Week in my Filofax

What a delight to know that my new filofax has already been delievered. Now all I have to do is go where my filofax is, which will happen by the end of this year. Yes, life isn't perfect - all the time - but it's good as it is. Now, truth to be told, I do am a wee bit disappointed in Filofax UK for what I perceive is a lack of customer care, regarding the time of processing the order and the shipping of the order, not to mention the absolute lack of means for the customer to track the order. Yes, it's not their money, it's ours, but now you can bet your socks I'll make sure to always check and double check the American site before I wander to the English site. Sorry, but I'm just that sensitive. My boyfriend is delighted with my new filofax, loves the scent, the feel... everything, and if it weren't because he specifically asked for a Kindle for his birthday, his lovely and smart and beautiful girlfriend would get him a filofax.

Well, this week has been pretty much packed for me, even though we had a holiday on Thursday, or maybe precisely due to that. Actually I was very little at the office, with a work "workshop" of sorts, which is basically a whole-day meeting where you are away from the office and concentrate on one topic and one topic only. It's pretty intensive, but sometimes it's needed to get something moving better and faster. This was on Monday, and it was a fabulous day. It wasn't in the same building I work, nor in the same district, but at one to which I could go on train. So yay! I left Sookie at home (also because traffic there is deadly, with world class traffic jams at peak hours), and took the train to go to the office. I love our interurban train! I would take it everyday if I could. Back home I've got a partial lift from by boss and a friend of hers, who is a hoot, and I've got the chance to meet her a little bit better. She's an amazing lady. We may not always meet eye-to-eye, but that's mostly because she's a lawyer and I'm an economist, and words and maths not always click together, but all in all we are really good together and work like an oiled machine. She's just amazing.

Tuesday I worked like crazy, pushing a couple of extra hours to get everything finished, because on Wednesday I had a meeting with my Union in the afternoon. First time at the Union building, which explains that makeshift roadmap I sketched on to find the place. Yep, there you can see, right there, one of the things you can't really do on a phone. Yes, by all means, you can now link a google map... but it isn't really the same, now is it? ^_^

Friday was a relaxing workday as a lot of people took it out for vacations in order to have an extra long weekend. Those of us who actually came to the office had a nice and relaxing day, with work getting done without the usual e-mail typhoon that usually flood us.

Then Saturday was Archery-day and Today was "Movies with the Boys" day. Tomorrow will be "oh fuck, I have to keeep wearing long sleeves" day, since guess who bruised her arm AGAIN at archery? This gara stop or I'll never, ever again will wear short sleeves! And a lot of shirts I love are sleeveless or have short sleeves.

I'm currently reading "The Secret Keeper" by Kate Morton, and so far so good. I'm really behind - AGAIN - with my penpals, and slacking with stuff here and there, but you know something? I'm feeling good, and that's all that matters. :-) Everything else can and will be fixed. 

The other day my Mom brought me a ziplock bag from a student of hers who knew I make jewelry from beads. She had seen some of my pieces on my Mom, so one day she brought this bag full of beads for me. It had a box with six compartments, with a huge array of beads mixed up in different sizes and colors. Yes, it looked like a nightmare. So today I decided to separate them all and put them in the box by color. The task wasn't small, and the picture you see here is, well, after half of the work was done (I didn't think of taking a picture of the bag or the way the box looked until after I was half way throught this, and I realized hoy much it reminded me of other things in life). Slowly but surely, I sorted out all the beads, put those in little number in small ziplock bags (there are tiny ones), and worked through the whole mess not letting the mess get to me, but concentrating in picking the beads in small groups and rather thought about how everything was looking nicer, how the size of the mess was diminishing by each bead I sorted into the right group.

After an hour and some, all the beads got sorted out, either boxed or nicely bagged. Now they are ready for stringing into something beautiful. Looking at them you feel inspired and you want to make something out of them, a necklace, a bracelet, earrings... you name it. Well, thing is that things in life are the same, and that's what I realied while I was sorting them: perhaps you are standing before a project that looks huge to you, and nearly impossible to tackle, or just so big and so labor consuming you are overcome with procrastination. Well, tackle it! It's okay, you don't have to lung the big chunk and conquer it in 24 hours, do it little by little, acknowledge the steps you take, the advance you make and enjoy it. Little by little you'll get there, so keep trying!

My next weeks is already looking really packed, but that doesn bother me either: slowly but surely, we will get there. I don't worry, I conquered the beads, I can conquer anything, and so can you.

