My youngest is getting to the age where he is shortly going to be crawling out of his crib. My oldest didn’t have that issue, she was not a climber like my youngest is. Our house is a ranch style bungalow. 3 bedrooms on the main floor. I’ve been using the smallest room as my office for my precious work from home days. With my kids getting older it’s shortly going to be repurposed into a bedroom. This means that my office needs to find a new home, and that home is a room in the basement. Frankly it is an upgrade. My new office is significantly bigger, and I have way too much junk to fit into the small space of my current office. The only issue, however, is that until recently, that room was uninsulated, studs with concrete walls.

Just before christmas I was working every night for hours finishing the main room of the basement. I framed 2x6 walls all the way around, insulated, vapour barrier’d, drywalled, mudded and taped, sanded, primed, painted, laid flooring, and installed trim. I got the main room of the basement to about 95% complete. Just a few touchups to the paint, and the trim needs to be painted This room was being used as a storage room, all the tools from the main room just got shoved into the new office for storage. Once I finished the main room, and christmas passed. I started work on the new office. I managed to find a good deal on a bunch of dricore subfloor tiles. I laid those down in the new room to give me a semi-insulated floor, which turned out pretty well, even if some of the tongues on the boards were broken, it’s hardly noticeable.

After that, I ran a new circuit to the office. I pulled a new 15A circuit to power my computers. I knew that I was going to be running at minimum 2 computers, a 3d printer, scanners, printers and sometimes some test equipment. I wanted to ensure that I don’t trip breakers. After that, I framed out a small closet that I plan on sticking the servers in.

Then came the drywall. I really don’t like doing drywall. The first part that I hate is simply carrying the drywall downstairs. Each sheet comes taped together in pairs, and it weighs about 40lbs or so. Sliding it down the stairs by yourself is a workout, except if you drop the weights you make significantly more work for yourself, because now you have more work to tape!

Once I got it down the stairs, I stacked it up and started working. The one part that I do enjoy about drywall is how easy it is to cut. A nice fresh box cutter and a T-square makes short work of getting the boards cut. As I’ve done it more and more I started to get a lot more comfortable lifting the sheets into place, holding it with my thigh, and banging a few screws in to hold it in place. This time, it actually went a lot faster than before.

When I did the main room, I made the major mistake of putting “train tracks” on my walls and ceiling. All my seams lined up, and it made taping a pain in the ass. For this one, I took a lot more care to stagger joins, and boy did it make a difference.

Now, the real meditative part starts with the taping, mudding and sanding. This is the longest part by far, and the most tedious. Once you learn how to cut and embed tape and corner beads, you don’t really need to think too hard as you smooth out the tape and feather the mud. You can kind of just let your mind wander. In this case, my mind kept wandering back to a meeting that I had with a local EDA. During this meeting, we were trying to get a budget for an event passed, it was a pretty contentious meeting, and a lot of feeling flared as people argued and made some pretty nasty personal comments.

I tried my best to kind of steer the conversation more towards controlled roberts-rules style meetings, but that was pointless. The level of decorum in the meetings was pretty deplorable. Nobody knew how meetings were supposed to be run, nobody knew how bylaws were to be ammended, nobody knew the process of motions, ammendments, and such. Everyone in this organization was just so green with governance that it was almost impossible to run the meeting without tempers flaring up.

As I’m putting mud on the wall, my mind keeps wandering back to this meeting. It’s just inconceivable to me that people aren’t interested in actually participating in events. It’s clear that some people just want to obstruct. But why? What’s the point of volunteering just to be an obstruction?

When I started to introduce some governance concepts, I noticed that the meeting changed significantly. The obstructionists kind of shirked back once their ability to obstruct was challenged via process rather than emotion. Thinking it over, I think what this particular character gets is conflict. The desire for this type of person is to be a contrarian, and it seems to stem from a sort of low self-esteem. Perhaps trodding on other people’s ideas and plans makes them feel stronger? I’m honestly not sure. But what seems to be apparent is that for the contrarian archetype the weak point is structure and process. They seem to thrive when decorum gets discarded and people let emotions run hot. Kind of like the fire triangle, if you remove oxygen, heat, or fuel the fire immediately goes out; the contrarian archetype dies when you remove emotionality, unstructured conversation, or essentially give them a reaction.

Working with my hands and having a task that lets my mind wander let me come up with a plan. It led me to the reflection above, that the desire to be contrarian can be derailed via process. In fact, that really is the point of roberts rules in the first place. Manage decorum, make sure meetings run smoothly, and make sure that the democratic process is followed. It let me come up with a plan on how to move forward. Reading bylaws and trying to bring some sort of order to the EDA. I can use my experience working within different organizations to bring a level-headed operating system to the organization, allowing me to steer discussion without needing to browbeat anyone into submission.

I’ve noticed that drywall in particular seems to put me in this sort of meditative state. I need to be doing something with my hands that is physically challenging and tedious. Once those come together, my mind just wanders and I can kind of just let it go where it wants to go. I find that it likes to meander around different experiences that I’ve had throughout my life. Conversations that I had with my grandfather years and years ago resurface as if they are giving me advice to my current situation. Situations that I’ve experienced in the past start to resurface and my brain contrasts those situations with what is currently happening. These thoughts don’t always make a lot of sense, most of the time they are random. For example, I’m thinking about the above meeting, and the memory of my grandfather and I going fishing will resurface. I don’t really know why it would pop into my mind, but then my mind starts to look for a connection and that in and of itself directs my attention to trying to understand the situation from a different light. For example, how can the meeting be similar to fishing? Waiting? Being patient? Is the connection something like: being emotional and angry about getting skunked fishing is pointless, you need to relax, stick to principles, and be patient? My mind keeps looking for connections, trying tons of different permutations, which I find allows me to understand the situation more deeply. Essentially what I’m experiencing is, I think, meditation.

After I finish for the night, I notice that I’m not only physically exhausted, but also mentally exhausted. I do feel like sometimes I manage to find some clarity about my current situation, other times I come away more agitated than I was when I started. It feels a lot like journaling, or writing this blog. I can kind of just let my thoughts run free and land where they will at the end.

With all that said, Nobody could pay me enough to be a fully time drywaller/plasterer. F-THAT.