dianaschnuth

The graphic designer Milton Glaser once said,

There was in the sixties a [gestalt therapist] named Fritz Perls who … proposed that in all relationships people could be either toxic or nourishing towards one another. It is not necessarily true that the same person will be toxic or nourishing in every relationship, but the combination of any two people in a relationship produces toxic or nourishing consequences. And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them.

Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much, but at the end of that time, you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired, then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy, you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.

My friend Dan has to be one of the most nourishing friends there is.

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I was actually on time to work this morning, having returned from a two-week vacation and a long weekend. Well, as on-time as I get, anyway: 8:05am or so.

I’d awakened well before my alarm, at 6:40am, thanks to insane jet lag messing with my daily rhythms. It was kind of nice, actually, being a bit of a morning-ish person, if just for a while. I had a nice slow and relaxed morning.

Now, this evening, I’ve been chilling on the couch, not doing any of the to-do list I’d made for myself (and quite enjoying the low-key evening, too). I’ve been dozing in and out, doing what I said I wasn’t going to do: staying up later than my body wants to. I should really use our VCR instead of staying up “late” to watch my current favorite show.

I hope I haven’t sabotaged my newfound morningness by staying up to watch my TV show. We’ll see tomorrow, I suppose.

Last month, my co-workers discovered Twitter. They didn’t join it — far from it. In fact, they seemed not to grasp the usefulness at all, decrying it as self-serving and stupid, and leaving me to defend it during one of our weekly lunch outings. I think I fared well in Twitter’s defense, as I got some conciliatory nods before the subject veered in another direction.

I can totally see where the Twitter haters are coming from. I really didn’t get it myself until I was more mobile: first with my lame-o pay-as-you-go flip phone (which, unbeknownst to me, couldn’t text to short codes or international numbers, which totally foiled my plan to Twitter our Hawaii vacation last year), and now with my iPhone.

Twitter can be stupid. I’ll grant you that. Depending on how you use it, it can be a tool of complete drivel and juvenile chatter. With a little thought and research, and occasional pruning, it can also be useful, informative, and a much-needed diversion at times. It all depends on who you choose to follow.

As for me, the people I follow tend to fall into categories:

1. Friends and Acquaintances. These are the people who can tweet pretty standard things like “back to work for another monday,” and I’ll continue to follow them, just because. They’ll occasionally tweet a piece of important personal news, and I’ll be glad I was on the front lines to see it and respond (if appropriate). Friends and acquaintances (both IRL and online) comprise about one-third of my flock.
2. Industry Experts. I consider myself a web design hobbyist (I get the occasional word-of-mouth freelance gig), as well as a fairly recent convert to Business Intelligence. Most of the “industry” people I follow are web designers whose work I’ve admired for years, although I do follow a couple of businesses that would count for this category. Industry folks make up maybe one eighth of who I follow.
3. Hobbies and Interests. I try to spread these out; I find that if I follow multiple people who tweet about a particular interest of mine, one or two tend to rise up about the rest, content-wise, and the others get weeded out. Currently, I follow a couple of diet/fitness coaches, some atheists, a local record store, a couple of GTD experts, a nerdcore rapper, a sci-fi author, a couple of bloggers, and Wil Wheaton, among a few others. My varied interests make up something like almost half of the people I follow.

Some people fit into multiple categories, like acquaintances and industry experts, or industry experts and interests, so it’s hard to come up with an exact breakdown of who I follow and why.

You may notice that I don’t have a category specifically for “celebrities,” although that seems to be what the media is latching onto about Twitter lately. I follow some “internet celebrities,” like Heather Armstrong and her husband Jon. I’m sure that Whil Wheaton would fit into the celebrity category, too, although I tend to think of him as a writer who acted in a movie and a TV show I like, and as just a slightly different brand of geek than I am.

Just because someone I know or a company I like has an account on Twitter, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll follow them. This isn’t a popularity contest — not to me, anyway. For the most part, I try to follow people whose tweets are relevant, interesting, thought-provoking, funny, helpful, newsworthy, or any combination of these. Sometimes it’s a LOL-inducing twitpic; other times, it’s a software announcement or links to little-known and under-publicized news stories.

(Next week, my contribution to the Twitterverse will include massive amounts of photos and observations from Japan. Look for it.)

I haven’t quite finished reading Getting Things Done (Note: I’d love to hyperlink to Amazon here, or even italicize the title, but my blog is still not accepting HTML), but I’ve at least started collecting my stuff to do, getting it all in one place, and revisiting the master list on a weekly basis.

Once I master this system, this could seriously help me manage the procrastination problem I’ve had for so long.

The key for me has been this: if it only takes two minutes, and you’re in a place where you can do it now, DO IT NOW. There’s no reason to put it off until later. It’ll take as much energy to write it down and prioritize it as it would have to just go do it already.

Having discrete tasks has also helped me not get pulled off-track as often. As much as I would LOVE to go putz around and figure out WTF is wrong with my blog, there are other things that I know I can actually get done tonight, like spraying for ants or editing a podcast.

I still have a long way to go, and a lot more archived to-do items to dredge out and add to the Someday/Maybe list. (I have a stack of scrap paper and text files and e-mails with to-do items and ideas from over three years ago. I wish I were exaggerating.)

Until I officially reach Inbox Zero, though, at least I’m headed in the right direction.

Back in the mid-to-late-90’s, before cameraphones or affordable digital cameras, if you wanted especially sexy photos of your honey, you had to either know someone who knew someone who had access to photo developing, or you had to know about THAT ONE PLACE in town that would develop and print ANYTHING. (Within reason.)

Or you had to find a Polaroid One-Step at the thrift, which is the route we went. And, boy, the two times we used that Polaroid were fun and sexy at the time, but overexposed and unsexy afterward.

People who came of age even just five years after we did had a completely different experience. These days, kids and young adults have easy access to digital cameras and cell phones that don’t care what kinds of photos you take. I can completely understand why hormonally-charged adolescents and post-adolescents would get off on sending sexy pictures of themselves to their boyfriends.

What’s unfortunate, though, is that the part of the brain that makes decisions and judgments is the last to develop, as I understand it. Doesn’t texting a sexy picture of yourself to your Significant Other sound pretty erotic? Sure it does — until you think one or two steps ahead. I know that there were plenty of times I was guilty of that sort of reasoning — well, not about sexy pictures, but about other things, like words said and notes written and homework ignored and classes skipped.

Is there a solution? Sure. Make sure your children understand the permanence of the internet, and teach them how to think critically and project the consequences of their actions. It’s not a quick and easy fix, like putting a content filter on your internet and TV, but it’s a thorough and responsible solution. I know I can’t really pass judgment, because I don’t have children; but I do know what my mother taught me about sex and responsibility, and what I learned on my own.

If I’d had a digital camera or a cameraphone back in 1997, would we have taken sexy pictures like we did with the Polaroid? I’m not sure we would have, since the novelty wouldn’t really have been there. If we had, though, they might have looked a little less… embarrassing.