Day: July 17, 2016

Lately I’ve been spending time with Marie Kondo’s The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. It’s a good and instructional book that should be taken with a grain of salt. Everything should. This particular author has managed to turn her personal neuroses into a successful business a la Stephen King. Well, maybe not quite like King. What she has done to great success is remind people that we all tend to have too much stuff and that stuff often takes over our lives. I live in a 4000 sq ft home filled with so much nonsense that I could be easily mistaken for a hoarder. I plan to downsize, and I plan for this dear lady’s words to help.

 

Part of this process is a return to listing in a very over exaggerated fashion. I discovered during a recent writing project that allotting specific hours of the day to jobs that needed to be handled really helped me to stay on pace. I discovered after that when I carried that information and list of responsibilities in my head, nothing got done. So, I’m going to be listing everything in my daily calendar as though I am the CEO of talislegger INC. Even factoring in ‘me time’ becomes important, because when you have so much that needs to be accomplished then often you get overwhelmed and burn out.

The elephant in the room is the sheer amount of stuff I need to get handled. My dude (brother from another mother, Dat n***a D, etc.) flew in last week and immediately recognized the need for me to automate some of these processes. This is true, as is the need to make the time and space for doing that while learning how to reduce the number of things that I do. I write, I teach, I’m a Dad sans wife (but my lady has my back there), I coach, I want to play video games, I want to get healthy, but I need to clean my house and pay my bills first. There are at least a dozen other smaller tasks that occupy my CPU to the point where the background processes get largely ignored. So, yeah, I gotta cut back.

I need to make the time to prioritize and repair and then I need to prioritize, limit, and automate moving forward. Thus sayeth the talislegger. So it shall be done

 

Some Thoughts:

1. The way I used to distribute info about this blog was through facebook. I think I am going to do that primarily through twitter (and maybe some corresponding link to my new video feed?) moving forward. Maybe not.

I wanted to step away from politics to discuss something a little closer to my heart: The names we black people give ourselves. I’m going to refrain from saying African-American, because the name doesn’t properly represent the diaspora of dark-skinned people who take root in the United States whether brought here by force or delivered by choice. Furthermore, African-American highlights many groups including a significant portion of the Brazilian population that doesn’t define itself as North American (or even black for that matter).

I come to this 10 minute conversation because of a kid named Zaevion Dobson. He came to my attention as the post-mortem recipient of the 2016 Arthur Ashe award. He died while shielding his family and friends from nearby gunfire. This didn’t happen in a desert trench. It happened in Knoxville, Tennessee.

This all merely establishes the name. He has a strange one, and it is common among black people to have odd names. These are only odd because they don’t seem to connect to some deeply rooted cultural history. Here’s the thing though: The names do represent a culture and a history. It is the culture and history of that particular diaspora of people who look like me and ended up on the North American continent largely severed from any other identity. So, these names are an effort to connect (in what ways we can) to the place we presume we came from and to introduce our own inflection to that history.

Some Thoughts:

1. I have a way too quiet voice. Fact.