Look, figuring out how to get what you want is the easy part. Figuring out what you want is the hard part.

I thunk up this bit of wisdom for Magdalene (The Great Mormon Novel) when I was rasslin’ with this concept way back in 2011. A perusal of my hard drive tells me I’ve been cogitating on this since at least 1998.

Here’s the backstory:¹

I have a Vomit Book. It’s where I dump my brain. I stand at the threshold of my brain and look at its Neckbeard Nest-ness and take a deep breath. Then I start to my right and go around the folds of my gray matter picking up the trash. Then I go back and do a rough sort of like with like. After that I refine.

I fill up a TOPS JEN Action Planner.² It takes however long it takes. I’m on Book 14 since 2011. Before that, I used AT-A-GLANCE DayMinder Executive Weekly/Monthly Planner from 1999 through 2008. I scanned those and Vomit Books 1-4, then destroyed them.

So, I just write. Dump. Vomit. I tried mind-mapping for a while. That didn’t work. When I’m overwhelmed, I just write words, words that come to mind like the die in a Magic 8 Ball. There is no point. I’m just taking out the trash.

I use it for everything: narrative, to-do, dun-did, wins, losses, health/medical, affirmations/quotes, kids. It’s all color coded,³ I also have a template to copy/paste typewritten thoughts, then print, cut, and tape it into the book.

When I get to the end of one Vomit Book, I go back and read what I wrote, and, in the fresh Vomit Book, I recap. I distill sticking points in black, and note my current thoughts in green.

Although a lot happened, Vomit Book 13 took 2-1/2 years. I filed it away September 1 after I recapped.

Now, I’m a creature of habit. I write the same thing year after year, and I have since 1998:

• What do I really want?
• Why am I so angry?
• What brings me joy?
• Why do I feel so hopeless?
• Why am I such a perpetual fuckup?
• Why do I eat?
• Who am I?
• What is my purpose?
• Why do I think I can have success without sacrifice?
• Why am I so lazy?
• Why do I ruminate on past events only I remember?
• Why can’t I remember the good things that happen?
• Why am I fearful of success and fulfillment?
• Do I have any goals and what are they?

Occasionally, there’s something new, like menopause and how it changed me in fundamental ways. With my mom’s ordeal earlier this year, a new thought entered my brain: I am useful, but not valuable.

September 1, when I recapped the previous Vomit Book and retired it, started out no differently. Same colors, same format, same complaints, but this time I did something new. I noted things that I wanted to explore further because I had new, tiny, vague epiphanies, the first of which was “What do I really want?”

I’ve been asking that question for at least 27 years, and I finally realized that that is the wrong question, and of all the questions I’ve been asking, I had never distilled my despair to its essence and defined my terms first:

• purpose
• fulfillment
• success

where I had to determine what I thought I should want/think/feel versus what habits I actually have. You don’t work to change habits you don’t really care about. You keep the habit because it does something for you.

PURPOSE

Useful, but not valuable.

My church teaches that one’s purpose is to serve others. You know what? I don’t like serving others. It stresses me out and I get zero joy out of it. In fact, I resent it, the work, the time, the effort. I get panicky and then once I’m alone, I melt down. Or I can throw money at it. I’m okay with that.

I don’t have a purpose. Never have had a purpose. No calling, no life’s work.⁴ I could take that as a sign that I should try harder, but that only makes me flagellate myself more.

Then it occurred to me: Do I have to have a purpose? Is having a purpose something I thought I should find? How many people actually have a purpose? How many people just go about their lives trying to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table? How many people go to high-paying jobs, slog through the day, go home, and mow the lawn with the occasional vacation here and there ad infinitum?

FULFILLMENT

I had noted that I was fearful of this. I don’t remember feeling this way, but I wrote it down in early 2023, so I did a deep dive on that. After some thought, I was surprised to learn that what fulfills me is so simple:

• listening to music that speaks to me
• looking at pretty things
• making pretty things
• making pretty ebooks out of complex print design
• listening to AI-generated stories read by AI-generated voices while I work
• laying down thousands of words in one long writing session
• walking in the grass in spring
• putting things in order (e.g., filing, computer file reorganization)
• solving problems (e.g., computer issues, plot/characterization blocks, WordPress, HTML/CSS)⁶

That’s it. That’s what I enjoy doing. When I drifted away from what I thought I should want, which were grandiose ambitions, vestiges of a time I wanted to earn my parents’ approval and only recently realized I was never going to get it, to contemplate what I look forward to doing, I … changed.⁷

It took me a minute to figure out I’m already fulfilled. I’m in my happy place when I’m doing whatever I would be doing anyway.

