Category: Personal

Anything and everything about me and my life. You’ll have to hunt a lot for gossip-worthy tidbits, though.

Less Extrovert Than I Thought [en]

[fr] J'ai réalisé qu'en fait je n'étais pas aussi extravertie que je l'imaginais. Cette "méconnaissance de moi", si je puis dire, m'amène à me surcharger un peu côté vie sociale (et vie professionnelle "avec gens"). En fait, j'ai aussi pas mal besoin de temps pour moi. Je vais être plus vigilante à l'avenir avec ça!

A couple of weeks back I found an MBTI questionnaire and took it. The result itself is not that surprising (ENTJ) — but what did catch my attention was that the test only evaluated me to be “slightly extrovert”.

I’ve long known that I do need alone time and can become over-socialized, but this test result has suddenly made me realize that I’m just probably not as extrovert as I viewed myself to be. I always thought that I was very extrovert, but come to think of it, it’s just not true.

I love being around people, but I do need a healthy dose of alone time if I’m going to keep my balance.

Now that I’ve put my finger on it, I’m going to pay more attention to making sure I have enough time to myself.

Face Blindness [en]

[fr] Un épisode de Radiolab qui parle de "face blindness", littéralement "être aveugle aux visages". J'ai un peu de ça (je ne reconnais pas les gens, mais je me souviens d'eux immédiatement quand ils me donnent leur nom). Episode intéressant à écouter.

I wrote some time ago about being bad with faces. I remember people, I just have trouble with faces. I’ve been paying more attention to this recently, and realized that I actually do “recognize” people — I know that I know them — but cannot “place” them or “identify” them based on their face alone.

This morning I listened to the Radiolab podcast “Strangers in the Mirror“, about face blindness (I love Radiolab).

Oliver Sacks, the famous neuroscientist and author, can’t recognize faces. Neither can Chuck Close, the great artist known for his enormous paintings of … that’s right, faces.

Oliver and Chuck–both born with the condition known as Face Blindness–have spent their lives decoding who is saying hello to them. You can sit down with either man, talk to him for an hour, and if he sees you again just fifteen minutes later, he will have no idea who you are. (Unless you have a very squeaky voice or happen to be wearing the same odd purple hat.)

Go and listen to it.

Like everything, face blindness is not all-or-nothing. I guess I have some degree of it (not as bad as Chuck or Oliver, though). My strategy is to tell people upfront. I’m also very good with names, so that helps compensate. I find myself using some of the strategies they talk about: looking for some distinctive feature in the face, making a mental note of eye colour or eyebrow shape, teeth. Some detail I can hang onto.

I’ve realized that I can in fact “recognize” or place people based on their faces, but it takes me a lot of time and energy and concentration to do so. Sometimes hours or days after I’ve seen the person. I’ll bump into somebody at the supermarket, I know I know the person, we say hi, but I have no clue who the person is. I’ll keep thinking about it, try and visualise the person (face, voice, movement, expressions) and see what context appears in my mind.

When watching movies, I’m often crap at differentiating actors that look similar. “Is this somebody we already know, or is it a new character?” Or if I see an actor in another movie/series, it can take me a long time to be certain I’ve recognized them. For example, Lisa Edelstein (who plays Dr. Cuddy in House) was playing the role of a doctor (!) in an episode of Without a Trace that I was watching a week or two ago. It took me a good 10-15 minutes to be sure this character was not the same as the in-house FBI psychiatrist (also a woman roughly the same age with long dark hair), another 10-15 to be certain I’d seen her before and realize she was Cuddy.

So, is my “problem” in the face blindness range or is it in the “link the face with the person” one? I wonder if there are any tests available for this kind of thing. I’m curious.

Venez m'écouter chanter… [fr]

[en] I'm singing on Saturday with Café-Café, come and listen to us!

