Crushing Krisis

That post was supposed to be about the Marvel Avengers Alliance PvP tournament and how you have to be in the top 1,000 people in the world to win Deadpool for free and how I am currently ranked 1,700 out of TWO MILLION but I am never going to close that 700-person gap between now and tomorrow when it’s over even though I am taking every POSSIBLE shot at this point.

In my head I still know it was about that, but I’d have to draw a effing diagram to explain to you how it wound up being about Wayne Gretzky.

Instead, please accept this rather hilarious comic book cover of Deadpool facing off against an undead Teddy Roosevelt and a hoard of animals – presumably either ones that he hunted or intended to kill but never got around to prior to his death.

Why they are playing for Team Teddy, I don’t understand.

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I know exactly three hockey players by name, and two of them are Flyers. The other, of course, is Wayne Gretzky, who famously said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

(Actually, maybe it was his dad who said it to him? In any event, I enjoy this version: “I learned that 100 percent of the shots you don’t take don’t go in the net.”)

This is one of those maxims that is so crazy obvious that we tend to lose the meaning. Like, duh, if you don’t try it, it will never get done. All of the shirts I never folded will stay unfolded until I fold them.

Except, I think it deserves a little more nuanced than that. It’s not just about taking every possible shot – like, asking every girl out until one says yes. It’s about maximizing your shots … which, in that unfortunate example, means going somewhere where there are a lot more girls.

(Or, maybe asking some of the boys out, too.)

This makes me think about how I play video games. I am a super-defensive player. This can be traced back to my great love of playing Chun Li in Streetfighter through ceaseless hours of turtling in strategy games like and Warcraft. I like avoiding attacks as I chip away at a player’s defense until I am big and bold enough to crush them decisively.

I take plenty of shots, as long as I stay safe while I”m doing it.

It should not come as a shock that I am awesome at playing these games against the computer opponent (hello: only child), but I am not so great at playing against other human beings. The computer isn’t terribly innovative, so my long game tends to work fine in keeping my undefeated, even at the highest difficulty. But, introduce one PVP game of Starcraft into my mix and all of my careful planning goes out the window. I get shredded. Or Zerg rushed. Whatever.

I’m taking every shot I can in my normal play style, so I’m doing Mr. Gretzky proud… right?

No. My play style isn’t meant to maximize wins – it’s meant to minimize damage. It features way less shots. That would be fine if I was a member of a team, but when we’re on our own we’re all playing the same position as Gretzky – center. I can’t afford to just play goalie, praying for shut-out.

The only way to take more shots is to change my entire approach to the game.

Hockey and video games might not be my calling, but when it comes to songwriting, me and Mr. Gretzy see eye-to-eye. It write it ALL down. I take every shot, even if it’s just a single line I’m jotting down, because I’ve seen too many bad one-liners turn into amazing songs to ignore them anymore. I know every song counts, so I stopped being such a perfectionist about it.

I’m a perfectionist in many things, and perfectionists take way less shots. Maybe they never get blocked or intercepted or misunderstood or finish second. Maybe every song is a hit. But, if you write down only the hits, you’ll be missing so many melodies, until you’re not writing down anything at all.

I do not want a life full of empty nets and blank pages.

I am going to take more shots. Defense be damned.

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I’m at my best when I’m on the clock.

That’s not just a euphemism for procrastinating until a deadline. I am consistently, measurably better at getting things done when I consistently measure what I’m getting done.

That’s always been true for me at work, especially starting in 2006 when I flourished like a unruly weed when paired with a project management system that allowed me to track my billable hours. Knowing what my to-do list consists of and how long I spend doing it is a huge motivator for me. I guess it was my own version of  ”gamification” before that became a hip thing to do to everything in your life.

It hasn’t always been as easy to find the same productivity alchemy at home. I always have long-term goals and near-term projects I’m working on, but I don’t exactly have billable hours. Who is there to charge, aside from myself? Left to my own devices I’ll always pick the thing that is the most fun or the most methodical – which works out frequently to rehearsing, occasionally as laundry, and hardly ever as cleaning the bathroom.