SUCCESS

Most people define this as winning and/or having a lot of money. When one wins, one is usually competing against something else. Except … I don’t like competing. It’s too much effort and risk and not enough payoff. I’m a sore loser and I do want to win, but winning doesn’t do anything for me. No dopamine hit, no feeling of fulfillment or success because what’s the purpose?

Money is a tool. Or, as Giselle puts it in The Proviso:

Money doesn’t solve anything. It just makes surviving less difficult.

It dawned on me that I don’t really care about money. It never occurred to me that the only thing I want money for is my basic needs, take-out, some inexpensive wants,⁸ an emergency fund, and maybe to be able to take off on a road trip at a moment’s notice. In short, not to be in survival mode in perpetuity.⁹

So this is where we get into the weeds of should want versus really want, and again, this is a vestige of what I thought my dad and/or the world viewed as success.¹⁰

I had to redefine success for myself, which was what my teenage and young adult self really wanted:

• to be a published author
• to get married
• to have children

Thus, by that measure, I’ve succeeded.¹¹

But you see, I never looked beyond those things.

• What happens after I get The Call?¹²
• What happens after the wedding?
• What happens after I see the positive pregnancy test?

It’s been 15 days now since I started looking at my life in a whole new way, and I feel free. Free of the burdens of expectations I don’t even know if others held. Free of expectations I thought I should fulfill or thought I wanted to fulfill. Free of expectations going forward. Free to enjoy puttering around. Free to have a job and not a career, and enjoy just having a job that pays for my basic needs. Free to know happiness.

I’m not going to ask myself why it took me so long. I’m just going to enjoy it.

★★★

And I do mean relative, but for a while, I was doing it one image at a time.

Now, how you organize your hard drive is your business, but I created folders and mimicked my board names.

First, download and install Basilisk browser. This operation is the only thing I use Basilisk for.

Second, go to Pin4Ever plugin page and install it. As stated, this is a plugin, and it runs only on Basilisk. Pin4Ever has a trial run before it becomes a paid service, but I decided to pay for a whole year.

If you decide to run it once to get all your pins, it will take FORever. It gives you one download folder and dumps them all in there. #protip Take the time to create your folders on your hard drive and download one board at a time from Pin4Ever because it won’t sort them for you once the pins are downloaded.

I have a “faves” board on Pinterest because they took away “likes.” Assholes. Anyway, I’m now meticulous about sorting and filing my pins because I want to maintain the correlation between Pinterest and my hard drive.

So every once in a while, I will back up my “faves” board, then sort them accordingly on both Pinterest and my hard drive. That way I keep up with the backup. This is also why I decided to pay $24.99 for a year.

Unlike a lot of people, I only have about 20,000 pins. With my Pinterest archive on my hard drive now, I put random pretty pictures into it instead of bothering with Pinterest. I don’t doubt Pinterest will someday come for my account, but I’ll be damned if I sit there and let them take away my carefully curated pictures.

It doesn’t back up links or web pages (e.g., recipes). It just backs up the pictures, including gifs.

I hope that is helpful. It’s saved me a lot of anxiety, so I thought I’d share.

I love utilities. Love love FLOVE me some utilities. I have utilities for every single damned thing I ever did and do, and some are already built into Windows. I even have a utility to make whatever latest Windows OS look like XP. Yes, really. You will find that some of these are quite primitive and/or aren’t developed anymore. I. Do. Not. Care. They do what I want and when what I want to do is something I can’t do, I go looking for more utilities. No, I don’t want one program with all the bells and whistles. I want one program that does one task well.

A list (not even close to exhaustive):

• Bulk Rename Utility
• Search My Files
• Drag and Drop File List
• Monkey Merge
• Product Key Finder
• Multi-Timer
• Merger
• Long Path Eraser
• Remove Empty Directories

There are also programs that are either pay-as-you-can, subscription, or that I’ve paid a pretty penny for and that have paid for themselves many times over, mostly related to my work:

• Edit Plus 3
• ABBYY Fine Reader
• PicPick
• Macrium Reflect
• Sigil EPUB editor
• Carbonite backup
• CuteFTP
• EssentialPIM

And lastly there’s Pinterest, where, as I have said before, girls collect pretty pictures and crafts we will never do¹ and guys collect prepper ideas and “fuck yeah, ’Murka memes.” It has monetized America’s hoarding proclivities. There is a utility to help organize and back up all that business, but it uses SeaMonkey and SeaMonkey is hot garbage. Everything always comes back to Nikki Sixx.

Scared money never wins.

THE VOMIT BOOK

My productivity keeper is a notebook. Not a simple one because why use a 20c spiral notebook I can get at Walmart during back-to-school month when I can get an expensive, hard-to-find notebook such as TOPS Journal Notetaking Planner (TOP63827)? It’s a version of the Cornell notetaking system.

