Windows 8, the Productivity-App-Hater’s Best Friend

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Elizabeth Calimente

I love Windows 8. There, I said it; now you can throw all the potatoes you want at me. I’m sure you’ve probably read my fellow Win 8 lovers’ posts about how great all the under-the-hood changes are, how much faster it is than Windows 7, and how the Metro Modern interface isn’t the OS. I won’t bore you with that. My reason for loving it is far more prosaic: I’m finally using an online calendar and a tracking app.

For a product to be usable, it needs to meet two major criteria: it must be simple, and it must also be easily accessible. The more steps involved in starting up said apps, the less likely I am to use them. Ideally, the app should also be fun to use.

Paper should be the solution, right? Paper calendars, notebooks and diaries have been around probably for centuries now, and there are fewer simpler things in the known universe. Except that paper is permanent. Even if an event or a thought is penciled in, once it’s time to erase, traces remain forever. Paper rustles and crinkles, and it requires either filing or disposing. In short, the simplest of all solutions brings additional complications.

Using online or computerized apps should be perfect, then. Not really. Websites require thinking about to look up and log into. The same problem occurs with calendar apps of all stripes. You have to remember to open them in the first place to trigger all of your meticulously set-up alarms and reminders. I tried the Calendar app on my old Samsung Epic 4G, thinking the alarms and notifications would be perfect. Nope! I had to actually be using the phone to see the notification, rendering the function utterly useless. You can probably see the biggest problem: in order to be reminded about important events, you need to remember to use the tools!

In your face, slacker!

You’ve got coffee in hand. You’re going to boot up your PC. You’re only half-coherent, since you’ve only tentatively slurped at your blistering-hot beverage. You click the button, you log in, and…

That’s it. That’s your calendar, staring you right in the face. You have no choice but to see it, unless you’re the sort to install Start8 or Classic Shell. Since it’s there, easily accessible, why not use it?

Advantages:

It’s right there. No excuses for missing appointments—you’ll see your next event every time you use your Start screen.
The app is simple and seamless, just like any calendar app. You type a few lines and save.
Windows will pop up reminder messages over your work without you having to think about opening any apps or having extra program windows open.
If you use your Windows Live account ID to log in on your Windows 8 computer, your calendar is automatically available online.

Calendar also syncs to Android if you use your Windows Live ID to log onto your Windows 8 computer. There’s the probably preferable way or the easy-peasy lazy and probably privacy-invading way to set up the syncing process. Guess which one I picked?

Now that I’ve started using Calendar, I can’t stop. It’s incredibly useful.

Tracking ideas – To the Cloud!

For someone who hates recording ideas or writing things down for future reference, the following might just be the easy, blissful and Zen recording experience you’ve been wanting. I’m talking about Thoughts, a whimsical, fun way to store brief glimmers of half-formed ideas for later.

The app itself is simple: a sky full of your bobbing, floating ideas, musings, and things to do later. Here’s my sky full of potential blog posts:

Using it is simple:

Click on the light bulb. A cloud will open.
Just start typing. Each idea cloud can accommodate up to 141 characters.
Click “Save”.
Watch your idea drift off into the skies.

To access and edit your drifting ideas:

Click on the idea cloud.
The menu will appear beneath your enlarged cloud.
Click either the garbage can icon to delete your idea or the pencil icon to edit.
Click the large “X” to send your edited cloud back to the sky, if it still exists.

Future possibilities

I’ve been trying to find a task tracking app that doesn’t involve additional web memberships or excessive transmission of personal data (I’m looking at you, qool). On deck are Priority Matrix, a Covey-based tracking app, and Eylean Tasks.

The Mysterious Psoas– How Working with this Hidden Muscle Re-ignited My Intuition

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Elizabeth Calimente

And, in looking at that title, I’m thinking as you probably are, “What hooey!” Yeah, I understand. Completely. A simple muscle that joins your lower rib to your pelvis shouldn’t have any bearing on your brain’s functionality.

