The Kind of Week It Has Been.

Okay, so mixed results.

I had really good days Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Every day I worked and my work days were reasonable. Every day I went running, every day I did some writing, every day I read, every day I did yoga, every day I did some resistance training, every day I ate healthy and clean. Good days.

Yesterday, Thursday, I was worn the hell out. Tired all day. Sore. If I tried to do anything with my right arm that approximated a biceps curl, my arm simply refused to comply. Walking was not great on account of the tightness in my hips and calves; I logged almost 20 miles of trail running in three days and my body retaliated with quiet refusal.

That’s all okay. I too a recovery day yesterday. All I did was yoga and clean eating. After work I basically took a nap for like an hour and that’s okay.

Life is mostly about boom & bust cycles. Plus, this is a pattern in my life: I overdo it, which prevents me from doing it well. However, lately more and more I find solace in the political concept of the Overton Window. The real goal here is not to make stunning change all at once, but rather to drag the narrow window of the possible in the proper direction.

This is what it has always been like with my weight. It tends to fluctuate within a window of about 6 pounds. That has always seemed like a lot to me, but I have lived in this body long enough to simply know that is what this body does. So my goal is never to lose weight exactly, my goal is to drag that window of six pounds lower down the scale. Yesterday (while not running) I looked back through my journals from 2019 when I was living in Arizona, when I had time to run and go to the gym every single day. I consider this to be a time when I was in pretty good shape (or at least healthy) and my weight then was experiencing a heavier window than it is now. Granted I had somewhat more muscle then. I also went back through some very old pictures of me when I was in my early 20s and VERY heavy. I didn’t even recognize that guy. And I had to remind myself that I didn’t even start running until I was 30. 

There are times when I have to remind myself that all of life is a kind of Overton Window. Beyond the edges of the window is a person we don’t even know. My window no longer includes that short 250 pound guy with a mustache (what was I even thinking????).

I have made progress. Not just this week, not just this month, but since February when I decided I needed to develop a plan, that I needed to build a staircase I could start climbing up. I haven’t stopped climbing it, but yesterday I paused to take a breath. And that’s okay. 

Today I will start climbing again.

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What Do People Do With Weekends?

Back in February I started this project of re-designing my daily life. I’ve written about it here extensively. Well, it has taken these last five months to really dial it in and test out what works, but this week I have really been doing it! Which is not to say I haven’t been doing it a little at a time. I’ve been climbing a mountain, so to speak, figuring out how to do it as I do it. This week has been good. The last three days I have managed to not only work, but also fit in running everyday, writing every day, reading every day, while also eating healthy, and keeping up with my journal. If our lives have to be filled with mostly boring days, I have finally been making the best out of them.

But now, on Thursday, looking ahead to the weekend, I realize, I don’t have a PLAN for that. Oh no!

The Quarantine made me realize that, left to my own devices, all I will end up doing is laying on the couch eating potato chips, drinking red wine, and listening to podcasts. Let me tell you, that is not the worst way to spend your time during a quarantine. But I’m kind of tired of it. I want to actually be doing things, I want to work off all that Quarantine weight, I want to be truly lean for once in my life, I want to be creating things even though I feel like I have been in a creative slump since that Quarantine started. Hence the conversation I had with myself back in February. The conversation went like this:

ME: You know what? This can not be my life. I don’t like it anymore.

ALSO ME: It’s fine.

ME: Is it though?

ALSO ME: Probably?

ME: I should run more.

ALSO ME: You don’t have the time.

ME: I’ll make the time. Here, look at this spreadsheet I made.

ALSO ME: Did you chart the activities of your average day, hour by hour?

ME: I also put some graphs in the appendix.

ALSO ME: Oh my god, you’re a nerd.

ME: I think I should probably start eating better too.

ALSO ME: I guess that wouldn’t hurt.

ME: Probably I’m also going to cut my meat consumption down to pretty much zero.

ALSO ME: Come again now?

ME: Not full on vegetarian. I’ll still eat meat if I go out or something. I just won’t bring it into the house anymore.

ALSO ME: Probably I can live with that …

ME: I may start doing that with wine too.

ALSO ME: I’m sorry, I didn’t process that …

ME: Look, we all love wine, but it’s not a hobby, you know?. I need better hobbies.

ALSO ME: Like what?

ME: I was thinking yoga?

ALSO ME: Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

ME: No, really.

ALSO ME: Oh god, you’re serious.

ME: I am.

ALSO ME: I don’t think you have the discipline for that.

ME: Do you want to bet?

ALSO ME: Not really, I’m not that interested.

ME: Well you just watch all the discipline I’m going to bring … Can I have my graphs back?

And scene!

I’ve focused so much on making my weekday/workdays better, that I have not figured out any plans for the weekends. Yes, I can do all the things I do during the week, but I need to create some activities that are ust weekend things, things I can find special enjoyment in. Maybe classes of group activities like hiking, things that will get me out of the house, out of my routine, and maybe provide the opportunities to meet new people. I am making a list of things like those and doing some research. Do you know anything about surfing classes???

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How to Prepare to Be a Beginner.

 

Lately I have been pretty consistent about doing yoga in the mornings. Nothing crazy. I am not good enough at it yet to do anything crazy. I also don’t have any special knowledge about it. My qualifications start and end with the fact I own a yoga mat. 

I found a woman on Youtube who has a series of “easy” and “beginner” videos and I have been working my way through those in the mornings. They range between 15 and 30 minutes and she doesn’t come across as judge-y, which is weirdly common, I have discovered.

Now I’m not here to convince you to do yoga, but I do kind of wish that someone had convinced me to do yoga a long time ago. Here’s why:

• It is waaaaaaaay harder than you think it is. I used to be all like, “That just looks like bending”, but OMG, it engages muscles in a way I hadn’t previously understood. It’s like the first time I ever did a plank and ended up shouting, “Why is this so hard!”

