The rest is…?

Hi friends. This is where it starts getting different. I only have so much cancer talk to talk about, so we’re going to veer off into… well, everything else? It’s an experiment. You don’t have to stick around if it doesn’t work for you. 

But first, some cancer talk! I finished my official treatment in the hospital last week, as I mentioned last time. I’ve since come across a whole thread on a support group of people who felt between ambivalent to mortified about the whole bell-ringing thing, which makes me feel in better company. To me, it seemed there were all these “fun” cancer people who wore the t-shirt to the concert and then got super-excited about ringing the ding-dong bell. And by “the t-shirt” I mean that not just metaphorically but also that there seem to be a lot of people, well, women, who wear these “cancer warrior” type t-shirts to chemo — there’s an endless variety in said genre, but with that  warrior/fuck cancer  kind of sentiment. Nothing in me has any urge to own, let alone wear, a cancer t-shirt, and would be embarrassed and perplexed and made to feel extremely awkward if one came into my life by some means. In the same way that I have to urge to dance to “Cel-e-braaate good times come on” or even Earth Wind and Fire at weddings — or any of those jolly songs, anywhere, really. That’s the kind of fun I totally don’t get. Ok, maybe I get it, intellectually, for other people, but it is the kind of fun I do not feel. I don’t want to do the hokey-pokey and turn myself around. And wearing a cancer warrior t-shirt and ringing the bell seems like the oncological equivalent. 

I know people get comfort or inspiration from the notion of being a warrior, of fighting or maybe “owning it” and all that, but those metaphors rub me the wrong way to a degree. Maybe it’s because I was told from almost the beginning that my disease would be treated with curative intent, it felt/feels like more of a process than a war. But generally, I just don’t like those bellicose tropes, for this or other topics. Love not war, man. 

That said, I did tell my surgeon that I thought Tandem and Ovoid would be a very good post-rock band name and she should really consider starting one. See, I’m fun.

Also, I’m ok with the fact that the chemo nurses all seem to have a full wardrobe of cancer t-shirts to wear with their scrub outfits. I mean, if there’s a time and a place, there you go. I also suspect they get them as swag all the time from whatever swag-dispensing events chemo nurses attend, so why not wear them to work — where they may well end up covered in blood, vomit, toxic drug cocktails, or other things you’d only want to get on your work clothes. Actually, they wear awkward protective gear over their cancer t-shirts when dealing with the toxic drug cocktails, so don’t worry.

I’m not some kind of pedantic Taylorism type or anything, but I really couldn’t help but notice lots of the little things that made the jobs of the nurses and other health care workers just that little bit more annoying or cumbersome, and certainly the disposable gowns and PPE they needed to put on for prepping the chemo drugs was one of them. They never had them secured — presumably because the ties were in the back and hard to self-secure, and because it hardly seemed worth it for the few minutes of use. Lots of other little niggles like this too, with equipment and procedures… I was always asking about this stuff, and at least being empathetic about it if not able to offer any solutions. Everyone hates the little things that are annoying in their jobs, especially when they could be made better by designers or who ever works on the user-experience aspect of, for example, chemo nurse PPE. 

By a similar token, however, I have to say I was very impressed and reassured by the procedures that the nurses, doctors, and other staff went through on the regular. First, that these systems were in place and second that they were scrupulous about it. Checklists, double checks, triple checks, not cutting off the incorrect leg. I kept wanting to talk about Atul Gawande and The Checklist Manifesto — but restrained myself, because it is highly possible that no one else does. 

I was going to give an update though, way back there, after the third or so sentence at the top. But I digressed. Update: I’ve been really exhausted for the past week. Physically mostly, but also mentally. The latter manifesting itself in an inability to think about/deal with even the littlest things (so sorry if it took me several days to text you back… I just… couldn’t think). 

The physical part is completely to be expected. The 5 internal radiation blasts I’ve had over the past few weeks are working their magical violent destruction whirlwind in there and it’s not, you know, what the body expects. 

But the body, mine anyway, is really freakin’ stubborn about resting. I don’t really know how. I kept asking people how to do it. Even reddit couldn’t tell me. Like, literally, what do you do? Stay in bed? Sit in a chair? Read books? Stare into space? I was very confused. I hate the muddlement that often comes of a whole day in the house not interacting with the world, even in superficial ways. (This is different than not liking being alone — I like being alone quite a bit. This is more of an unsettling sense of disconnectedness that can come when you’re sick or nap all day or are generally out of it). 

Anyway, trying to rest really confused me for a few days there. Very grumpy. Yesterday and today I’m feeling a bit more energetic, and trying a new plan of a combo of doing stuff, napping and consuming caffeine to see if that works for a bit. But yeah, if you know how to rest and can explain it to me like I’m 5, feel free. 

