced fractures of the radial head (elbow) are like the practical joke of broken bones. No splint, no cast . . . basically I have to spend the next month trying to claw back my range of motion regardless of pain or discomfort, as failing to do so would result in a locked elbow and surgery.

What does that mean? It means busting my ass to do the everyday things that I used to do without thinking. Typing, brushing my hair, feeding myself . . . these have all become part of the grueling rehabilitation process. Ordinarily I would prefer to be a lazy git and let other people take care of me, but my fear of losing full use of my elbow and surgery has prompted me to show an unusual amount of initiative. In fact, so much initiative and determination that I think some people are having trouble believing that it’s actually broken. Yes, it’s still broken. Yes, it still hurts like a MOTHERFUCKER sometimes. Yes, I still need painkillers, and no, I really can’t carry as much as you think I can. I have to keep reminding Seuss that despite my progress, I am still in no position to jump back into using my arm to cook, clean and what-have-you. I’m contemplating painting it a different colour just so he remembers that it’s STILL BROKEN. Perhaps I’ll vary the shade by pain level.

This experience has also given me a renewed appreciation for the work that my mother has done as an occupational therapist. I’ve seen her work with patients in the past, and I’ve seen firsthand the incredible progress they make under her care, but I never understood the patient’s side of the experience. I never realized how much it hurts, how much it sucks, how fucking irritable you get from the combination of pain and slow progress. It never occurred to me how much of a difference a caregiver can make in the rehabilitation process. Sometimes, particularly if the condition is slow to show improvement, the caregiver’s interest and enthusiasm can be the only thing that carries the patient through a difficult time in their therapy. I thought I understood rehabilitation on a basic level, but I’m only just starting to get a glimpse of what is actually involved.

I’m also full of awe and admiration for my mother’s clinical knowledge and bedside manner with patients. It’s a shame she doesn’t have a clinical practice anymore, because she has a real gift for it. There is a magic to how she approaches the rehabilitation process, and a boundless enthusiasm that is just the antidote for the frustrated and demoralized patient. I wish more people could experience that from the healthcare providers they encounter.

Breaking Myself

Limegirl — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 20:05:24 +0000

It seems only natural, being risk-averse as I am, that the moment I engage in a physically demanding task, I break myself. I’ve been working with Seuss doing landscape construction, which is a huge departure from my otherwise office-dominated work history, but I’ve always liked a good challenge. Things were going well until Friday, when I got both feet caught in some wire mesh and went face-first into some sidewalk blocks.

I managed to crack my incisor in half and fracture the radial head in my elbow, nevermind the grotesquely swollen upper lip and nasty-looking abrasion. I racked up a lovely dentist bill before proceeding down to the emergency room for an eight-hour visit. I’ve gained some insight from the experience, which I will now share.

1 – Those calcium-magnesium supplements ARE actually important
In spite of doing a face plant into one of the most unyielding substances around, I managed to knock out ZERO teeth, required no root canals and sustained the tiniest of fractures. Some of this can be attributed to genetics, but I think a good bit of it also has to do with taking those supplements. I met a woman that day who also broke her right arm in a fall, but rather than a small fracture, she shattered her humerus (the large bone in your upper arm) in four places. Take those supplements – you won’t care until your arm looks like a sack of potatoes and you need surgery just to line the pieces back up.

2 – My vanity far exceeds my pain threshold
As I lay on the ground staring at the fragment from my tooth, my first thought wasn’t about pain, but instead about how horribly disfigured I would now be. Visions of me missing my front teeth flashed before my eyes, and yes, that was what made me cry. Me as meth-addict. Me as hockey player. That was one of my top ten least shining moments as a human being – discovering that I care more about how I look than how much pain I’m in. Thankfully, I also discovered that my mind was quickly put at ease once I knew that my tooth could be filled and made to look like a normal tooth, and I was completely unselfconscious about have a giant, swollen and bloodied lip that made me look like a parrot. Go figure.

3 – I need my right arm for just about everything
Take typing, for example. Writing this has taken me at least 3x as long as it normally would have. In fact, everything takes three times as long: showering, brushing my hair, making a sandwich, eating . . . I can’t play video games for very long because my arm gets tired and sore from trying to hold the controller at an awkward angle. I can barely put a bra on, and I definitely can’t put my hair in a ponytail. One tiny crack, and I can’t perform 90% of my activities of daily living.

4 – Being at home with nothing to do isn’t as fun as I would have imagined
It’s only been a few days, and I’m bored as fuck. I can’t play video games for very long, there’s nothing on TV, I’m too handicapped to clean the house, I shouldn’t drive unless I absolutely have to, and everyone I know is either working or in school during the day. Even using the computer is physically awkward and draining. I take a lot of Advil, read and sleep. Thrilling.

5 – It’s really easy to take things for granted
I sustained no head injuries, no internal injuries, contracted no communicable diseases – in other words, I got off really, really easy. As much as having a broken elbow is uncomfortable and a nuisance, it will heal, and quite quickly at that. My tooth is patched up, my lip is healing, and I don’t require anything stronger than Advil. I saw people in emergency who looked like they would gladly take a broken arm over the pain they were in, people who were white as a sheet and nauseous, others struggling to breathe, still others doubled over and dreaming of lying down on a bed. My pain is minimal and transient, and I think I owe it to myself and the people who never get relief from their pain to revel in all that my body allows me to do everyday. More dancing, more running, more feeling the sun on my skin and the wind in my hair. Life is short.

Until I’m mended, however, I will probably continue to swear when I can’t spread the peanut butter without dropping the knife. And when I can’t reach something mere inches away because my arm won’t bend. And pretty much every time I try to dress myself.

Existentialist Angst

Limegirl — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 21:03:34 +0000

The 10-year anniversary of this blog, coupled with the discovery that someone I went to high school with has become famous for her Tweets is giving me existentialist angst.