…en compagnie d’une centaine d’autres chanteurs 🙂

Je ne fais pas normalement de la pub comme ça, mais le concert de ce samedi 12 juin (20h) à Châtel-Saint-Denis est en faveur de Terre des Hommes, donc ce serait bien que la salle soit pleine à craquer! Sans compter que ce qu’on fait chez Café-Café, c’est pas mal quand même…

Pour réserver, appelez vite le 021 948 77 54. J’espère vous croiser samedi à la sortie du concert!

Apprendre à se dire non [fr]

[en] Saying no to others (when you don't want to do something) is one thing (it requires dealing with one's fear of displeasing the other), but saying no to yourself is another (which requires learning to deal with frustration). I'm not too bad at the first one, and on the way there with the second.

Dire non, ça se divise pour moi en deux catégories:

  • savoir résister à la pression d’autrui qui désire nous faire accepter quelque chose que l’on n’a pas particulièrement envie de faire (consciemment ou non)
  • savoir résister à ses propres élans de se lancer dans des choses nouvelles, que ce soit en réponse à la demande d’autrui ou par désir d’entreprendre (ses propres projets).

Il y a une limite un peu floue entre les deux (comme quand on veut rendre service — quoique), mais grosso modo, cette distinction permet d’appréhender le problème intelligemment.

En effet, dans le premier cas de figure, ce qui nous retient est la peur de déplaire à l’autre. Dans le deuxième cas, c’est la difficulté à se frustrer.

En ce qui me concerne, je n’ai maintenant plus trop de peine à dire non quand je veux dire non (premier cas de figure). Je crois qu’un pas important sur le chemin a été de refuser de donner une réponse “à chaud”, et de dire quelque chose comme “laissez-moi regarder ça, et je vous donne réponse dans 24h” ou bien “a priori je te dépanne volontiers, mais laisse-moi te dire demain si c’est vraiment possible pour moi ou non”. Vous voyez l’idée.

Par contre, me dire non à moi, c’est beaucoup plus difficile. Je suis d’ailleurs en plein dedans, là. J’ai toujours plein d’idées de choses à faire, la vie est pleine de choses fascinantes à entreprendre, et régulièrement, j’ai les yeux plus gros que le ventre de mon agenda.

Et alors il faut faire le tri. Accepter que je dois renconcer à faire certaines choses que j’aimerais beaucoup faire, pour pouvoir faire celles auxquelles je tiens encore plus. Cela demande d’être au clair de ses priorités. Si on refuse de hiérarchiser, on finit par vouloir le beurre et l’argent du beurre (sans mentionner le désormais incontournable fils de la crémière).

Warning Signals [en]

With the years, I’m getting better and better at identifying early warning signs. Human beings (I’m no exception) have this tendancy to dig themselves into holes now and again, but not realise they’re digging them or even inside them until the waters are closing on over their heads.

For the past month I’ve been looking at my calendar with increasing dread. I’ve barely been blogging. Things haven’t been spinning out of control, though, but I’ve been tired and more stressed than I like and kind of thinking “gosh, how am I going to manage all this”. At the same time, I’ve been refusing to make some hard choices regarding the things I want to do. Dropping one or the other was not an option.

I’m talking mainly about non-work things here. And things I do for me (as I might have mentioned somewhere before, I’ve become reasonably competent at not saying yes when I want to say no to other people, so I don’t end up with commitments I’d like to wriggle out of as often as I did a few years ago).

Yesterday, I realised that I was setting myself up for a couple of inhuman weeks before the end of the year, but that I was refusing to consider that I might have to let go of something. This is the cousin of “I really need a break now but there’s no way I can manage to take one“.

Something clicked. I realised that I was wanting to do everything. That clearly there was too much on my plate, that I was not Superwoman, but that I was refusing to set priorities between all these different things I wanted to do. So, I knew what I had to do: accept that I have to sit down and decide what is most important for me, and what is less important. I did that, decided to let go of something, and though it really saddens and frustrates me not to be able to do it (in addition to the umpteen other things I’m already doing), I feel better.

