The Savvy Life

It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan. - Eleanor Roosevelt

If only I had every minute I spent looking around my apartment and my life wishing it was better organized, less cluttered, and purposeful. All that time could have just as easily been turned back into developing a plan on how to create organization, eliminate clutter, and have purpose. A plan guides action so the action isn’t wasted. A plan might help indicate areas of inefficiency, or stumbling blocks in the process.

Sometimes creating the plan itself is a trying process, but one very simple method is to jot down a simple definition of how each area of the living space is to be used.  For example, I love to cook, so my plan as it stands is to focus on making my kitchen more efficient and better able to store the staples of cooking.  Even with this simple plan in mind, I am able to better address the organization.  Since my goal isn’t to make it look pretty, I can do things that aren’t aesthetically pleasing but are pragmatic for the chore of cooking.

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, “and go till you come to the end; then stop.” - Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)

Where to start is one of the hardest decisions to make when the goal is a full scale makeover of a living environment and the life that goes with it. The first thing to do is establish the priorities. Is there one area or another that is crying out for attention? Is the kitchen close to condemnation? Would Mom find the bathroom offensive? Is there little distinction between dirty laundry and clean laundry? Speaking of necessary distinctions, are the floors distinguishable from the ground outside? What about odors? Is there a lingering not-so-fresh scent that might indicate something is rotting in the couch? Identifying the key problems helps in developing a plan of attack.

Order is never observed; it is disorder that attracts attention because it is awkward and intrusive. - Eliphas Levi

It may be hard to determine the key problem areas. Consider the areas that play heavily on the mind. The areas that draw attention are quite possibly the areas in need of organizing, cleaning, or something. This trick works best when, unlike my apartment, the living space is mainly in an ordered state with only some adjustments needed to get it all aligned. This tip also helps in identifying areas to focus on during weekly cleaning.

I’m not fortunate enough to have this problem regarding my living space, but it does happen with my life. Like right now I spend a lot of time thinking about a friend of mine whom I’ve neglected to call for a long time. When I look over my entire life, while there are a lot of things I need to fix, this is standing out. This bit of social neglect on my part is causing me the greatest anxiety and needs to be addressed before all else.

I know that if I don’t, all other successes I have fixing everything else will be dwarfed by this huge failing.

We adore chaos because we love to produce order. - M. C. Escher

Last weekend I found a tiny bookcase in the alley behind my apartment. One of the benefits of living in Chicago is people throw out furniture all the time. The tiny bookcase was too small to really help do anything for my books, DVDs, or stuff like that, but it was perfect for putting in this area in my kitchen that is underused. I took several of my appliances that don’t get used often, like my blender, toaster, and coffee maker and put it on the shelf. I also emptied my cupboards which are in short supply to free up space for the items I use every day. So the cans of pureed tomatoes, cartons of oatmeal, and all sorts of other stuff got relegated to the bookcase. Since the location is slightly inconvenient, I had to make sure I didn’t put anything I use often there. Without all the appliances cluttering my main counter I find I have the workspace to do more things. Creating that order out of the chaos was remarkable and was so rewarding that I really wanted to create order in other places of my apartment, which led me to this whole sorting out my life thing.

Find a quick victory and it will fuel the desire to continue.

The trouble with organizing a thing is that pretty soon folks get to paying more attention to the organization than to what they’re organized for. - Laura Ingalls Wilder

I know I’ve misappropriated this quote but I felt it was quite apt to the process of organizing my life.

In creating order out of chaos, it is important to remember the purpose for doing it. Having a neat and ordered kitchen means I can step into it and begin creating almost immediately without first having to look for the right tools, clean the dishes I need, clear off a work space, or wonder if I have all the right ingredients. The same goes for my desk. Getting it organized and cleared up isn’t just to make it look pretty for guests, but so I can actually use it for the purpose for which it is designed. Nothing is more annoying to me than sitting down at my desk, reaching to get a book or paper and having a cascade of crap that I’ve piled up fall behind the desk. I do know people who focus so much on keeping things neat and tidy that entire rooms sit unused for fear of creating any sort of muss and fuss. I’m sorry, but I’m not wealthy enough to devote square footage to a showcase room. I live a pragmatic yet hedonistic life, which means I need to use my space and ideally have such usage be a pleasurable experience.

