On reading, note cards and marginalia

from Ryan Holiday (likely via Austin Kleon):

-I’ve talked about this before, but the key to this system is the ritual: Read a book or an article and diligently mark the passages and portions that stand out at you. If you have a thought, write it down on the page (this is called marginalia). Fold the bottom corner of the page where you’ve made a note or marked something (alternatively, use post-it flags).

-A few weeks after finishing the book, return to it and transfer those notes/thoughts on to the appropriate note cards. Why wait? Waiting helps you separate the wheat from the chaff. I promise that many of the pages you marked will not seem to important or noteworthy when you return to them. This is a good thing–it’s a form of editing.

-In the top right hand corner of each card, put a theme or category that this card belongs to. If a card can fit in multiple categories, just make a duplicate card. Robert uses color coded cards for an extra layer of organization.

— The Notecard System: The Key For Remembering, Organizing And Using Everything You Read

Holiday also has interesting notes in his suggestion to keep a commonplace book.

How to Write a Memoir (via Austin Kleon) is an interesting read for the history project(s) that I’ll someday start — maybe I should just follow Zinsser’s suggestion:

As for how to actually organize your memoir, my final advice is, again, think small. Tackle your life in easily manageable chunks. Don’t visualize the finished product, the grand edifice you have vowed to construct. That will only make you anxious.

Here’s what I suggest.

Go to your desk on Monday morning and write about some event that’s still vivid in your memory. What you write doesn’t have to be long—three pages, five pages—but it should have a beginning and an end. Put that episode in a folder and get on with your life. On Tuesday morning, do the same thing. Tuesday’s episode doesn’t have to be related to Monday’s episode. Take whatever memory comes calling; your subconscious mind, having been put to work, will start delivering your past.

Keep this up for two months, or three months, or six months. Don’t be impatient to start writing your “memoir,” the one you had in mind before you began. Then, one day, take all your entries out of their folder and spread them on the floor. (The floor is often a writer’s best friend.) Read them through and see what they tell you and what patterns emerge. They will tell you what your memoir is about and what it’s not about. They will tell you what’s primary and what’s secondary, what’s interesting and what’s not, what’s emotional, what’s important, what’s funny, what’s unusual, what’s worth pursing and expanding. You’ll begin to glimpse your story’s narrative shape and the road you want to take.

Then all you have to do is put the pieces together.

from an interesting series (in an unliklely place) that I stumbled on via rabbit hole that started from a Goodreads review:

I can imagine one of my 17 nieces and nephews walking through my door someday and having no idea where to start. My significant other is an 11-pound Pomeranian; I’m the only one who knows what in my house has real value and who will treasure it when I’m gone. So I made a decision: I’m getting rid of it now. I’m 54, in perfect health. But I never want someone else to have to go through my stuff and decide what’s important. I want to be the boss while I can.

I started by digitizing my music so I could give it to the New Orleans Public Library, which lost a lot of records during Katrina. I hope some young girl from my old neighborhood will wander in, listen to Ella Fitzgerald like I did and just shut out the whole world. I’m gifting my diamond studs to my nieces on their 21st birthdays. The music that shakes my soul, the books that have kept me going, my best reserve wines: I want to share them now.

I’m unclear why getting rid of things seems both desirable and utterly impossible to me.

Today was the last day of the Healthcare-NOW conference. After the HCN board meeting (which I had to chair and did so well) we went across the street for beers and Phillip and Margot came and joined Katie and the group. She was such a happy little baby full of smiles and joy. (Had a great pic but don’t feel comfortable without K/P’s permission.)

interesting read (Letting Go of Sentimental Items) as I try and get rid of 365 things this year:

Among the organized chaos that comprised the crawlspace beneath her bed, there were five boxes, each labeled with a number. Each numbered box was sealed with packing tape. I cut through the tape and found old papers from my elementary school days from nearly a quarter of a century ago. Spelling tests, cursive writing lessons, artwork, it was all there, every shred of paper from my first five years of school. It was evident that she hadn’t accessed the sealed boxes in years. And yet Mom had held on to these things because she was trying to hold on to pieces of me, to pieces of the past, much like I was attempting to hold on to pieces of her and her past.

That’s when I realized that my retention efforts were futile. I could hold on to her memories without her stuff, just as she had always remembered me and my childhood and all of our memories without ever accesses those sealed boxes under her bed. She didn’t need papers from twenty-five years ago to remember me, just as I didn’t need a storage locker filled with her stuff to remember her.