The important point here is the warning signals. If I look back at the journey of these last years, one constant for me has been to learn to spot warning signals that I’m leading myself somewhere I don’t want to go, and spot them earlier and earlier. And figure out what to do when I spot them.

And I’m happy to say I’m getting pretty good at it!

What about you? How good are you at recognizing your warning signals? When you recognize them, do you know what to do to keep things from going further downhill?

Nouvelles du front [fr]

[en] Busy busy busy, but doing good!

Les jours et les semaines passent et le temps ne ralentit pas. Comme vous l’aurez deviné, c’est assez la course depuis quelque temps — mais je tiens à rassurer mes lecteurs sur le fait que je suis vigilante et que c’est moi qui gagne dans la lutte contre le stress et le submergement.

Mis à part une vie professionnelle bien remplie, je prépare actuellement mon deuxième dan de judo (pour le 19 juin si tout va bien), et côté Café-Café c’est aussi plutôt chargé question répètes, entre les trois concerts que nous donnons avant fin juin et Starmania.

Cette fin de semaine je serai à la conférence Lift à Genève (même si vous n’avez pas de billet, il y a 5 événements ouverts au public, faites un saut). Ensuite, je file au Portugal pour quelques jours de répit à Lisbonne avant la conférence SWITCH, à Coimbra.

En parallèle: préparation d’une formation longue haleine pour la rentrée (je vous en dirai plus quand je pourrai, mais c’est super excitant), diverses formations plus courtes pour divers clients, une conférence ou deux, mes mandats à La Muse (avec ses pique-niques) et pour ebookers.ch, le Bloggy Friday pas-en-mai-mais-en-juin, à l’eclau, p’tit déj et apéro, bref, je pourrais continuer, vous voyez un peu.

Je ne chôme pas.

Version courte, comme vous le dira la réponse automatique de mon e-mail: jusqu’à fin juin, je suis complètement bookée. Juillet, on peut commencer à parler. Août, c’est pas trop mal, et à la rentrée, si tout va bien, ça se chage de nouveau. Ah oui, et je vous ai dit que je comptais partir en Inde un mois en janvier-février 2011? Non? Ah, j’ai dû oublier 🙂

Something Strange [en]

[fr] Petit épisode étrange: pleine d'élan pour bloguer, je mets sur slinkset mes dernières idées d'articles, et pof! mon élan se casse la figure. Je n'ai pas tout à fait identifié ce qui s'était passé. (J'ai quand même blogué, hein.)

So, something strange happened to me a bit earlier. I went to bed yesterday with a huge drive to blog, ideas for articles, wrote them down in Evernote, got up this morning ready to blog, dealt with some domestic issues, and set to work.

Blogging drive intact.

Before I actually started writing, I decided that I would add my latest article ideas to the list on slinkset that people can add to or vote on. So I copy-pasted, went through my old post list to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything and… As soon as I had finished doing that, my blogging drive went *poof!* almost down to nothing.

Well, I didn’t bow down, picked a topic or two, and blogged happily — but still, I’m intrigued. What made my blogging drive deflate? I can think of two things:

  • taking the list from private to public
  • going through the complete list (overwhelming)

I thought I’d share this little episode with you to see if you had any insight, dear readers.

My Journey Out of Procrastination: Doing Things Now [en]

[fr] Une clé pour procrastiner moins: faire les choses à mesure. Evident, bien sûr, mais important. Pour pouvoir faire les choses à mesure, ralentir, prendre le temps. Comprendre au fond de soi et pas juste dans sa tête qu'une tâche effectuée maintenant ne sera pas à faire plus tard.

This is the fifth post in my ongoing series about procrastination. Check out the previous ones: Five Principles, Perfectionism, Starting, and Stopping, Getting Thrown Off and Getting Unstuck, and Not Running (Firewalls and iPhone alarms).