I’ve found a website and an app that both nip that occasional path-of-least-resistance listlessness in the bud, but from slightly different directions.

ToDoist: a tasklist website and app

First, there’s ToDoist. I found it over the summer after demoing over a dozen task management systems online to help my wrangle dozens of things I was hoping to get done. Some of the services were no-frills checklists, while others were practically their own personal Outlook installation.

ToDoist falls closer to the former side of the scale – it’s a simply, obvious checklist that allows you to group tasks into projects and set deadlines and priorities.

When I checked out other systems, I discovered the lack of projects and priorities to be a real dealbreaker. If you can’t organize your tasks or give them some sense of order then you might as well be working with a pen and paper – which is cool and all, but I wanted something dynamic that worked from any internet connection as well as on my phone.

ToDoist does the trick, and for a mere $2 a month you can add improved filtering, tagging, searches, and reminders – totally worth it!

ToDoist meant I was actually crossing things off my list of at-home to-dos – awesome! However, it lacked one feature I really treasure about entering billable hours at work – the ability to perform an audit on what I was spending (wasting?) the most time on. I find that’s a useful exercise to undergo both at work and at home to normalize your expectations … like, your commute is always 45 minutes, so stop being so sure you can leave work late and still get home by six!

Timesheet: a time tracker app for Android

I needed a super-straightforward phone app – effectively, just a stopwatch for tasks. I found my match in a free app called TimeSheet.

It’s the perfect tool for a freelancer or home project enthusiast. You can set up multiple projects, each with a client and a billable rate. When you start working you simply start the clock on your project! When you’re done you stop the clock and wind up with a handy task summary that breaks out your billability and allows you to add expenses and notes. You can also add tasks after the fact without the clock, and export your data to Excel.

Is this overkill for a week or two of auditing how I spend my time? A little. But, you don’t have to use all of those features. Heck, you could use it just for one thing you are trying to bring more of in your life, like working on your NaBloPoMo book or mixing your band’s new album.

(Not that I need extra motivation to do either of those.)

(Okay, maybe just a little.)

In just three days I found out that I’m getting way more sleep than I used to, and that my commute takes up a lot more time in aggregate than I realized – so I should find something productive to do while I’m in transit. I also decided I could be spending a minimum of time each day doing other things (a-hem: blogging), so I added projects for those too.

There you have it – two free productivity tools that can help you get a better handle on your time. I’m totally into them both, so hopefully you can find some use for them too.

Now it’s your turn: What productivity tool are you crushing on lately? Is it super-techy, or as simple as a pen and paper?

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I often lament that there is no instruction manual to being a rock band, and one of the areas I most frequently wish Arcati Crisis had some sort of guide to is selecting songs when your band has multiple songwriters.

Ideally, this guide would be written by The Beatles, or maybe Fleetwood Mac. However, Gina would probably not read it if it was written by Wham!

(What is the grammatical rule for punctuating sentences that end with a name that includes punctuation? Like, I didn’t mean that sentence to be exclamatory. I certainly don’t want Gina to think I am shouting (again) about her not liking Wham!)

(There it goes again. Damn you, Wham!)

Lately Gina and I have been on a new-song-selecting kick. It is interesting to pick multiple songs at the same time because we always choose one song from each of us at a time, but there is a huge disparity in the pool of selections. I write a lot of songs – anywhere from 6 to 20 every year – in many different styles. Pop, folk, rock, country ballads. I’m all over the place. Gina writes relatively few songs. There have been years when I have only heard one or two finished ones, even if she has many others lying in wait. Yet, Gina’s songs are much more thematically consistent.

Thus, the selection process is a bit madcap. A few weeks ago, I played twenty-five songs for Gina to select a mere two. I had my preferences, but I have long since learned that it doesn’t do any good to try to force Gina’s hand into a pick. The resulting song will suck. Gina has to hear a space for herself inside of it.

