Category: knots

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Tackling the Chaos – the Saga Continues

I started yesterday talking about the latest part of the Google drive saga, with the discovery of the ‘Desktop’ folder, which was inside the ‘My computer’ folder, which was inside the ‘Computers’ folder. There were two other folders in the ‘My computer’ folder, one called ‘Documents’ and one called ‘Pictures’. I opened ‘Documents’ and it contained one other folder, called ‘Bridport’, which rang a vague bell, but when I opened it, it was empty. I tried drilling down through some of the folders in ‘Desktop’ too, and found that they were also empty.

It was very puzzling, but I went back to the list of files in descending order by size. At the top were some music files, which I didn’t want to delete because I regularly access them from my phone, but I had a go at deleting some of the photo files again. I started getting warning messages telling me that the files would be deleted ‘…from all devices…’ which spooked me a bit. Did this mean they would be deleted from my hard drive ‘Desktop’ as well? I decided to leave that until I could confirm that they were still there, and went back to copying all the photos from my phone to my computer and then deleting them from Google photos, and the ones from the latest phone backup from my phone into the ‘USB devices and SD cards folder’. This got the storage down to about 11GB again, and I left it at that.

The next day when I restarted the computer, the usual messages about my cloud space being 99% full came up. I opened Google Drive and went to the Desktop folder. Inside it was a complete list of the folders on my computer desktop, including the ‘Backup photos’ folder which I had specifically created to save the photos I’ve been downloading and deleting from Google Drive to save space. I opened it, and it contained files which I had created only the day before.

At this point, I need to explain how I organise the files on my computer. My virtual desktop is pretty similar to the state of my physical desktop (and you’ve seen photos of that). Although I am quite organised in having folders for important stuff: individual projects, my blog, poems, accounts, novel, etc etc, I create them on the Desktop and shove the lower folders and various files inside them – although I also have a tendency to save files to the desktop ‘temporarily’, so there are always quite a few odd documents or photos lying around which I don’t sort out, so that the whole thing becomes a bit of a mess, and I rely heavily on the ‘recently accessed files’.

And it seemed as if not just my phone, but all the files from my desktop (in other words, all the files I had put – and was continuing to put – on my terabyte of hard drive) were being automatically backed up to the 15gb of cloud space… tbc

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Tackling the… Whatever

Some days when I start writing without knowing what to say, it develops, and by the end I feel as though I’ve written something interesting – or at least not too shameful. Then there are days like yesterday when I start but stop half way through because I’m not getting anywhere and, honestly, I just can’t be arsed.

There are many mornings when I start off wondering what I’m going to write and my head is so full of worry and fear about things that no one but me could possibly think were worth being worried or fearful over, but the worry and fear are there anyway, so do I write about them? I am trying to stop beating myself up over this, but it’s become apparent that it isn’t really just the ‘beating up’ that’s the issue, it’s the fact that the feelings are there anyway, it’s the things that I have to do, and the things that I fail to do, and the flotsam that swirls on the dark churning maelstrom of memory.

Planning and organisation are anathema to the dyspraxic brain, because while the attention is fixed on one thing, action or requirement and trying to assemble the others required to precede and follow it, the rest of the mind-stream is charging off into completely different paths, cul de sacs and labyrinths. ‘Write it down!’ I hear you cry, but any attempt to do that initiates mind-block and stasis – a Mexican stand-off while the focussed brain tries to remember what it was thinking of in the first place.

The only way to make things stick is through rote learning and repetition, so the same things are run through over and over again. ‘Planning’ consists of reminding oneself multiple times that ‘something’ needs to be done before a certain date, which induces panic that it will be forgotten, or done incorrectly, or will take a lot longer than the time allowed, and ‘writing down’ becomes a substitute for action.

In situations like this, ‘self care’ can only mean ignoring all that and doing something pleasantly mindless (or mindful) while all that other stuff goes to hell in a hand basket. Which famous author said: ‘I love deadlines, I love the swooshing noise they make as they pass by’? Can you remember? No, neither can I.

Incidentally, the Word grammar checker wants me to change that last ‘I’ to ‘Me’. Grammar checker, in this instance you are wrong, so wrong. How about if I turn it into a question? Can I? See, you can’t object to that, can you?

