stevengharms

Very minimalist
Originally uploaded by sgharms.

I saw a bumper sticker driving around town that had this simple verb as the content: simplify.

Wow.

So much of my life in the Bay Area, I was carrying around too much stuff. Too much mental baggage, too much physical stuff in disarray. I was so consumed with the stuff pursuit that, well, I allowed myself to start believing one of the great myths of the Silicon Valley:

Working that hard for what you get here is worth it.

And I’ve still got that toxin in my blood, it’s still German autos I think about, it’s still hand-crafted asian furniture I dream of resting my 30” Apple Cinema display upon while sitting in a Herman Miller chair. The dream of all these things, the imagined ledger book that adds up how many ducets would be required to fulfill that vision, it’s all part and parcel of teaching one to hunger for malnourishing things and then to hate being starved.

If Vedic India took a third of a lifetime to push Siddartha Gotama to realize that thinking this way is a trap, Silicon Valley can do it in thirty months.

Therefore one has but two choices:

• to exceed and succeed: This is why Wall Street and similar keep looking to this area to find the next starved person who will be so driven with hatred of the upper-class meagre lifestyle to create a great startup
• to Simplify, really simplify: This is essentially the message of Buddhism. Your want is limitless, you want, because you want you are unsatisfied, because you are unsatisfied you suffer. The Buddha said to end this cycle of pain, we must un-learn the wanting and not be attached to that which we do posess

Our move to Austin has been motivated, even before we saw this bumper sticker, by this idea. We sold off about 3000 worth of stuff: computer parts, TV, bags, furniture, etc.
I’ve never felt so much more like I’m getting “better”. Walking outside, the humid days for indoor study, the warm twilight for walking and relaxing on patios, the evening where I speak honestly, openly, and peacably with my girl.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not espousing some sort of know-nothingism. Get thee back to living simply, but think deeply about difficult important things. You’ll do this a lot better once you’re freed of some of that damnable stuff you’ve got.
You may be saying that my bucolic vision is quaint and cute. How could you implement it? Well, if you were really serious….Hmm….If I were to coach someone on simplification I’d suggest.

1. Buy / rent a place smaller than what you think you need. You will be daunted by this at first, but do it. As an added incentive, get the place up 3 flights of stairs and move in the middle of the summer. You will be rather motivated to shed any inessentials you have to haul up that kind of stairway on a hot day.

2. This place should cost you less than your present circumstances, therefore you should have cash leftover.

3. Simplify-ing is hard. A lot of us have an addiction to stuff. Take the aforementioned cash differential and buy yourself a nice storage unit.

4. Pack suitcases, etc. for a 2 week road trip vacation. Everything else box up. Mark dishes, silverware, critical clothing (if you have to wear suits, etc.), a few favorite books, etc. and put them in storage but mark them special.

5. Take vacation. Think about simplify-ing.

6. Move in. Your “critical boxes” should be fairly small in number and you should be able to move this by yourself in your truck or rented vehicle. It’s the threat of this pain that makes sorting essential from inessential effective. Naturally your bed, dresser, art supplies, etc. should come along. Also, for me, a computer and networking gear are required.

7. Try to live. You will have forgotten things. You’ll need a colander, or an iron, or swim trunks. Fish them out of storage.

8. Realization: Hey, all that stuff in storage, I’m doing pretty well without.

9. Enjoy the clean zen asthetic of your new home minus tons of bagage.

We have done this with our move and are enjoying all the open space. Even more we enjoy the freedom from furniture, trips to Ikea, boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff to empty.

I think the above is a generic formula whereby people could become well simplify-ed. Here are some things that we’ve done that may be “phase 2.0”.

Sell your TV.

I have mixed feelings about this one. I like movies, I like entertainment, I like to play video games.

But….without a TV i still use up all my time but with other things: writing, talking with Lauren, kissing Lauren, walking, cooking meals. In short, things that I’d rather be doing anyway. I mean, I’m sure “Deadwood” is great, but Lauren and I have had some great conversations and have spent quality time together. I ask myself, would I trade that for 30 minutes of some recycled sit-com pablum?

Put your book stack away

Now most “I don’t have a TV” people are all on about how they read: Harper’s, New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Dostoyevksy, and Molière. But if you read, and love to read, you could quickly find yourself breaking under the weight of your purchased dead wood.

I have such a stack of unreads that I find it hard to face the stack. Put that in storage in a box called unread. Take out one book, have it around.

I understand that books are a great decor item, and smart people use them to make smart people feel good about coming to a smart person’s home. I think that smarty-pants people should come to appreciate the calibre of the conversation and the cleanliness of the asthetic as the new calling card of the focused mind.

I’ve not really thought this philosophy or HOWTO out to its fullness, but I’d welcome any further insight from anyone reading this.

Dear Readers,

I must apologize for not having put together any real entries before this date. I would have liked to - I really would have - but things have just been so busy what with moving in, getting settled, and living that strange sort of “tourist / resident” life you live when you first get somewhere.

