What’s On My Plate?

Not much blogging this past week, it has been a busy time “cranking widgets” – that is, getting through lots of small tasks. My desk has been swimming in forms (Fringe Club, Foreign Correspondent’s Club, Tate, subsciptions for The Atlantic and Le Monde Diplomatique, bank accounts, investment products, store discount programmes, storage arrangements, Apple Care, etc). As we approach the final quarter of our first year in Hong Kong, it really is time to get these things sorted out.

Moreover, Chinese New Year is traditionally a time to go through one’s belongings, tidy up and and discard anything old and useless things. I’ve been putting that into practice, especially going through old projects, notebooks, files and folders. It’s good to be reminded again of how creative and productive my years in London were. But, that season closed nearly four years ago now and living with the open loops of unfinished projects is becoming too much of a stress.

So, I’ve decided both to let go of a few things, but also to push ahead with one or two, including the film book. I’m finally going to reject some of the advice I received about working with publishers before writing and just write the thing, even if the book never gets published. Maybe it is a bit insane, but feels better to me than to live with a perpetually half-finished work.

In terms of music, I’ve been plowing back into two Logic books, (Logic Pro 7 and Logic Express 7 and Advanced Logic Pro 7). Everytime I push further forward with either the film scoring, or the solo album I quickly encounter my DAW technical limitations – so it has been very productive to put aside some time to work on those skills.

Along with that, the last week has involved an annual clear-out of email inboxes, old documents and backup discs. In Delhi I did not fully migrate to the laptop, since I was expecting to bring my iMac out of storage. I’ve always been amazed how I allow myself to get into a greater level of computer-clutter than I allow in the “real” world.

We’ve felt under quite a bit of pressure to join a “small group” at church, but have resisted for a score of reasons. After many years out of the conventional evangelical thing, it is alarming how hard the sell is for the programmatic approach to “fitting in” and “belonging.” Whilst we are connecting with their pattern of Sunday worship and thankful for the Sunday School experience, our focus really is using our time to connect with the local culture and community to build networks. Since we have opted to forgo a slave , sorry, a servant, oops, I mean a “helper” we have an atypical lifestyle here and as a result, a midweek “Bible Study” doesn’t feel like a wise investment of time. Being told that we will never be part of the community without that, is rather revealing!

Oh, and I wish I had a few real Samosas on my plate – Cantonese food fatigue is setting in.

[tags] Church, Writing, GTD [/tags]