Obviously, doing things now (as opposed to later) is the remedy against procrastination. If you do things now, then you can’t procrastinate them, right?

Now that the obvious is out of the way, let’s dig a little. Doing things now is both the result of not procrastinating and part of the cure against procrastination. This means that if we understand what’s going on, and manage to make a habit of doing certain things immediately, we have a key to easing the accumulation of incoming tasks on the procrastination list.

At one point in my life (the “when” is a little fuzzy here) I really understood (deep down inside) that if I did something now, then it meant that I wouldn’t have to do it afterwards. I’m sorry for stating the obvious. Everybody knows this. But between knowing it in your head and knowing it in your gut, there is a difference. The procrastinator’s gut believes that if you don’t do it now, with a bit of luck you’ll be able to continue ignoring it safely until the end of time.

So read this again: if you do something you need to do now, you will not have to do it later.

I know that one decisive “aha!” moment in that respect was when I reached the “2-minute rule” part of GTD. Here’s what this rule is about: when you’re in the “processing” phase of GTD, going systematically through a pile of stuff and deciding what you need to do about each item — but not actually doing it, just making decisions and putting tasks in the system for later — well, there is one situation where you do what needs to be done instead of putting your next action in the system, and that’s when it takes less than 2 minutes to deal with the task. The logic behind this is that putting a task in the system and retrieving it later is going to take two minutes or so — so you’ll actually spend less time if you just do it now. Also, a 2-minute interruption in your processing is not the end of the world.

The trick here is to use a timer — if the timer goes off and you haven’t finished what you thought would be done in 2 minutes, then you stop, put the task on the right list, and continue processing.

Now, I’m not saying that this is where I got the “do it now” revelation, but it’s definitely one blow of the hammer that helped drive that particular nail in.

Another moment I remember is when clicking around on a few links on the FlyLady site brought me to Bratland. I like this metaphor of the “inner brat”, the part of you who finishes the toilet roll but doesn’t put a new one on for the next person (who, if you live alone, is going to be you). The brat who spills the milk and doesn’t clean up, so it ends up caking the kitchen counter and it takes you 5 minutes to get rid of it instead of 30 seconds. I started keeping a kind but firm parental eye open for my inner brat, and that is something that helped me not create more work for myself by letting things drag along.

One area I managed to put this in practice rather well is e-mail. If an e-mail comes in my inbox, and I answer and/or archive it straight away, it won’t be sitting there looking at me next time I go into my inbox. I know this goes against the “deal with your e-mail only twice a day” (or whatever) rules — I’ll write more about why I think my way of dealing with e-mail works, though.

But clearly, if you are the kind of people for whom tasks tend to go onto todo lists to die or weigh on your conscience for months, there is a decisive advantage to not letting them get on the list in the first place.

Related, but not exactly in the “doing things now” department: I have a trick I use when people ask me if I can do something for them (I’m usually tempted to say yes, because I want to be helpful and I want people to like me, and then I feel horrible because I let things drag along and don’t do them). I ask the person to send me an e-mail to remind me about it. This has three advantages:

  • if the person doesn’t really need me to do this for them, they won’t e-mail
  • I don’t have to answer right away
  • I have a “physical” reminder already in my system (I know that I am going to deal with stuff that reaches my inbox), that I will answer when I have the brain space to do so, and if necessary, can politely steer to “sorry, have other commitments” or “this is stuff I get paid for” or even “so sorry, I know I said yes, but actually, to be honest, I just can’t because xyz”.

One important element to be able to start doing things that need it “right away” (you do not want to be putting things like cleaning up spilled milk on your to-do list) is to slow down, run less. If you’re trying to run out the door because you’re late for an appointment, you’re not going to clean up the spilled milk. You’re not going to do the washing up right after your meal. You’re not going to put the laundry away today if you haven’t planned that you need time for that. Yes, household chores, but it’s the same thing with work-related stuff: accounting, invoicing, getting back to prospective clients. You need wiggle space in your days, and that will not happen if you’re running from morning to evening.