When I first got to Holland, I admit. I went to Amsterdam often and just hung around: went to musea, had many drinks. When I first got to Silicon Valley…uh, well there’s nothing to do there. When I first got to San Francisco: dinners, bars, taxis, etc. So, it’s normal to be a tourist in the town that you have adopted ( or in my case, re-adopted ) as your home. Since the 6th, I’ve felt so much like a tourist in my town.

Looking back at the last posts they’re incidental thoughts, postcards from my visit in Austin.

In the last few weeks it’s been dinner at Whole Foods on 6th and Lamar, trips to Magnolia Cafe, unpacking and boxes. In short, I’ve not faced the music and the reality that this is now my home.

So this weekend began with the completion of my first full week of work at my new location. That evening Lauren and I ate at Magnolia. We live one exit south of there and the proximity makes it for a very tasty fall-back option. Saturday morning we were awoken by an early morning thunderstorm. After remembering lightning and thunder we started breakfast and then did the last 10% of unpacking / cleaning required to get all of the moving paraphenelia gone.

With that done, it suddenly hit us with a real gravity: We live here.

We headed up to the Target ( how many more times, I wonder? ) and bought a new iron and some other stuff. While fishing some other necessities from our storage unit ( ironing board, natch ), my Dad called and he and my sister were free of a morning obligation and wanted to know if we were free to meet for lunch. We headed back home, dropped off our loot, and then headed to meet them.

We all walked from my sister’s place to Kerbey Lane, the street and the cafe, and enjoyed great meals all around. Lauren had the Cobb Salad and I had a Very Good Burger. The real coup in that meal was getting the sweet potato fries. They were excellent. if you love the sweet / salty mix of flavors, the fries + ketchup are a sure winner. Speaking of a winner, I followed up that not-so-meagre plate with pecan pie a la mode. The state tree of The Lone Star State is truly giving in delicious bounty.

Afterwards we headed back to my sister’s and while she had to leave, my Dad, Lauren and I got a chance to chat. My Dad had only met her briefly before, so it was great for them to have an opportunity to talk about life, work, love, relationships, and what’s important. I tried not to moan too much as I processed my delicious lunch.

Having rested, we went our separate ways and Lauren and I headed down Lamar to 6th street’s BookPeople. Our relationship really kinda starts in a bookstore, so they seem to keep cropping up. Lauren was hungry ( you’ll recall she had the reasonably-sized salad for lunch ) and we got her a calzone from Whole Paycheck Foods.

Our meanderings at BookPeople took us until the warning of the cafe closing. At that time we realized we’d been there a long time and it was time to go home.

Sunday we slept in - again with the appearance of a pre-dawn storm - but spent the morning and midday working on our programming projects. Lauren is undertaking to learn programming ( her first language ) with C++ and I’m learning Ruby. She did some classic CS programs working with compounding interest and I wrote a simple script to try to make a simple class ( “Car” ) do some trivial instance tasks ( myCar.turn_key, myCar.accelerate(10) ). After a day of working on these things, we decided to go do some grocery shopping at the HEB.

While out my sister called and invited us to go for a walk around Town Lake. It was a good opportunity to balance out or keester-sitting morning, so we went along. A few fun pictures can be found in the flickr photoset.

Here’s a sample or two:

Tomorrow I begin my 2nd week back after a 2 week vacation. I feel kinda caught up on the “what happened while you were gone” material ( emails, obligations, etc. ), so I’m looking forward to actually being able to start some work and make some real progress this week.

This is a test.

(more…)

Lots of time in life, we have ambitions and things that we would like to have happen.

Lots of time in life, we cannot make those things happen because the environment is not conducive.

It is in times like this that I think about the battle scene of Jedi Qui Gonn Jinn and Darth Maul.

While waiting for a force shield separating himself from his attacker, Jinn kneels calmly, preparing his mind and body for the battle ahead. Maul, on the other hand, works to keep his rage stoked, so that he can attack viciously.

I recommend pooling your mental resources.

If you’re not prone to accidentally bumping into the FoxNews Channel (what the hell was that i tripped over, oh it’s Alan Colmes’ sense of being a craven puppet!) you might have missed the news that kneecap-with-hair, Ann Coulter has a new rrriiight rrrrriot book out (Uh, why are you angry, Ann, your guys have all three branches of government in the bag, a compliant congress, and no one seems to mind too much when the Constitution gets used as toilet paper, what’s to bitch about?) claiming that liberalism is a church.

Uh, yeah. A church is where people worship a diety, liberalism is an attitude about human dignity. Whatever an -ism is, it is certainly not a religion.

In any case, Henry Rollins crafted a humorous retort to Ms. Coulter on her latest hysterics. Enjoy the video.

I love Robots
Originally uploaded by sgharms.

After the singularity, when our new machine overlords are deciding which carbon-based parasites will be tolerated, I shall point to this analog-creature fabricated artifact and thus be primed for assimilation.

I arrived in Austin 2 days ago and am too tired from movings in and other goings on to post much more than this.

I’ll give the full run down shortly.