Childfree: "To Save The World"

As I was driving home yesterday at the end of the workday, I heard a very interesting advertisement on the radio (yes, I'm one of those who must listen to the radio or to music while driving): It was an add about condoms, mainly directed to men, and it was sketched in the way of an opinion survey, where different men said why they used condoms. One of them, a happy, chirp, young man said:

"Because I want to save the Planet."

This hit me and got me thinking. It was in the very begining, loud and clear, and put in a way not only that it sounded reasonable, but it sounded noble. But how's that? How do you save the planet by using a condom? Well, you use a condom to prevent the transmision of venereal diseases, and also to prevent pregnancy, or in other, more simpler words: to avoid having kids. So, while, yes, saying that you save the planet by doing your share in stopping the propagation of sexually transmitted diseases, in many environments, with established couples that "not sample on the side", the function of condoms is to prevent the birth of children. Unless, of course, you think that condoms are only used by people with multiple sexual partners, most of which are casual, and that established couples use other means of birth control.

However, starting with the presumption that condoms are used by a wide range of people in a wide range of sexual partnership arrangements, then the purpose of these are double in many cases (avoid diseases and children) or serve to one purpose: birthcontrol. Now, from that message, could you think that "saving the Planet" would be in any way related with "not having children"? Well, actually, yes. Though in several developped countries the population has been aging - meaning that the number of elder people is larger than the number of younger people - in many other countries the population has continued to grow, and grow enough to keep our global population growing - thus not only compensating but surpassing the low in growth in those countries with aging population. 

Okay, that sounded too "technicist", so let me explain this quickly and simply: while in richer countries people have less and less babies, and they have more old people than young people, in poorer countries not only have they more young people than old people, but they actually have enough babies to compensate the lack of babies in richer countries, and then some.

To make things worse, the resources of our planet aren't well distributed, with less access to food, education, health, infratructure and so on in the countries with higher population growth rates, while those with a lower growth rate enjoy a surplus of resources they then transform into something else. Thus, the food needed in a poor country, it's converted into biofuel in richer countries that swim in food and other resources. In the meantime the prices of everything hike up and even the richer countries are developping within their citizens ample rings of poverty. The way things go - and there's an European Crisis that proves me right - soon we won't be speaking of "rich countries" only about rich people and rich corporations, which will float on a sea of poverty keeping the resources from the planet, for their own excessive consumption.

And what does that have to do with children? Well, the more children are born, the more pressure is put on the resources of the planet. It means more poor people, whether your baby belongs to one of the poor or one of the rich groups. It's another mouth to feed, another kid to put through school, another child to clothes and shelter, another kid who would consume toys and all sorts of goods, than then will put pressure on the job market, on the unemployment rates - either your kid gets the job or not - the demand for fuel, housing and so on. Let me see if I can say this straight and simple: a baby isn't "a baby": it's a person who will have to fight for a job, will need social insurance, healthcare, education, food, transportation, housing, communications, all sorts of infrastructure, and so on. A baby is a person in the future, with the needs of the future, living often in countries that haven't invested in any of these in ages!

Do you save the Planet by choosing to be Childfree? Well, you for sure don't put more pressure on the lean and ill distribuited resources of the planet, you have more time to dedicate to a job or different causes to seek saving the planet (yes, you can do that with a kid, but let's be honest, with a kid you SHOULD pay attention to the kid too, while the Childfree could invest the time you spend on the child either in more voluntary job, or resting to recover energies to be able to do more job than what a drained parent can, but it all depends on the parent and their view about what parenting is). So, the answer, I believe is "yes". You can save the Planet and have children, but you can also hot have children as your wait to aid into saving the Planet.

Being Childfree often isn't just about one reason: "I don't want a child because they would have no space in my life", "I don't want a child because I want to save the planet", "I don't want a child because they don't deserve to live in such a rotten place", etc.  Being Childfree more often than not is a decision you have gotten to through a series of elements. You don't feel like it, you worry what sort of conditions would receive your child, you believe that the last thing the Planet needs is another person adding to the contamination, you have decided to dedicate yourself to a project that means more to you, or you decided to work with other people's children, thus give that part of your time to them, or simply you know you can't stand children, you don't get along with them, thus you avoid them (the "but it would be different with your own children" conveniently hides the fact that children attract children, thus you may like your own children, but you will have to deal with their friends, their classmates, their birthday parties and so on), or simply that you like your life the way it is without children and you don't want to give it up.

As becoming a parent should be a decision made only on one aspect "I want to be a parent", "I don't want to be left alone when I'm old", "I like babies", "that's what adults do", "I want to 'consumate' and fulfill my marriage" - choosing to be childfree isn't also a one variable decision.

