Well, hi-ho, everyone, and greetings from Dollop Coffeehouse in the Uptown neighborhood where I live, where it's looking likely that it's going to rain at any minute, so maybe I should actually get heading home. Hmm. Anyway, regular readers know that things here at the site have been rather quiet as of late; and that's because pretty much all my energy for the last month has been expended in trying to get the website finally open for my new arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography. (It's open, by the way; you can click here to learn all about the stress and fear that went into getting it open, if you're interested.) I mentioned in that last entry, in fact, that I'd get another one up today, telling everyone about all the other stuff that's been going on with me in the last month or so as well; and that's not a hell of a lot, to tell you the truth, but I thought I'd get an entry up anyway, written in my usual "random notes" style, to finally get it all reported.

--So first of all, I guess the biggest news, is that one of my super-secret freelance clients has finally gone public. Long-time readers know a little about this already, of course; of how I've had two particular clients this spring that I've been doing regular work for, but neither of whom could go public yet because they were still working on their websites. Anyway, one of them finally did finish their website, and are about to have their grand opening next month, so I can finally start talking about them by name here.

It's a new social network for small businesses, in fact, called MetroProper, which actually has over 200 individual cities in their network already, each of which has its own URL. (So Chicago's, for example, would be ChicagoProper.com.) The company's owned by Phil Tadros, the same guy who co-owns Dollop Coffeehouse that I'm always talking about; and what it is in a nutshell, as I like to put it, is "MySpace meets Craigslist." That is, like Craigslist each site in the Proper network will have a series of free classified ads, that members of general public can reply to for free; but unlike Craigslist, many of these will come from people who have free accounts at Proper as well, with their own profile you can check out to learn more about them and what else they sell.

Like MySpace, then, both businesses and individuals can have profiles, as well as marking other businesses and individuals as their friends; that way, for example, a cool clothing boutique could sign all their customers up as "friends of the store," and in turn the customers will get instant messages about the latest items for sale at that store. And if you're not a member, those messages about new items simply run as classified ads as well, searchable and sortable right there in the main database. Basically, it's an attempt at doing what a number of small businesses are already doing at MySpace -- that is, awkwardly trying to use a social network as a way of marketing their company -- but in the case of Proper, with an interface specifically designed for small businesses, not dull by any means but also not chaotic either, with definitely a more grown-up feel than the endless badly-designed homepages and blaring MP3s of the former service.

Anyway, I actually did a little video interview with Phil a couple of weeks ago about MetroProper; those of you with Flash Player should be seeing a version above that you can watch this second, or you can click here to go watch it at YouTube. And then the next time I update, I'll actually get into the details of what I've been doing for Proper, and what I'll be doing for them once they open (in a nutshell, being their Web Evangelist). So anyway, that's that for now -- one super-secret freelance client now divulged, one to go!

--So what else? Well, let's see, here's some news that should interest all my fellow "Getting Things Done" dorks of the world; that I've been doing some tweaking lately of my own GTD system, to better handle all the additional responsibilities in my life that have come with CCLaP opening, which is actually the first time in almost two years I've screwed around in any way with my particular system. See, for those who don't know, GTD is this remarkable time-management system invented by a guy named David Allen; it works so well, as a matter of fact, that its adherents sometimes treat it with the reverence of a religion, hence the term "GTD dorks."

I, for example, am one of these members of the Church of Getting Things Done; and I too compile my project lists on a regular basis, like all the other GTD dorks out there, convert them into action lists, review the entire thing once a week and all the rest. As I've been increasing my workload this year, though, I've discovered that there are some things in my life I need to track that simply don't fit into the traditional GTD system very well; say, for example, the increasing amount of small daily activities I'm now trying to get done in my life (like riding my bike at least once a day, drinking at least 32 ounces of water each day, etc), stuff not nearly as important as my other action items but that still need to be paid attention to.

GTD dorks can of course already see the problem -- that tracking those four or five things the traditional way would mean not only having to write them all down again at the beginning of each day, but also having them compete for my attention in my action lists with stuff that's much more important. What I've done, then, is take a cue from ol' Ben Franklin himself, and have created an old-fashioned "Franklin Grid" just like he used to -- where all my daily items are listed as columns at the top, each day of the calendar as its own row to the side. Then throughout the day I can simply put an X next to each daily item I've gotten finished; and then at the end of the day, I give myself a positive 1 for everything I've gotten done and a negative 1 for everything I didn't. And that way I don't even need to calculate what my potential maximum score could be at any given moment; I simply compare my current or long-term score against 0, which is what it'd be if I was getting half of my daily activities done.

And then the other thing I'm discovering is that I'm compiling an ever-growing list of things in my life as well that one day need to get done, but that don't necessarily have the pressing urgency of other projects -- for example, finally getting all my hundreds of CDs, cassettes and vinyl albums finally converted into digital format. And yeah, technically I could track such a thing through my traditional action lists, and in fact used to do so when there weren't a lot of other more pressing things going on in my life; but now there are, and much like my daily activities, I've been finding these low-priority items competing for attention with more pressing issues.

