I spent the latterly chunk of today despairing of getting nothing done, on account mostly of our youngest’s new habit of being an angel during daylight hours and a shrieking, sleepless imp by night. I’d call it teething, but that would require her to be producing teeth; at the moment she is keeping all but two of them safely — and, one presumes, painfully — in her gums.
The problem with being zombified with lack of sleep (at one point today I put Ms Rachel on to babysit the kids and lay down on the floor for a bit) is that you are still running over your undone to-do list in your head, and being in your head with regard to tasks that you know you have to do is, I find, the least helpful way to get things done. The longer you’re in your head the less chance you have of getting the thing done at all, until the anxiety crests a breaking point and you either do it in a panic or autoclave whatever project is causing you mental anguish.
Because I’m not sure how coherent that was, I made a graph.
The problem is that being very very tired and avoiding work because you are worried about it occupy similar mental spaces (I assume, non-neuroscientifically, that both are redolent of a lack of easy dopamine) and both produce the same kind of craving for both distraction and ice-cream. Which is to say, you feel lazy, even when it’s not your fault.
It hits me like this: I have a business I am starting, and it requires time and completed tasks, several of which would have been rather useful to have done six weeks ago, and here I am burning nearly an entire day on almost cleaning the kitchen.
I said as much to My Wife and she said “Some days just don’t work.” And she’s right. So we took the kids out and got takeaways for tea and we are now calling an early night, ideally to rack up as much sleep as possible before getting back on the wheel in the morning.
Our family game was always “Balderdash,” a trivia game where all but one answer is made up by the players. It goes a little like this: one player is get handed a card, on which are printed a bunch of wild but true answers — a word (with a definition) or a movie (with a plot description) or a date (with some vanishingly unlikely occurrence). They read out the word or the movie or the date or whatever, but not the definition. Then everyone secretly scribbles their fake answer which is mixed in with the real one and they’re all read out by the person who knows what the real one is. Points are given accordingly. Strictly speaking, you’re meant to assign points to the definition that sounds most like the real answer, but it is much more fun if you just vote for the one you think is the funniest.
That tended to be the way our family played it. I say “played” but we still play it, on the sadly rare occasions when we’re all in the same place, and some of the bullshit definitions we’ve come up with have passed through the fires of in-joking and been forged as family folklore.
I bring all this up as my way of introducing the Egyptian Goddess of Irony, a figure who (of course) does not actually exist, and whose corresponding word has been lost to time. But we are an irony-appreciating lot, and the idea that the ancient Egyptians had a goddess specifically attuned to the vagaries of Murphy’s Law really tickled us, to the point that the nameless deity has somewhat dogged my life. Whenever something suitably ironic happens, the Egyptian Goddess is never far from my mind, sometimes paired with a fist brandished at the uncaring sky.
In my mind she looks like Alanis Morissette by way of Cleopatra.
And isn’t it ironic how the projects we care most about, the ones we’d most like to see succeed, are the ones that so often seem to fall a bit flat or get passed over by audiences? This was always the case with the stuff I wrote, as far back as my student media days — I’d put together something I thought was an absolute blinder, or plead with audiences to consider this one Very Important piece — and it’d get passed over entirely, or (worse) damned with the faintest “oh yes, I saw that, I think”-type praise. And perhaps the agonising process of carving off little lumps of soul and presenting them for the world to consider, only to have them spurned — or even just to risk a spurning — is what led me to adopt a certain blithe, perhaps supercilious, ironic detachment about earnest things, and perhaps it plays a role in what I now think of as a decade or two of missed creative opportunities.
Irony on irony.
Late in life, I am back to embracing earnestness. I don’t think irony took me far. The Goddess will lurk still, ready to be cursed or invoked with a wry chuckle; there will always be a darkly funny side. But perhaps I need to find a new patron. Perhaps a further game of Balderdash will reveal the name of a Goddess of Earnest Endeavour, a new, cheesier, but kinder and ultimately more productive muse.
On that note, here’s the Secret Project. I’m very proud of it, even if (as early signs indicate) it completely whiffs on social media.
