Solving several problems at once

Suppose there are many problems. I am a bit overweight; I don't exercise. I spend too much time randomly looking at comments on web sites. I binge watch. I look at my stocks too much. My kitchen is messy. Etc... 

Now my idea is this: to solve one problem a day.  The first day I gave up X, the second day Y, the third Z.  Today I cleaned my kitchen and deleted stocks from my "widgets."  I will have to start cleaning the kitchen more, of course. 

Don't do all of this in one day, because it is more satisfying to "stack" them. Make one small change a day. 

It is not a sustainable model, perhaps, because I will ((a) run out of new things to do (b) not be able to keep up with what I have already decided, or backslide.  Problem (a) is negligible, because if I run out of ideas, then that means I will have addressed a lot of problems at that point. The solution for (b) will be to restart (or re-quit for a negative thing.) It's like the old joke: They say it's hard to quit smoking,  but not for me: I've done it a hundred times. 

Connections

 I've playing the connections game from NYT.  There are 16 words, in four categories (four words per category. You guess them one by one, and the game updates if you guess them correctly.  

The first step would be to identify at least 2 categories.  

The words were Marley, Hope, Glen, Hue, Color, Dre, Genre.... etc... 

I saw one category soon:  glen, hollow, dell, dale. 

Then I saw one related to color: shade, hue, color, tone, 

Then, it was obvious that the only Marley I knew was Bob. I remembered Bob Ross was a guy with a PBS painting show. The other two were Bob Dole, the politician, and Bob Hope, the comedian.  

The last category was anagrams of colors: Dre, genre, Gary, lube, for red, green, gray, and blue.  

The secret is not putting in any answers until you have mostly solved in your head. Gary, Glen, Hope, and Dale are first names, for example. Dre and Marley could be part of musician category.  Shade might go with glen or hollow.  Some people try to guess the hardest category first, which involves figuring out all of them and then guessing at what the hardest might be.  

Ways in which Cervantes is metafiction

 1. The work is a parody, so it is automatically metafiction, because of intertextuality.  

2. Breaking the theatrical fourth wall, in DQ's reaction to Maese Pedro's puppet show. 

3. In the second part, commentaries on the 1st part, and critique of the apocryphal Quijote. The printing press in Barcelona. 

4. Discussions of the merits of various literary works. The burning of books at the end of the work. 

5. Interpolated novels. 

6. The found manuscript and translation tropes.  

There are probably other things too, depending on how one wants to slice the pie and define these terms.  

IRISE

 We have had a rebranding.  The acronym is IRISE and each letter represents a value: integrity, respect, innovation, stewardship, excellence. It's hard not to see this language as being kind of empty.  The words are great ones to which we should aspire, but making a list doesn't help the administration negotiate better with our faculty union. It doesn't raise our salaries or our morale. Of course, each word has its own bullet points. For example, under excellence we find this inspiring but somehow uninspiring language that might have been generated by AI:   

• "We are all leaders who engage in, advocate for, and support learning and the advancement of knowledge, skills, and society." 

Riffaterre's joke

I heard a talk by Riffattere, He said this joke was not ambiguous, because the only funny way is to read it is one way, not the other. 

"Bob makes love to his wife every Thursday. So does Bill."   

I was thinking of a variation of this. A man complain to his boss about being depressed. The boss says, when I get depressed, I take the afternoon off, go and have a martini with my wife, and take her to bed. Why don't you try it? I'll give you afternoon off. 

"How did it go?" asks the boss the next day.  Wonderful! says the man. By the way, you have a nice house.  

A joke

 What do you feel about the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning?  

I'm not intuit.  

Machado

 Cuatro cosas tiene el hombre

que no sirven en la mar:
ancla, gobernalle y remos,
y miedo de naufragar.