What I've done, then, is to adopt something I've seen mentioned on the various 'lifehacking' websites out there; what's called a "chunk" list, or activities that are best done when one has an entire chunk of free time at their disposal. So say that I suddenly find myself one evening with a 30-minute period of free time, as one TV show I like finishes and it's still another half-hour before another one I like comes on. Instead of sitting there, then, and watching the 30 minutes of crap that network puts on to fill the time, I can instead turn to my chunk list -- and perhaps get a half-hour of CD burning done, or a half-hour of getting my hard drive cleaned up, or a half-hour of old journal archives proofed and edited. It's amazing, I think, how much you can actually get done under such a system; in fact, in just the last couple of weeks I have completely finished three of my chunk activities, things that had been previously sitting around unfinished for a year or more.

The key, just as with GTD in general, is to not forget about any of these things you're trying to get done; that's what the entire GTD system is all about, in fact, is you creating an intuitive reminder system for yourself, one that requires as little maintenance as possible so that you can instead spend your time simply getting things done. And this applies to both my daily and chunk activities as well; which is why I now add them each as one item in my overall GTD action lists, just like anything else I'm trying to get done. And that way, all those little things are still being brought to my attention throughout the day, and are still things I can definitively "finish" and cross off my list; simply that I'm now listing them as two items in my overall GTD system instead of dozens, with me being shuttled off to a different section of my GTD notebook whenever I want to deal with them specifically.

Anyway, such a thing might not work for you in particular; that's the other whole point of GTD, after all, is that you should create a system that specifically works best for you. In the spirit of the GTD community, though, I thought I would share what is working for me these days. Consider yourself now dorkified!

--Okay, and then there's this; that starting Friday, I'm finally getting out of Chicago for the first time since last Christmas, hooray. I mean, sure, it's just St. Louis where I grew up, but still! There is in fact a big family reunion going on in Missouri over the 4th of July weekend this year, that my mom wants me to attend; which is why I'm going down, and am just staying for the 4th as well, since I never do anything for it in Chicago anyway. Oh, and how cool is this? I'm taking my fuckin' Mini with me! That's right; the damn thing is so small, literally the size of four White Castles boxes, that I can simply slip the thing into my luggage and take it with me, with my dad having plenty of old monitors and keyboards to hook up to it once I get there. (Now, whether I get through the airport without being accused of being a terrorist is a whole other issue altogether.) And that's extremely cool, needless to say; that I can bring not only all the stuff I'm working on with me, but also boot into Second Life and let my parents check it out for the first time, let my dad play with Google Earth as well, be able to scan old vinyl albums right into my hard drive and more.

Anyway, I leave on Friday and will be coming back on the 5th; if anyone else is in the St. Louis area and would like to get together, please just let me know. Oh, and speaking of my parents and computers, the two of them are finally getting around themselves to scanning in the dozens of boxes of photos they've collected over the last half a century; it's a huge project, to be frank, especially when you add the thousands of my grandparents' slides that they inherited as well. Anyway, here's a recent scan that dad forwarded on to me, because he thought I'd get a chuckle out of it:

Yes, that's right, that's me at two years old sincerely playing chess, not just randomly pushing pieces around; proving once and for all that for as far back as you want to go, I've been a pretentious little shit. Okay, people? It's not going away anytime soon, I keep telling you that! Much more entertaining, though, at least in my opinion, is the whole look my dad is pulling off in the photo; 28 years old here, in full mod mode, including the pipe and the horn-rimmed glasses, even while living in the middle of the hippie counterculture era (1971 this photo was taken, believe it or not). What a nerd! I love it!

--Oh, and I know I haven't really been mentioning it, but rest assured that I am on my bicycle this summer even more than I was last summer; I've made it a goal to ride at least two miles every day, in fact, and to make at least one trip a week somewhere around eight to ten miles altogether. (That's about 30 minutes of riding each way for me, which is about the longest I can go continuously as a smoker before legitimately losing steam. My bike habits should become much more interesting starting next summer, I think, my first as a non-smoker.) And the city of Chicago, thank God, is just making it easier and easier for people to have an all-bike lifestyle here as well; they've added yet more bike trails since last year, more roadway lanes, are about to try out an experimental bike lane used in the Netherlands that's actually raised a little above street level, and have added twice the staff to the city's special hotline, for calling in cars that are illegally parked in bike lanes. All right! Dude, we're like Battlestar freakin' Galactica here in Chicago; the last lonely band of liberal green refugees, fighting an increasingly conservative and eco-hostile world! I love it!

Of course, I'm a year older as well, which means that the aches and pains from all this riding are coming with just a little more frequency than last summer too. I mean, I'm not complaining; I'm 37 now, after all, plus spent pretty much my entire twenties punishing my body, and so constant stiffness and soreness should be pretty much expected in my life at this point. In fact, I was just thinking about this the other day, about how in many ways it's the soreness that's actually letting me enjoy exercise at this point in my life so much, after spending the majority of my young adult years thinking of exercise as the most ridiculous thing a person could do. See, as I was sitting there one night, limping over to my bed and massaging Ben Gay into my aching calves, I was thinking of the old cliche -- that youth really is wasted on the young, of how effortlessly I could've managed this kind of workout when I was in my early twenties.