It’s a truism that aphorisms never track back to the person who supposedly said them. — Mark Twain.1
Gary Player, a golf player who (for the non-golf players) really is called Gary Player, supposedly coined the aphorism, “The more I practice, the luckier I get.” Of course, he did not really invent the phrase, and we know this mainly because he says he didn’t. According to the excellent Quote Investigator, which I learned about ten minutes ago, the quote originates with a Cuban revolutionary mercenary, which somehow makes the extremely cool phrase even cooler.
Because it doesn’t matter who said it (and apparently Thomas Jefferson said something similar) the aphorism is true. If you practice, you get better. Dangle more lines and you have a better chance of snagging a fish. If you cast a die more often, the probabilities multiply. I could go on; I won’t. The point is that eventually you come to a place where probability and practice and talent kind of merge. The more you play…
That’s the reason I started my challenge series, both here and with my semi-daily 30 days of videos; I wanted to get better by doing things that maybe weren’t destined to be great but at least existed. Instead of avoiding mistakes, I’d just accept that mistakes would be made, and ideally I’d learn from them. Much in the same way I enjoy the challenge of making my own art, I wanted to give making my own luck a shot.
And now that I’ve been at it a while some of those luck chickens are finally coming home to roost. Of course, these plump fowl are the consequence of hard work, but that’s what the saying is saying; effort and luck are in many ways indistinguishable. The Secret Project I’ve been hinting at goes live tomorrow, and I’m looking forward to showing you all the results. What’s more, useful emails were exchanged. Calls were made. Good Zoom meetings were had, as opposed to the normal kind of Zoom meetings.
I’m pleased, not least because it’s nudging me towards thinking there may be some viability to my hybrid art sales / social media / art teaching / marketing consultancy malarkey, but because I have been up since 4 AM for a variety of reasons, which is the name I should have given my daughter. If this episode was more incoherent or circuitous than normal, now you know why!
It’s now 11 o’clock and all’s well. Time for bed, and the best weekday yet to come.
Thanks, as always, for reading. I haven’t shown you the big red button in a while, out of a fear that folks were getting Big Red Button fatigue. Here it is again.
Do you feel lucky?
A skeptical dive into the weird, sketchy, occasionally life-changing world of self-improvement.
Today’s update is to let you know that I finally bit the bullet1 and emailed a bunch of galleries and sanctuaries about my art.
This was singularly horrible and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Art is intensely personal, and the inevitable well-meaning no-thankses threaten to hit me and my sweet little rejection-sensitive snowflake heart like a blast furnace from Hades. I am not looking forward to gallery-owners having the entirely reasonable opinion that my art is not for them or their customers.
That said, despite dreading sending those emails for years — I really do mean years, I’d have approached galleries properly a long time ago if I hadn’t been so petrified of the process — once I was actually writing them I wasn’t too worried at all. I was just stringing some words together and attaching some stuff and hitting send. I do it a bunch of times every day. And as for putting my art out there, it occurs to me now that approaching several galleries should be much less scary than putting my art on Reddit where a million or two people might see it, and in fact just did. And also that sending a few emails should be less scary than sending emails to couple of thousand people, which I do quite often.2
In the spirit of celebrating things that are self-improving but are not traditionally-coded self-improvement or productivity-hustling: I looked after my daughter for most of the day. It was wonderful. She is the sweetest little girl. She points at everything and wants to know its name. (She is obsessed with the artwork on our walls; I have to take her on regular gallery tours.) She laughs at a lot but very especially at burps and farts. She likes my silly videos. She really liked the duck video, which is how I should have known that it had a bit of viral potential. She’s a great test audience.
She is at this moment having a grand old howl upstairs and I will have to lug her around the house while patting her nappy-clad butt and singing the Happy Song which will hopefully lull her. For the third time tonight. So far. I love her so much.
Here is today’s video, in response to the typically horrible news that OpenAI (chaos be upon them) have released a video generator that produces near undetectable AI slop. All human creativity and potential rendered into one big stupid chum bucket. Revolting. I hate it so much.
I will email more galleries tomorrow.
Thank you, as always, for reading.
This is not the metaphor some people think it is, so I’d best explain briefly. It references the days of pre-anaesthetic surgery where patients would be given a bullet (wrapped in cloth) to bite on while having a limb sawed off or some such. I have heard of people thinking it means something even darker. It doesn’t.