I often will walk through office supply stores and become enamored with bins, crates, and all sorts of things that I convince myself will solve all my organizational problems. The tools of organization do not create an organized life. In fact, getting too many of them means they are something else that will need to be organized. Also, I find that I use the ‘tool thing’ as an excuse not to organize. I will convince myself I need a label maker to do a project correctly, conveniently ignoring that a sharpie and masking tape is a perfectly acceptable labeling system.

The topic of untangling the complexity of life has been one that I’ve been struggling with lately.  It isn’t something I’ve mastered and is definitely something I want to get done.  Everything from how I keep and clean my apartment, to maintaining relationships, how I do my job, to my finances, and my health all need to be sorted out and properly managed.  I thought that this sort of project is exactly the kind of thing that deserves to be blogged, yet, I struggle with the idea of how to start.

I was blessed today with two great starting points.  The first comes from Threadbangers Decor It Yourself on Cleaning Your Closet.  Now this episode of this video show was released awhile ago, but I don’t keep up on the vidcasts as much as podcasts, so it is just happenstance that I watched it this morning.  The general concept of cleaning out your closets is to first empty your closets.  This is also the way the show Clean Sweep makes people deal with cleaning out the junk in their houses.

Once the closet is empty, the next step is sorting.  What wasn’t covered in the vidcast I linked to is the important element of getting rid of the stuff that is no longer used or needed.

The other fortuitous bit of information that came my way today is from The Simple Dollar on Making and Maintaining a Master Information Document.  For the last couple weeks I’ve been morbidly considering what would happen if I up and died.  I’m in my late 30’s no family who lives nearby, no significant other, no one that is established within my life who would know what all I have and what to do with it.  Then I realized that I right now don’t know what to do with all of my stuff.  Now I’m not talking about just the physical stuff, but the financial stuff and the simple commonplace stuff as well.

The article is brief but touches upon all the important elements I know I need to consider.

Using both of these projects, closet cleaning and Master Information Document creation, I think I have a good start on which threads to start pulling in order to untangle my life and begin the process of sorting it all out.

Every good relationship starts with good communication.  Or at least it sounds good to say that but it may not be the case.  A recent research study performed by researchers at Indiana University, examined almost 300 undergraduates of both sexes to determine their ability to detect sexual interest.  They were shown 280 photographs of women and were asked if the expression on the woman’s face was friendly, sexually interested, or rejecting.

Oddly enough, men often mistook friendly for sexually interested and sexually interested as friendly.

What does this mean to us men?  It means that when that woman we are friends with is acting like she is into us, she probably isn’t.  I have a lot of female friends who get frustrated that all their guy friends want to suddenly date and get upset over the fact that they received ‘mixed signals’.  Yeah, no mixed signals, they were just being friendly.

More to the point, it is critical for a man who wants to enter the world of dating and have some sense of accomplishment to understand the nuances of body language.  Calling some elements of body language ‘nuance’ is a complete understatement.  The following is a quick guide to body language:

1. She is looking at you.  This isn’t foolproof.  If you are wearing antlers and dancing on the bar in a drunken rendition of the Electric Slide, she may be looking at you, but probably not in a good way.  Unless she jumps up on the bar with you, it is safe to assume she is gaping at the car accident.  What is key is the look, look away, and look again move.  What is difficult is catching this without staring at her.  She may then be looking up to look at you to see if you are still staring.

2. The laugh.  Did you just say something mildly funny?  Maybe you retold a witticism you heard from Jon Stewart, or retold that one story about that one time when you were in that one place and she laughed, not a soft “I’m supposed to insert laughter here” laugh but a genuine laugh?  Then she is digging you.