Some people have a very intimate and familiar relationship with their bodies; they understand what it wishes and what it needs. They don’t resent satisfying its demands or disciplining the mind to serve its whims. That hasn’t been me. For most of my life, my body has pretty much been a life-support system for my far more important brain. I’ve felt it as a huge encumbrance that weighs down and limits my intellect: the tether at the end of the balloon string that’s attached to a giant block of cement.

The body that cages the mind

About eight months ago, I drowned in the depths of a deep depression whose root cause I won’t discuss just yet (maybe later). I could barely move, and when I forced myself to take walks with my husband, he’d glare at me when I asked him to slow down. I didn’t understand what was happening to me; my feet had always seemed to move at the same speed, and so far as I could tell, he was the one always speeding up. Strange, that change! I’d always been the faster walker, leaving him to choke on my dust as my long strides took me far, far away. I’d been choking on my own mind’s metaphoric dust for two years.

To say that I was bound up to almost claustrophobic tightness is akin to claiming a mote of dust is the size of the moon. I was beyond that. If I could see beyond my inner nothingness when I woke up, it was a good and rare day. I’d force myself out of bed, but that was about all I could make myself do. My body weighed more than the sun, more than the black hole at the center of my inner universe. My mind had turned to jello, and when I’d walk, my thoughts moved through me more slowly than a snail’s slimy wriggling.

Re-connecting

Finally, something sparked based on some of the best advice I’d ever received.

“You need yoga,” my mother said.

I’d been a yoga dilettante when I was thirty. I’d purchased a full set of Kathy Smith’s New Yoga Basics DVDs and I’d done them sporadically, along with taking the occasional yoga class at my old gym when it wasn’t too crowded. I’d burned out on running with a number of small ankle and Achilles’ tendon injuries, and hadn’t had a good boxing class in a couple of years. I’d enjoyed the workouts, but I’d never enjoyed much more than a cursory sense of grounding or connection from them. The one thing I’d noticed then was that my feet felt strangely rooted to the ground, and I could feel the totality of every phase of every footstep at the end of a practice. Usually, I only feel the full impact of my foot against the ground, if I even pay attention to that much.

I hauled out my DVDs a week or two after my mother’s advice and “practiced.” I managed a couple of days a week, and slowly I noticed my moods improved. I still spent a good half of each day deep in the emptiness, but that was better than a whole day. I started collecting DVDs: Rodney Yee’s Yoga for Beginners, Rodney Yee’s AM PM Yoga for Beginners, etc., etc. I highly recommend his workouts, by the way. I’d almost created a regular practice when I got a real introduction to my mother’s yoga instructor (Nancy’s utterly awesome!) and a new addiction.

Before the addiction came revelation on a warm, but not too hot day in early June of last year. I walked the length of the Oakland side of College Avenue, seeking a little creative boost from the funky clutter-shops and art stores that make the Rockridge area so wonderful. I walked, and for once I felt a breeze moving around me. My hair followed behind as I moved, even though the air itself was still. Not only did it it fall back, but it bounced with my steps. Hunh. I used to bounce when I walked. The movement felt almost natural, but after a few laps from Rockridge BART to Broadway and back again, my calves started screaming from the unfamiliar movement. But it felt good. Really good. I kept bouncing anyway, passing most of my fellow shoppers. I took a short glance into a window, and noticed my strides were long again. I felt the expansion within as I settled into the rhythm of the universe and the flow of all around me. I could feel my inspiration slowly waken, and ideas danced just out of my grasp.

The next day, the smaller strides returned as my muscles ached, and inspiration took a short vacation. I watched my feet in reflections as my stride shrank again. I forced my legs wider as I walked for the next several days, keeping an almost obsessive watch over every footfall. If my steps felt too short, I jammed my foot even more forward before I allowed it to make contact with the ground. Slowly, I could feel creativity awaken, and a little more of the emptiness faded each day. My stride length was a direct reflection of the state of my creative health. My intuition.