I had forgotten about this when I wrote my previous post in this procrastination series, but one thing that helped me break out of the vicious running cycle was heading up into the mountains with no internet for a few days, in summer 2008. Up in the mountains, with nothing to do but eat, sleep, walk, and read a bit, I slowed down. I started taking the time to do things. And I kept a taste of this when I came back to my work-life.

I’ve found that, in the spirit of incremental changes, it’s no use deciding “from now on, I’m going to do all the regular stuff I should be doing as it comes in, à mesure“. Picking an area or two where you stick to it, on the other hand, is helpful. It’s helpful because it means one area where you will be accumulating less procrastinable material, and one area where you can experience the change, the slowing down, the “less backlog”, and get a taste of what it can be like to encourage yourself to make these changes in other areas of your life too.

My Journey Out of Procrastination: Not Running (Firewalls and iPhone Alarms) [en]

[fr] Je ne cours plus. C'est un pas important: si on court tout le temps, on est toujours en train de remettre à plus tard, et ça ne nous aide pas à résoudre nos élans procrastinateurs. Une vie un peu plus calme est un bien meilleur terrain. Je me souviens de deux éléments importants qui m'ont aidée à changer ça: premièrement, délimiter strictement du temps non-professionnel, plutôt que de travailler tout le temps (un piège surtout pour les indépendants). Deuxièmement, utiliser les alarmes (multiples!) de mon iPhone pour rythmer mes journées et mes semaines (ne plus partir stressée au judo parce que je n'ai pas vu passer l'heure, mais avoir une alarme placée assez tôt pour que je puisse y aller tranquillement, par exemple).

This is the fourth post in the series. You might want to read the first three ones: Five Principles, Perfectionism, Starting, and Stopping, as well as Getting Thrown Off and Getting Unstuck.

At some point during 2009, I realized that I had stopped running. I had stopped being late, doing things in a rush, and being over my head in emergencies. As with all virtuous circles, not running was at the same time a consequence of my decrease in procrastination and one of the elements that led to it.

If I look at my life now, I see clearly that I am doing many more things immediately (they never end up on a to-do list, and therefore reduce the number of procrastinable items in my world) — and doing things immediately is only possible when you’re not already running for your life.

I’ve been thinking back and trying to understand how this change happened, and I can think of two important things that I started doing during the course of 2008:

  • strictly firewalling off “non-work” moments
  • using my iPhone alarms to structure my days.

The first, firewalling off “non-work” time, might not seem immediately linked to a decrease in running, but actually, it’s very important. To stop running, you see, you need to learn that things can wait. You need to teach yourself that even though you’re behind on the deadline, you can still stop.

Lots of people stay trapped in a life of stress and running by saying things like “I have to finish this”, “I can’t afford not to”, “I don’t have a choice”. We always have a choice. We always choose to stay up late to finish something a client is expecting, for example, rather than face the consequences of not doing it. Not much of a choice, you may say. But it’s still a choice. And being aware that you are actually making a choice, rather than just enduring a situation you are powerless over, will in fact making you feel better.

More importantly, it opens the door to revealing your priorities: I am staying up late to work on this project for the client rather than relaxing in front of the TV after an already long day of work, because it is more important for me to avoid having a pissed off client than having a healthy balance in my life. Sounds a bit guilt-inducing said like that, but the point here is: what does this choice reveal of your priorities? What is more important, the client, or you, or your health, or your relationship, for example? All the time, we make these choices, but our priorities are so hard-wired in that we don’t realize anymore that they are choices, and we end up being victims who “have to do it”.

