Friday, January 28, 2011

Mapping The RD Life

Allow me to set my stall out. I'm a great fan of mindmaps. It's not that I've got all their albums, have seen them live a million times and fantasise about them doing things to me in the night. No, that's Thin Lizzy, Thin Lizzy and Jennifer Aniston and Britney (from her great Slave 4u days of course) respectively.

Though, truth be told, I'm getting increasingly worried about our Jen's looks as she moves into her forties. Some people are like wine and leather and age well, with the advancing years giving them a worn in and glamorous rugged look. I like to think of myself like that, it's such a shame other people don't.

Other people get older and we find their features that used to be cute and sexy becoming ugly and prominent. I worry about MR's moustache in this context and I fear for Jen, whose chin is taking on the proportions of a small continent, perhaps a large country. She's still one of the few women to hold a position high enough in the RD ranking to still have her own tag in my sexy moving tag cloud, so all is not lost.

In fact, having looked at the details, I can tell you that the only other women to currently have their own tag are T, (though it's called Dance in a Triangle), Darwin, G12, Lady Divine, The Missing Sandwich and the much missed Soixante neuf. Oh and of course Dinidu de Alwis has her own one too! There's a tag called "girls", not for random girls but specifically for A and K.

I reckon that I should probably create one for C, certainly after writing this I should. And Naz Sansoni deserves one for sheer number of mentions.

So I was telling you earlier about my love of mindmaps, which probably deserve a tag as well. I'm never going to be a world champion mindmapper, for I don't follow the strict rules as outlined by the esteemed Mr Buzan. I don't use colours, I don't use symbols, though being a drummer I do use cymbals (badoomtish!) and I put circles around each thing I write.

But then again the rules for mindmapping also tell us to develop our own style, so perhaps I'm following the rules to the letter.

I've used them for a few years now and in the past it was mostly as an approach to a project or a way of trying to squeeze a drop of creativity out of me. They're a brilliant way in which to kick something off when I have a load of facts swimming around in my head and don't know where to start or which thing to look at first, as they eliminate the need to think logically and progressively. You can chuck stuff out in whatever order it comes to mind, then order it later.

In parallel to that I've written journals of sorts for the also five or six years. At times they've been proper diaries, when I've spent big chunky KFC large Buiriyani size portions of time writing down my innermost thoughts and emotions, analysing everything to the, sometimes second degree, pretty deep for a man I think you'll agree.

At other times I've not written anything for weeks or months, breaking the diary silence with a quick entry then leaving it for another long spell. There's a certain cruel irony in the whole diary writing scenario that no one talks about; the fact that the more that goes on in your life the more there is to write about. But also, the more that goes on in your life the less time you have to write about it. Alanis could have used lines like that, instead of that shit about being late for your wedding.

Then, when things are quiet, we have loads of time to record our innermost thoughts and actions, we just don't have many.

This lack of time issue prompted me to begin drawing up quick little informative diary type mindmaps each time I visited the motherland. I'd take five or ten minutes to make a quick record of the things I'd done each day. Sometimes, when I was feeling rebellious, I'd leave it for a few days and do a mindmap to cover those few days. Easy peasy.

That new Arcade Fire song is on the radio, I think I'm going to buy the album, just thought I'd share that with you.

Now my latest idea is to do a quick mindmap of every day of my life. What I've been doing is taking a few minutes each morning to record the events of the previous day. The format of a mindmap allows me to go into as much or as little detail about each specific thing as I want to.

C, she who has not got her own tag, says that maybe this will split things down into too much details for me. She might be right. But, a couple of weeks into the venture, it seems to be giving me a slightly positively different view on life, undoubtedly a good thing.

Sometimes it empties my head. Yes, yes, I know there's not a lot to be emptied. But sometimes it's a way of getting negative things out of my head and onto paper, something that I also found happened with a longhand diary. It's also seems to be making me appreciate things more, I guess the act of writing something down makes this happen.

Also it's a nifty way in which I can look back and recall things that otherwise would have been forgotten. Like all bloggers I go through life thinking, often saying to fellows that I "must write a blog post about that", then promptly forgetting about it until the next time the situation crops up. Now I can look back on things and memories are triggered much more easily.

It's an experiment. I'll let you know how things progress and who knows, one day when I'm highly famous and dead, someone might find volumes of spidery RD mindmaps and make sense of the absolute piffle and tosh that goes on in my head. I'm serious there, I was glancing at from a few days ago and I'd written on it that I might be getting tired of Superdry stuff and moving over to Paul Smith. I'd be worried about me if I was a friend of mine.

Enjoy the GLF if you're there.

I'm not jealous, not one bit.

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