In September, I started a real yoga class at my mother’s yoga studio, since the DVDs weren’t quite cutting it anymore. Now I was yoga-ing in a more demanding way with fellow yoga-ees in a wonderful and supportive environment. As winter descended, and the days shortened, I dreaded the return of the blackness. Really, to pretend I was “all better” was kind of ridiculous, but though I wanted to hibernate, the true darkness and emptiness never returned. I’d always surrendered to the season, and my mood had always gone with me, but this time, I didn’t. Well, not completely.

And what about the psoas?

One of the things that we work on most in my yoga classes is core strength from deep within the body’s musculature. We’d talked about the mysterious “soaz” muscle more than once, but I’d never really felt it, even if I’d felt myriad other benefits of a regular practice. Practice had freed my body and had slowly re-integrated my mind with “holistic” me.

After today’s practice, I finally achieved consciousness of my psoas. We’d worked the muscle heavily, including several isolating movements and exercises, but I hadn’t felt it. Maybe it’s better to say that I wasn’t actually aware I’d felt it. The psoas is one of the deeper of the body’s muscles, running behind the abdominals, and most of the yoga poses done to work with it also involve larger surface muscles like the quadriceps and hamstrings. When you’re stretching your legs perpendicular to each other, for example, it’s the thighs and hamstrings that really demand your attention, even if the psoas is doing a fair amount of the work—not surprising if you know the muscle is the thickness of a woman’s wrist.

The muscle’s oddly fascinating in ways your abdominals or your deltoids aren’t. When you cringe at a traumatic memory, Nancy told me, your psoas is the muscle that clenches your at your midsection. When you sit too long at a computer desk writing or surfing the web (guilty! and guilty!), the psoas contracts and shortens, especially after repeated exposure. When you suffer from a long bout of depression, good posture isn’t exactly your first priority. When the world and the emptiness weigh you down, you slouch, as I know all too well from experience. You cringe away from life, and your psoas suffers. If your psoas contracts too much as you age, you lose your ability to stand fully upright, since your back muscles aren’t strong enough to counter the psoas’ pull. This is especially a problem for women.

A supple psoas, she told me, lengthens a runner’s stride, and makes walking easier. Suddenly, I understood why my stride had improved with even a small amount of yoga practice, and the muscle-body relationship came clear. I forced a cringing movement to finally connect to the muscle and felt the contraction behind my abdominals. Oh, that vaguely sick feeling is the psoas protesting! I thought. As the muscle protested, so did my mind; yoga always leaves me vaguely euphoric but the contraction made me feel just a flash of dark emotion. I’d actually felt the muscle before, but I’d never known what it was. I still feel my psoas eight hours later—ouch!

Body and mind – all part of the system that is you.

Certain types of muscle movements change mood, this much seems to be almost scientific fact. Studies have shown that the mere act of smiling can induce happiness, so it’s not much of a stretch to consider that the state of one of the body’s major muscles can have a huge impact on one’s mental state. Movement and exercise are often prescribed to ease depression.

You aren’t just your mind, you’re body as well. You’re the hormones and the muscles, the contractions and expansions that move and support you through the day. That’s been a startling realization for yours truly. Appreciating that connection, and that I can heal it if I’m aware and conscious of my physicality is even more staggering. My body has usually felt like an afterthought except when a sickness forces my mind to halt. Yoga has reversed a little of my obliviousness, though I still have a long way to go. But the journey itself has been wonderful so far.

As Nancy says at the conclusion of every practice, Thank your body, mind, and breath for supporting you every day. Even when your body isn’t at its peak, your bones and muscles support your mind, your thoughts steer you, and your involuntary functions like breath keep you alive. Realizing how much I actually owe my body has made me renew my commitment to care for it.

A few random thoughts

If you’re feeling mentally off-kilter, don’t discount that the source might well be physical.
Appreciate the life and the health that you do have. Be grateful to the parts of you that you don’t usually appreciate. They’re sustaining you. They are you.
If you haven’t tried yoga, give it a shot. Just once.

Namaste.

People actually like shopping?

Posted on March 2, 2013 by Elizabeth Calimente

No! No! No! Don’t make me!

A little sanctimony goes a long way.

