📝 🎲 wrangling the chaos

to-do lists and notes to self

A good and happy Thursday!

Today I’m writing to you from my kitchen, where I’m watching the local foxes and cats take turns to inspect our garden.

I have something exciting to tell you before we get this newsletter started properly, and that is this: I designed a tote bag and I love it and it is for all geology nerds and people who just like rocks in general.

If you’re reading this thinking, what’s guh-neiss? then let me enlighten you.

Gneiss (pronounced “nice”) is a metamorphic rock, which means it was created when a different kind of rock was buried underground and put under such intense pressure that it changed completely. Gneiss is often characterised by its beautiful bands of minerals, like wiggly stripes. So, maybe you can relate! Maybe you were once put under intense pressure and you became beautiful, too. It’s like an ugly duckling situation or something. Or, you can just buy the bag and be happy.

This tote bag is one of the ways I’m inviting people to support the creation of Typical Forever, my geology album. You can pay £10 or higher and support me by getting a bag on my Bandcamp. I will post anywhere!

Where do you write your to-do lists?

The other day I saw one of Kurt Cobain’s to-do lists for his band:

If you want to read more about his notebooks, then see this excellent post by Jillian Hess of the newsletter Noted, which is where I first saw this.

I really like seeing people’s to-do lists, as it gives me a feeling of belonging. Other people are out there, writing their own lists. Getting only half of their items done. Swearing profusely in between lines. Carrying one task over and over and over to the next to-do list, ad infinitum.

Creating an album, and managing myself as an artist, I have a lot of things to do. It often feels like I am herding clouds. So I write a lot of lists. I thought it might interest you to have a peek inside the chaos.

My to-do lists exist in several different places. Some are in a big spiral-bound notebook I dump all my excess brain activity into:

Some live in my 2023 planner:

Some are just on a blank document:

And some exist in a desktop organisation program called Notion:

As you can see, there are a lot of moving parts to making an album. It’s a lot to stay on top of when it’s just you sailing the ship.

What also often happens in these pages is a lot of this:

As I was flipping through pages to find things to share here, I noticed that some tasks kept popping up time and time again. I’d push them off to the next list. Some things disappeared for pages, then appeared up again as they became relevant. The stuff that I wrote “HELP” next to got done eventually, and then there was a new task which I’d be writing “HELP” next to. It never ended!

I then saw this quote I wrote down. It made me laugh:

This is a James Hutton quote, he’s a man we like to call “the founder of modern geology.” He wrote this whilst looking at Siccar Point, a place on the coast in East Scotland where you can see layers of stone which sit at odd angles with each other. It was here he figured out that, in order to create such complex and irregular structures in rock, great amounts of time must pass. Thus, geologic time was kinda born.

Last night I video-called my four closest friends and we talked about what happens when you achieve something. One of us had finished a round of exams, another had an essay due. We all admitted that it was hard to stop and celebrate, because of the endless tasks which come with each new success.

If I thought about my successes: releasing an EP, writing 100 songs, getting funding from the Geologist’s Association… I realised that with each completion, I had a whole bunch of new things to be getting on with. There truly is NO PROSPECT OF AN END. And also, there wasn’t really a true “beginning” point to discover, either. Every thing I started stood on the foundations laid by the project I’d done before.

To-do lists layered over each other, infinitely.

Making to-do lists is our attempt to bring some order to the chaos that has no beginning and no end. It makes me feel good that we all do it, in order to wrangle a lasso around a passing cloud.

Here’s one from Johnny Cash, to round us out:

Thanks for reading! I have a couple recommendations for you before we say goodbye.

I finished reading The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward the other day and it floored me. It’s a thriller/horror with a really big heart and that’s all I can say without spoiling it for you.

I haven’t listened to a lot of music lately but I did add this to my playlist recently:

Alright. Be good! Be orderly, and stay chaotic.

Olivia 🌈🌋✨