This week, in Refuse to Choose! we will read Chapter Two: What’s Wrong with Me? It’s only 16 pages. We will also complete two very valuable exercises, then reflect on what we’ve learned about Rewards and Durations from this chapter.

Chapter 2, Exercise 1: The "What Have I Done So Far?" List

Chapter 2, Exercise 2: What Are Your Rewards?

What I Learned from Chapter 2, What’s Wrong with Me?

Your First Free Bonus – an Index to Refuse to Choose

Professional indexer Do Mi Stauber generously created a complete index to the book. Download your copy of the index here. To save it before opening it, right-click (Windows), click and hold (Mac), or Ctrl-click (Mac), then choose the Save option in the popup menu. Want to learn a fascinating part-time or full-time career for Scanners? Do Mi has written an in-depth guide to how to be a great indexer.

Comments

Comments are what make this book club work. Your computer will probably remember the name and email address you used in the past, but you can change either of them while posting a comment. If several of you have similar names, you can add something descriptive, like “Rob in Upstate NY” or “Joan, cattle rancher.”

When you leave a comment, you get the opportunity to subscribe to email notices of future comments on the same page. You will receive an email asking you to confirm your subscription. Confirmed subscribers receive a copy of each comment with a link for where to post a reply. When commenting on a chapter or an exercise, I ask that you put the comment on the “What I Learned” page for that chapter or the page displaying that exercise. When leaving general comments for your group, I recommend putting them on the Welcome / Agenda page, where almost everyone is already subscribed.

Check the page title before commenting. If you are on the Login page or the Member Profile page, for example, your comment is public, seen by anyone, logged in or not. And if you are on the Book Club Help page, it can be seen by members of all the groups in any past, present, or future book club.

Images

Check the Book Club Help page for help with putting a picture of yourself on all your comments and for sharing other images with the group.

Problems

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Use the Next link (up above the title) to continue on to Exercise 1: The "What Have I Done So Far?" List, or use the links above.

Book Club Help Page

Welcome / Agenda Page

This is your chance to reflect on what you will take away from Chapter 1: All about Scanners and to learn from or contribute to other book club members’ take-aways. You can also pose questions here about the chapter or what you are discovering about yourself.

Here, to remind you, are the exercises we completed in Chapter 1: All about Scanners.

1. Create Your Scanner Daybook
2. Your Living Quarters Map

Please subscribe to future comments on this page or check back here on Wednesday evening or Thursday morning for new ones. Make sure your fellow Book Club members know they are no longer isolated and are now part of a large, international group of Scanners.

That’s it for this week! Watch for your weekly email on Thursday or just log in again then. If you’re not getting the weekly announcements and you would like to add them, please send an email to me at webmaster@barbarasclub.com. I can also help with comment subscriptions if you need it. Until next week!

Book Club Help Page

Welcome / Agenda Page

Open up a fresh pair of pages in your Scanner Daybook (remember, in your Daybook, you always start on the left-hand page so you have plenty of open space to write on). Leave a bit of space at the top of the left-hand page for the title of this entry. When I designed this program, I wrote at the top of my page “A Scanner’s Home Is Her Workshop,” because I found that every single room in my house (even the hallway) has at least one writing surface with paper and pencils nearby! Wait until you’ve completed this exercise to see what kind of title you come up with.

Now, sit down and sketch out a rough plan of your home in pencil and then, with your Daybook and pencil in hand, walk carefully around each room looking for projects. It doesn’t matter if you never finished them, or even if you never started them. You know which items were intended to become projects in your own home. When you find one, draw a circle in that part of the floor plan and write the name of the project, such as:

• Little video player for watching old VHS home movies
• Basket of interesting clips from magazines
• Telephone recording hookup & instructions for my telephone classes

“I’m going to get embarrassed if I do that,” one Scanner wrote me. “I kind of hate to document how many projects I’ve started and not finished. They make my place a mess, too.” But that’s not the true Scanner inside you talking; that’s you worrying about your critics. Scanners, with their love of learning new things and their instinct for potential, almost always live in a “cluttered” space, and it’s not always easy for other people to understand what the clutter is about. But I asked you to do this exercise here at the beginning specifically so you could start being proud of that eager mind of yours and all the things it’s been drawn to do. Your home is not just a storage facility for your unfinished projects, it’s the workspace of a creative mind. See if you can find photos of the studios of famous artists, like Picasso, and you’ll see what I mean. A tidy housekeeper would be horrified at the disorder. Another artist-even a neat one-would have no problem understanding that he wasn’t looking at disorder, he was looking at a functioning workspace.

Sherlock Holmes, of course, would find an artist’s rooms very interesting indeed. So should you.

Let me close with an example from a Scanner just to get you started.

I walked through my living room and saw one antique lady’s shoe sitting on the floor behind a table and remembered why I took it home from a lawn sale. I once saw a lamp made of a shoe just like it, in a magazine. The lamp was beautiful. It also cost almost $400! I had an idea that I could start a whole line of items from found objects. So I circled the spot on my map and wrote “Victorian Shoe for Lamp.” Then I saw my harmonica and remembered I wanted to learn how to play it so I could accompany a friend who plays guitar on the street sometimes…

Got the idea? Okay, you do it.

After your map is complete, you can keep it in your Daybook and add to it whenever you start something new, or you can do what one Scanner did:

This map of my projects is beautiful! I colored it and even attached photos from magazines and a miniature piano from a charm bracelet. It’s a work of art, and I’m going to frame it and put it on my wall! It’s like a collage of my soul!

When you’re finished, you might see a pattern in your projects, like I did in my map. Whatever you find, with respect and admiration write a heading in the space you left at the top of the left-hand page. Nothing deprecating is allowed. Praise is due, and I want your heading to reflect that, even if you have to scratch your head and search for it the rest of the day.

Be sure to do this exercise in your Scanner Daybook, not on your computer or on ordinary, uninteresting paper. In a new comment on this page, tell us about your experience with the Living Quarters Map and what title you gave this entry in you Daybook. Then read the rest of the comments and see if you would like to reply to any of them.

Please be sure to subscribe to future comments on this exercise or to check back here on Wednesday evening or Thursday morning for new ones. If there are a lot of comments by then, look for an Older Comments link to see any that do not fit on this page.

Use the Next link (up above the title) to continue on to What I Learned from Chapter 1 after you are done with your comments.

Book Club Help Page

Welcome / Agenda Page