3. The questions.  Does she seem to ask a lot of different questions about you?  Unless she is trying to fill the silence with idle chatter and is asking you questions about whether you think it will rain or not, there is a good chance that she is into you.  Women who are interested want to know about you and will ask questions and actually listen to the answers.  How do you know this is happening?  The follow-up question.

4. The touch.  This is huge.  Does she find a reason to touch you?  Touch your hand, fix your collar, or just lean against you if possible?  This is the riskiest move she can make from her perspective - initiating contact, but is the most commonly confused by men.  The subtle pretense she used to initiate the touch is often thought of as valid by the man.  Adjusting a shirt collar?  It needed to be adjusted.  Being leaned against?  That other person needed to walk by and she was just making room.  The touch on the arm in the midst of a conversation?  She is trying to get your attention so she can say something or she is excited and doesn’t realize what she is doing.

There are countless number of books and websites devoted to interpreting body language.  After reading all of them, I’d still be an idiot about how to do it?  The fundamental factor involved here goes to the heart of a lot of dating issues:  fear of rejection.  The fear that the woman crawling over the table giving me that sexy look isn’t interested in me and if I make a move she’ll reject me will always be present.  Even if I am married to her.

As the study seemed to indicate, we have two options as men: assume every friendly woman wants us, or assume they don’t.  The option that seems safer to us indicates a lot about our personalities.

The New York Times has an article, You Use It Every Day. But Can you Make It Cook, in which Mark Bittman shares his revelations regarding the ability to cook in a microwave.

I own a superior microwave oven due to the generosity of a friend, but all it ever gets used for is heating up frozen vegetables and leftovers.  Sometimes it may get the glamorous task of heating up water.  Once in a great while it may be turned on to actually defrost something.  There are buttons on the front of it which I don’t even know what they do and my efforts to cook on a setting other than HIGH don’t tend to be all that fruitful.

Bittman’s conclusions are well stated in the article and I for one am going to revisit this device on my counter and see how much more I can do with it.  I’m keen to try out the eggplant recipe he recommends in his article.

As a single man in the city, I sometimes struggle with the concept of eating well.  Sometimes eating well to me is not eating the entire bag of tortilla chips.  I was discussing the process of making dinner with a coworker and he talked about making chicken pot pie by opening the box and putting it in the oven.   This seemed fundamentally wrong to me, though I am just as guilty on relying upon frozen dinners for sustenance.  I decided to attempt to create a chicken pot pie.

The result was an unqualified success, and the process was so simple that I felt a compulsion to share.

Here is the basic recipe:

1/2 chicken breast (roughly 1/4 pound of chicken)
1 cup frozen mixed vegetables
1/4 cup chopped onion
1 1/2 cup vegetable broth (I only buy vegetable broth in case I  have to cook for a vegetarian, chicken broth obviously would work as well)
2 tbsp of flour
1/4 cup of water
1 pie crust

Add the chicken, vegetables, and broth to a pot and bring it to a boil.  Mix the flour and water together to form a nice slurry and drizzle into the boiling broth.  Stir thoroughly and reduce the heat so it goes to a simmer.  Flour needs to cook for awhile to eliminate the cereal taste, but this is just the first cooking step.  The next step is to transfer the ‘filling’ into an oven-safe bowl and lay pie crust on top.  Pop the bowl on a cookie sheet and place in a 400 degree oven for roughly fifteen minutes or until the crust is all browned.  I pulled mine out just a bit too soon and missed out on having a nice golden crust.  If I would have brushed it with butter, I could have gotten that delicious golden look.  I was content with this result, though.

Now you might notice that this isn’t a true ‘pie’ since there is no bottom crust.  Nothing is stopping you from laying down a bottom crust in the bowl, baking that while cooking the filling and then finishing it off as I described above.  I just happen to dislike the sogginess of the bottom of pot pies so avoid it completely.

For the pie crust I used the stuff you can find in the refrigerated section of your grocery store, usually near the biscuits in a tube.  Its cheap, you get two in a box, and it serves the purpose without having to take the pains of actually making pie crust.  Or, if you like your crust more flaky, track down some puff pastry to place on top of the filling or some of those biscuits in a tube might serve as a tasty topper to this meal.