Finally, what also hit me from that advertisement of condoms was, how acceptable and natural it sounded coming from a man, but would have been the same coming from a woman? The Law can't force you, but society seems to believe that men are entitled to choose not to have children, while women must have children. A man can choose to protect himself, not to have children and even deny the children they have outside the wedlock, but in many countries women can't even decide to abort a child they don't want, not even if that child is the result of rape.

Childfree and Childfree women still have a long path to go.

Bitter Shells

Wasn't I supposed to tell you about my week last week? And I completely forgot, haven't I? Well, stuff like that happens more often than we would like to admit. Now, what was so fabulous last week in my life, that wasn't related to my filofax or my future filofax - which is already in delay, thank you for asking - ? Well, hn, (I actually had to check my filofax, because my memory is really that bad) lets see: last week was an interesting week. I made some progress in the office, got a new shelving unit for my cubicle, so now all my files no longer crowd my desk, and then had some really interesting project assigned, which have given me the chance to go back to the academic part of my career and investigate a few old matters.

I also met with a few old coworkers from the company, who have drifted apart through the years thanks to oportunities and circumstances. Two of them - Julie and Dew - were my coworkers at my last place. Dew didn't work in the same process as me, but Julie did, however Dew and I often lunched together and talked a lot together about the terrible environment and the office perils that hung over our heads. The other coworker - Pat - used to be our coworker a long time ago, but she managed to move to another department and stay there, where she's very happy. We met on Friday through very particular circumstances. I had to do some reseach at the Economics and Industry Ministry building, which is at the South side of the park that separates my current workplace (at North) from my old one (South). By the time I finished, it was closing lunch time, so I decided to walk over to the Southern building, and see if I can have lunch with my old friends. I still remember their lunch schedule, and their lunch habits, so I called Julie and asked her if she would like to have lunch with me. To my surprise Julie was rather unfriendly and cut me short saying she was going with her friends to have some Argentinian food. Sad, and wondering why could she be so strangely mad at me, I walked around trying to figure out what would I like to eat. Eventually decided to go back North and have my lunch there.

However, as I was walking towads the pedestrian bridge, whom I see but Julie and Dew! I went over to greet them and saw still how stiff julie was with me. Dew, however, was welcoming and nice, and quickly invited me to lunch with them and Pat, so I joined them. We went to an Argentinian bistro at West, really close, where we met Pat, and ordered our lunch. Then the ladies started talking about work and a lot of terrible omens were discovered. Plans to lay down people and also plans to reform our payment system to turn it into a less friendly system that cuts back many of our current benefits, such as seniority payments (we are paid extra for each year we complete at the company), academic and career point recognitions (extra payment for degrees and further education and capacitation you receive), and then the subsidy we would receive in case of being laid off, or when we retire would also be sensibly cut back (currently we have this system where you receive 66% of your monthly payment for each year worked up to eight years, and then 66% of your monthly payment for each two years worked up to 24 years) among other things. I was also surprised to know that Julie was deeply unhappy with my former boss - the good one - and had mentioned to Dew that she was looking to move to the very area where I'm working now. I was happy, though I know that my current boss wouldn't accept her, given the fact that Dew has twice made a very, very poor job replacing me at the Regulator Canon calculation project.

It was strange to me that she would have said something to someone about wanting to go work were I work now and yet acted so unkindly with me, who could have put a good work for her with my boss. Julie is strange in that way. She lives a very unique life, up in her mind, which blurs completely the border between fantasy and reality. Her word is a fantasy realm more than anything else, which feeds on the morsels of reality that would fit into her very personal soap opera. She has also been wronged many times, which has covered her in a thick and bitter shell, under which she tucks all of her soft spots fearfully protecting them and never considering the possibility of doing something to strenghten them. Her bitter tongue and bittering behavior had slowly leaked into her work, where resentment weights more than knowledge, slowly making her drift to a point where she has lost her valuable skills and now floats in a cloud of utter inability. Younger heads raise to teh challenge around her and she resent them, but that resentment grows so strong and central in her life that it unables her from applying the vast knowledge she has and handicaps her from further evolving. Her protests are shut down and handled as annoying temper tantrums, even though more often than not she has been very accurate, and thus pushed into human obsolescense. At 50 she's now a workforce burden, a totem, a stone paid huge sums only to remain tucked in a cubicle clumsily staring at her computer and forwarding corky e-mails with corny music, corny colors and commonplaces disguised as wisdom.