It’s been a good day, unmarred by madness or bad drivers or the usual range of human stupidity. For the last three weeks, I’ve been compacted, convulsed by coughing spasms, my mind shrunken by extended confinement to beds, tiny apartment rooms, and endless episodes of Angel. But now I’m free, and I’m flowing with the universe. I’m expanded, and my mind runs freely like a river after a session of restorative yoga poses. I’ve made some progress on my novel, finally, and I have a vision for what happens next. I can finally see the end of this project which I began last April. I’ve had a little fun socialization with one of my writing groups.

In short, I’m the very definition of contentedness, gratitude and harmony. I’m actually—gasp—happy! I’ve found Nirvana. Now I just need yogurt and to pick up cashew butter for my husband and the elixir of life for the two of us: Sprouts’ organic Sumatran blend.

What can go wrong? For the first time in a long time, I don’t actually ask myself the question. Nothing can go wrong. All is right with the universe, and there is eternal peace within. My inner self is mirror to the harmony without.

I head for the bakery section. Sprouts doesn’t have my heavenly sprouted wheat apple cinnamon bagels. Instead, I settle for honey sprouted wheat. Well, most of them taste okay except the blueberry. Whatever. My inner Zen returns. They have the pretzel-hummus snack packs again! I stock up. The yogurt selection’s pretty sad, though. I have a week’s worth in the fridge. No problem. I snag a couple of half-hidden jars of cashew butter—they’ve gotten smaller. Whatever. I fill up a bag with Sumatran beans and inhale the heavenly scent. Aaah! Life is wonderful.

The checkout line is long, so I browse the check-stand magazines. Ooo, a magazine with a brain on the cover! Hey, it talks about creativity! I slide it into my basket and join the masses. The lines split and re-connect as new registers open. I flow with them. I muse about my novel as the line I’m in grinds to a halt. Who cares? Life is grand!

A small family gathers its bags at the end of the register. The cashier runs the next set of items over the scanner for the couple just ahead of me until something halts her flow. Why, it’s white, and looks a little like the stylized artistic brain on the over of my magazine! I stare down at my basket for a moment before beginning to unload it at the end of the conveyor belt. The universe whispers to me that I might be making the perfect purchase at the perfect time.

“Did you get cauliflower? I thought you hated it,” the woman says.

“No. Didn’t you?”

“This isn’t yours?” the cashier asks.

The man and woman both shake their heads.

“I had a cauliflower. You got me a cauliflower. I remember!” The family pauses in their grocery wrangling as the mother claims her vegetable. She grabs her purse and whips out her wallet.

A scuffle ensues as the cashier grows increasingly confused. I should pay attention. I should be mindful about what’s happening around me. I don’t care. Instead, I examine the precise placement of olives on the yummy-looking plate of pasta on the cover of a food magazine. Mmm. Olives. Too bad my husband hates them. Whatever. Like all things, this kerfuffle too will pass, and life will continue its serene flow through time and space.

And it does. Now my items are getting dragged over the scanner. The cashier looks befuddled. I pull out my wallet and start shuffling through the pile of receipts there for actual monetary units. I half-sense the long line of people behind me, so the least I can do is try to make my time in line efficient.

“Do you have a bag?”

At the beginning of the year, Alameda County outlawed plastic bags in grocery stores. If you want a paper bag, you have to pay a dime. It’s vaguely annoying, but so is most legislation. I still haven’t made the mental shift, so sometimes I just pay the dime and buy my paper bag. It gets promptly recycled when I get home. You know, “reduce, re-use, recycle.” I lean on the third part of that probably more often than I should, but at least I adhere to part of the triad.

“No. Could I get a bag?”

She stares at me, and then those eyes widen until they’re about to fall free from their sockets. “Why don’t you have one?”

“I wasn’t thinking about it.” If I’d actually thought about anything beyond getting my mental shopping list, I’d have remembered the cloth bag in my car trunk. But I was flowing; I had story in my heart, and poetry in my soul. Who cares about bags?

“Did you plan on shopping?” There’s probably venom in her voice, but I’m a little busy trying to pull a couple of twenties out of my wallet.

