Song: I'm On Fire (video) - about life, it's foibles and that billion person carousel. Culling as a Kindness...
Wanna see how nerdy/analytical I can be... read this...
I’m going to share a song with you. It’s a nice one. Just me, my guitar, sitting on the loft couch yesterday morning.
But first, let’s have a heart-to-heart.
CULLING: Definition
noun
reduction of a wild animal population by selective slaughter.
"kangaroo culling"
the action of sending an inferior or surplus farm animal to be slaughtered.
"local areas affected by livestock culling"
Kind of brutal, right? Okay… I won’t be culling any kangaroos or livestock. But certain activities? Yeah, they are on the chopping block.
Culling as a personal kindness
As I mentioned last time, I took a role with Meta. I started this past Monday. My brief review of my week:
There are a lot of systems, people, and processes I need to become familiar with. Which is to say, I’m mostly lost but excited about climbing to the many lookout posts to get a better lay of the land.
Last weekend I created a spreadsheet to analyze activities that take my time. This is where I reveal my analytical nerditudity. Aka: how much of a nerd I am. I have a link below where you can get a copy of this sheet. ;-)
My sheet has 7 columns. They are listed in bold with an explanation below.:
Activity: The name/description of the activity (Work at Meta, Music: Recording, Music: Performing, Fitness, etc.)
Continue: Where I flag with a Y or an N if I am continuing this activity.
Importance to Soul: A 1 to 4 rating (1 being the highest) of whether this activity feeds my soul. (How much do I LOVE IT!)
Functional Importance: A 1 to 4 rating (1 being the highest) of the importance to life goals and my day to day functionality.
Evaluative Sum: Importance to Soul + Functional Importance
The lower the number, the safer the activity.Why Important: A few words on what the activity provides or potentially provides.
Time/Week: How much time the activity does or should take each week.
My highest paying work is a 2, 1 on the Soul, Importance metric. Sum: 3
Music is a 1, 3 on the Soul, Importance metric. And so it goes. Sum: 4
The highest rating any activity could get would be an Evaluative Sum of 2. Only one activity attained that rating. Fitness & R&R (working out, hiking, cycling).
Anything that scored a 5 or higher is on the block. Well, I have one activity that I will continue that scored a 5. It has to do with work but not with Meta. And it is temporary.
Why is it a kindness?
Anytime you can better focus your activities, even if that means putting certain items on hold or even into the trash bin, contentment & happiness can increase. Read about that here.
What was culled?
First, some of these will be re-evaluated over time. Just because I will not allocate time to it now, does not mean that I won’t in 6 months or a year. With that disclaimer, here are some things that are being culled and their Evaluative Sum in parenthesis.
The Google Automator: My Substack teaching Javascript. (6)
Photography/Drawing: (6)
The Arrogant Sage on LinkedIn (writing/essays) (5)
What avoided the axe?
Work at Meta (3)
Finishing client work (5)
Music: Recording (4)
Music: Performing (4)
This Substack (3) - Talking to you guys rates. Do you feel honored?
Soul (1), Functional (2)My YouTube Music Channel (4)
Fitness & RR (2)
Another note: Personal relationships, Deb & I, my family, and the friends I see too infrequently, were not evaluated using this spreadsheet. I’m certain, not matter how highly she rated, Deb would not appreciate being a number. She is on a different chart… the kiss, hug, and squeeze chart. She rated better than adequate….
….‘nuff sed.
If you want to evaluate your activities, you can make a copy of my spreadsheet. This will require that you have a Google (Gmail) account. Here is the link. Open it and choose, File->Copy. I’ve prefilled at least one activity for you. I’m nice that way.
The Song: I’m On Fire
I wrote this song in 2011. It was a time of change for me. My 2nd marriage had ended, I had moved to be closer to my youngest, I was trying to figure out some of my why’s and what’s. I was trying to re-create my who as well.
And in that turmoil, I had determined that I was happy through some sadness. I was happy because I had stripped away all concern of what others thought. I was content to be alone and had committed to having no committed female relationships until Sara, my youngest, was 18.
I had committed to evaluating and working on myself. I was culling things then, similar to now.
The song, summarized:
Verse one and the chorus reflect on where I was personally. Verse two is a bit of an ode to my oldest daughter, Jess. And verse three was reflective of the idea that most of us, to a greater or lesser degree, are all on a bit of a circular journey of culling and discovery.
I sat down on my couch yesterday and recorded a purely acoustic version based on Deb’s recommendation from the night before. She asked me to change the key and perform it with more of a simple finger-picking approach. She’s bossy that way.
I hope you enjoy it! Oh.. the lyrics are below the video.
With love and gratitude.
Matthew Moran, June 10, 2022
I'M ON FIRE
© 2011 - Matthew Moran
VERSE
Another sunset on that California coast
And when I think of all the times we shared,
I think love those times the most
But calendar pages, things change and
There goes my innocence
Well, maybe that's a stretch but I
Never thought it would end like this
CHORUS
And every time I thought that I'd find my way home
I found I'd lost it all but in that I've finally found what I can own
I'm on Fire and I'm alive and it's alright
La dee dee, la dee dee, La dee dee dee dee It's alright
VERSE
A young girl in a sundress drinking ice cold lemonade
Stares into her future
her faith certain that she's got it made
But cups you fill are bound to spill and
Leave a sticky mess
Still the sweetness permeates She laughs,
"Ain't life what we make of it"
(chorus)
VERSE
A billion people on a roadside carousel
Trying desperately to find a way
Up from here and back to there
Well, two steps forward, two steps back and
Then get shuffled to the side
You know, life it's for the living and
Living just ain't something you can hide
(chorus)
Your essay on culling reminded me of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
He was the nerdiest nerd in America.
He was famous for his keen ability to quantify data and interpret the material studied
In any event, he was perhaps the most important architect of our failure in Vietnam
He believed that if we measured everything we could adjudge whether we were succeeding.
He had his minions turn out thousands of pages of data per week providing metrics on everything: Number of enemy grenades fired, bomb tonnage dropped, the number of enemy troops captured who were Buddhist, who were communist etc.
Most of all, he prized the kill count, or the number of enemy soldiers killed per week, per month etc.
He believed that a high kill count meant we were winning.
This was one of his biggest mistakes. His subordinates knew that he would be happy with a big kill count, and they therefore inflated the kill count by killing innocent civilians (And some people wonder why so many of us were so radical. There is a very high positive correlation between how much one knew and how much one hated American policies in Indochina. Its no accident that Ivy League students were the most fantastically, furiously radical --- Sorry for being an intellectual snot once again. )
Hegal said that every thesis has within it the seeds of its antithesis.
Robert McNamara's almost fetishistic adoration of metrics provoked its antithesis: The hippies, the yippies, the wild-eyed, fierce adoration of free spirited, unquantifiable life.