Not always often enough, but I’m improving! 12 days straight!
It may not surprise you to find out that after 24 hours of feverish gastro I am still not 100 percent; I did in fact spend a chunk of today asleep. The rest of the day was mostly doing miscellaneous chores, those I felt well enough to do. Looking after the kids, doing the dishes, cooking dinner. Things of the carrying water, chopping wood variety, if not those things exactly. Oh, and once night fell and the kids (mostly) fell asleep I played D&D with my wife and friends. Good times.
We’ve had one, yes.
It seems to me that self-improvement stuff is often unnecessarily compartmentalised, into individualistic, dare I say capitalistic systems, which means — to bring in a little Marx — they are often alienating. If your image of self-improvement and those that practice it is a single male gymbro who takes cold showers and meditates, perhaps this is why. And perhaps that’s why those that pursue self-improvement as marketed often ultimately find it lonely or unfulfilling. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with being single, going to the gym, cold showers (I still do them!) or meditation; just that when these often solo pursuits become what is understood to be “self improvement” then the common things in life that it actually makes a lot more sense to be good at (cooking, cleaning, fixing things, and such) are denigrated. Or, as often seems to be the case these days, they are gendered; the lionised warrior-monkish self-improvement stuff is male-coded whereas cooking and cleaning and child-rearing gets flowy sundresses and Instagram filters and becomes tradwife-chic.
I say nuts to that. Sometimes the most improving thing you can do is be present with the kids, or make sure the dishes are done, and I’m going to assert that this is independent of gender; you can be sheila or bloke or anywhere in between and find the ordinary things that don’t require a membership the most self-improving activities around.
Thanks as always for reading. All going well, something like normal service will resume tomorrow.
Apparently it was Sir Francis Bacon who coined the phrase “if the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, then Mohammed must go to the mountain.” The funny thing is, I’ve always thought the proverb ran the other way around; perhaps in my head it got mixed up with the Christian wisdom about faith being enough to move mountains. But I take the meaning to be roughly the same: if one thing won’t budge, something else will have to give.
The gastro I have is as bad as any I can remember; the fewer details the better, and it’s kept me in bed and mostly half-asleep with a temperature all day. (A friend made a joke about Jackson Pollock paintings and, well, yes.) But the gastro is clearly made worse by burnout; I have been going too hard and if I keep missing out on sleep to get stuff done I will get sick. Physics! It is what it is.
So this is as short as these emails get; I’m now going to turn in and try to coax some rest out of the resurgent nausea, and come the morning I will start prioritising bedtimes. It will be tricky to get all the Business Stuff done while also getting enough sleep, but burnout would be trickier still.
Every day I teeter on the edge of not sending one of these out; every day (or night) I manage to do it anyway.
A lot of the pain I experience, mental or physical, has to do with overthinking. I overthink my art, my work, my videos, my newsletters, my health, my relationships; and while I’m sure this is a human universal — no special snowflake stuff here, we’re a species of overthinkers or we’d probably have stayed happy in the trees — I find I could often do with a bit less of it. That’s what this do-shit-everyday project has accomplished, for this newsletter and much else, and for that alone it has been worth it. Instead of agonising over a given decision the short time-frames involved mean I just get stuck in and do the thing. Finally. At last. Took me long enough.
The side effect is that I am very tired and spent this morning sleeping in. Don’t worry, it’s not all the newsletter. A lot of it’s my infant child’s emerging teeth causing her to yell in pain throughout the night as nature apparently intended. But I am pooped, almost as much as she is, and I need to turn in early tonight.
I’m still on the wagon. I went for a run today. I did pullups. And I noticed that after struggling to make 5 pullups at the start of this thirty day thing I am now quietly putting away a couple more per set. I spent a bit of quality time fiddling with my Dungeons & Dragons character sheet; that warlock/bard gunslinger multiclass in a alt-history Wild West setting isn’t going to roll itself, is it?
Oh and a bunch of folks on TikTok really liked that stamp video, and several people actually subscribed to my print club! Exciting stuff (here it is again, if you want to use it to write actual letters to your actual friends.)