Why do I call it my vomit book? Because I vomit the contents of my brain all over it. The single most productive thing I do is vomit my brain all over the pages of my notebook. I cannot describe how mentally jumbled I get and what a short period of time it takes, and I cannot overstate how much more productive I become once I’ve spent an hour (or 2 or 3) vomiting my jumbled thoughts.

I have depression and anxiety, and I am ADHD and bipolar. My mother was pretty regulated, so she became my coping mechanism growing up without drugs. I am not nearly that regulated (or more likely, what was important to her is not important to me). But the coping mechanisms I developed during my childhood and adolescence, thanks to my mom, got me limping through early adulthood before I found better living through chemistry.

I say this only to illustrate the most extreme of my vomiting: One day, I was so jumbled, I wrote “angry” over and over and over again. Two pages front and back. That was necessary so I could begin to put into words what I was angry about. That journaling session lasted nearly 4 hours, but it was 4 hours well spent.

I don’t vomit every day. I do it when my brain is too full, which could be every day or it could be every week or it could be six months from now.

I do use it for lists. In that period when I was so angry I had to write down my morning routine in a list (though it never changes): get up, shower, brush teeth, get breakfast, take meds. During that time, I also struggled with the everyday things like … making a doctor’s appointment.

I had to write down the list: pick up phone, dial the number, ask for an appointment, check the calendar, commit to the appointment. I tried twice to make the appointment, hung up when I got voice mail because the expected thing hadn’t happened, and THEN I changed my list: pick up phone, dial the number, select the right key to go to voice mail, leave a message. And yes, I had to write the message down and read it.

I realize now this was anxiety, for which I am now medicated. But that vomit book got me through some rough times. The rough times might change, but the vomit book is there for when I need to puke up a new pen’s worth of ink.

What are you doing right now? Right this very minute.

Stop for a couple of minutes and answer that question.

That’s all it takes. Just stop. Look around. Are you where you wanted to be at this time of TODAY? Are you past that? Did you get sidetracked? Are you focused? Are you floundering, confused, overwhelmed? Are you hungry or thirsty? Is your brain tired? Do you need a nap? Are you cooking with gas?

What are you doing right now?

Answer the question.

• bullet journals
• productivity apps
• to-do lists
• habit trackers
• Pomodoro
• time tracking
• GSD (Getting Stuff Done)
• etc
• etc
• etc

I have failed or I flail at any or all of these. To-do lists and GSD works the most consistently, but some days that’s not saying much.

Some of my Twitter friends and I are productivity enthusiasts, which is to say, we try. And flail. Sometimes fail. We run through methods to see what we like, what we don’t like, what will work provided we work it, what won’t work or what we won’t work.

Mostly we do it for the stationery.

Not really. All we really want to do is get our stuff done so we can do other things that make us happy. That’s all any of us (productivity enthusiasts or not) really want.

That’s what we tell ourselves anyway.

My main method of wrangling my productivity or lack thereof is a combination to-do list, a dun-did list, and mind-mapping with a splash of GSD. (Bullet journaling is beyond my comprehension.) I’m not always faithful about this. But!

I have several problems, three of which are:

1. I’m addicted to procrastination (which is a form of thrill-seeking)
2. I’m only able to focus on one thing at a time and I lose time like crazy, and
3. I’m terrified of getting everything done. What would I do then?

But I ran across this: WHAT ARE YOU DOING RIGHT NOW? I don’t know where. I meant to make a note so I could link back to the article. But it only built on an idea I had when I heard the local college’s clocktower chime.

I have alarms on my phone set for 9a, 11a, 3p, 7p, and 9p and I use distinctive ringtone(s).¹

This one thing, more than anything I have tried thus far, has managed to make me more aware of my daily pace. Even if I don’t write in my journal, even if I don’t have a to-do list, even if I don’t have a dun-did list, when I hear my distinctive ringtones, I know exactly what time it is and I can make a mental note of where I am in my day and what I still need to do.

I don’t wander around so aimlessly now if I’ve hit the wall.

And so I leave you with these and two questions:

What are you doing right now?

What’s your most effective productivity mechanism(s)?

Well, Dude and my mother liked it. I can’t stand pineapple, so I was having none of it. Neither was XY TD, who ate about two cans of green beans by himself. XX TD had some but she’d been noshing all day and wasn’t hungry (also, she ate all the pineapple I carved out of the middle).

Depending on how you define “hit,” it was one because the person I made it for liked it. A lot. And he is grateful for a plethora of leftovers.

Note: The smoker instructions called for 5 hours. I roasted mine, checking at 3 hours expecting the thermometer to register 120F or something, and shot to 180F before I pulled it out.