In the midst of reading the monstrous New York cover story on Grizzly Bear, I discovered they utilize nearly the same process.

It is common, Grizzlies! See, this is why we need a guide.

(After reading, I was inspired to listen to Grizzly Bear’s new LP – Shields. It was very well-produced – transfixingly so. Yet, not a single melody was memorable. I felt pretty similarly about their last record.)

(I don’t think my votes would be very popular in their democracy).

By contrast, Gina played me a mere seven songs (a bumper crop, for her), of which I became immediately obsessed with six, so then she had to go back and choose four more of mine. One of hers was about zombies, another about Ben Franklin, a third particularly ingenious one about Daylight Savings Time. It helps that I am a massive fan of Gina’s sensibility in just about everything.

However, there was one I was not obsessed with. Gina also played it for me earlier this year, and at the time I said I thought it might not be done. I made the same argument a few weeks ago. “Maybe it needs more of a refrain,” I said, “or a slightly different chord change in that middle section.”

Now I realize – after Grizzly Bear so succinctly summed up the democracy of songwriting – that there is simply no room for my fingerprint on the song. It is distinctly Gina, with very little room left for my own devices. I am trying to convince her to change it to make room for my fingerprint, but it doesn’t really need it.

How is it that I have always understood that about Gina’s choices in my songs, but never about my choices of hers?

See: we really need an instruction manual.

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I sprained my left ankle this summer.

(Have I really not mentioned that? It feels like all my life has been about for months. Remember when we could say these things on our blogs without fear that they would not be later hoovered up in a Google search of our lives as proof we have some kind of pre-existing condition?)

I don’t know how I sprained it. All I know is that I uncharacteristically spent the prior day walking around in flip flops. Clearly they ought to carry some sort of warning label.

Anyway.

After a miserable day of limping around my office I did all of the things you are supposed to do: ice, heat, keeping it wrapped, staying off it. I am a good patient, even when I’m not under a doctor’s care.

Except, it never got better. Not really. I kept limping around, hobbling up stairs. And, forget about anything active. The gym went by the wayside, and I had to turn down summer hikes and camping with friends.

My life began synonymous with my left ankle being in pain if I did anything other than sit still. I started doing a lot more sitting still. And, yes, I did eventually go to the doctor – who agreed that I was definitely in pain, but did not have much else to offer me.

I am very, very blessed with good physical health, and I’ve never had to endure any kind of pain for more than a week or two. And, honestly, this is a silly joke compared to the chronic pain many people – my friends! – endure every day of their lives. They, too, get a reminder with every step.

On Monday, in the midst of filling bathtubs and buckets during Hurricane Sandy, I realized my ankle hadn’t bothered me all day. Maybe it’s the anxiety, I surmised. But, I couldn’t help but smile about taking the stairs at my normal speed as I ferried my buckets around the house.

It felt fine on Tuesday, too. Yesterday I wore a pair of boots to work I haven’t worn in months. I smiled down at them all day.

Now, on day four of being pain free, I think it’s safe to say my ankle is all better. I kind of want to go on a celebratory jog. More than that, it means this is my first pain-free week in months. I didn’t realize the psychological effect of that. I’ve been hearing for weeks that I don’t seem like “my normal energetic self.”

I don’t know how people with chronic pain ever wear a smile, let alone act like their energetic selves, normal or not. I just had a bit of low grade ankle pain and I became a miserable shut-in.

I think I may do a lot of skipping today.

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E and I saw Heart at the Tower Theatre on Friday, a classic-rock date night sequel to our spur-of-the-moment decision to see the Pretenders a few years ago.

I don’t adore the entire Heart catalog like I adore that of The Pretenders, but I do love a great number Heart songs – especially from their first three albums. That acoustic-driven galloping rock is definitely in the lineage of Arcati Crisis; I’ve always been fascinated that Gina isn’t a particular fan, given her similarities in writing and performance to the Wilson sisters.