Also I just realised that it’s been more than a week since I did the proper Cynic’s Guide email to all subscribers. Irony! You guys have had more emails than I’ve sent in the rest of the year, and I still haven’t quite managed a weekly cadence for the rest of the email list. Tomorrow! It’ll give them something fun to do with their Sunday.
After this email goes out I’ll head to bed. I can’t wait to sleep blissfully for thirty minutes before the baby wakes up.
Thanks for sticking with me as I stick to whatever this is.
A skeptical dive into the weird, sketchy, occasionally life-changing world of self-improvement.
Hey everyone! I have already sent out two big ol’ emails today — a lot of you are paying subscribers, and I sent you something special earlier today — and I also put out my first customer newsletter in a while. To save my sanity and some semblance of an early bedtime, you 30 Day Challengers are getting the email I sent out to my customers. I think it’s relevant, as there’s a fair bit of art and stuff you may not have seen yet.
And apparently rest days are important when you’re doing an absurd endeavour like this newsletter+video posting marathon. That’s probably true, I wouldn’t know, but today is the seventh day so maybe some kind of kip is called for. I believe it’s traditional.
Oh also I finished the painting part of my secret project today. Y A Y
Gidday, Two Ruru art enthusiast,
It’s been a while, but I wanted to show some of what I’ve been working on. This is just some, by the way; I’ve never done more art (or writing in my life.) There’s a good reason for that:
I’m now a full-time artist/writer/marketing contractor/consultant/dilettante
So there really has never been a better time (for me) to purchase my work. And I’ve just made the best possible way (for you) to do just that:
Introducing the Two Ruru Print Club: where you can subscribe to my work (digitally or in-real-lifey, your call!) for a very attractive price ($2 less than the cost of one PDF download from my shop)
AND the prints come with a postcard printed on the back, so you can send a message to your friends in the snail mail like in the olden days!
AND there’s an option to get a stamp with your print and the stamp has art on it that I made myself, as seen in the following educational film:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lEiR1nJskVU
I like all this very much, and I hope you do too. I especially like the idea of getting folks sending actual letters (well, postcards) to each other — it’s something I miss from the pre-internet days and I think it’d be good to get going again.
Oh and subscribing to any of the tiers will also get you a letter from me each month. If that’s something you’d like.
And I’m still making prints, shirts and other things. The aim is to get a print, a sticker, and a shirt made for each piece of art I make each month, so if you want to buy something as a one-off, you definitely have that option too.
That duck picture you’ve seen a lot of is part of the new project I hinted at last time: I am attempting to paint along with every single episode of Bob Ross’ show The Joy of Painting and make… creative adjustments to the art that comes out. I’ve done a few of these now and will be putting out prints and stickers for each, as well as making them available for digital downloads.
And on a completely unrelated note, people seemed to like this:
If you’re more in the scrolling mood, I’m making an antidote to doom at all of the usual social media hellsites. I challenged myself to post something new every day and I very nearly have — I’m now up to day 22. Feel free to check it via the digital addiction platform of your choice:
“Kakabro” (a kakapo wearing a trucker cap) was the standout winner in the poll I sent asking you what bird I should paint next, and work is now underway! The reveal should be my October Surprise (a good one, I hope.) I’m looking forward to showing you.
Thank You
Now, more than ever, I appreciate you supporting my work. Go have a hoon on https://www.tworuru.com/shop/ and I’ll have more for you soon.
Feel free to reply to this email with any suggestions or requests, and I’ll make sure to reply right back – I read every email you send, and I appreciate ‘em, too.
I have, true to my word, been absolutely smashing the website. As always when I make Website Stuff I feel like Homer when he’s been up all night eating cheese, or like Billy Joel Armstrong in Brain Stew.
There, some comforting references for Elder Millenials. The rest of you will have to be confused. Let me assuage that by showing you the things I made today. Behold, my stuff!
Some of the stuff I made today
First up is a print of old mate Moby Duck, as requested by what seems like a billion but is more likely about ten TikTok commenters:
And next is a digital download, because DRM is silly and digital products are cheap and convenient for customers and all margin for me, baby! It’s a win-win!
