Rav Casley Gera

Procrastinating was a way of giving myself permission to do a less than perfect job on a task that didn’t require a perfect job. As long as the deadline was a ways away, then, in theory, I had time to go the library, or set myself up for a long evening at home, and do a thorough, scholarly, perfect job refereeing this book. But when the deadline is near, or even a bit in the past, there is no longer time to do a perfect job. I have to just sit down and do an imperfect, but adequate job. The fantasies of perfection of replaced by the fantasies of utter failure. So I finally get to work on it. Now it would have been simpler for me, and for the publisher, and for the author, if I had sat down and spent four or five hours on the manuscript right off the bat. If only I had been able to give myself permission to do an imperfect job right at the outset. Is there anyway we can bring that about?

You have to get in the habit of forcing yourself to analyze, at the time you accept a task, to consider the costs and befits of doing a less than perfect job. You need to ask the questions: how useful would a perfect job be here? How much more useful than a merely adequate job? Or even a half-assed job? And you need to ask the questions: what is the probability that I will really do anything like a remotely perfect job on this? And you need to ask: what difference will it make to me, whether I do or not?

John Perry, “Procrastination as Perfectionism”

There’s surely some truth in this. The slow descent from great intentions to panicked cobbling-together is a depressingly regular hallmark of my life. But I’m not constantly getting into trouble. Actually, the results are usually pretty good. So why not aim to do an adequate job, get it out of the way, and get out of there, right from the start?

Those frightening people who tend to have half a task done, halfway through the alloted time; who never seem to have that sick feeling in the pit of their stomach when they think about things they have to do; they’re not superhuman. They just understand that, for most things, good enough is just that - good enough. But millions of us - particularly, I’ll wager, over-educated knowledge-worker types - create a vision of genius that haunts us until we’re unable to actually get anything done.

The election being over is… odd. Of course, there’s a transition to over-analyse and the future Obama administration to wildly speculate about. But that sense of urgency - the sense that it really is my duty, as a concerned citizen of the world, to spend an hour or so each day catching up on the latest Sarah Palin scandal / Joe the Plumber appearance / McCain campaign infighting / outrageous slur against Obama - is gone.

There is an upside - more time for pointless web crazery such as, for example, finding my-name-as-a-face:

Disapointingly dull, you may agree. But I like that it appears to have a moustache.

In other Web News, Metro’s Tom Phillips has pointed out that the forgotten (or in my case, never-on-the-radar) indie lot Johnny Boy produced a 2004 hit (ahem) that, as well as being pleasantly jangly in a sort of Retro Bar way, presciently predicts the current ongoing Collapse Of Everything:

“You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes & You Get What You Deserve”

Change. It’s in the air. From the Change Election to the End Of Capitalism, the very smell of the world has gained a top note of transformation of late. Or something.

Sometimes, though, change is bad. Sometimes, it doesn’t work. Importing comments and tweets, while a fun idea, didn’t work. It was confusing and made the site seem odd and inconsistent - moreso than it already did. So I’ve turned it off. As before, you can find my comments on other sites, and my tweets, in the left-hand sidebar.

Hi. I’ve been having one of my periodic redesigns. One result is that all the content that used to only be on the main casleygera.com is now also in the blog. The main site is now a showcase for my best writing, or at least the stuff I like best.

That renders the old feed for the main site - http://feeds.feedburner.com/ravcasleygera - pretty much redundant. So I’ve repurposed it as a “firehose” - one feed combining every photo upload, blog post, bookmark and video - a total web 2.0 extravaganza.

I can totally understand that this may be of no interest to you, in which case you should switch to the blog feed, which is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/ravcasleygerablog.

The main site’s comments feed is no more. If you’re still subscribed to that, switch to http://feeds.feedburner.com/ravcasleygerablog-comments.

And don’t forget you can subscribe to any type, series, theme or topic - or the comments on any post - by sticking /feed at the end of the URL.

If this all seems really irresponsible and wacky of me, bear in mind that according to feedburner, I have, like, ten subscribers. Sob.

I use cocomment to record the comments I make on other blogs and put them in the blue box you see on the right of the page. But I’m going to experiment with using a plugin to import such comments right into this blog, to keep all my web-writing in one place. Let me know if you love this, hate it, or if it just doesn’t seem to be working.

Everything pretty much back to normal. Tags and categories on the main site still messed up. Let me know of any other problems.

The articles section of this site, at the root www.casleygera.com, has been replaced by - well, by a bare-bones wordpress blog called “fuckoff”. I don’t know when, or why, this has happened. I also don’t know how to fix it. I’m basically mad as hell.

I’ve just deleted 20,362 music files from my computer. Over 1,400 hours of music, gone. I feel like a wave of liberation has washed over me, or something. [Read more →]

A few more random Madrid thoughts:

• Those who bemoan the demise of the sit-down lunch in London and elsewhere would like it here. It’s very, very hard to get takeaway food, or much resembling fast food, really. A languid bocadillo over a beer in a tiny cafe is more the Madrid style, which I very much like, now I’m used to it.

