If you want to truly care about anything, you can’t care about everything.

The capacity for giving a f*ck is finite; dispense available f*cks wisely.

I miss Hermitage‘s F*ck You Friday. Anyone knows what’ up with Hermitage? Last I heard, she’s been leading a productive, respectable life of a brainy academic we’ve always known her to be under the facade of a hard-core gamer with a potty mouth. If anyone’s in touch with Hermitage, please say ‘hi’ for me!

***

I have taken the position of a volunteer editor at a microfiction magazine. I know, I know, it’s not like I need more things to do… But let me tell you, this is exactly what I’ve always needed for my perpetually hungry brain! New stories are continuously coming in, so each time I pick one up, I get a little hit of dopamine. The zine is devoted to providing personalized feedback, so I really have to think about what worked in a story  and what didn’t, which really, really helps with my own writing. I think I’ve learned more in a week of editing than over a few months of writing.

***

I have a proposal due early next week and writing it has been a slog. The last thing I want to do is work on it, as this is a second resubmission (recommended twice, but no cigar). If I don’t get it this time, I am done submitting it, at least to NSF; I have other things that I want to pursue with the same directorate.

Considering that I don’t really want to work on it, it’s actually helpful to have multiple ‘distractions’ that give me tiny bursts of will to live, so I can go back and write another paragraph or so. Therefore, I fight procrastination by self-indulgence in small amounts. Here are all the tabs I have open in my browser right now:

• Three tabs related to my fiction-editing duties (posting; communication with authors; communication with other editors)
• A Duotrope tab, where I refresh to see which among the markets where I have stories pending has been sending in decisions recently
• A Submittable tab; Submittable is the electronic submission manager through which many markets handle stories
• Google Doc where I am tweaking a story with a Halloween theme for the Oct 31 deadline (for someone who nominally doesn’t like fantasy, I sure seem to write a lot of it)
• Twitter (yes, my fiction persona has a Twitter account, but I use it conservatively, mostly for liking and lurking)
• Two blog stats pages open (this one and the fiction one) because stats make me happy
• Logged into three Gmail accounts, each with a tab open (various online pursuits)
• Three manuscript status pages for the three technical manuscripts I currently have in review
• Editorial dashboard page for the technical journal where I am an associate editor
• Fastlane (NSF submission portal)
• Internal routing service for proposals
• An Amazon tab and a Wrangler tab (I just bought Eldest two pairs of jeans)
• Obviously WordPress dashboard for this post

Other tools open:

• Outlook for work email, as I am waiting for letters of support from my experimental collaborators and have just answered some homework questions for my undergraduate class
• Excel, where I tweaked the budget
• Word, with several documents that I am currently working on (cleaning up Current and Pending Support, Budget Justification, Biosketch, along with the Project Description and Project Summary documents)

Busy brain = happy brain.