You folks who’ve signed up for this 30 day challenge malarkey are the first ever to see this. And if we’re all extremely lucky, all the subscription links and options on that page should actually work. Feel free to test it out! 1
A bit more about the print club in the last few minutes before midnight. Essentially, it’s a way to subscribe to my art. I’d been wanting to set up a subscription print club for ages, but I thought the concept was a bit… done. Then I thought: why not postcards? So you can choose to keep them or send them to your mates?
So that’s what I did.
And then I thought: but why not stamps too? Because it turns out New Zealand Post offers a custom stamp option, and so now you can bathe in this glory:
Minutes left until deadline! Oh, I almost forgot. Paid subscribers to the Cynic’s Guide are going to get opted into the Two Ruru Digital Archive automatically. I’ll send an email about it tomorrow. It’s the least I can do for you guys. With that in mind, here is the big red button.
Thanks all! And feel free to reply to this email and let me know what you reckon.
(Don’t worry, I’ll sort you if anything goes wrong.)
Today is a shorter update. I worked on my Secret Project — it’s a painting, but that’s not the secret bit — and I did House Chores.1 This episode isn’t likely to be riveting for anyone playing along at home, but I think there’s a metaphor to be mined out of the boring detritus of domesticity.
We have a set of curtains in the master bedroom that is Not Doing Well, and hasn’t been for oh, let’s say, a year. The lining, I suppose you’d call it, the stuff that blocks out light and attracts mould, is getting sun-damaged and fragile and has ripped accordingly. When the rip started it was about four centimetres long.
“We should fix that,” Louise, or I, said.
Of course, since then, the rip has grown up and had little baby rips of its own. It’s now a good metre long. Or I should say was over a metre long, because today I finally took the curtains down and fixed them.
Of course, I’d figured out how to fix them many months ago. About midway through what I am, entirely without justification, going to call the Rip Saga, I’d bought some iron-on patches and tape from Spotlight and done nothing with them. As is so often the case with ADHD stuff, there were what seemed like dozens of reasons not to fix the curtains. The stuff I’d bought might not work. The ironing board wasn’t big enough. The curtains might rip even more. All these excuses, half-thought, felt as a kind of almost tangible barrier in the mind.
So while the kiddos were out and after I’d done enough work on my secret painting I popped into our bedroom, took the curtains down — five minutes, tops — laid them out on a set of drawers, no ironing board needed, grabbed the iron-on patches and scissors, and the curtains were fixed. It took maybe 45 minutes.
45 minutes, for a job I’ve been avoiding for a year.
I don’t want to pin all this sort of thing on ADHD. Every person in with a house has housework they don’t get to. But that odd little barrier in the mind, the terminal indecision followed by a reflexive urge to do something else — that, I believe, is an ADHD thing. So many of the things I struggle with come down to indecision. I can’t decide, so I avoid, so I fall in to some kind of default behaviour.
Since finishing my old job and attempting my own thing, this sort of stuff happens far less. I’m noticing I get more done, more often. Some of this is the inevitable result of having more time and more mental bandwidth; there’s a reason newly unemployed people are so often portrayed in media as taking a sudden interest in housework or arcane hobbies.
But I feel like mine runs a bit deeper; I’m finding myself more apt to do tasks I’d typically avoid. That little mental hiccup of indecision, the stab of resistance, is somehow more noticeable and therefore more avoidable. And some of this is quite definitely because of my do-something-every-day project; instead of just letting the roadblocks get in the way I’m just smashing through them, and realising (to continue the road transport metaphor) they were more cones than concrete barriers.
Or maybe I just give fewer ducks these days.
Speaking of ducks! For inexplicable reasons, that duck I painted has gone almost legitimately viral on TikTok. Last I looked it had 123,000 views, which is still small beer in the scheme of things but is by far the most looks anything I’ve ever made has had. My almost-daily posting and gruelling video-making has, at last, paid off. Not in money, of course. That would be too easy. But there are a lot of folks asking for prints, and so I’m going to have to get some of those ready to sell tomorrow.
Oh here is that large red button again I suppose. Thanks to those who have taken out paid subscriptions! You can pay what you want, so long as it’s more than $3 dollarydoos
https://buttondown.com/cynicsguide?as_embed=true
Then I played D&D with friends, which is why this one is late (there will be a new reason every night, I’m sure.)