She might resent me because I fled, I've got free and I had arms wide open waiting to catch me and hold me. The battle to keep me was also epic, and it had to reach to her, which only rubbed salt into her open wounds, seeing how another newby was fought for like a modern Hellen of Troy, while she was being given away like the lump everybody is eager to get rid off.

This week I talked over some of these things with my good friend Gis, who confirmed some of my theories, and sadly said she had not only heard about the deconstructing plans and the wage modifying forecasts, but that these were supposed to be pushed through this year. Gis and I are starting to talk more about her son and about healthy cooking. We do talk a lot about work, but our topics start to falter, and sometimes it's like talking much about work annoys her a little bit. Indeed in some places too much talking about the office only adds to the foul mood.

I believe that's also the case at our office.

As time goes by I start noticing much resentment at the office where I work. It's a strange place where the bosses seem often to be battered by the subordinates, who tend to act like the world owe them just for the mere fact of breathing. This past week a few thorns were discovered, where people who had made whining and demanding their battle horse, ran finally to the end of their means. The incompetence and buyyling of some of these sacred cows became shamefully to light and they could no longer pull the wool over the eyes of the director with their fake aggravated tones. It must have been horrendous to find those cans of worms unlidded and spilling right in front of the whole office. Some watch these unveilings with malevolent pleasure, even when they hold in their hands their own cans of worms with lids that no longer hold the disgusting contents.

Perhaps I'm simple minded, but even after all I've been through, I don't understand why so many people choose "waiting for others to notice" instead of "doing it themselves". It's like attempting to go to the Grandma's house, and instead of taking the road to her house, taking the opposite route and expecting the whole town to move Grandma's place into your path.

There's a lot of bad blood in that place, and you can see many people already eaten up by their emotional gangrene. They are all becoming the new Julies.

So, How's the Filofax Doing?

Welcome to yet another filofax post. I should really go back to posting much often and more about my life, right? Like, the people reading this isn't reading it because they want to follow a given topic, but because most of you know me in real life (yes, penpalling actually counts for real life in this case, as letters do arrive to you... in real life ^_^), and well, yes, that. However, given that I've just posted in the Hungarian blog - where I write about real life - I don't feel like posting here again and repeating myself in a different language. Thus, filofax it is. (Okay, I'll post later on about how's my fabulous life going on, though I just drank the last of my coca-cola, so you may have to wait a tad bit more.)

Last week - after a really looooong and hard debate over whether I should get a new filofax or not, and if I do, which should I pick - I finally made a decision and ordered a Personal Identity Filofax Black from the UK site. They don't ship directly to here and I didn't want to have it sent to the US so that my "smart address" company can rip me off with the extra shipping and handling charges, so I sent it to my boyfriend - because there was shipping there - and he's going to bring it to me once he has it and the next time we meet. We are talking of different parts of the planet, so don't you think that Filofax UK works like cable complanies that give you the service up to the third house of the block and denies it from the rest. No, not that case.

 If you remember, I had ordered a Personal Chocolate Sketch Filofax last year from the FilofaxUSA site. I really loved it - though had some issues with the inserts, as you all know - but then after some use the base of the claps (or latch, really, at this point I can't figure out how should I call the closing thingie) started to rip.  I contacted the company and they told me to send it over to the US, and they would replace it with a Marron Personal Sketch. People, Marron! Marron that looks like red though people swear up and down that it really looks more brown that red... but still. Marron! So I said then "thank you but no thank you". Well, by now the clasp has ripped off and only the stitches are holding it into place. I've been forced to slim it down as much as I can, which included taking out basically all of the dividers (only six survived), and also all of the card holders and two of the three plastic pockets. It is thin now, though still if I put the whole contents to one side, I won't see the part where the rings meet, BUT, it's thinner.

By the end of the choosing process, I decided I wanted a filofax that had a pocket in the back for a notepad, NO ZIPPERS!, was available in brown or black (preferably brown, and I mean brown-brown and not marron), and no bunched up corners, but tucked under another layer of something. Elasticized penloop or more than one were a plus, since I'm actually planning on getting myself a frixion multipen, and an elasticized one would be dandy. Leather would have been nice, over PVC. I don't have any PETA afiliations or no-leather politics. I eat cow, so I might as well use the hide, right? So I checked the Holborn, the Guilford, the Cuban... even the Finsbury and none would do! The Malden won't do it for me because of the stitching and the detailing, and the other ones are textured and too... flashy for my taste, so no. I even considered the Metropol - as I have in the past - but once again the puffiness of it broke the deal for me. I was between the Fusion - which is a bit too juvenile for me - and the Identity - bunching up corners - when I decided to take the question to the big audience: Facebook. There I asked opinion over the Identity, and it turned out that the corners don't bunch up so bad, and the stitching in real life isn't as crappy as the amateur stitching in the cataloge. Thus the decision was made!

