Tag Archives: motivation

Maybe it’s just a passing fancy…

Posted on by

I like writing. I mean that in just about every possible way. I like the feeling of my hands on the keyboard. I like sitting down and filling a page with ideas that were, just a few minutes ago, just some vague ideas banging around the inside of my head. I like the notion that, thanks to the permanency of the internet, that somewhere some of these thoughts will continue to exist in the ether long after I have ceased to be. I suspect that’s something of the same reason why I have such an affinity for old fashioned paper books. I accumulate them in hopes that one or two might somehow survive the passing of the years to become the rare old survivors that people wonder about when they eventually come to light.

Just now, though, it’s the writing itself that is intriguing me. Part of me really wants to get back after it in a more methodical way. Is it time for a follow up to Nobody Told Me? Should I take another crack at short fiction? Do I have more to say if I follow either path? Maybe I should just serialize something here instead of dealing with the pain and aggravation of relearning the electronic publication platforms.

The big question – the one that rules them all – is ultimately one of how much time am I willing to allocate to it. Back when I was going at it strong, I was writing every day. That was more than ten years ago now, but back then I was ginning up 300-500 words for the blog 5 days a week and then doing another 500-1000 words a day on other projects. Doing it, even in the halfassed way that I went after it, represents a relatively significant investment of time. Doing it whole-assed, of course, means laying in ever more time than that.

At some point I’ll just have to be very honest with myself about whether this is a passing notion or something that’s going to stick around for a while and be grit in the gears if I don’t do something about it. For now, it falls somewhere on the list of things I’m pondering without applying too much mental horsepower.

On my distinct lack of give-a-shit…

Posted on by

There are a million things going on in the world, and if I’m brutally honest with you (and with myself), there’s not a single one of them I feel interested enough in to write about today. Sure, my privilege is showing or whatever, but I just don’t have it in me at the moment to be morally outraged, vaguely interested, heartbroken, or whatever appropriate response is dictated by the events of the day. 

All I really want to do – and therefore what I will spend my evening doing – is sitting here comfortably with a book. Jorah will inevitable be napping next to me. One of the cats (Anya for sure) will be curled up between my knees. Monday is bad enough on its own without trying to dwell too much on all the ills of the world. 

This is a thought I keep coming back to. I know it’s made an appearance here more than once. There are probably lots of valid questions – How engaged should we be in what’s happening outside our bubble? What do I owe the world if I’m keeping shit together inside my own fence line? Should I even be bothered by what’s happening out there beyond my immediate span of control? 

The last year has, somewhat of necessity, been focused internally – on what I’ve needed to do in an attempt to follow doctor’s orders and the various episodes of fuckery that resulted from that. While it hasn’t been a full-on shitstorm, it has been the better part of a year of the number of things I’ve had the bandwidth to care about being reduced pretty dramatically. Maybe that was self-preservation, but the downstream consequence seems to be that my naturally low give-a-shit level is almost nonexistent these days. Believe me when I tell you that any time you think you see me giving a shit (and it doesn’t directly involve animal welfare or mocking the feckless or stupid among us) I’m 100% faking it… and probably doing a piss poor job of that in the moment. I’m honestly not sure if I’ll ever adjust this attitude or if I even want to. Like so much else, that is apparently yet to be determined.

Like art and pornography…

Posted on by

I really didn’t know what to expect when I cut down the blog from something I posted every night to just two days a week. I’d been five-a-week for so long it represented a surprisingly significant change in my evening. One thing I didn’t expect though, is how much of an embarrassment of riches it would yield in terms of how many things I had the option to write about in any given week. 

This week, for instance, I thought about taking on the federal government’s continued fumbling of border security, the Iranian backed attack on US troops in Jordan, my MAGA-led county government’s ongoing efforts to gut the local school system, and some additional thoughts on my ongoing efforts to be vaguely less unhealthy. Any number of those topics could stand alone as a single post, or even as a series of posts. Each and every one of them is its own particular brand of shitshow. 

I assume that’s why, when it came time to sit down and start writing, that I couldn’t get past the first sentence or two. They’re all big issues in their own way, but damn am I tired of picking apart all the great foibles of the 21st century. I’m even more tired of spending my free time pondering the vagaries of health and diet.

With all that said, I decided I didn’t have it in me to write one of those posts just in the name of it being Monday. Being an election year, there will be ample opportunities to delve into the absurdities of contemporary American politics. The Middle East seems determined to go hot again at any moment, so there will be plenty of time to go through that meatgrinder. I’ve got a few doctors appoints stacked up over the back half of the winter. I’m sure that will be the topic of at least a few posts after the fact. 