“Yes.” Of course that “plan” was just thinking I was going to head to Sprouts after my writing group meeting. Bags don’t enter into planning, just wrangling with location and timing. Bags are a whole separate level of logistical pain that I can’t process unless my only plan is grocery shopping.

“You were planning on shopping, but you didn’t think of bringing a bag?”

Instead, I’m wrangling cash. I’ve found the two ones to go with my two twenties as she huffily starts stacking my groceries into an easy-to-manipulate paper bag, unlike the cloth monstrosities she usually has to wrestle with. I pull out a dime and hand her exact change as her dudgeon finally bludgeons me over the head. Wait, you’re lecturing me on proper bag use? You’re guilt-tripping me when there’s a huge line of people behind me and you’ve just screwed up the two transactions directly ahead of me?

“Exact change.”

Yes. What does that have to do with anything? She puts the money away in the register and gestures to someone else’s specials flyer left behind on the customer platform. “Do you want to take that home with you?”

“No,” I say, trying to re-center myself. I don’t bother to tell her it isn’t mine.

She snatches it off the platform and chucks it disdainfully in the trash. No bag, and she’s a litterbug to boot! I can almost feel her think.

I take my grocery bag and my suddenly too-heavy but inadequate selections. I don’t have my bagels. I don’t have good yogurt. And I’m suddenly muttering invective beneath my breath. There is no flow in the universe. Instead, it’s cold and stark and disorderly. My serenity is shattered and I notice just how horrible the other drivers are around me as I merge onto 880 North. I get cut off. I’m tailgated. Some blue light special with his douche-beams is blinding me in my driver-side mirror.

Just what I need, I tell myself out loud, some complete moron giving me a guilt trip. Want a side of sanctimony with those bagels? That’s my new mantra for the rest of the evening.

Let’s take a wok!

I probably like Target too much for my own good. My husband’s the same way. It’s well-organized, well-lit, there’s no crappy music, and no massive displays block the open aisles. It’s a weird sort of heaven that’s close to things we usually go to, and it’s open late!

We get the random items that my husband needs, and then I remember my abortive Thursday cooking attempt. You’re not supposed to improvise the way I do, but what else are you supposed to do when confronted with, “Brush barbeque sauce on chicken,” besides use a paint brush (not used, and generally clean) if you aren’t specialized enough to have the pastry variety? I remember my “hack” as we walk by the mixers. They’re cherry and cotton-candy colored. My mouth idly waters as I think of those sour-cherry ball things and carnivals.

“We need a pastry brush,” I say.

My husband stares at me.

“Remember the paint brush I ruined?” I couldn’t imagine putting it in the dishwasher, or shoving it in watercolors after I’d contaminated it with salmonella. And I sure was never going to use it on food again.

He snorts.

Target’s kitchen section is utterly insane. You’d think items would be organized by type or by color, or by something that resembles a scheme. Instead, I think they use brand as their standard. This means you have a whole wall of random thingamabobs interrupting the measuring cups. You can’t compare prices, types, or anything else without a long walk between, and lots of overwhelming gadgetry to befuddle the senses. We’re engaged in a long debate over the merits of steel vs. plastic measuring cups, or whether we should get a spoon/cup collection when I find the only pastry brush on the wall. Aside from the silicone one he finds a minute later for $5 less. Done. I settle on a set of blue plastic measuring cups. Sky blue! Pretty! Unlike the oddball black and white ones we have lying around, this one reminds me of a sunny day and is a completed set. And it’s blue! Blue! And it’s $3 cheaper than the metal cups halfway down the long aisle.

Did I mention I like blue?

He’s found the larger measuring cups. We used to have a really pretty clear blue plastic measuring cup (2 cup size), but we haven’t been able to find it for months. I liked it for two reasons: 1) you could drop it, and it wouldn’t break, and 2) it’s blue. He liked it too. We have a nostalgic conversation about just how wonderful that missing cup is. These new ones are glass aside from some weird slanty-measured plastic things that cost a mint. One claims to be Pyrex, and I remember that Pyrex isn’t supposed to shatter when you drop it. But it will hurt your foot. I know that from experience. We debate the merits of glass and shudder at the $8 pricetag on the plastic slanty-measure cup. We muse about hurt feet and dropping things. Or at least I do as my husband snickers at me.

