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. Poking some more at the thing I wrote last time:
On reflection, I don't think it's about "using time well" for the brain weasels; I think that's too big and complicated a concept for them. They care about doing particular tasks well -- or, more precisely, worry about doing them badly. Contemplating a purposeful and productive task creates anxiety about whether I'll successfully achieve the purpose, which makes it hard to get started. Aimless activities like meandering around on the internet or flumping on the couch might not be a good use of time, but they don't generate the same level of anxiety because where there's no aim there's nothing to feed anxiety about failing to achieve the aim.
Interestingly, my brain weasels apparently don't consider watching TV or a movie to be sufficiently aimless: I know people who, if they want to kill time, can just pick something out and sit down and watch it, but I don't have the trick of it. Apparently there's a wrong way to watch a TV show? Or maybe the barrier to entry is the task of choosing which show to watch.
. Relatedly, I saw a post on Tumblr recently that resonated with me, where someone said that when they found themselves surrounded by new things to read or watch and couldn't summon up the motivation to read or watch any of them, it was because starting a new novel or series or whatever required a minimum amount of spare emotional investment and all their emotional investment was currently occupied, either with things they were already reading or watching or with things going on in real life.
At the moment, I seem to have about enough spare emotional investment for one thing at a time; in the last few weeks, I've watched a couple of theatrical streams and a few movies and re-read an old Modesty Blaise novel, one at a time, and in all that time I didn't pick up The Master and Margarita because it was only by leaving it on the back-burner that I had room for anything else. This suggests that if I want to take advantage of all these theatrical streams with their time-limited offers, I'm going to have to be careful with my time management and not start any new long novels or series (or narrative-heavy video games).
. The movies I watched were the three James Bond movies from back when I was the age to start being interested in James Bond movies -- Timothy Dalton's The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill, and Pierce Brosnan's GoldenEye. Of the three, on this rewatch, I liked The Living Daylights the most; GoldenEye was a lot of fun but felt somehow more hollow than I remembered, and Licence to Kill has good bits but also the problem of being the one where Bond goes on a personal vendetta and gets a bunch of people killed and the movie never quite settles the question of whether everyone would have been better off if he'd just stayed home. (There's a hint that undercover narcotics agent whose operation Bond inadvertantly tramples over might have been about to mess things up for himself anyway, but the movie never follows that idea up because it's got explosions to do.) The Living Daylights, apart from a few moments I found jarring, is charming and has a bunch of actors I like in it, and of the three is the one that to me felt most like Bond and his young lady actually cared about each other and weren't just ticking off boxes on the "young lady in a Bond movie" checklist.
. I picked up The Master and Margarita again this weekend -- it turned out I'd stopped just as the title characters were about to be introduced -- and have now finished it. I said before that it reminded me of The Man Who Was Thursday; with the whole thing under my belt, it also reminds me of Carnivalé, partly because of the moments of people having everyday reality yanked out from under them and partly because it has a similar structure where the first half throws a lot of concepts at the audience and raises a lot of questions and then the second half settles down to start properly explaining how it all fits together. (Which, as the example of Carnivalé taught us, is a perfectly fine way to run a story but it may be a good idea to make sure the audience knows that's what's happening if you don't want them giving up before the explanations arrive.) There was also an interesting shift of mood in the second half where it stopped being nightmarish and became, in places, laugh-out-loud funny; the same kinds of things are happening as in the first half, but now the audience is in on the joke. Despite a somewhat confusing beginning, I found the novel pretty satisfying in the end.
. I got stuck on a crossword for several days because I couldn't figure out what the compiler was after with "Queen of whodunits (6)". "Agatha" had the requisite number of letters, but I couldn't get any of the words that crossed it to work. Ditto "Sayers". After that, I was inclined to think that whatever the compiler was thinking was obviously wrong, but when I did get enough of the cross-words to figure it out -- which was at "_ _ L _ _ Y" -- I had to admit he had a point.