Some words of caution… the gravy is HOT when it comes out of the oven.  I had to let this cool for a good five minutes before I could attempt to eat it.

It snowed again in Chicago. This winter seems to be going on for a long time. I am not complaining about this but it is starting to make me a bit glum. Spring is still a month away and even then, Chicago is still grayish until June. I need to find ways of chasing away the gloomy feelings that the dark days of winter invariably cause.

The winter blues are easily diagnosed by feelings of lethargy, unusual cravings of carbohydrates, intense feelings of self-deprecation, and a decrease in creativity. The winter blues aren’t to be confused with cabin fever - which is more of a reaction to feelings of being cooped up. Winter blues are more commonly associated with Seasonal Affective Disorder, but usually a more mild case. More severe cases might need to be treated with medical attention.

Here are seven ways to beat the winter blues.

Maximize Daylight

The root cause of seasonal affective disorder is the lack of daylight. Modern American society is one that lives and dies by the clock, not the sun. We don’t wake up with the sun so we miss out on a lot of that restorative sunshine. At work, we may get sunshine from the windows in our office, but if some people, like myself, work in the center of the building and only sometimes get to see glimpses of sunlight from the windows of other people’s workspace. Then when leaving work, the sun has already set.

A concerted effort needs to be made to maximize exposure to sunlight. Waking up earlier, making sure blinds and curtains are open in our living spaces, and getting outside during the day can go a long way to chase away these blue feelings.

Declutter and Enliven Your Living Space

Clutter is usually a symptom of depression, not a cause, but for mild cases of winter blues, clutter may enforce the feelings of depression and lethargy, causing a downward spiral. There is something very restorative in renewing your living space. Just decluttering is not enough, though, we also need to enliven the space. The quickest, easiest way to bring life to a space is to literally put life into it. Two of the easiest ways of doing this is through plants and animals, specifically houseplants and fish. Fresh flowers are an option, but if we aren’t careful, we might end up with dead flowers which look tragic and not very uplifting. Other ways to enliven your living space is through smell. Bright spring scents can go a long way in shifting moods. Other smells also trigger happy thoughts, like the smell of fresh baked bread, the smell of mint, or the smell of fresh laundry.

On a not so cold day, we can open up our windows and doors and let some fresh air into our space to help enliven the space and make it feel new.

Bring Color Into Your Life

Color has a remarkable affect on mood. When our days are filled with gray, it might be hard to find the color we need to enhance our mood, which means we have to take special actions. We need to look around our work space and living space to see what elements of color we are surrounded by. I know my work is blah beige everywhere and at home, my apartment is stale white. I’ve also fallen into the trap of decorating things in a modern style which means blacks, whites, and reds. These colors don’t enhance a person’s mood and in many cases will only help in causing feelings of depression. Yellow, orange, and green colors will help enhance a person’s mood.

This may sound silly, but simply making sure the computers we work on have a brightly colored desktop picture is a good, simple start in adding color. We can make sure our wall calendars are filled with great colorful pictures. Finding ways to add color to our lives during this gray season can be uplifting in and of itself.

Reconnect With People

People may be the source of our greatest annoyances, but we humans are by nature  tribal creatures. Winter months cause isolation due to inclement weather and this isolation affects our moods. Due to the feelings of lethargy that come with the winter blues, we might convince ourselves that is a good thing that we aren’t seeing people because we just don’t have the energy to do it. Because of these feelings, we need to make special effort to reconnect with people. Just spending time with people we like will help remind us that the season isn’t so bad.

Usually connecting with people also involves activity, whether it is watching movies together, playing games, going to concerts, or simply sipping tea which energize us. Often all we need to do is remind ourselves of good things. During the winter months, life can become monotonous and our schedules look more like ruts. There isn’t any reason to turn our lives upside down to break out of the rut - instead we just need to reach out to people that we are close to and spend some time with them.

