So much of what I capture on this here blog is on the fly and in real time.  I don’t label each post ‘Live Blogging My Brain #’s 1-87′ because those are pretty boring and non-descriptive titles.  Also, not every single post of mine is on the fly, and using a naming convention that would occasionally be broken would only serve to wreak havoc on my OCD governed brain.

When I’m not in front of my computer and I have one of these moments where I am moved by a beat in a song, or a dust particle in front of my eye, my brain doesn’t particularly care to remember whether or not at the time of these synapse firings my fingers were working so diligently to capture their every nuance. It still happens just the same.  But if a tree falls in the my brain and my fingers aren’t there to capture it, does it make a blog post? I won’t bother using spoiler tags: It doesn’t.

Thus, for every blog post I do write, I’ve lost seven (statistical data pulled from studies done at the Institute of I Just Made This Number Up).  Which could be translated to only one day of your week is it worth getting out of bed.  Maybe not, I wasn’t always the best at maths.  Regardless, I just wrote a blog post about not writing blog posts. I know what you are thinking you trendy little hipster,  so ‘meta’ or ‘ironic’ or ‘funny’ or whatever incorrectly used cool word you wanna call it.

Where this post will end in the next two paragraphs, I never really know.  I don’t like to the know the endings of things before I read/watch them, and my own blog posts are no different.  I really do like them to be as big a mystery to me as they are to the reader.  Now here’s my breakaway.  If I’m busy doing other things when these moments occur, so much so that only 1/7 of them get captured accurately in real-time, then I must ask myself what I’m doing from day-to-day and minute-to-minute to allow for such a colossal loss of raw mental download.

And finally, here’s your takeaway. Sleep is overrated.  Sex is oversold.  Jobs are for losing. Dreams are for chasing.  Do way more of what you want to be doing. Do absolutely none of what you don’t want to be doing. You will never have enough money.  You will never have enough time. You will not get another chance.  You will only happen once.

Today when I opened my cupboard to get out a glass for some water, a Four-Clawed Gecko fell from the heavens.  Not an extremely rare occurrence, as I have two or three that have taken up residence in my kitchen.  I welcome them since they eat the bugs that bite me, and they come out only at night for the most part (presumably to watch over the hut while Maxine and I sleep).  However if you’ve ever had any living thing fall from the sky in front of you, you know it elicits a good startle.

When I was in high school, my brother and I were playing some Nintendo 64 in our basement when the heavens sent us a gift in the form of a small field mouse.  In the ceiling of our basement we had those puffy white panels.  Some of them had been cut to allow for pipes to come down (and back up, which makes me think why it had to come all the way down in the first place).  The genius who cut the panels decided to cut square holes (even though the pipes were round, like every pipe ever) so the corners of the cutout were a perfect size for critters to fall through.  This tiny mouse also gave us a good startle (and ruined our game of Goldeneye 007).

Who knows how many more times in my life some living creature will pay me an unexpected visit? Not me.  I do know that no matter how often it happens, it’s one of those events that I can depend on happening, but in such a random and infrequent fashion that I will never get used to it.  I will never not be startled, or jump, or squeal like a pre-slaughter pig when a gecko falls out of my cupboard.  Try as I might.

So where is the threshold?  When does something happen enough times or frequently enough that your reaction is compromised?  I’m not sure there is a global variable for when we dull to these things, but I do know that it happens.  The first few times your heart is broken, the first few family/close-friend deaths, and other less significant events that are unexpected can take a toll on you.  But somewhere between that first heart break and that twentieth death, something happens.  A line is crossed.  Is it the 1000th gecko?  Is it the 100th field mouse? Is it the 7th gecko if the previous six were on the last Saturday of the month?  When does jump and squeal fail to kick-in?

More importantly, is there anything that you would never get used to, no matter how often it happened to you?

You got to steal from the time of a life that’s passing by. – Stephan Jenkins

It was only a few days ago that I was mathing through the dilemma of ‘time’ as we all get older, in one of my posts.  I also just got done reading Getting Things Done by David Allen a few days ago. It is a strange thing to be so conscious of how much (or how little) time is passing and what you are doing with that time.  It is also a strange thing to be in Hawaii where time has much less societal importance then other places I’ve lived (namely New York and Tokyo), but maybe not so strange as it may be what allowed me to be so conscious about the whole time issue.

