Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor
This thank-you card had to go to the person who sent me the two boxes of books…which sat in the hallway unopened for days…which were finally opened…and shelved…in another "just one thing" some time ago. To be sure, I photographed the return address to get that thank you done and then it stalled.
I need a magic pen to write it.
You know how your mom used to say, "That bed isn't going to make itself, you know!"
And my musician friend says "That music doesn't write itself, you know!"
Although people think these things happen now with chatGPT. Well, they don't. And I can't entrust this job to Jippity, because it's a complicated, personal missive, not just the thank you. No it's got to be sat out and done.
So once I got over the magic pen illusion, I still felt I had to have this Perfect Stationery, which is actually this stationery made from these really weird Russian religious paintings, and I've had at least one friend wonder what the hell message I was trying to convey with those damn weird paintings, and I refrained from sending the card to a relative after having thus been brought up abruptly to realize that not everyone understands the context of weird Russian religious paintings.
Still, I felt they'd be great for this job! So I had to find them! And now I couldn't! Because I got too industrious and put them away somewhere…not in the file cabinet drawer where they used to be…who knows where…this wasted a couple of days….
And this is one of my insights from the Just One Thing regime. Everything is connected, and you always find something didn't get done because it was connected to something else. You wanted to write a thank you note. But you didn't have the address. Oh, actually you had photographed, but that meant trying to find it now on Google Photos. You wanted to send this note, but you couln't find that right stationery… Or maybe there wasn't a stamp.
When my boss from New York used to call me in Moscow when I worked at the Soros foundation and inquire why things weren't getting done (I was sent there to unsnarl a program that wasn't getting done), I would try to explain that one Russian was always dependent on another…that Russian couldn't get permission…was blocked…was ignored…another was disenfranchised…there was always a chain of inexplicable bureaucratic layers and maneuvers worthy of Ilf and Petrov or that Georgian movie about the painting Golubye Gory [Blue Mountains]…. Sometimes there would be simple explanations. Why did the email get turned off? Why didn't it flow over night from the New York office or visa versa? With the time difference of 8 hours, this was vital.
Come to find out that Dyadya Vanya (Uncle John) would vacuum the office at night. There was one working outlet. He had to unplug the computers to plug in the vacuum cleaner. He would clean the rooms for some hours with an extension cord…nothing worked then…sometimes he'd forget to plug the computers back in. Mystery solved. But most of the time it was these elaborate chains of permissions.
Later in life I realized that in fact it wasn't just Russia that worked that way — although it can be more obvious there because there are housing authorities and stamps and grandmothers on benches and all these inhibiting factors. Everything works that way and it works in your life that way. You didn't do a thing because it depended on another thing.
I know! Let's break the chain and ditch the idea of the Perfect Stationery and just use Any Old Card (except maybe a Christmas card). Didn't I see one out of the corner of my eye when shifting around desk drawers and file drawers? Oh, but it didn't have an envelope…but wait…we're going to go entirely through these drawers at some point but let's rifle quickly through one promising one called "Family" and see, isn't there some generic cards sent by some charity? There were. Didn't they have envelopes? They did.
Written — and mailed even.
And there's a way that the links turn positive as well as I explained in the post about the "Wires Drawer". The trick is to break the cycle of all the nay-staying and negative connections and try to flip them into the positive circuits. This sounds awfully cheesy, but it seems to work that way. Step by step.
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