Do Less

I know, I just said we need to be more active. Doing less means we don’t have to maintain a hectic schedule. The stress of trying to maintain a hectic schedule can make everything seem more difficult. It is okay to pull back on our schedules. Pulling back on the stress we cause ourselves in our daily lives will enable us to focus on our mental health and won’t let gloomy moments spiral out of control.

Not being able to have time to ourselves only makes us feel drained and that feeling of being drained makes us feel like we aren’t working to our full potential at all times. When we feel this way, we tend to start beating up on ourselves.

I had a neighbor growing up who made the comment that we shouldn’t spend too much time kicking ourselves in the ass because there is a whole world filled with people willing to do it for us.

Exercise, Eat, and Eschewal

Okay, I was trying to get fancy there with the forced alliteration but I wanted to cover three elements together. Exercising, eating, and eschewal (which is just a $10 word for temperance/avoidance) are elements of maintaining the ‘body temple’ as it were. I make no bones about being a hedonist. I believe life is pleasure and should be pleasurable. This means enjoying good food, good times, and good wine. Yet, when we are feeling blue we tend to overeat or eat the wrong things. Carbohydrates give us a boost in seratonin levels which does relieve feelings of depression but overdoing it leads to other problems. Choosing complex carbohydrates over sugar is a better option. We can’t forget exercise. Exercise is another way of increasing those chemicals in the brain that makes us feel good. Yes, oh my god yes, I completely understand that trying to get the motivation to exercise is near impossible in the winter. I’m already cold, I don’t want to go outside and run. The effort has a huge psychological payoff though. Getting some exercise seems to clear away the cobwebs in th brain and the body. Nothing chases away feeling of self-deprecation faster than a thirty minute jog. Hey, if I can exercise, then I must not be wasting away.

So what about this ‘eschewal’ I mention. Well, be very aware that alcohol is a depressant. It is funny that when I am feeling the winter blues, I tend to want to have a drink… which only further contributes to the winter blues. It becomes vitally important that when we are feeling the blues that we don’t attempt to self-medicate the problem with alcohol. When in doubt, opt out. Again, this is not my normal advice since as a hedonist, I do believe in the power of the social lubrication alcohol provides… yes, the key word there is social. Drink with friends, not alone.

To wrap it all up…

I feel the need to restate that clinical depression needs to be addressed by medical professionals not through blog entries. Anyone who is suffering from long term cycles of depression, even if there are good days where the depression isn’t overwhelming, need to seek out medical assistance. This is one of the reasons why I am trying to use words like glum, gloomy, and blues to differentiate these moods from actual medical conditions.

Over the past few days I’ve read a few other blogs that have stated in their long lists of ways of improving financial situations that one of the ways of accomplishing this is to ask for a raise.  There are entire sites devoted to the methods in which a person can ask for a raise.

I’m intrigued about other people’s experiences with getting raises.

My company has a Byzantine bureaucracy built around reviews and tie pay raises to a complex formula that gives the appearance of impartiality but is still fundamentally arbitrary.  Requests for pay raises are easily dismissed  by referring the employee to the yearly review process and the standard 3-6% raise that this review process produces.

It seems to me that companies develop this process to protect themselves (and their budgets) from unexpected requests for pay raises.  This means, though, that if I poorly negotiated my initial salary, I am forever on a weak financial track with the company with no hope of ever catching up unless I get that rare opportunity for a promotion.

I do believe all rules can be broken.  I see it done often enough to know it is possibly, yet it is annoying to me that I am made to feel that the company I work for has intentionally created barriers to my getting paid what I am worth.

Do others feel this way?  How common is this methodology in other places of work?  Do you feel like your company is assisting you in financial success or hindering you?

I’m in the midst of writing a complicated post regarding money lessons I learned the hard way which has put me in a personal finance mindset.  When I saw 21 Money-Saving Sites from Around the Web, I felt a need to pass it along.  This entry from the Get Rich Slowly site contains such a wealth of resources it is almost shameful.