Makes me think about making some of those gorgeous journals T.Barry makes that are on display in his Wait at Milano video.

“Debt is an opportunity cost. A cost that you trade for one of the most valuable things in your life, time.”

– Tammy Strobel

Presentation to Florida APWU Summer Institute

Presentation to Fla. APWU meeting; October 25, 2014

 

Good morning brothers and sisters. My name is Mark Piotrowski, I’m a staffer for the Florida Education Association, but today I’m here on behalf of the Labor Campaign for Single Payer Health Care. We’d like thank President Richardson and Brother DeMauro for inviting us to talk with ya’ll about our campaign — which the APWU has endorsed nationally.

The Labor Campaign was launched in St. Louis in 2009, just before Pres. Obama’s first inauguration. It brought together 12 national unions, 9 state feds and dozens of local and regional labor organizations.

We work to coordinate grassroots labor support for a single-payer, Medicare-for-All healthcare system in America that eliminates the role of private insurance companies. We believe that health care is a fundamental human right and that it should be treated as a public good, not a commodity. We also believe that the labor movement must take the lead in the fight for healthcare justice.

Before we talk about specifically what the Labor Campaign is working for and how you can get involved (and maybe take some questions), let’s review some of the problems we face as working people — and unionists in particular — under the for-profit U.S. healthcare system.

It’s really a remarkable system, isn’t it?

We spend more than twice as much per person on health care as any other country yet we still have tens of millions of folks who can’t get the care they need. We have some of the most advanced medical technology in the world yet lag behind countries like Japan, Canada and Germany in basic health statistics. Ours is the most expensive and the most unequal system in the world.

Of course this is because we are unique in the U.S. because we have private insurance companies — Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Humana, Cigna and the like — skimming off 30% of our health care dollars for advertising, political lobbying, denials of care and huge CEO salaries. Last year the CEO of Aetna got a 131% raise — jumping from a measly $13.2 million to $30.7 M. Anyone else here get a 131% raise last year?

So our healthcare crisis is really a health insurance crisis.

And we know that this crisis is the top issue on just about every bargaining table for every union across the country.

Along with being the #1 cause of bankruptcy in the U.S., rising insurance costs are also the leading cause of strikes, lockouts and concession bargaining. Time that could be spent at the table pushing for health and safety, better pay or retirement is gobbled up by insurance fights. Many of us see our hard-fought pay increases eaten up by skyrocketing insurance rates. Public employers are relying increasingly on cost-shifting to deal with stagnant or shrinking budgets. Even those of us with so-called “good insurance” still face a confusing mess of co-pays, deductibles, out-of-pocket costs and mountains of paperwork.

And of course I don’t need to tell you how the insurance crisis affects postal workers. The absurd and unique requirement that the postal system pre-fund retiree health care costs for 75 years is one of THE driving force behind so-called deficits and the push to privatize — or even eliminate — the post office.

And starting in 2018, as you’ve probably heard, many union workers who have fought hard to win and protect good health insurance benefits for themselves and their families will face the so-called “Cadillac Tax” of 40% on health care costs over a certain amount. (($10,200 (indiv.) and $27,500 (fam.).)) This tax is levied on the employer or union health plan — and many employers have already said they’ll pass this tax right on to the workers. We’re already seeing employers using the tax to speed up cost shifting or squeeze out early concessions at the bargaining table.

So we believe this isn’t a fight we can win union-by-union. It’s one that we think the labor movement has to unite around to win on every bargaining table all-at-once by “finishing the job” as we like to say —by winning a national, publicly funded, Medicare-for-all health care system.

What is SP?
A single-payer system (like workers enjoy in every other industrialized country) would guarantee quality, affordable health care — not just the right to buy insurance — for every man, woman and child in the U.S. for all of our health care needs for our entire lives (including things not currently covered like dental or long-term care). We’d have guaranteed coverage whether we’re married or single; whether we’re working, looking for work, or retired; whether we’re sick or healthy.

We can pay for the health care of every person in the U.S. simply by eliminating the role of private insurance companies and redirecting the 30% of health care dollars they waste on overhead and giant profits back into direct care. In fact 95% of us would pay less under single-payer than we do now when you total up our premiums, deductibles, co-pays and out-of-pocket expenses.

The Affordable Care Act

A few quick words about the Affordable Care Act… For all the work the labor movement put into electing Pres. Obama and passing the Affordable Care Act, and for any of the benefits contained in the ACA, it has not solved the health care crisis.