I’m feeling a need to branch out a bit, although I’m not sure in my own head exactly what that means. In any case, I need some fresh topics to get my hands – and head – around. As for what form that might take or even what those issues are, I don’t have the foggiest idea. Like art and pornography, I suppose it’s just something I’ll know when I see it. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

Posted on by

1. The U.S. House of Representatives. I was really counting on the House of Representatives to completely shit the bed and shut the government down at the end of this week. I mean I don’t want them to close up shop forever, but a week or two furlough over the Thanksgiving holiday would have been some much appreciated time off for which I’d have ended up getting paid for eventually anyway. Alas, the House managed to drop back and punt… and do it without waiting until the last possible moment. It’s not that kind of performance I should find impressive, but given all their recent fuckery, it’s honestly surprising.

2. Timing. The six weeks between Thanksgiving and New Years are, in my experience, pretty much dead space. Sure, technically there are a fair number of work days in there, but the universal consensus is that the vast number of bureaucrats are focused on other things. Just now, the week before I launch into my five day Thanksgiving weekend, I’m feeling the siren’s call of a near total lack of motivation. Yes, of course I’ll keep plugging away at whatever crosses my desk, but it’s undeniable that my annual holiday lack of motivation has arrived early this year… and it’s only annoying because some of my distinguished colleagues haven’t arrived there yet themselves. I question their timing.

3. Cold. For most of my adult life I’ve been thermally protected by the extra weight I’ve carried around. With the recent arrival of cold weather combined with some appreciable weight loss, I find that for the first time in memory, I’m constantly cold instead of running just a little bit warm. It’s a predictable side effect, but I’m finding it more unpleasant than I expected.

The summer motivation trough… 

Posted on by

This time of year is not a good one for job-related motivation. June is bookended with good times – the week off I take for my birthday and the week off I take in conjunction with Independence Day. Over a span of six weeks, it creates two motivational high points and a corresponding four week motivational trough. Now they’ve thrown in a new federal holiday right between the two. All else between those two points is me trying my hardest to at least present the illusion of giving a damn… or at least enough of a damn not to draw unnecessary managerial attention.

I do a reasonable job of tying up loose ends before walking away for my early June holiday. Then I come back and find it hard to mentally justify ramping up any new efforts, knowing that in a couple of weeks, I’ll be in the middle of another 9 days out of sight and hopefully out of mind.  Throw a spanking new holiday when a bunch of other people are taking time off and making it hard to get anything accomplished and the opportunity to do much in the way of great new work is pretty minimal. 

I won’t go so far as to say I plan it that way, but it is a happy coincidence.

After Independence Day, we’re in the long march towards the fall holidays. That, of course, is demotivational in a completely different way.  As a professional bureaucrat, truly the cycles of the year have a savage beauty all their own.

I love them for it…

Posted on by

Every morning, beginning Monday of this week, between the time my alarm goes off and I flop over to turn on the lights, a certain gray kitten has taken it upon herself to jump up on the bed and give me a headbutt and demand about 45 seconds of ear scratches before she hops down and goes on about her day. Given the trials and tribulations of the last two months, it ranks well up on the list of best possible ways to start the morning.

On Wednesday evening, for the first time, Cordy found the courage to jump up on the recliner to join Anya, who was already well practiced at keeping my legs warm. Through my own twitching, and Jorah’s close quarters investigation, she stayed put until it was time for me to close down the house for the evening. It was a big day for a kitten who was so recently content to spend 95% of her waking hours holed up under my bed.

That this week, among the 51 other weeks of the year, is the one that’s most filled with utter bullshit, it’s been entirely fortuitous that they’ve decided to really make the effort to settle in as full members of the household. Unsurprisingly, they’ve made Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday bearable – and I love them for it.

In the end, they’re all Monday…

Posted on by

It’s Monday. Again. This morning, I reached deep into the cabinet where I store my fucks, but alas those shelves were bare. It’s a sad state of affairs that my increasing lack of fucks to give is even seeping into telework days now. Historically, it’s mainly been a problem reserved to those days when I’m required, for reasons defying logic and common sense, to schlep over to the office and sit with other people all day.

But here we are. Trying to come up with new and interesting ways to say what I’ve probably said 137 times here already. Gods, I’m not sure I could be less interested even if I put maximum effort into it. That’s probably some moral failing in me as a person. Meh. So what?

