Dear Mr. Corgan

Billy,

I hope it's okay to call you that. I have been a fan of yours for a long time. I read a recent interview with you in Rolling Stone. My man bought me the magazine to cheer me up because you were in it.

And some would say this is an oxymoron. I'm a total fangirl of yours, and even I have to admit you are a bit cynical and depressing at times. This interview was no exception, but I wasn't surprised or saddened by that. The fact that you had to call them did shock me a bit, but you are right in saying that you have always been undervalued. Sometimes whining is warranted. Not quite so much, but I am emotional to a fault, so I certainly understand you're upset at feeling forgotten.

I have not forgotten you. I still play Stumbeline, both from my repurchased copy of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, and on my own guitar. “And what you never knew/Can never get to you”. Those words have gotten me through countless depressions caused by teasing in school. Then there's the song I would use as my wrestling entrance music, Mayonnaise. It has felt like my personal anthem more times than I can count, cause “no one fails like me”.

Except you of course, sir. It has been troubling to watch you since the New York incident, like the Moon card in tarot, secret enemies swirled around you and the music was affected. I love the acoustic versions of anything you have ever produced, but Adore hurt dude. Smashing Pumpkins and electronica refuse to mix in my head, even ten years later. Parts of Machina were great, though, and I Iove Zwan.

I swear I tried to convert others to the cause, my brother, but some of the songs were too damn happy. You confused us, it has been a common fault of yours since the original family split apart in such a violent fashion. In any case, and despite your faults and failures, you have always inspired me.

Thus, I declare you my hero, Mr. Corgan. Sorry to put such a responsibility on your thin shoulders, but no one else has ever come close to motivating me to be better. Motivating me to be depressed, maybe, and some say you do that to them, but not I. You speak so close to what I feel, how I see the world. I don't know how or why, it has always been this way, since the first time I heard Disarm.

That's right, I disagree on which is your sacred song. It ain't Today. That one is chump change compared to Tonight, Tonight. It is all good that you have released it to mainstream to finance further musical journeys. I want to hear them, be inspired to evolve. But please don't let me ever hear Tonight, Tonight in an Ambien commercial.

I'd vomit a bit in my mouth, and you don't want to inspire that sort of thing, now do you, Billy?

Now, how does this tie into the whole time management thing. Yes, I know I was supposed to be all daily about those posts and stuff, and I am still gonna try for that. Weeds got in the way for the past few nights. Awesome show, but I have been staying up too late watching the DVDs and not motivated to post about scheduling in the mornings. Billy said in the Rolling Stone article that he wakes up at seven in the morning everyday.

Well god dammit, then I am too, Mr. Hero.

This is an important step in my quest to have a more defined and productive schedule. Wake up time is now in slices, with a definite start and end, as I already have a ten am start time in place for the boy's lessons. Wake up time begins at seven am now, the end, cause that's what my hero does. I will then have my coffee with eggs and toast. Billy, you do the egg white shit but that's not my style, I'll have grandma's scrambled eggs and toast with butter, spanks. This is my Google Reader time as well, so I will be sure to have the Gmail open first to keep up with my reminders after all is in the schedule. Breakfast and Reader from seven to eight, then read or write from eight to ten depending on the day. As Tiger said, got to give myself options with the time so as to be sure to at least to one of them.

Not the fornicating golf player Tiger, my SecondLife buddy Tiger. All my little sl topic posts get cross-posted to her awesome magazine Slick. I need to get on more content for that blog. Gotta put it in the schedule. First we'll start with rising at my hero's chosen time. Maybe the quiet beginnings of a typical day in the neighborhood will inspire my Soothe. I surely hope so.

If I can stick to my hero worship, a detailed explanation of the entrance of this sliced wake up time will be forthcoming after my eggs and toast tomorrow morning.

Thanks for being an inspiration to me, Mr. Corgan, and I hope you manage to receive the recognition you deserve before you die. You have to know that's why they worship Kurt over you. Dating his insane, untalented ex did not help sir. But I forgive you.

With sincerest thanks,

June Stormcrow

Side Project: Oh Google, Please Help me!

Me and time management have issues. I am very much an all or nothing sort of individual, and it makes scheduling anything difficult for me. My brain doesn't want to work along those lines, ignores my pleasant paper reminders. I tore down the "Get Out of Debt Plan" a month ago. It's not like the man or myself sticks to it at all. We both made sincere attempts to reduce spending, but a more realistic plan needs to be worked out. Like, with actual numbers and stuff.

Life is cluttered beyond the finances though. The root of the entire problem is that we aren't the best at scheduling our days. I have a firm block schedule in place, but in practice, I am finding that it is not enough structure to me. The blocks need more slices, clearer defined times. Yet, how do I do this without walking away and ignoring it like I do my other lists?

This is where my call to Google for help comes in. I have tried the Calendar function before, but it didn't translate in more motivation to take nature walks or hit the Absolute Write Sci-Fi chat like I had hoped, due to a complete lack of checking that email address for the reminders. As I am now quite fond of Gmail and Reader, this is no longer a problem.

How far do I go in my slices, however? My other efforts to schedule often suffered from being too detailed, and thus, too hard to follow without feeling I had put myself in a straight jacket. The current "schedule" consists of six blocks of time: wake up time, morning school, lunch, afternoon school, dinner, after dinner. The after dinner section consists of two slices already - family time and after kid's in bed time. I thought this obvious openness would give me some structure without overwhelming me, after a long period of life being too chaotic to even dream of scheduling it. It has helped me bring structure, just not enough. I flail in the mornings and evenings, so many things that I could do overwhelming me and leading to inevitable shutdown, fried brain mindlessly roving SecondLife, Twitter, or Reader instead of writing something, ANYTHING, or doing one of a hundred things around the house.

Housework is never "done". It's one of the reasons I despise it.

I feel an overwhelming need for more balance in my life. Over the coming months, I hope to use the Google Calendar to its fullest, bending its functions to my will and slicing the broad divisions of my schedule into more structured pieces of a whole that will be more productive. Today I am about spent after weeks of insomnia, agonizing over how to better organize my time. Seriously. Being less productive than I feel I could be makes me depressed, until I burst in flaming tears. Tomorrow I'll come to a conclusion about how to divide my broad blocks, following my friend's suggestion of "give yourself a choice". All slices of time will have two options. It works with the boy's schooling, it could translate to the rest of our time.

Where does Google fit into all this again? I hope to use its connection of Blogger, Buzz, Reader and Gmail, along with the Calendar and Document functions, to make my real life and online life more streamlined. Let's see if email reminders work when my lazy ass actually checks the email account they go to, shall we?