Of course, those Heart albums were all before my time. My actual introduction to the band was most like the video to “These Dreams” in 1986, which to me at the time might have plausibly seemed as though it came from the Labyrinth soundtrack.

Don’t worry, I won’t subject you to the entire video.

I was always confused by Heart on Casey Casem’s count down, because in their videos they were made up just like the big-haired rocker guys I was so bored by … except, these were… women? I felt like I should have liked them, but this was in their “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You” period, a song Ann Wilson won’t even sing today, so could you blame me for not liking them?

Yet, these were also the acoustic-rockers who spawned hits like “Barracuda” and “Crazy on You.” What gives?

I read Heart’s new memoir Kicking and Dcreaming overnight on Friday, and it explained the peculiar duality of the band. Heart nearly dissolved when they left CBS Records imprint Portrait in 1982, and when they reformed for Capitol records they began performing songs by other writers in an attempt to fit in on rock radio. It brought them their greatest success – including their first number one single, “These Dreams,” one of their few songs with Nancy Wilson singing lead.

I’ve always been obsessed with the song, but the synthesizer- and reverb-drenched original never really sounded right to me. Back in college while I was trolling through the CD racks at Tower Records I noticed a peculiar lone title in the W section – Live at McCabe’s Guitar Shop by Nancy Wilson?

That Nancy Wilson? I picked up the case an examined the track list and, LO AND BEHOLD, it included an acoustic version of “These Dreams”! But, it was $18 – far too rich for my blood when it came to CDs.

(Oh, the quaint stories of being a music fan in early 2000s.)

I eventually did buy the album, after picking up those early Mushroom and Portrait LPs with the encouragement of my old colleague Alex. I’ve never been one for those Capitol albums, though. Their stadium rock sound also mean that Nancy’s acoustic leanings were muffled and later altogether drowned out.

Happily, that wasn’t the end of Heart – in the past decade they’ve refocused on their old-school sound with a bluesy tinge on three solid studio albums.

That also means that on tour they’ve reclaimed some of their excessive 80s hits. On Friday they brought me to tears with an acoustic version of “These Dreams” with Nancy on mandolin that flowed directly into an acoustic and piano duet on “Alone.”

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I am not getting larger – my clothes are shrinking.

This does not sound like an Occam’s Razor sort of solution to the button-busting problem of my too-tiny garments. Logic dictates that I probably gained a few pounds at the wrong places. The systematic shrinking of all of my clothing by a single size is probably not the answer.

This sent me into a paroxysm of obsessive weight-checking. I would catch my sneaky body gaining a pound like catching a kid with his hand in the candy dish. I would also keep my hand out of the candy dish.

Nothing. I actually lost a pound, sans candy dish. So, lesson learned, on that front.

I was stumped, and also barely squeezing into my jeans. So, I went with my gut (oh, the puns) and called the plumber. I’ll mention that our plumber already thinks I am a little crazy – he’s the one that put a new spigot on the side of the house after I crashed the car into the old one.

“I know there is no cold water,” I explained on the phone to his service, “because I cannot fit into any of my clothes. Also, they all steam when they come out of the wash.”

That’s what the plumber and I discussed yesterday while the washer spun empty, bone-dry circles on the cold cycle.

“Looks like it’s not getting any cold,” he said.

“Yup,” I replied.

“But there is cold coming out of the wall.”

“Really?”

“Yup,” he replied.

“So why isn’t the washer using it?”

“Good question.”

I feel relieved and empowered by this revelation. I was not growing, for real for real. My clothes were shrinking – for sure. Now I’m wondering what other unobvious, Occam-defying explanations for problems in my life I have been dismissing in favor of the most likely answer.

However, there’s still the matter of half of my clothes no longer fitting me.

“Hey,” he said, as he reconnected a hose to the port on our wall, “how’s that new spigot working out for you?”

“It’s great.” I paused. “Actually knowing I have a few extra inches on that side of the driveway makes it easier to pull the car. I’m not as worried about hitting it, so I just do the whole thing better.”

See?

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