I haven’t written much about dating, relationships, and sex and there is a reason for that. I can’t say that I have a lot of great advice to offer in these areas and planned to collect the advice of others and present it here as a clearinghouse.

Dan Savage’s Savage Love Podcast has been the best source of information on all things sex - not necessarily all things dating and relationships, but definitely the best source of realistic information regarding sex.

In Dan Savage’s latest podcast Episode 64, dated 1/8/2008, he is helping a woman deal with her boyfriend’s porn collection when he makes the following pronouncement that made me pause. Sometimes it is hard to see the forest for the trees when you are in the thick of it.

The world is stacked against guys. Male sexuality, heterosexual male sexuality in particular – they get the raw end of the stick because male sexuality is pathologized. It’s not healthy, it’s not good to want to fuck a million people. It’s not healthy, it’s not good to want to look at pornography. Or want to not be monogamous. Guys are derided for having standard issue heterosexual male fantasies like a threeway with two girls. Guys can’t seem to catch a break. Guys are told that love is not wanting to sleep with someone else, when actually love is refraining from sleeping with someone else.

I can’t speak for women, I can’t speak for homosexual or bisexual men, but I can speak as a heterosexual male that I understand this statement so well. If a man wants to have sex more often than his partner, then there is something wrong with him. If a man doesn’t want to have sex as often as his partner, then there is something wrong with him. If a man wants to do something kinky, he is a pervert. If a man doesn’t want to indulge his partners fantasies, he is a prude.

Yes, I am certain that women also feel these constraints, yet women exploring their sexuality is generally encouraged by men. Men again are just considered perverts.

There isn’t much here other than a general recommendation of Dan Savage’s podcast for quality raw information about sex.

It seems like common sense.  It is so common that governments do it, businesses do it, and non-profits do it.  To achieve any sort of financial success or stability, a budget is necessary.  Let me restate that.  Budgets = Financial Success.  It is a very simple formula.  Budgets help define spending and make sure it is in line with income.  Budgets encourage savings.  Budgets assist in making decisions.

Knowing all this, I still can’t seem to make a budget for myself.  I know what my bills are, I know what my income is and I know how much is in my accounts.  From that basic standpoint, I’m not doing horribly, but I’m also not making any headway.

Trying to make a budget from scratch seems almost impossible.  Tracking my expenditures is not as simple as straightforward as I would like it to be.  I know it is a simple matter of keeping my receipts and recording them in a spreadsheet or investing in Quicken or Money.   Just can’t do it consistently enough that I trust the numbers.  Trusting the numbers is critical for following a budget.

To help rectify this problem, I have started using mint.com to keep track of my accounts.  I have five accounts to track: checking, savings, ING Direct, and two credit cards. Mint.com takes all of these and merges the data into simple charts.  It lets me plot through the various transactions, coding them as I see fit and then begins to build a budget for me - a budget of actual expenditures which I can then go in and adjust to match my financial goals.

There are two big problems with this for me: one is the amount of access and personal information I need to give up in order for this to work.   The second problem is the amount of time to truly capture a solid image of my spending.  It will take another month for me to have a realistic view of how much money I spend on gas, utilities, food, and entertainment.  I decided to take the risk and let Mint.com access my checking and savings, but not ING or my credit cards.

What I’m seeing in the charts Mint.com provides is I am well within the national norms on my spending so far and seeing how much I am spending on things like my cable churns my stomach.  Do I really watch $60 worth of TV a month?  I will have to evaluate that expense and look into alternative broadband internet access.

I’ve been using Mint.com for roughly a month and a half.  I tried to user wesabe.com at one time and found it too bland to bring me back.  I like colorful charts. I like the thought that maybe there is some intense analysis going on behind the scene trying to find me ways to save money.  Of course the only way it has determined I could save money is switch my internet, phone, cellphone, and everything else over to Verizon.  I think maybe this free service is sponsored by Verizon.  Just a guess.

I know the only real way for me to save money is to monitor my spending carefully, make wise purchases, move money from my checking account into my ING Direct saving account, set other money aside for emergencies, and work the other side of the budget equation: earn more money.