The Identity has two elasticized pen loops, a notepad pocket in the back and it isn't as puffy or shiny as the Metropol. And it was 27 GBS, so I would say it's a fair price. Now all I have to do is wait to see it in real life and give you a piece of my mind when I do. As usual.

While this happens, how's my current and only filofax doing? Well, after having to submit it to a forced slim down, I decided to move a couple of things around. One of them was to move my List of 13 to the front, right after my personal information and before my calendars. I haven't been doing so well this year, and almost on every list there are things that remain to be completed on the next list. For this moon's list, I actually made a mistake and put the same activity twice (that happens when you jot down activities not at once but some now, some others later and you don't read what you've written), but hey! Stuff like that happens! I also changed their order, so now the current one is on the top and the last ones go to the back. I also leave the space behind each list to write notes on what had happened and what I thought about that particular list.

My weeks are working well with the week-on-two-pages format, so I believe I'll keep it. Personally I like the panoramic view of my week it gives me, though truth to be told, I do miss the space a page-per-day format would give me.

I've been thinking on what format would I prefer and use from now on, but since my new filofax promises to come loaded with yet another Wo2P calendar, that decision has been left for 2015. I had my next inserts already planned - I posted about that a while ago - but recently I've been thinking about redoing my inserts - those inserts - since I had the day slotted in hours from 8h to 15h, and I actually would need it to go from 6h to at least 20h. That's nearly twice as much, I know. And I would really need the same for weekends. Could work with 7h to 18h, though, so I'll try to fit that in and see how it goes.

Another thing I've been thinking about is the paper type. The regular paper one can get at a paper store might be thicker than the paper filofax uses, and that could affect the general volume the filofax takes, so I've also been thinking about ordering blank pages. However, I have a bunch of pages cut to size, so I'll experiment on them first before making any other decisions and ordering like it's the end of the world.

One of the things that had really pained me has been removing my dividers. My 18 dividers. Things are messier nor inside, so I'm thinking about reinstalling my dividers, but I know that I can't use cardboard again for that, so I'll thining about other ways to sort this out. One idea has been to use magazine pages (there are art magazines with slightly thicker pages, yet not as thick as cardstock dividers) and somehow find and use tabs on them. Making the tabs is also a possiblity, but if you are acquinted with my handywork, you'll agree with me that buying them is better. Hey, each to their own!

Currently I've three large sections:

Calendars

This includes my monthly calendar, my weekly calendar and my Event Planner... which hasn't been working as well as I expected it, but that's still up for fixing.

Notes

Which includes my track and notes. These were two different Major Dividers at one point - thus the two post-its on it - and these house all my tracks (fuel, blogs, books, etc) and my notes and lists such as my to-do (which has nothing...), housed my List of 13, and all sorts of notes like info on shipping and handling, or stuff about the University God willing I'll be enrolling for again in August, some on Archery, German and whatever I decide to print out or write down and keep in there. I actually have a couple of poems I like in there! One of my most important sections is in there as well, which is the "How To" section. I tend to forget everything, so I map out there stuff like how to change message ringtones on my phone, how to create a new archive for Outlook and stuff like that.

Information

This is my final section. I call it "information" because it parks just about everything from addresses to the map with the timezones, and also stuff like lists of contacts, which I don't copy on contact pages but I either add on a page - like, lets say the names and numbers of all the people I need to contact about Fishermen Project under F, or all the contacts for Filofax under F, or the notes I need to remember for my penpals under their letters - or on post-its stuck to the dividers.

A lot of people like to pretty up their dividers with scrapbooking paper and pictures and washitape, but I've found that I like simple stuff as well. A simple divider with a post-it to personalize it works just fine for me. Now, don't get me wrong, I love using pretty things! And I have, as you can see in this picture, where I used a segment of a painting I found in a magazine (this gave me the idea) to cover up the unsightly side of the registration number page. However, the hard thing here is to find a magazine page sturdy enough with a good image on both sides. (I would personally go for cataloges, art magazines, architechture and Nat Geo, but that's me.) I tried using simply post-its and post-it flags but after a while that didn't do the trick.

If you have any other idea to deal with dividers, or any idea for super-thin dividers, let me know!