You forget what you meant when you read what you said

Have you ever been inside my mind? No? Lucky you. It's a rat's nest of a mess in there. Disorganization reigns, distraction is a constant threat, and there's a huge block between what I want to do and what I actually do. This last part is more severe than you might think, and further stories would only end with you looking at me in disbelief and exclaiming, "You idiot!"

In a nutshell (note there may be actual nutshells lodged in my brain that cause my problems), I'm not a very organized person, but I desperately want to be. I've tried a number of organization techniques, and with my new job heavy on the management side, I need to get a technique to stick. So far, I'm going with a combination of Simple GTD and Google Docs, but the Docs in particular are already becoming unwieldy. It's still working, but I wonder for how long. It's all fine and well to try to keep lists and references at the ready, but then keeping your to do lists updated is another thing to do.

So while you're already distracted by this post from doing whatever else you were doing, lemme axe you this: what do you do to stay organized? Do you just trust yourself to remember everything that you need to do, a feat that I consider nothing short of super-human? Or are you a lists type? Any particular software? Do you keep a habitual daily schedule and only stray when you absolutely need to?

If you prefer to stay only mildly distracted, ignore these questions and return to your previous state of quiet and/or bedlam.

Water, water everywhere, but not a drop for free

One of the strange games I play with myself is called...well, it doesn't really have a name, but the boringly descriptive one would be, "What Would Someone From The Past Think?" The rules are self-explanatory, but I'll explain for them anyway: you wonder (without ever getting an answer, obviously) what if a person from the past were suddenly time-warped and dropped in today's world with no other information than the year, what would they would think of various things.

I wonder if someone from 200 years ago was dropped in the middle of Washington DC if they would be amazed at the smell of the air, and if it would be terrible for them or much improved. They almost certainly would be struck dumb by the noise. I wonder if someone from 100 years ago would be unbelieving that football was more popular than baseball. And I'm sure all of the technology would seem absolutely incredible to them, but would it be in a way that they never could have possibly seen coming, or would it seem like a logical (though fascinating) evolution? For instance, if we could go 200 years in the future and find that there are large cities on the moon, we wouldn't really be that surprised, but we sure as hell would want to see them.

This game has popped up in my head often over the last few weeks, as my office has moved into the soul-sucking, spirit-crushing confines of Crystal City. In the first few days, I didn't trust that the water in our office was filtered (long, uninteresting story), so I was buying bottled water, and besides discovering that the cost of bottled water varies very widely (20oz is $1.50 at some places, while you can get a liter for .25 less than that at others), I stopped to wonder what a person from even 50 years in the past would think of this bottled water development. Most likely, they would think something like this:

"The water coming out of the pipes is so bad you won't even drink it?! People in the future BUY water?! Why?! And it costs HOW MUCH?! You pay as much for water as you do for Coke?! The future is so horrible and dangerous that even water is untrustworthy! Take me home!"

Then we'd explain the internet to them and take a tour through the hundreds of channels we have on TV and they'd collapse in amazed exhaustion, but the water questions would remain.

From the pages of Cheeba Connoisseur

If pot was made legal, would it become something that people would cultivate refined tastes for, like fine wines? Would collectors and aficionados meet in exclusive clubs in their smoking jackets and cashmere turtlenecks to compare kinds of marijuana and look down on those who don't have such heightened, sophisticated tastes?

What I'm really thinking about is if it would become something in movies that immediately shows that the smoker is someone with worldly appetites, like giving a tour through an extensive wine cellar. And more specifically, would we marvel at the sophistication as a tuxedoed, English-accented 007 villain says with a knowing smirk, "Well, Mr. Bond, I think you'll find our villa quite to your liking," as he fires up a gold-plated ivory bong? Then James Bond could steal the secret plans as the villain lay on the couch with a bag of Skittles saying, "Bond. Bong. Bong. Bond."

And before one of you smart asses asks: no, I'm not stoned. This is from a sober mind. Which, of course, is much more worrying.

These berries will kill you

A recent resolution of mine is to become bearded and fat. Having accomplished the former in a week, I set out to the grocery store last night with the goal of helping along the latter. Seeing as how I already had a bottle of wine and an Italian sausage at home, I chose a package of three cheese (three cheeses! Only in America!) tortellini and a jar of "cabernet marinara". That's right: I cook by opening packages. Have you seen my kitchen? Imagine a small closet and halve it. There's not room for fancy cookin'.

So I'm standing over the stove, cooking up the sausage, and as I sit there watching the raw animal flesh turn from gooey to golden brown, I think: Yeah, I'll need to make sure this gets cooked thorougly. And then I thought this: how did they figure out how much to cook it? How many people died after saying, "No, no...it's best to eat it raw" before they figured out how long you should cook sausage? And how did they even come up with the idea of making sausage in the first place?

I flashed back to an Australian TV show that I used to watch when I was in England called Bush Tucker Man. It was about a guy from the Australian commandos who knew everything there was to know about what was edible in the Australian outback. He could make crawfish trap out of twigs, he knew which trees had edible bark and which berries wouldn't kill you. And besides thinking he was a total badass, I wondering how many thousands of years it took for the original aboriginals to figure all that out, only to have some army recruit share the secrets with the world.

But here's a secret to share: my lazy-bachelor feast was mind-blowingly delicious, and I would just like to thank those people that got really sick before me so that I could make such a great feast. Thanks.

The bucks of food

Maybe someone with a better grounding in economics can explain this one to me...

We've all been at a restaurant, ordering, say, a bowl of Cafe Asia's delicious fried rice, which only costs about 8 dollars. The dish comes out and your first reaction is one of absolute horror. It's HUGE. You think you might have to put on some climbing gear to get to the top of it. You wonder if they made a mistake and thought you asked for "The Gutbuster". You wonder if your recent slight weight gain was noticed by the kitchen staff who thought, "He's a hungry boy. Give him double."

But what I wonder is this: Couldn't the kitchen cut the portion by at least a quarter, still giving the patron an American-sized amount of food, but still charge the same? It would still be a huge portion, enough for two meals, and I can't imagine anyone would look at it and think, "That's what my eight dollars gives me?!" They would still tuck in without thinking about it, be stuffed at the end, and the restaurant would profit off of using less food. Not nearly as much food gets wasted, the customer isn't over-fed, and the restaurant makes more money. Who doesn't this benefit?!

See? This is the shit I think about.

Framed!

I have a new theory. It's a theory that's still in its infancy, so it could be disproven easily, but so far, I haven't found any exceptions. The theory comes in two parts, is about people displaying pictures on and around their desk at work, and it goes a little something like this:

• People that put pictures of themselves with friends on their desk will choose a picture that is especially flattering to them, regardless of how terrible their friends look in the picture.

• People that put pictures of themselves with their spouses or sigificant others will choose a picture that is especially flattering to their spouse/s.o., regardless of how unflattering it is to them.