“Excuse me?” The voice that interrupts us comes from a young and gangly man who is ridiculously well-dressed for Target or Rubio’s, where I remember seeing him staring befuddled at the menu. He’s wearing a suit that’s both somewhat stylish and somewhat expensive. He matches, which is more than I’ve ever managed in business attire. “Do you know anything about woks?”

I had a wok once. I tried to season it, and ended up smoking up my old Oakland studio, setting off the smoke alarm, and gunking its surface up with burned oil. “I had one once but I barely used it.”

He shows me a sink scrub-brush. It’s one of the ones that has space in the top to store dish soap. We once owned something like it, but it got gummed up with dried soap so badly it became useless. “Will this work to clean it?”

Maybe? I’m not really sure what to tell him. My brain starts shooting off in all directions, including my failed seasoning attempt, the times I’ve seen woks used on Yan Can Cook, and I swear that I’ve actually owned a real wok brush. I start thinking about potential problems, and as my gears start grinding, I say, “I’m not really the wok expert. I got mine and the cleaning tools at The Wok Shop in Chinatown. I just let them sell me whatever.”

Surely this disclaimer should make him back away, right? I mean, I’m talking with my husband about injuring myself with cookware, after all!

“You don’t think it will work?” His eyes beseech me, and I have to give him something.

“Well, um… I think I had a wok brush. The bristles were made out of bamboo or something. That plastic might melt.” I start thinking about how all of the plasticware in Target is made in China. I remember the melamine-infested pet foods, about horrible cancers, and how real melamine is used on shelves. Eating shelves. Not healthy, especially not on a healthy-food device like a wok. “Maybe there’s something else here that will work better.”

We start scouring the displays for something else. He puts back the scrubber. I try to remember what my wok-cleaning brush looked like. I half-remember the one on Yan Can Cook. I see nothing except—is that a brush? No, it’s an egg slicer with brushy-looking yellow plastic things on the bottom. My husband laughs at me. I laugh a little uneasily; someone’s asking me for cooking advice. The young man picks up the scrub-brush again.

“There’s more stuff here than at Nob Hill,” he says, and I manage a self-effacing laugh.

“Kind of overwhelming, isn’t it?” I pick up the plastic slanty-measure cup. “I don’t want glass.”

My husband nods as he snickers under his breath. When the young man focuses on the rack ahead, we sneak away, new cups and pastry “brush” in basket.

“That melting thing was stupid, wasn’t it?” I ask. “He’s probably just going to cool the wok down with water, right? I was just thinking that he’d make multiple things in the same wok like Yan Can Cook. But he’s probably not. Why was he asking me for help?”

“You’re a woman.” And right then, I know my husband’s right. This scares me. A lot.

“And he’s single.”

“Well, if he was attached, wouldn’t he be with his wife?” Things are so obvious to my husband. I wish I could be that realistic. “She’d be telling him what to buy.”

I spend the rest of the evening wondering what happened to my wok brush, if my memory’s actually faulty, and if my brush was really a figment of my imagination, brought on by remembering Martin Yan’s brush. My husband asks me if my wok brush memory is a fabrication. I wonder myself and torment myself for an hour as we wander around a bookstore. Did I actually own one? Or am I confusing reality with television?

“Nope,” I say as we leave the bookstore. “I ruined the brush seasoning the wok. I tossed it in the trash years ago. The brush part was all gunked up with that black oil crap. The couple of times I used the wok before we chucked it, I cleaned it out with water and a paper towel, and ruined it in the process.”

“You’re still thinking about that?”

As we drive home, I think to myself, Shopping sucks. At least I’m not thinking about woks.

Eternal Randomness

A story in the hand is worth two tips in the bushes.

Monthly Archives: March 2013