The Dinner Party

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I'm reading Getting to Yes with Yourself: (and Other Worthy Opponents), which is interesting and in which author William Ury talks about how to negotiate with yourself. Early on, he encourages you to give your critical inner-voices personalities and to think of them as guests at a dinner party. His idea is: look, these things aren't leaving, you might as well name them and try to understand them as a way of more effectively dealing with them. Clearly, IANAA (I Am Not an Artist), but I follow Paul Greer on Instagram at @burningfp, and his sketches, which, unlike mine, are terrific, inspired me to draw some of the creatures at my dinner party. So, here is The Shrew, which whines and complains a lot. It's female and consists of a ball of fat with a matting of hair stuck to it. Meet "Judgey," a cat with mange who is never anything but critical of others. There's Hypochron, whose superpower is overreacting to everything and also catastrophizing. Let's not forget Lay-Ze-Bonez, which is quick to pronounce any lag in productivity a testament to one's laziness. And, finally, we've got I'm Thirsty. I'm Thirsty is a head-only it-thing that lives at the bottom of a glass that is barely filled with water. It's always thirsty. Despite the water. I hope you enjoyed meeting my new friends! It's actually been sort of interesting and effective to think of the voices in this way. It makes them easier to be rational in relationship to. Let's face it, these guys suck. As Ury writes: "Self-judgment may be the greatest barrier to self-understanding." 

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What I'm reading

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“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well -- better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good,' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words -- in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston?”
-- George Orwell, 1984