It’s probably a gift that I don’t have to be particularly interested in something to do it tolerably well. If it were otherwise, we could be in a real spot of trouble here. As it is, I’ll sit here with a dog sleeping on my feet, a cat trying to occupy the keyboard, and tinker about with some PowerPoint slides (while trying not to dwell too much on the four Monday equivalents left to go before my time is wholly my own again). 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

Posted on by

1. AFGE Local 1904. Here we are 16 weeks past the “end of max telework” and the union, such as it is, still hasn’t come through on delivering the new and improved telework agreement. So, we’re still grinding along with only two days a week like pre-COVID barbarians… as if 30 months of operating nearly exclusively through telework didn’t prove that working from home works. All this is ongoing while hearing stories of other organizations tucked in next door that are offering their people four or five day a week work from home options. It’s truly a delight working for the sick man of the enterprise. There’s probably plenty of blame to go around, but since the updated and perfectly acceptable policy for supervisors was published 16 weeks ago, I’m going to continue to go ahead and put every bit of blame on Local 1904 for failing their members (and those of us who they “represent” against our will) for not getting this shit done.

2. Missing motivation. You know it’s bad when I don’t even want to sit down and write. I do more reading on days like that, so it’s a bit of a trade off, but still, it’s not exactly good tidings. I’m assuming my current lack of being motivated by anything is part and parcel of the mid-winter doldrums when the yard is a mud pit, I see very little sunlight, and the temperature very rarely claws above 50 degrees. It’s about as bland a time of year as you could ask for and it can’t help, it seems, from seeping into my bones. The days, though, are ever so slightly longer than they were a month ago, so help on the way. Probably.

3. National sales tax. Republicans are currently hung up on pushing a national sales tax. If it were to, in fact, replace the current Byzantine income tax regime with a dead simple x% addition to the cost of goods and services, I could probably get behind it. What the whole program will end up being, though, is a sales tax in addition to an income tax. I mean even if, despite all odds against, Republicans manage to implement a sales tax and eliminate the income tax, does anyone really believe that some future Congress wouldn’t come back to the income tax trough so that John Q. Taxpayer ends up getting hit with both a federal sales and income tax? In the absence of a Constitutional amendment declaring for all time that income taxes are abolished, I’m a hard “no” on a national sales tax.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

Posted on by

AFGE Local 1904. Here we are 14 weeks past the “end of max telework” and the union, such as it is, still hasn’t come through on delivering the new and improved telework agreement. So, we’re still grinding along with only two days a week like pre-COVID barbarians… as if 30 months of operating nearly exclusively through telework didn’t prove that working from home works. All this is ongoing while hearing stories of other organizations tucked in next door that are offering their people four or five day a week work from home options. It’s truly a delight working for the sick man of the enterprise. There’s probably plenty of blame to go around, but since the updated and perfectly acceptable policy for supervisors was published 14 weeks ago, I’m going to continue to go ahead and put every bit of blame on Local 1904 for failing their members (and those of us who they “represent” against our will) for not getting this shit done.

The GOP. It’s been a hundred years since a majority party in the House of Representatives failed to elect a Speaker on the first ballot. It’s a level of ineptitude that would be shocking if it weren’t so entirely predictable among members of what passes for the Republican Party. Government is serious business for serious people – and this slimmest of majorities has led off the 118th Congress in the most embarrassing way possible in not being able to conclude the most basic step of leading that chamber without devolving into a useless conglomeration of cockwombles. My level expectation of them being able to do anything else over the next two years is less than nil. 

The rut. Once upon a time, I use to believe that you were supposed to come back to work after time off feeling refreshed and energized. Maybe others do, but I came back from my long Christmas break no more excited or motivated than when I left. If anything, the time away left me even less enthused by the day-to-day after two weeks of doing “not work.” It’s a rut, to be sure. Uncle’s gold-plated fetters make it unlikely that any real changes are in the offing, so getting my head around this just being how I’m going to feel for at least the next 12 years is… troubling.

Don’t expect a Christmas miracle…

Posted on by

Most parts of life, in my estimation, are about finding the proper amount of motivation. Whatever goofy shit you can’t find a way to avoid doing, requires at least some motivation to get through. For instance, I rarely actually want to do laundry… but I like having clean socks and underwear. See, that’s the motivation. 

As I sit here, with a mere 24 working hours between me and a 17-day weekend, let’s just say that motivation is more than a little hard to come by. Systems not working right? Fuck it. “Urgent” email asking things that have been answered three times already? Don’t care. Computer refusing to download a critical system patch that will result in the machine becoming unusable after Friday? Yup. That sounds like a January problem.

Look, I like getting paid on a regular basis. That’ll be all the motivation I need to muddle through the next three days… but it’ll be just that – a good old-fashioned pre-holiday muddle. Don’t waste your time looking for over and above. Disabuse yourself of the idea of it being a zero-defect environment. It’s the time of year when everyone’s just going to need to be satisfied that there’s a warm body here at all. Anything past that truly is a year-end bonus… or perhaps a Christmas miracle.