The time I learnt to make time off work a greater priority for me was when I was organizing the Going Solo conference. It was a huge amount of work, and though I had a great support network, I was carrying the whole thing on my shoulders and doing more or less that had to be done. I was under a lot of stress. I would wake up in the morning, grab the computer from under the bed, and collapse in the evening after trying to squeeze in some food between two e-mails or Skype calls. I didn’t know what a week-end was anymore. I was exhausted.

One day, one of my advisors said to me something like “there’s only so much you can do in a day” or “at some point, you have to call it a day”. I can’t remember the exact words used, but the point was this: even if you have a ton of work to do, even if you didn’t do what you expected today, even if you’re behind… at some point, you have to stop. Turn off the computer, turn off work.

So, I stopped feeling guilty about calling it a day. I also started implementing mandatory lunch-breaks: I would leave the computer, set the kitchen timer on 45 minutes, and go about making myself food. 45 minutes was the minimum time my lunch-break was to last. Yes, at least 45 minutes.

And that’s where interesting things started to happen: I started cooking again, for one. In 45 minutes, I had time for more cooking than just grabbing a piece of bread and cheese — so I did it! I also started relaxing a bit in the middle of the day. I’d read something, or lie down. “Time out” like that is important, because if you’re using to your whole life being taken up by work, you tend to forget what living is really about.

If you’re less stressed, in a general way, you’ll be more fit to tackle your procrastination issues. You can’t tackle procrastination issues if you’re running around in circles from morning to evening. So first step: run around in circles only during “work” time, and have “non-work” time when you don’t run.

End 2008, I opened eclau, the Lausanne Coworking Space, and started working there. That was a tremendous help in the “firewalling non-work time” department. Without really trying to do so, I gradually and naturally stopped working at home, to work only in the office. I’d be able to relax better at home. I never implemented real office hours (and don’t want to), but I started going down there in the morning (it’s two floors below my flat!), coming back up for my lunch break (leaving my computer behind!), and closing house in the evening at some point when everybody else started going home.

And that’s the context in which I made my second big step: using iPhone alarms to pace my day. iPhones allow you to set loads of different alarms, repeating any way you like over the week. So I set a daily alarm at noon to encourage me to take my lunch break (otherwise, I would forget about it and end up without having eaten at 3pm — doesn’t make for a very functional Stephanie). I set an alarm in the evening at 6.30 to think about dinner, except on the days when I’d go to judo. On those days, I set a mid-afternoon alarm to remind me to have a snack, and one early enough to remind me to stop working, pack and leave. I set one to tell me when to get ready for my singing rehearsals. I even set myself a “go-to-bed” alarm at 23:30 and a “Cinderella” alarm at midnight, because I was going a bit overboard with late-night DVDs.

Of course, all these alarms worked because they were there to remind me of some important decisions I had made. I wanted to start getting ready for judo soon enough that I wouldn’t arrive late. I wanted to have lunch at regular hours and take lunch breaks. I wanted to be in bed by midnight so I would have enough sleep and still have a morning the next day. But as I know my sense of time is bad (and being in front of a computer is a killer), I used my iPhone to help me. It made my coworkers laugh that every midday, my quacking alarm would go off — but I knew it was an important crutch for me in applying my priorities to my life.

And that’s when the magic actually started to happen: I had the time to prepare my judo and singing things and set off without being in a rush. I had spare time during my lunch break — I would actually use it to do the washing-up. I even had a moment in the evening, in between 23:30 and midnight, to think about my next day and plan it a little (inspired by FlyLady). I would look up train times the evening before if I had to go somewhere rather than sometime in the morning, and then realize I was running late.

Gradually, some areas in my day and life started to slow down. It wasn’t chaos from start to finish. And slowly, that slowness started creeping into the rest of my life, including work. It doesn’t mean I do things slowly, though. But I take the time to do things. I’m not running anymore.

Souvenirs d’écolière [fr]

[en] Reminiscing about the various tricks I used as a teenager to communicate with my friends during class: secret codes, morse code, more traditional notes of course, and a sheet of paper on the table on which each wrote in turn. Long conversations which remind me of the way I communicate online today.

