“the void in your mind when you forget to do something because you’re so overwhelmed”
It’s been that kinda few weeks where one gets sucked into the suck of the web. I’m Canadian, I have a lot of hope, but man… that hope is being tested for sure. I think we need to come up with some other name for doom scrolling… it’s not so much doom as WTF.
I’ve been trying to pick the pieces up from my last weeknotes. I had a nice hiatus celebrating my Wife’s Birth Week ( yup a whole week here, full of zany 3yr & 6yr old ideas for how to celebrate ). Topping off with a great no-kids bday party which opened a window just a little bit in my immune system for me to then be smote down by some good awful bug. One that taunts you be being healthy just enough during the day to try and work or feel really guilty for not, and then when the sun sets, the beast is released in a rage of heat and chills.
So, in the end, those pieces I’ve been trying to pick up off the ground, pieces of my ego, hope, drive… ya, those are mostly still on the ground being gently shuffled over by a dirty slipper to make a path to my bed.
You know, sometimes you start the day tripping over something in the dark trying to get up quietly no to wake anyone up. Then you bang around and the whole house is awake?
That feels like the beginning of my year.
I’m not going to jinx it, because I remember that on those day’s, while it take a bit, I do get some semblance of recovery.
Missions
My weeknotes for work ( I do them on an internal blog ) was about setting missions. I used to do Chris Brogans 3 Words. But right now, that seems much to much. I’m going to focus a but more low key on smaller missions this year. What’s my mission today? this week? Nothing more, nothing longer.
The goal, if I choose to accept, is simply complete the mission.
Is work not that into me?
One mission I have is to get people at work sharing. There’s something about our communication that feels too silent for a relatively small, all remote, growth stage company.
Part of the difficulty of working all remote, is something you feel like “they just aren’t that into me”. Which most of the time that’s not the case. Silence, when you don’t want it, is probably the hardest part of remote working. You go a bit zany. The more asynchronous communication processes you can instill, can help with those moments.
Right now, I’m feeling it.
And I want to fix it.
Designing my life
My outside work mission? To get into the drivers seat to design my life. There’s a few exercises I’m stuck on, but one foot in front of the other. I’ll get there. I’m saying it out loud on a blog on the internet, so it must come true – By the end of the year I’ll be prototyping and experimenting with life idea’s.
This week has been health and family first. The rest can wait.
I’ve had several conversations over the course of the week that have me thinking about repackaging a couple idea’s into an upcoming post:
The Literaty – the idea that there will always be a deep underground group of active readers.
Proficiently Literate – that as the US drop below 50% proficiently literate, what’s going to happen?
The rise of government during the rise of literacy = the reduction of oligarchy as literacy rises. What happens in the other direction?
I want to learn more about serfdom. I have a feeling there’s something in there that has some parallels to what we’re seeing in the world. I just can’t put my finger on it.
I tell my kids this all the time. This week I made the mess. Long story short, with Power Pages and Power Platform I was given the choice of “blue door” and “blue door” and I investigated, thought I experimented and when it came to click and squint…. I picked the wrong “blue”.
When doing so, it brought in a flood of things into the “solution” we didn’t want.
Clean up was just as slow. Do you want to remove the purple thing or the purple thing. Luckily, I was able to find a way ( through a series of 4 clicks… over and over… ) which which was which.
The Team Onion
Read The Team Onion this week in search of more comms ideas for the day job. I bought it right before postal strike, I was the silly one who picked “regular mail”.
I thought I would never read it, but today, I finally got the book!
It’s one of these things that deceptively simple, but breaking down has some very interesting applications.
Time to throw it against the company wall, and see if it sticks.
In, Ong’s, Orality & Literacy, I have to admit for me, “Agonistically toned” was one of the lesser argued characteristics. Perhaps it’s because his use of laser specific language; it’s name has more punch? It sure wasn’t the generic references to old plays and stories such as Iliad, Beowulf, and The Mwindo Epic.
What is agonistic?
Not agnostic. Not antagonist. To the dictionary!
2. Argumentative
3. Striving for effect
4. Relating to, or being aggressive or defensive social interaction between individuals usually of the same species 1
While “Argumentative” maybe a doomsday definition you may lean toward, it’s also “striving for effect.” What Ong continued to point out, is it is also about being boastful; peacocking and bloating chests.
Bragging about one’s own prowess and/or verbal tongue-lashings of an opponent figure regularly in encounters…
Based off the old plays, this may seem oddly over the top and, perhaps to literate society, could come across as “insincere, flatulent, and comically pretentious.”
Recently Agonistic
Rap battles are a great example of agonistic tone. Two rappers slinging saturated, insults at each other while making themselves larger than life. But what else in modern culture could be considered agonistically toned?
Here’s a quick list of other recent examples
Every “character” in a reality TV show
The more questionable Minecraft YouTube show hosts my son sneaks
Every Xitter post from it’s owner
The 45th, now, 47th US President-Elect
Good or Bad?
What I find interesting about this characteristic is, Ong, is careful not to say an oral culture is simply agonistic, but agonistically toned. Meaning that while they sounded agonistic, they may not physically be.
Reading Orality & Literacy, there is attention to stay unbiased, to have no opinion on better or worse between literate and oral culture. While others might exclude “tone” from the characteristic and go towards tribalism and the darker natures of our past coming back; while perhaps Ong had a personal opinion, he gently stays out of that fight.
Does a highly agonistically tonned society lead to agonistic behaviour2? Could there be a future where Agonism is everywhere?
Note: I’m not sure what “usually of the same species” has to do with anything. But sure, we’ll go with it. ↩︎
Ah… that explains the specific species language. Many of the studies are not on humans. ↩︎
I’ll admit – I’m struggling a bit. Which is expected with the B-Day coming up. I spin into a well every year questioning everything, wondering where I’ve been and where I’m going.