This is because it keeps the insurance companies right in the middle of an employer-based system of coverage. While the ACA allows millions to buy needed insurance who haven’t been able to, removes age and preexisting conditions as barriers to getting insurance and expands coverage to dependents up to age 26, it continues to treat health care as a consumer good, a commodity and individual responsibility instead of a human right.

The Supreme Court ruling that states like ours could opt-out of Medicaid expansion is another new front in the fight for health care justice.

(How crazy is it that Gov. Rick Scott was CEO of Columbia/HCA when they were fined $1.7 billion for Medicare fraud but won’t expand Medicaid for millions of Floridians — mostly the working poor?)

And the new layers of tiered coverage in the exchanges — platinum, gold, silver and bronze — and the “Wal-Mart loophole” (which says employers only need provide coverage for workers averaging 30 hrs/wk) both increase the “race to the bottom” pressure at the bargaining table to cut hours and reduce benefits.

Instead of this confusing mess — that again costs us so much time and energy at the bargaining table — we believe that in a country with the wealth and resources of the U.S., all of us should have the same high quality care — whether we’re a custodian or a CEO, a postal worker or a congressman.

So how are we going to do this? How are we going to “finish the job” and create a health care system with everybody in, nobody out?

The Labor Campaign for Single Payer Healthcare thinks that like in other industrialized countries that have single-payer health care that covers all workers, the Labor Movement must lead the fight for healthcare justice. But we’re only going to win that fight by building a big mass movement to demand it and protect it once we win. We all know the Labor Movement is the only social force with the resources and organizing capacity to bring together workers and patients and community members and doctors, united to get rid of the insurance companies that profit so much off our healthcare.

So we invite you to get involved with the Labor Campaign for Single Payer. Stop by our table and sign up for more info. Join as individual members. Bring us to speak to your local or CLC.

We’re working to push the issue up, to convince the national labor movement that this is a critical priority for our unions and our members; And to move it down… to educate and mobilize an army of union activists ready and able to build a movement that finishes the job — that expands the solidarity model of HC that we’ve perfected at the bargaining table over decades  into a movement around the call for “Medicare for All”.

This is a fight that’s going to have to move past passing resolutions and to a real commitment of resources and organizing. This is a fight that will once again show labor’s commitment to speak up and stand up for the entire working class. And it’s a fight we can’t afford to lose. Join us!

Thought-provoking post by David Raptitude. The ones below either really hit home or I think (but don’t yet know) are, as the author calls them, ‘things I know are true but haven’t quite learned yet’:

3) Whenever I’m playing with my phone I am only shortening my life. A smartphone is useful if you have a specific thing you want to do, but ninety per cent of the time the thing I want to do is avoid doing something harder than surfing Reddit. During those minutes or hours, all I’m doing is dying. …

9) Our minds are geared to manage much less than we typically end up managing. Modern people have so many options they conflict with each other in almost every area. The fewer things I have, the more I enjoy my things. The fewer goals I have, the better I do them. The smaller the portion size, the better food tastes. …

11) All you need to do to finish things is keep starting them until they’re done. The idea of doing something in its entirety always seems hard. But it’s easy to commit to simply starting on something, and then you’re past most of the resistance. Continuing is just as easy. (Thanks to Leo Babauta for this one.) …

13) Ultimately, to get something done you have to forget about everything else while you do it. The mind is always telling you that 85 things are on fire and you need to do everything now. However you respond emotionally to it, to move things along you have to pick one to deal with, and let the rest continue burning while you do.

14) The most consistently joyful activities for me are visiting with other people and reading books. Aside from earning a living and a bit of travel there isn’t much else I need in my life. Somehow these two things are still not clear priorities. What are yours?

I’m working on finalizing the 2013 XTH-ar and #14 is something that will figure into my goals for 2014.

This article skates a little too close to the idea that consumers are sheep (which ignores that the vast majority, even in the ‘west’, have to work to make ends meet not fuel consumerist goals). But to his credit the author bases it self-critically on his own experience(s).

These two snippets resonated (as I sipped on the $3 coffee i probably didn’t need):

Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy.

and…

We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.

I started — on the heels of a week off of work — the annual review/plan that i’ve been trying to do for some time now, and with so much i’d like to accomplish I totally feel this way. That working 8 hrs/day leaves so little time for the other things I’d like to do. No great conclusions here, but more to think about.