On reflection, I don't think it's about "using time well" for the brain weasels; I think that's too big and complicated a concept for them. They care about doing particular tasks well -- or, more precisely, worry about doing them badly. Contemplating a purposeful and productive task creates anxiety about whether I'll successfully achieve the purpose, which makes it hard to get started. Aimless activities like meandering around on the internet or flumping on the couch might not be a good use of time, but they don't generate the same level of anxiety because where there's no aim there's nothing to feed anxiety about failing to achieve the aim.
Interestingly, my brain weasels apparently don't consider watching TV or a movie to be sufficiently aimless: I know people who, if they want to kill time, can just pick something out and sit down and watch it, but I don't have the trick of it. Apparently there's a wrong way to watch a TV show? Or maybe the barrier to entry is the task of choosing which show to watch.
. Relatedly, I saw a post on Tumblr recently that resonated with me, where someone said that when they found themselves surrounded by new things to read or watch and couldn't summon up the motivation to read or watch any of them, it was because starting a new novel or series or whatever required a minimum amount of spare emotional investment and all their emotional investment was currently occupied, either with things they were already reading or watching or with things going on in real life.
At the moment, I seem to have about enough spare emotional investment for one thing at a time; in the last few weeks, I've watched a couple of theatrical streams and a few movies and re-read an old Modesty Blaise novel, one at a time, and in all that time I didn't pick up The Master and Margarita because it was only by leaving it on the back-burner that I had room for anything else. This suggests that if I want to take advantage of all these theatrical streams with their time-limited offers, I'm going to have to be careful with my time management and not start any new long novels or series (or narrative-heavy video games).
. The movies I watched were the three James Bond movies from back when I was the age to start being interested in James Bond movies -- Timothy Dalton's The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill, and Pierce Brosnan's GoldenEye. Of the three, on this rewatch, I liked The Living Daylights the most; GoldenEye was a lot of fun but felt somehow more hollow than I remembered, and Licence to Kill has good bits but also the problem of being the one where Bond goes on a personal vendetta and gets a bunch of people killed and the movie never quite settles the question of whether everyone would have been better off if he'd just stayed home. (There's a hint that undercover narcotics agent whose operation Bond inadvertantly tramples over might have been about to mess things up for himself anyway, but the movie never follows that idea up because it's got explosions to do.) The Living Daylights, apart from a few moments I found jarring, is charming and has a bunch of actors I like in it, and of the three is the one that to me felt most like Bond and his young lady actually cared about each other and weren't just ticking off boxes on the "young lady in a Bond movie" checklist.
. I picked up The Master and Margarita again this weekend -- it turned out I'd stopped just as the title characters were about to be introduced -- and have now finished it. I said before that it reminded me of The Man Who Was Thursday; with the whole thing under my belt, it also reminds me of Carnivalé, partly because of the moments of people having everyday reality yanked out from under them and partly because it has a similar structure where the first half throws a lot of concepts at the audience and raises a lot of questions and then the second half settles down to start properly explaining how it all fits together. (Which, as the example of Carnivalé taught us, is a perfectly fine way to run a story but it may be a good idea to make sure the audience knows that's what's happening if you don't want them giving up before the explanations arrive.) There was also an interesting shift of mood in the second half where it stopped being nightmarish and became, in places, laugh-out-loud funny; the same kinds of things are happening as in the first half, but now the audience is in on the joke. Despite a somewhat confusing beginning, I found the novel pretty satisfying in the end.
. I got stuck on a crossword for several days because I couldn't figure out what the compiler was after with "Queen of whodunits (6)". "Agatha" had the requisite number of letters, but I couldn't get any of the words that crossed it to work. Ditto "Sayers". After that, I was inclined to think that whatever the compiler was thinking was obviously wrong, but when I did get enough of the cross-words to figure it out -- which was at "_ _ L _ _ Y" -- I had to admit he had a point.