My mother felt the need to say to me, “Oh, c’mon, just one bite. If I tell you it doesn’t taste like pineapple will you have a bite?” “Mom, I made this. I can turn my nose up at it if I want to.”

I will not be making this again, so if you do, good luck. Also, invite Dude. And my mother.

Oven¹ 240F, timer 5 hours.

And we have liftoff.

I don’t know where I ran across the “Swineapple” recipe, but it got posted to Reddit not too long ago and immediately went semi-viral.

From a cursory search, it seems to have been around at least since 2008. Sadly, I sent it to Dude who, you guessed it, wanted me to make it. In his defense, I am a good cook (but not a good photographer, as you will see) and it’s his Father’s Day present.

After a few false starts long ago, I decided that the first time I did a recipe, I was going to follow the directions exactly. Everyone who knows me knows I have worked a miracle through God’s grace by following the directions exactly.

My first problem was that the Historic Lynchburg Tennessee Whiskey Swineapple Rib Glaze and Dippin’ Sauce called for in the recipe (the one Dude wanted) was not available in my stores and after shipping, upwards of $20 per. Er, no. Especially not when he luuuuurrrrves KC Masterpiece (which, I will have you know, is ketchup and molasses with a ton of brown sugar just to give you diabeeeedus) (please, please don’t judge us on KC Masterpiece). I had to talk him into letting me use KC Masterpiece because I didn’t think he’d appreciate a substitution of Gates or, heaven forbid, Bryant’s.

Then it took me a long time to figure out that what the recipe called “boneless pork ribs” were called “country-style ribs” here.

The recipe I used (where I found out about the “country-style ribs”) said to rub them before stuffing them in the hole (so so so so tempted to say it … ). So I had to figure out what rub would “go” with KC Masterpiece other than straight brown sugar with a little cayenne pepper thrown in to make it legitimate.

Lastly, I have also not had great success in slow roasting things (no I don’t have a smoker) (yes, I do live in Kansas City) (yes, I know I have committed a capital crime and have provided evidence for my execution), so I’ve been apprehensive about this project.

But I have girded up my loins.

Today, I rub. Tomorrow, I roast. Wish me luck.

• country-style ribs
• many squirts of extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 tbsp liquid smoke
• KC Masterpiece rub

And yet, I must eat. Because DEATH.

Anyway, part of my frustration is how I taste things, meaning, I like the taste of things, but I don’t like the texture. That leaves a lot of things out. A lot of things in a lot of dishes I would like to try. But don’t. Because basically, I’m afraid of wasting money. Yes, I said it. Afraid.

[Aside: All the eating Victoria and Emilio do in PASO DOBLE is an expression of my unwillingness to experiment and lack of ability to appreciate whatever flavors come my way. My palate is less sophisticated than a three-year-old’s.]

All this means is I hate cooking and I hate trying new things. Because what if it’s icky? This worked well when I was single and low-carbing because all I had to do was throw a steak under the broiler and fix a salad. Alas, children have a way of growing up and eating you out of house and home and they have expensive taste in meat. My fault.

[snip rest of psychological profile]

For various reasons, today I tried something new.

I had a three-year-old (yes, that too) slab of London broil in my freezer. I wanted to marinate it, but I have no soy sauce, no Teriyaki sauce, no wine. This will be rectified in the future, but suffice it to say I couldn’t run out and get any right then. So this slab, I had intended to use to make beef jerky. It’s a long process. I had thawed it out intending one thing, changed my mind to another, changed it a second time, realized my lack of ingredients, but had a slab of London broil waiting for me to do something with it, so I went with door number four.

I sliced the London broil into 1/4″ wide strips, all the while wondering what to do with it. Then I wondered…chicken fried steak?

Soooo I got out ye olde almond flour.¹ Mixed it with parmesan cheese, onion powder, and garlic powder. I cracked an egg in a plate and scrambled it well. Put on a skillet with oil to heat up. Dipped the strip in the egg, coated it with the “breading” and fried it up. When the few strips were finished, I made gravy with the drippings (not a lot because there wasn’t much oil) using water and arrowroot powder.

Dude was the victim. He pronounced it pretty okay. Then he dipped it in some bleu cheese dressing. He liked that better.

I ate a bite plain. It was pretty okay. Needed spices (like a package of Italian Seasonings). I had a piece with gravy on it. That was really okay. I had a piece dipped in mayonnaise blended with some Italian Seasonings. That was awesome.

Next time I’ll put the seasonings in the “breading.” The meat is tender and moist, but my only complaint is I wish the “breading” was crispier.

My first victory. I’m not a foodie and I’m never going to be. But this was a food victory for me.