7 Ways to Procrastinate NOW

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Maybe it’s due to the extreme heat we’ve been enduring here in the Deep South, but I’ve been working overtime thinking about what else I can put off until tomorrow.

I’ve done an incredible job of avoiding the keyboard this week, and right now that’s how I earn my living--or attempt to.  We also have a hobby farm and a million chores associated with that, and I’ve delayed most of those as well.  It was only when I saw that temps were climbing steadily to 105 degrees that I finally decided to harvest the cool crops in our garden.  Ahem. 

So now that I’ve become a SME (subject matter expert) in the art of procrastination, I thought I’d share some of my favorite techniques for putting off what really needs to be done NEXT:

1.   Cook something that necessitates that you hang around in the kitchen.  I baked bread  and pretended to be watching to make sure my husband didn’t slam the kitchen door.

2.   Wash and dry all your laundry.  Now this is a drastic choice, but you will have the most wrinkle-free laundry ever if you sit by the dryer until it buzzes.  (You can repeat this process all day if you have procrastinated sufficiently on beginning this chore.)

3.   Ignore all your own work by helping someone else with theirs.  I used up a couple of days recently helping my husband with his auction business.



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4.   Orchestrate your own panic attacks by frequently revisiting how much you are not getting done.

5.   Sit down to make to-do lists and goal spreadsheets and immediately let your ADD/ADHD send you into another room in search of something that you can’t seem to find/remember.  Wander aimlessly.



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6.   Focus on your guilt and let that spiral into a mountain of negative self-talk, which will completely paralyze you.

7.   And my absolute favorite way to procrastinate:  Write (or read?) a useless blog about procrastination! J

What are your favorite ways to procrastinate?  I’d love to hear them NOW J. 

Marianne M. Smith
Writer At The Ranch
Making You Look Brilliant One Word At A Time
http://writerattheranch.com
wordsmith@writerattheranch.com

Three Hours in a Dead Woman’s House

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Sometimes I do strange things.  This week I found myself in a dead woman’s house for three hours.  Before you call the authorities, please let me explain.  My husband is an auction agent, and was holding an open house for the woman’s estate so that online auction items could be personally inspected before bidding began.

I went with him so that I could help with phone callers while he dealt with people who walked in.  “What size is the coat?” someone asked me.  Suddenly I’m trying on the dead woman’s fur so I can answer.  I counted place settings of her silverware for another caller.  I measured her bed for someone else.

Now I know possessions don’t define us, but they do tell a bit about who we are.  I’m very attached to family things, but this woman had no family left.  The proceeds of her estate are being donated to her favorite charitable foundation.

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Framed pictures of her and her husband together were being sold, most likely for the value of the frames, and this made me melancholy.  I wandered her house and wondered about who she was, what she liked, and what her life was like.  I knew her husband had died a few years earlier, but little else.

I found some clues in the house.  She had no children, but she collected life-like dolls.  Her husband was once a soldier, and she saved things related to his service.  There were at least four rooms in her house dedicated to conversations.  I’m guessing she liked connecting with people.

I met a neighbor who knew her, but who was hoping that I knew her better.  She mentioned how frail the couple was, and how it seemed to take forever for them to answer the door.

Why I found this whole experience to be so personally moving I can’t really say, but it definitely was.  Even now I keep walking through her house in my mind, thinking about this woman I never knew.  I don’t mean to be invading her privacy, or making judgments of any kind.  But I felt love and kindness in that house, and also a compelling sense of aloneness (which probably belongs to me).

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Maybe that is what is disturbing me:  We are ultimately alone.  I’ve lost much of my own family already, and I know that this experience reopened some of that.  (Then again, has it ever really been closed?)

I realize I’m writing in a vacuum, but if I actually knew this woman, it wouldn’t be the same story.  People come and go and their things get scattered.  Sometimes their stories are told, and sometimes they are quietly kept.

Have you ever had an experience like this?  Please feel free to leave a comment.

Marianne M. Smith
Writer At The Ranch
Making You Look Brilliant One Word At A Time
http://writerattheranch.com
wordsmith@writerattheranch.com

Garden Humor

Photo by Marianne M. Smith

Maybe it’s because we’re making a potting bench from pallets this week, but I’ve been giggling a lot in the garden.

No matter how serious life gets, I find that it’s easy to regain my sense of humor in our garden.  Perhaps it’s because I get grounded (no pun intended, really!), or it could be the fresh air and the sense of freedom I feel while hanging out with the plants; somehow things just seem lighter outside.

Whether you like quirky garden gnomes or whimsy less traveled, consider adding something to your garden that makes you chortle.  If others laugh, too, that’s an added bonus.  Most visitors love to find something totally unexpected while exploring your garden.  But install something that makes YOU smile every time you see it.  And when the grins wear off, try something new.  It makes all the hard work of serious gardening a little less daunting.

Photo by Marianne M. Smith

And while we’re being silly, how about some garden humor?

Why do melons have fancy weddings? Because they cantaloupe.  

What do you call a country where people only drive pink cars? A pink carnation.