Becoming a navel-gazing narcissist before anyone else realized it was cool to become a navel-gazing narcissist is my sole claim to fame. I am not married. I do not have 3 beautiful children. I have not garnered the notice of Hollywood types, and yet somehow I continue to scream into the gaping void of the internet while simultaneously telling myself that it doesn’t matter if anyone else reads it.

It’s not true. It doesn’t matter until someone you went to school with gets famous for doing something you thought no one was really paying attention to. THEN it matters.

I’m going to go polish off a bottle of tequila.

Flow

Limegirl — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 04:12:02 +0000

You know the kind I’m talking about. It’s playoffs, and you will preserve every bristle, whisker and lock on the off chance that your team will gain an advantage. Or maybe you just graduated from university, and you’re going to Coachella, and you just don’t give a fuck, and you progressively move from flow to mullet to skullet in a demonstration of genuine hair artistry. You may have also given up on the idea of ever getting laid again, but that’s beside the point.

Seuss has been cultivating flow. No playoffs. No fuck-you gesture as a post-graduation demonstration of individuality and will. Just three months of EI and an unwillingness to pay for a haircut. In honour of this, I present the following images as depictions of his creation.

I’m overdue for updating his Mii, clearly.

I was torn between this picture and a picture of Chewbacca, which was almost identical.

Let’s face it . . . even with that hair, I’d still do him.

This is the future. This is what I will be waking up next to in a few months. Somebody hold me.

Skepticism

Limegirl — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 08:01:06 +0000

How oddly appropriate that the same night I have an amazing chat with my mother, I stumble across a post about being a lifelong cynic.

I’ve always vacillated somewhere between skeptic and cynic, depending on where I was in my life. The above picture is the perfect example of how, at 3 years-old, I wasn’t buying all this Santa Claus jazz, and I certainly wasn’t going to sit on some strange man’s lap. Neither of my parents ever felt any need to carry on the charade, as it was obvious from early on that I wasn’t buying any of it. Tooth Fairy? Easter Bunny? Just give me the candy/coins, and I’ll play along if I must, but until my firmly skeptical father provides me with legitimate evidence of their existence, I’m not buying any of it.

My family never went to church, but my parents were always an amusing juxtaposition of belief sets. My father grew up in the ~~Pentecostal~~ Christian and Missionary Alliance Church, and later found himself disillusioned by organized religion. Science became his belief system, and he wasn’t going to believe in anything that hadn’t been extensively examined and scrutinized. My mother grew up Buddhist/Shinto in Japan, which while ever-present and permeating every part of the culture, was not particularly rigid. She has always had a flexible approach to spirituality, and has frequently incorporated new things into her belief system, whether it be a loose interpretation of Christianity, or all things paranormal.

Somehow this eventually resulted in a skeptical 10 year-old attending a bible camp without either myself or my mother fully realizing it was a bible camp. A Christian family friend suggested it, and while we understood that the camp was Christian, I was expecting a regular camp with the occasional prayer and grace at mealtime. Rather than the canoe trips and orienteering I had been expecting, we spent quite a bit of time memorizing bible verses in a camp-wide competition to earn the most points for our bunkhouse. This was novel and amusing, as I had never read a bible in my life, and the content of the verses floated entirely without context in my mind. Every evening, we were presented with an impassioned sermon from our pastor/minister about how failing to take Jesus into our hearts would result in eternity in purgatory. Some nights he would emphasize the tragedy of missing out on the experience of allowing Jesus into our hearts, other nights he would go on and on about the fiery terror that would await the non-believers among us.

I weighed these sermons rather heavily each night. In part because I was a compulsive people-pleaser, but also in the interest of covering my bottom-line. I wasn’t about to believe in something that I wasn’t being provided concrete evidence of, but I wasn’t keen on taking the chance of being wrong. I decided to make a bargain with God/Jesus, if he did in fact exist; I would do my utmost to be a good person and generally aspire to conduct myself as Jesus would, and he would agree not to throw my ass into the fires of Hell. I decided that God had to be a reasonable and practical guy, and would understand the arrangement.

Cynicism/skepticism rarely limits itself to the spiritual and fantastical, however. It wasn’t long before I was cynical about the institution of marriage, true love, the nuclear family, and any and all things that are found in Hallmark cards. Naturally, I somehow ended up with a romantic that I initially regarded as hopelessly naïve and in need of protection from the ugliness of reality. As much as we were opposites, my ex softened the cynic in me, eventually making me realize that believing in something can make a lot of things possible that my cynicism never did. Being hard and cynical didn’t spare me from sadness or disappointment, and having hope really didn’t cost me any more. He gave me a lot of courage to work towards things that I otherwise would have given up on, simply because I didn’t believe they were possible.

My cynicism/skepticism is still something I both value and struggle with. There are situations where it has protected me from unscrupulous people, but there are situations where it has also prevented me from connecting with genuine people. Today was a reminder that sometimes I need to set my cynicism aside and just let things in. I thank the universe for that lesson . . . and God, in my own way.

Hooker Painting Her Toenails

Limegirl — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 00:47:00 +0000

Hooker Painting Her Toenails

I am a great fan of street photography. I think many powerful and moving images have been taken on the street. But this one gives me pause.

The photo itself I have no objections to. I think it’s interesting and it tells a story. The bit I can’t quite wrap my head around is posting it in Flickr humour pools. That, and going on for paragraph after paragraph making derisive comments about prostitutes and the people who try to help them, not to mention using a 200mm zoom lens to take the picture from across the street.

Prostitution is a dangerous profession, and the Pickton trial in Vancouver has done a great deal to highlight this fact. I hardly think that these women are deserving of ridicule for what they do.