• Graffiti notwithstanding, Madrid is, I think, the most beautiful city I’ve visited. From the shambolic, but completely charming old centre to the deft neoclassical elegance of the Palacio Real, it’s a stunner all over. And unlike many cities with a rich pre-20th century architectural heritage, it’s embraced modernity with gusto. The Paseo de la Castellana, the long avenue that divides the old town from more recent Northeastern areas, is packed with impressive buildings from the 70’s and 80’s banking and insurance boom, notably the Peurta de Europa (see below). Underwhelming in film and from a distance thanks in part to its bland location, it’s awe-inspiring up close.

• The city also has a truly impressive slate of parkland to its East. From the three spaces surrounding the palace - the exquisite Plaza de Oriente, the Campo del Moro, which was closed when I went past, and the Jardines de Sabatini to the North with some excellent surrealist sculpture - to the massive Casa de Campo, kind of Madrid’s answer to Hampstead Heath, accessible by cable car from another excellent space, the Parque del Oeste.

First sights:

* Hostel is astonishing glow-white slab of ultramodern, and shares space with the local drama school, which is both nice and bizarre.
* McDonald’s appears to have exactly the same menu as in the UK. Bit disappointing.
* Euros aren’t as cheap as I thought.
* The hostel charges an extra 4 euros a night to the over-26’s. I feel like a paedophile just being here.
* Madrid has a serious grafitti problem (see picture). I saw a maid standing in the doorway of an upmarket-looking apartment block, but she couldn’t budge the mass of spray-paint all over the door.
* Also saw a dreadlocked white guy, early twenties, presumably homeless, shaving hastily in a car wing mirror.
* I walked behind a TV interview, and will therefore be on Spanish TV.
* Sat in a cafe eating fries with garlic mayonnaise, watching Spanish TV (not looking out for my cameo), I was struck by the tacky presentation of Spanish daytime TV, with on-screen captions and idents that could have been from the early 80’s. And the program, which seemed to be enitrely celebrity gossip (Spain invented the modern celeb mag, of course, with Hola! - which begat Hello!), didn’t feature a single American or British celeb. No Winehouse, no Beckhams, no Britney. Perhaps, I thought, all this talk of globalisation is nonsense. Perhaps TV is the great local medium, maintaining individual cultures, local obsessions. Then I noticed the background music to the feature I was watching was “Matinee” by Franz Ferdinand.

PA100166, originally uploaded by Rav Casley Gera.

I’ve started a tumblelog. It’s a place for things insufficiently thought-out to go here, but not sufficiently personal to just share on Facebook. It may expand to become a magnificent multimedia repository; it may not. It may take on a wierd tone and need to be anonymised. It may remain a separate blog and subsume its cousin, Rav Idly Wonders. Or it may merge into here under its own category.

I

just

don’t know.

But you can find it here:

Ravindr

If you want.

UPDATE: Tumblog? Tumblelog? I don’t know. What do you think?

Shopping. It’s an enjoyable, but not exactly enriching way to spend an afternoon. You’ll come home tired, probably happy, maybe a little worried about how much you’ve spent. But you don’t normally come home feeling like you’ve really had your world expanded, like yourhorizons have widened -not like you might after a day visiting art galleries, for example.

Well, at least that’s traditionally been the case. But no longer [Read more →]

You know, I’ve lived on or near Holloway Rd all my three years in London – I lived right on it for a few months – and I’ve never really thought of it as a place to go; just as a route to somewhere else. Everyone talks about it as vaguely dangerous place, in that way which is basically code for “it’s poor and unpleasant.” A bloke at work – who is admittedly a self-professed Tory Snob – declared yesterday that it would do nothing but good if you stood at Archway, pointed a large flamethrower towards Highbury Corner, and pressed fire. [Read more →]

I am so doing this. Soon.

So I submitted an edited version of my column “Democracy 2.0” to the London Paper’s “the columnist” feature. And they printed it today! Hooray!

Flying is an incredibly weird experience. And unlike other weird experiences, which you get used to - like, say, massages - flying just gets weirder the more you do it. Once the initial, childhood rush of isn’t-this-exciting wears off, you start to notice the little details, and the sense of otherness just increases. Take toilets. Airline toilets remind me of coach toilets, which is more than enough reason to avoid them. [Read more →]

Being the diary of Ravinder Madron Casley Gera, a volunteer with the campaign of Deval L. Patrick, for September 19 in the year two thousand and six, the day of the Primary Election for the position of Democratic Party candidate for Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts

6.00am. I’m awake. Having kept holiday hours for several weeks - sleeping 1-10am or thereabouts - this is something of a shock to the system.

6.05am. Right. What to do? The “Primary Day Victory Plan” sheet I picked up at headquarters says we need “visibility from 6.30am.” [Read more →]

Actually, there’s a wide range of architectural styles. Downtown, old clashes with new in slightly bizarre ways:

See the little, uber-historic State House in the middle? [Read more →]