   

"I do not like broccoli.  And I haven't liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I'm President of the United States and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli."
        -  George Bush, U.S. President, 1990

"My wife's a water sign.  I'm an earth sign.
        Together we make mud."
        -  Rodney Dangerfield   
     

Ok, I’ll stop!  But be sure to bring a little fun into your landscape!  Hope you’ll share your favorite garden humor.  Please feel free to leave a comment or shoot me an email.

Photo by Marianne M. Smith

Thanks to these two sources for the gardening jokes:
http://home.golden.net/~dhobson/Jokes.html
http://www.gardendigest.com/humor.htm

Marianne M. Smith
Writer At The Ranch
Making You Look Brilliant One Word At A Time
http://writerattheranch.com
wordsmith@writerattheranch.com

Outdated Words, Grammar, and Formatting, Oh My!

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My husband was reading me a bio from a magazine and it mentioned that this individual was “an ombudsman.”  “Isn’t that kind of an outdated term?” I asked.  That led to a whole discussion of how words become obsolete, and even get ditched from the dictionary.

And then, of course, there are the neologisms—words that are in common usage but haven’t made it into the dictionary yet.  (No accident that neologisms are also defined by psychiatrists as nonsensical words made up by the disturbed!)  And just in case this isn't enough, we have tons of emerging words to go along with e-everything and social media.

After painstakingly learning all the basic grammar back in 1968, I thought that I was done.  Finished.  Complete.  Grammar has always been emotionally loaded for me, since I was taught by overzealous nuns who were convinced that correct rocket diagramming was part of their spiritual experience.

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And now I find that the rules have changed.  When I sent the first draft of my book in for editing recently, I found out just how much!  Even formatting is different.  When I learned typing from my hero, Dan Wortham, I was taught that there were two blank spaces after every period.  No more.  Now only one is acceptable.  But see, I can’t quit doing it!  I even read recently that editors and recruiters can correctly “age identify” a writer by how they use grammar, and yes, by how they type.  Accccccccck!  (But we’ll save ageism for another blog post--if I can remember, that is.)

 Vocabulary, grammar, and formatting are difficult enough without having to constantly adjust to new trends and rules, or the lack thereof (Oops, I believe thereof is now obsolete!).

So what’s an old curmudgeon (also dropping out of the dictionary soon) like me to do?  I’m constantly consulting with Grammar Girl, Grammar Monkeys, and other sordid (another archaic word?) characters.  The nuns would NOT approve.  But a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.  Unless of course, she could find an ombudsman.

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Have you had similar experiences with changing language and grammar rules?  I’d love to be less alone.  Please feel free to leave a comment with fresh words J.

Marianne M. Smith
Writer At The Ranch
Making You Look Brilliant One Word At A Time
http://writerattheranch.com
wordsmith@writerattheranch.com

 

Why You Shouldn’t Struggle



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What could be easier?
What could be lighter?
What could be softer?
How does it feel?

These questions are part of the teaching philosophy of Trager, a bodywork method that is ridiculously simple yet brings about profound results.  I had the privilege of taking a Trager training many years back, and found myself reconsidering Trager concepts just this week.

Struggle begets more struggle.  I’ll give you a light, practical example.  I’ve been trying to learn to play an F chord on guitar since I was 12. Mind you, I frequently get frustrated and quit guitar practice altogether.  Recently, I traded a donkey for a nice Martin guitar (if you missed that story, click here); it’s inspired me to practice again.  Last week I ran across a YouTube video of a young boy demonstrating a “cheater” F chord.  While practicing this week, I sat my guitar down and went back to my computer to find that video.  For some reason, I couldn’t locate the video feed.  So I thought to myself, “Hey! How hard can this be?”  I found another video on the non-cheater F chord and got the hang of it in just a few minutes.  I’m now convinced that the difference was my mind-set:  I was looking for easy.

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That’s not to say that hard issues are made airy-fairy simply by applying these “easier, lighter, softer” concepts.  But when things are difficult for us, we generally close down and shut down.  Or we try harder and harder until we feel like we might just implode.  As a culture, we’ve been taught to “try again” and “never give up.”  But sometimes that can be counterproductive.  Our struggling only makes us more “stuck” and less resilient.

When we are facing difficulties, we create more struggle and more drama.  In our current economy, the answer is not always to power through.  Many of us who have been laid off have created new freelance careers, or taken some time to chase a dream that we couldn’t justify earlier.

And if we kept running down the same rabbit hole (looking for non-existent jobs, perhaps?), we might never relax into something new and lucrative.  If you’ve got your back against the wall, I do understand your skepticism.  But if what you’re doing (repeating the struggle) isn’t working, I’d challenge you to try something easier, lighter, and softer.  What do you have to lose except the experience of pushing the rock up the hill, only to watch it fall down again?

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Next time you want to beat your head against the wall, just ask yourself:  What do I want instead of this?  What could be easier, lighter, or softer?  You might be surprised by the answers.

Have you ever relaxed into success?  I’d love to hear about it.  Feel free to leave a comment here or shoot me an email.

Marianne M. Smith
Writer At The Ranch
Making You Look Brilliant One Word At A Time
http://writerattheranch.com
wordsmith@writerattheranch.com