What set me off being overly exhausted — maybe — was that I did a market last Saturday and it was, to be honest, a frustrating one. Interesting event put on by cool people for a good cause, but the vendor part, at least where I chose to have my booth, just wasn’t conducive to a lot of sales on that particular weekend in that particular setting. Salem was in a transition moment last weekend in the tourist cycle. It wasn’t quite right for my more touristy stuff, but there weren’t a lot of locals shopping either. It was a small part of a bigger market, first time doing it, and that is how I learn. I mean, I broke even and made a small profit, but it was a slow day. The vibe can get you down when you’re dealing with non-shoppers all day. Wish I could think of a better word than “vibe” for that sentence, but I can’t at the moment, sorry. Anyway it all put me in a bit of a bad mood, but more, it was probably too soon for me to do a market and I ended up being very exhausted for most of the week after that. 

This blog post… let’s talk about me! Let’s talk about my health! It feels very egotistical.  

But Seth Godin says to blog every day. Just ship it. Get it out there, keep up the practice. Remember him? I just read his latest book The Practice. It’s kind of odd that I read it because I’d pretty much dismissed him years ago — chiefly because his books had become increasingly obvious and excessively reiterative. And also because I designed a bunch of posters and promo materials for one of his talks for a client and I was at said talk, talking to him and mentioned that I did all the design for the event to promote him and he was really quite dismissive and grumpy and I felt it was rather hypocritical for Mr Get-Your-Creative-Work-Out-There guy. Though, really we all have bad days. I thought I was done with him at that point. However, I grabbed his latest book because it was there, in the dewey decimal system at the library next to something I was looking for, and gave it a read and actually quite liked it. Very much in the same vein as Stephen Pressfield’s much-lauded The War of Art, but possibly even simpler. A nice little inspirational treatise on doing stuff. But not in a bro-y way. But don’t get me started on bros and their yucky way of thinking about “self-improvement” and productivity. At least not right now. 

In related news, I’ve been unproductively fretting over how best to organize my notes and research for the book I’m working on. Let me drag you into the weeds with me! There’s part of me that really wants to use actual notecards, because that’s how I was taught to do research in grade school, and because analog bits of paper are sexy. This led me down a rabbit hole of learning about zettlekasten, or the “slip box” — a system of keeping and cross-referencing everything of interest you come across on notecards made famous by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. People get really into this and then go down tangential rabbit holes about how to optimize it, and of course how to do it digitally or why you shouldn’t do it digitally. Then there’s overlap with the Second Brain people, and lots of talk of Notion and Obsidian and, more dogmatically, future-proof .txt files in punctiliously named or tagged folders and so forth. People spend a lot of time jockeying information around on the premise that they may or may not need it someday. They tout the benefits of finding the connections, and I can see that that would be useful and pleasing. And I get that writing things out longhand has benefit for comprehension and memory. But also, information management can become a full-time gig if you’re not careful. I need to actually do something with my information, that’s the point. 

So, much as it was interesting to learn about the modern version of zettlekasten, I don’t think I’ll be doing that per se, especially not in analog form. But three takeaways from that tangent that seem helpful are: to include cross-referencing links in notes when possible so that information can be organized into different places depending on where it fits better; to not bother organizing notes while in progress but let search tools do the work when it’s time to structure; and to rewrite/summarize all ideas from other sources in your own words right up front unless planning to include direct, attributed quotes. No cut and paste.

As an aside, although Lehmann is lauded and studied for this whole zettlekasten thing, people/scholars have ben employing similar ideas for centuries. Commonplace books and all that. And beyond all the Renaissance and Enlightenment type dudes (and presumably dudettes who went uncelebrated), the whole writing of the first Oxford English Dictionary was nothing if not a giant box of slips of paper. For decades. (Highly recommend The Professor and the Madman if that sounds exciting to you, which, why wouldn’t it? Come on, the OED!) (There is also a film, but it stars Mel Gibson as the Scottish protagonist, enough said?).

Where was I? Oh yes, so I have been keeping notes in Apple notes, which has the advantage of being relatively omnipresent in my “digital life”, simple, and backed up. I haven’t been rigorous about one-idea-per-note by any means. Many have long bullet lists of stuff. I think maybe I’ll continue with that and then transfer everything in the idea-sized chunks to the digital notecards in Scrivener when the time comes. Writers of researched non-fiction, what do you think? What do you do? 

I guess that’s it for today. Cancer and notecards. Never say I didn’t give you anything. 

[Photo at top is Harvard Widener Library in 1915 from the LOC]

Bonus items

• Alternative to Earth Wind and Fire for a song about September you don’t have to dance to

• Fabulous new record out today from the amazing young people of Circus Trees

• When I was linking things above, I discovered that Joan Rivers had an archive of over a million 3x5 index cards of Joan Rivers jokes.