Je glisse doucement dans le sommeil, et mon esprit vagabonde dans le carton contenant mes vieilles photos. J’y ai passé mon dimanche après-midi, plongée dans ces instants de vie passés.

Alors que j’atteins la fin de la boîte, vers les enveloppes contenant les photos de mes années de scoutisme, l’une d’elles attire mon oeil. C’est une grande enveloppe A4, étonnamment rétrécie pour tenir dans cette petite boîte, métaphore onirique de mes souvenirs. Elle contient une magnifique collection des mes correspondances d’écolière, petits billets ou longues conversations écrites avec mes camarades de classe de l’époque.

Je me souviens. Le début des années nonante, le gymnase, et mon amie inséparable d’alors avec qui je communiquais sur une feuille posée entre nous sur le bureau. J’écrivais, elle répondait, puis moi à mon tour. On chattait. Avec des plumes et du papier.

Je me demande quelle influence cette expérience de jeunesse a pu avoir sur mon adoption très rapide et enthousiaste, une dizaine d’années plus tard, du chat sur internet, mode de communication quasi-identique, mais par claviers interposés.

Et je me souviens encore: j’ai toujours été une grande “bavardeuse”. Par écrit, bien sûr. Au collège, on rivalait d’ingéniosité pour continuer nos conversations pendant les cours, au nez et à la barbe des enseignants. Petits papiers roulés dans des stylos que l’on se passait, taquets-correspondance volant à travers les airs à force d’élastique, et le traditionnel lancer discret du petit mot sur la destinataire…

Mais nous étions allées plus loin: avec un petit groupe d’amies, nous avions mis au point un code secret alphabétique, des symboles bien compatibles avec le quadrillage de nos feuilles d’écolières, et dont nous nous servions pour assurer la confidentialité de nos correspondances en cas d’interception par les autorités professorales… ou d’autres camarades. Assez vite et sans effort, nous avions appris notre code par coeur et l’écrivions couramment.

Mieux encore? Le morse. Nous l’avions appris, le gribouillions sur nos billets (à force d’entrainement on était franchement devenues assez fortiches), et surtout, le tapotions sur nos tables discrètement: un doigt pour un point, les 4 pour un trait, les doigts repliés pour une fin de lettre, la main à plat pour une fin de mot, et un petit mouvement horizontal pour une fin de phrase, si ma mémoire ne me trompe pas. C’était redoutable, je l’avoue.

Bien plus tard, à l’université, je trompais l’ennui durant ma dernière année de chimie en réfléchissant par écrit, sur de nombreuses feuilles qui finissaient ensuite dans mon classeur-journal. J’avais des carnets dans lesquels je recopiais les passages intéressants des livres que je lisais, et un en particulier, mi-journal, mi collection de textes, ancêtre un peu plus intime de mon blog d’aujourd’hui.

Je vois dans ces expériences para-scolaires les signes précurseurs de mon activité présente de communicatrice en ligne. Et je me rends compte, à l’heure où les écoles peinent à ouvrir leurs portes à Facebook et aux modes de communication d’aujourd’hui en général, que déjà à l’époque, toute bonne élève que j’étais, une part non-triviale de ce qui m’a faite celle que je suis aujourd’hui était des activités que l’école tentait de réprimer.

Qu’on me comprenne bien: j’ai été enseignante, et loin de moi l’idée de prôner l’anarchie dans la salle de classe. J’ai aimé l’école et mes études, j’y ai beaucoup appris de choses utiles, et je sais qu’un certain cadre est indispensable pour pouvoir enseigner. Cependant, quand les présupposés de l’école concernant ce qui est important à apprendre et la façon de l’apprendre sont trop éloignés du mode de fonctionnement et des élèves, et du monde professionnel, il faut se poser des questions. Et je sais qu’il y en a certains qui se les posent (Lyonel et Mario, pour commencer).