But then I realized; well, that's kind of the point, isn't it? When it's literally no effort to do something, then there's no real fun involved either; and why do something when it's not fun, especially when you're in your early twenties and think you're never going to die? The creaks, the aches, that slide into these routines when you get older, are actually the things that make them fun to us fuddy-duddies; because it gives us a concrete, physical sense of accomplishment, of doing something that in other circumstances we couldn't. It's like what I was talking about in my last entry, about the seminal '80s book Flow I've been recently reading; that surprisingly, what we find most enjoyable in life is often quite different than what we find most pleasurable, and that enjoyable activities in many cases afford very few physical pleasures when you're actually going through them.

Flow is such a brilliant book, I'm telling you; anyone into GTD would be completely into it as well, anyone into applying science to philosophy, anyone into the surprisingly complex breakdown of something simple like achieving happiness. Like, here's yet something else I've been thinking about a lot because of Flow; that the opening of CCLaP this month marks not only a radically new part of my life and career, but even a radically new shift of complexity in my entire personality, a paradigm shift into an entirely new person than I was before. See, one of the many things that author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about in Flow is not only achieving this Zen-like state of happiness from each activity one does in life, but how to harmonize all the activities together into one giant state of happiness for an entire life.

All humans, he argues, start with the same basic set of needs in order to have a happy life; to simply survive, to learn about their surroundings, to learn about how to actually get along in the world so that they're not killed or harmed. (And many humans across the world, he claims, in fact never progress past this stage.) If a person does figure this out pretty securely, though, they of course need more complexities to keep themselves satisfied and happy; they start learning about the world around them, in fact, the societies and groups and cliques of the world, their neighborhoods and communities and the ways they tick. This is the period most of us go through during adolescence, Csikszentmihalyi argues; when acceptance by our peers becomes of utmost importance to us, of proving to ourselves that we can fit in with this society of other humans existing around us. And again, he argues, many people never really conquer this stage either, and pretty much spend the rest of their lives reacting to life the same way a typical 16-year-old would.

If you do successfully learn how to peacefully co-exist in society, though, many people again become restless and need yet a more complex set of challenges in order to be happy, such as was the case with me in my mid-twenties, when I first left school and moved to Chicago. A third stage of development then happens, Csikszentmihalyi argues, where a person's focus shifts intensely inwards -- where they spend an extended period of time trying to figure themselves out as well as possible, of where their true beliefs and morals actually complement those of society at large, and where they clash. And by necessity, this is a period when a person can really shut themselves off from a large part of society, or maybe even society as a whole, again much like I did throughout my twenties and early thirties; a necessary period when you're saying, "Look, I feel very different about this issue than the rest of you do, and I know I'm right, and fuck you if you think otherwise because you're wrong and what do you know?" Again, much like I did throughout my twenties and early thirties.

If a person, though, can finally master yet this stage of human development, though, Csikszentmihalyi argues that there is yet another one awaiting; the time when that person gets intensely focused on bringing his community back into his life, of now enfolding all these lessons he knows about life into a larger whole, as a way of helping to provide a better life to a bunch of people at once. And if we take it that Csikszentmihalyi's theory is sound, this would then explain why I started feeling so restless about my life starting in the early 2000s, culminating with me quitting writing as a career in 2004 and starting an arts center instead; because I was coming to the end of my third stage of development during those years, learning the last basic lessons of what makes me tick, itching more now to start applying these lessons to a larger community.

It's no secret that this is precisely what I want to do with CCLaP; that I worked out a way for artists to get free admission to events, for example, because I've been arguing for years over why artists should get free admission to events, and am now finally ready to simply show people how it can be done. I want to take the things I've learned about the arts over the years, and I want to teach other people about them: about how much more fun art appreciation is, for example, when you're doing a little creating yourself; of why you should never perform more than five minutes at an open mic, more than 20 at a feature, or run a show that's over three hours long altogether. It's a question I had at the beginning of this entire process, back in 2004, for those who remember that far back; of whether I'd have what it takes to be a magnanimous, laid-back small-business owner, given that I had spent the majority of my adult life at that point being a drunken, opinionated, fist-fighting blowhard. But now that I'm actually shifting into that role, of being a behind-the-scenes leader and teacher instead of the swaggering cowboy in the spotlight, I find myself really welcoming it, of it being something I'm really looking forward to.

Anyway, like I said, it's an eye-opening book. I highly recommend it to anyone trying to figure out how to add more happiness to their life.

--And finally, and I don't know why I'm even mentioning this, but I've picked up a horrible habit recently -- that every time I get pissed off at random people, I respond to them (in my head) as an arrogant space alien of advanced capabilities. "Does it look like I have room to move for you and your dozen shopping bags, PETTY HU-MON? Your self-absorption will be the end of your weak, ignorant species!" Yeah, I know, it's fucking ridiculous. Welcome to my life. COWARDLY, FOOLISH HU-MONS!