For those of you not in the know, GTD is a system that guides its practitioners into a series of behaviors/methods that allows them to reduce stress and increase efficiency and productivity both in work and personal lives (and everything you do).  It sounded like a good thing to learn and implement, and after reading it, I can confirm that it still does.  For someone with slight OCD tendencies it helps aid me in processing everything that I need or want to get done in life into it’s own place, and more importantly out of my head.  It’s not until you have a complete list of everything ever that you want to do or accomplish in life (from getting a new toothbrush to retiring before 60), that you can really begin to prioritize or make decisions about what is reasonable to expect to get done.

I realized that I want to do it all.  Not everything ever, but everything that would ever make it onto my list.  I don’t knowingly suffer from any attention deficit disorders, but I do suffer from something drastically different that has very similar symptoms.  I am interested in too many things, and so my attention can be kept focused on one thing for only so long before I realize that there are way too many other things on the list that I need to get started on.  It’s never about boredom, or the inability to focus, it’s about the ability to focus on too much at one time (but not enough concentrated focus).

Even as I type this my iTunes is playing through songs on shuffle and I actively skip or replay songs as I see fit, my iChat is open and I am engaged in conversations with people in Israel and California, Word is open with two wire frames of the same web-page (one as the user sees when logged in and the other logged out), Firefox is running with 4 tabs open (my Basecamp work to-do list, MouseHunt application in Facebook, my WordPress back-end, and the Something Awful forums), Coda is open with 3 php files that comprise the component I am developing from the wire frames in Word.  All this on two monitors while my left leg is shaking rapidly and my right hand is petting Maxine.

I can’t do it all.  I can’t even get relatively small and simple things done half the time.  It’s not that I don’t have enough time though.  I say I don’t have enough time, but the thing is, I know people who get more done then I do and they don’t have any extra hours that I don’t have.  We all live by the same clock (just in different time zones), we fill the exact same hours with very different things. I’m not alone (Amy leaves Friday for two months, but even then I won’t be alone), but I have also noticed in recent conversations with many of my friends that they experience similar thoughts/feelings about the time in their life and how they are spending it.

Make a list, of everything you want to get done ever, ever.  Or just start it with some big/medium/small picture stuff.  Are the decisions you are making about what to fill your time with really what you want to be doing?  Can you envision those hours a little bit better?  If you make them better, are you moving yourself towards one of the end-goals on the list?  Are you working towards anything on the list at all right now?  How hard will it be to adjust to working towards things on that list?  I don’t know, but I’m about to find out.  The less time and energy I spend on things not on the list, the more time I spend pantsless.

I just got a newsletter email from Paul saying that it was the year anniversary/birthday of his album release (‘Cycles’).  It seems like it came out only a month or two ago, but after checking my calendar,  it has in fact been a year.  This is ridiculous and also important, for two reasons.

The first reason is that another album can’t be far behind.  In the decade or so that I’ve known Paul, he has been involved with the release of five or six full length albums and countless EPs/demos/singles.  According to this track record, it’s about time for Paul to start working actively on his next album, which is exciting.  Since his move into the heart of the Lower East Side, his sound has gravitated in a very different direction then us old-timers were accustomed to, and that makes the impending album a very new/scary/exciting prospect.

The second reason is that a year has passed in what seems like only one tenth of the time.  His email isn’t the first instance in which time has seemingly flown by.  I am a very logical and practical person, and thus have always known that the more time that passes the less value each passing second/minute/hour holds. For those of you who are no good at maths (or those who are just generally unintelligent), I’ll break it down for you.

• When you are 1 year old, 1 year is 100% of your life.
• When you are 10 years old, 1 year is 10% of your life.
• When you are 20 years old, 1 year is 5% of your life.

What this means it that as you get older, each increment of time is a smaller percentage of the whole.  When you were six years old, and your mom told you that you could get a puppy when you were nine, she said “don’t worry, it’s only three more years”.  If you were smart, you would have reasoned with her in response “mother dearest, that means I have to wait another half of the time I’ve been alive, are you bat shit insane?”  You didn’t though, you cried until Rugrats and Doug came on, and then asked again in another few months.

So now when you have to wait a year or two for something, it’s no big deal.  Products get announced a year or two before they go on sale and it’s standard procedure, people get excited, and no one cries.  Should you though?  It’s only 4% (let’s round up) of your life to wait a year for something you’re excited about, but according to my other calculations it’s 4% of a life that you will only have one of. So you get excited, but just for a day or two.  You don’t hold out, don’t waste the time in limbo, because before you know it the next big thing will come out to be waiting for or excited about, and the funny thing about those 4%’s is that they start to add up.

Here’s to enjoying each and every 4%, sans crying about the waits, and sans waiting all together, and of course sans your pants.