Why do I even leave the grammar checker turned on? Because it’s the default, and I can’t be arsed to change it, so I just ignore it because I have more confidence in my own understanding than in its – except sometimes I can’t see what it’s objecting to, so I follow the explanation and have a good laugh at its incompetence.

The routine is: write 500 words. And so I have.

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Tackling the… What was the question?

I know that most of the things I worry about are unimportant. I know that the worst scenarios will probably never happen.

My attention bounces from one thing to the next, to the next, to the next ad infinitum, and I can’t retrace my steps to see how I got there, and I can’t see where it’s going, and the track of my thoughts goes round and back and crosses and intersects and spirals down then shoots off into another dimension and still I am no more secure in what I know, I have reached no conclusions, made no plans, discovered no revelations and… what was the question again?

So far today I have: dropped a match into a candle glass and left it to burn because the glass still contained wax but no wick and I thought the match would act as a wick, but minutes later there was a crack and bits of broken hot glass on the floor (fortunately the flame had gone out); then in the shower I picked up a bottle, saw the opening was at the bottom (the only indicator that usually works and I specifically noticed it), squeezed some of the contents onto my fingers, rubbed it into my hair and then realised it wasn’t lathering because it was conditioner, not shampoo. I’m not saying either of those actions was disastrous – on the contrary, they are both perfectly normal, and I cleared up the broken glass (when it was cool enough to touch) and thoroughly rinsed my hair before trying again and getting the right bottle this time. Oh, and I lost my reading glasses in between coming out of the spare room where I do my yoga and into the bedroom to get towels for the shower, and had another look in the spare room before finding them on the book shelves in the bedroom where I must have put them all of thirty seconds earlier. As I said, perfectly normal.

So where is this train of thought taking me? And is it anywhere that I – or you, my putative reader – would choose to go?

Once again, I stare at the clutter on my desk in search of inspiration ‘A tidy desk is the sign of a tidy mind.’ Evidently, the converse is also true, as mine perfectly depicts the state of my mind. The clear space in the centre front is where my phone was, which I had to move in order to take the photo. As soon as I brought it into this room, and within reach of the wifi, it sent me a message informing me that my data cannot be backed up because my cloud storage is full, and I need to upgrade it – the Magic Data Pot in action once again. I have now downloaded all my photos up to 2019 to my hard drive, and deleted them from the cloud and my phone. When the will to live returns, I’ll do the same for last year…

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Untangling

I didn’t write yesterday, and I don’t want to write today. The emotions and thoughts that swirl around in my head are probably best kept to myself. Everything is complicated and tangled up together, and if I find a way through and come out the other side, I daren’t look over my shoulder because I know it will drag me back in again.

I like that metaphor, and here’s another one. When you have a tangled ball of yarn (which happens to me a lot), in order to untangle it you have to start with an end. Ends aren’t always easy to find, but you can make one, by choosing a thread at random and cutting it. You now have two ends, and you pick one – maybe the one that has a longer ‘tail’ – and tug gently on it. You should then see a movement of one of the threads in the tangle, so you put your thumb and finger through the gap nearest to the movement, take hold of the thread that just moved, and pull it through the gap – if you’ve got the right thread, the cut end will follow, and now the tail is a little longer, so you repeat the process and watch for the next movement. The tail gets longer, and eventually you have to start rolling it into a ball, or else it might create another tangle. But then you have to pass the whole ball through the tangled loops – you can’t just pull on it from inside the tangle any more, because the ball will just unroll. At that point, I hold the ball in my hand and slide my hand through the loops, so that they’re effectively wrapped around my wrist. In this way, I can gradually free up more of the tail – or rather, of the ever-growing ball.

Sometimes, in the middle of the tangle, you come across a knot in one of the threads. You might be able to pull it open with your finger nails, or slide a needle under one of the loops and gently pull it looser, and in that case, once you’ve made one of the knot-loops big enough to pass the ball through, you can get rid of it. If it’s in a single thread, it’s easier just to leave it there, but if it’s two (or even more) knotted together, it’s got to be dealt with. However what’s even worse is when two threads have rubbed against each other long enough to effectively become stuck together, but not actually knotted in the sense of being wrapped around each other. These can be a nightmare to prise apart. If you can work out which ends belong to which thread, sometimes it’s possible to grasp both ends of one thread in one hand, and of the other in the other hand, and tug them apart, but then they’ll both be left with a fluffy bobble attached. And of course, they might snap – or you can cut it.