• I’m not going to get all woo-woo on you, but I think it is possible that I’ve been calmer this week than I was a month or two ago. And that’s good because my work life has been … a lot this week, but I have felt it less. This might be a correlation, not causation thing, but I have started to just sort of feel better. And that’s good.

• It seems like my cat is getting a cold. I don’t think that is related to the yoga, though if there is some zen spirit energy swirling around my apartment now, who knows how that manifests?

• I’m sleeping marginally better this week. I’ve always had trouble sleeping, but I think I’m getting a little better at it.

• This isn’t initially going to sound like a good thing, but I go through my days with a little bit of that physically exerted feeling in my body. They way you feel when you’ve been going to the gym consistently. It isn’t a pleasant feeling exactly; some soreness in the arms and legs. It is a good feeling though. I imagine this is my muscles busy throughout the day trying to adjust to this new normal.

• I’ve also been using the elastic band thing and foam roller I had to get for physical therapy, except I figured out I can use them to do some light working out during the day. Again, nothing crazy, but sometime sit is nice to take a break from work and go do some reps on my stretchy band that hooks into the closet door. Do you even stretchy band, bro?

• None of these little things seem life changing. I’m not going to give up running or anything; it’s good to sweat and to run your body into the ground sometimes, but this may be the first time in my adult life that I have realized that not everything has to be that. I think that my brain thinks that nothing counts if you don’t end up a painful sweaty mess. Probably this is the fault of high school gym or being raised as a man in America. Not everything has to be dialed up to 11. Maybe slow and steady and consistent is good. As much as I love running, I’m not going to lie, most of the times I do not go out for a run it is because I just don’t have the juice for it. And who could blame me? When I DO go run, I do like 6 or 8 or 10 MILES! And some days I don’t have that in me. Most days I could go do a mile, but what fun is that?? The first mile is the worst part! But maybe it is good to do things that do not require ALL OF THE ENERGY in your body. Doing some light yoga in the morning isn’t going to change my life, but over time, might change my life, you know what I’m saying?

• If I do this yoga thing long enough, I might one day be comfortable enough to go to a beginners yoga class and then I’ll end up being all about green smoothies or something. So stay tuned for that!

• I really like doing the “Namaste” thing at the end of yoga. I don’t know why. It just seems gracious and we could all use a little more of that.

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Back on Track, Baby!

 

Just a short post today because I am running behind schedule this morning.

I feel like I have been running behind schedule since I got back from my Washington trip about two weeks ago. I’ve expended lots of emotional and mental energy over the last several months trying to make adjustments to this life of mine, with varying degrees of success. Going out of town — while fantastic — screwed up my progress and last weeks I lived more like I had been living for most of Quarantine, which is to say I let my sleep schedule get away from me and my diet somehow decayed back to wine and pizza. That seems to be my default setting, which is no good.

So here I am today, trying to get back to the business of living better, healthier, and non-Quarantine-y.

So while I slept later than I was supposed to today, I have still managed to wedge in the time to sit down here and write out this little post. So now at least I have this little marker for when I started to get back on track. 

Today I have a full day of work, followed by what is supposed to be a run this afternoon, followed by a reasonably healthy dinner this evening. Back on track, baby!

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Be Best.

Yesterday when I posted I was feeling pretty down about my own lack of follow through when it came to building a more effective and productive life. I should mention that I am not one of those self-help-book-reading people who wants to maximize their output and vibrate into some sort of astral projected new plane of productivity. In fact, I tend not to like those people. All I’m looking to do here is be better. Be best.

The work of a life is never done until — you know — one day it suddenly is, and with great finality. Until then though, I think it is important that we should make efforts to build lives that we can both enjoy and be proud of.  That is a weirdly tall order. Both ENJOY and be PROUD of. We live in a society that requires us to have these jobs that consume so much of us, that exhaust us so, that most of us, all we have the bandwidth to do after them is eat crappy food and watch TV. If you’re lucky maybe you find love (or a close enough facsimile). Maybe you have kids and in them can find both joy and pride. So much of ourselves though we are forced to abandon along the side of the road of life. Some people make it work, I guess, squeeze their passions into “side hustles” or something like that. Or convince themselves that what brings them joy are actually childish things that must be put away.

None of this seems great.

It is almost as though we live in a system that prizes capital over people …

Zoom out from our own lives to everyone’s lives. What would a world look like if it wasn’t organized this way? What would a world look like if it was organized around people and not profit? I’m not trying to be a dorm room Marxist here. This is something I think about a lot. 

It probably would be a world with fewer cars and televisions, but a shitload more public access television shows. But who builds the cameras and the who strings the cables that move around the electricity to power those cameras? Who works at the power plant that makes the electricity? I’m sure there are probably people out there whose passion is running a nuclear reactor, but probably not enough of them to make this all work.

There is a fallacy that we have to choose between an electricity-less, pre-modern world or the one that we have now. As if those are the only two options. Discussions like this usually degenerate into those kind of blunt abstractions. 

Often I like to think on a world like ours, but better. We can keep our electricity, but it is solar and wind now. And yes, someone still has to run the power lines, but it is a hard job, so maybe they don’t have to work as much. Maybe we can just all agree to 20 hour work weeks instead of 40 hour work weeks. Or, as is the reality for so many people, 50, 60, 70 hour work weeks. I believe it really is possible to construct a way of life that cares about people and so reduces the size of our capital-focused activities. I believe we really can create a mode of socially organized life where working for a wage is only one of many parts of our lives. That society would have to be structured a little differently than ours and it would likely result in a world that physically looks a little different than ours (higher density housing, fewer cars, more communal spaces, community gardens, etc.). It would be a world where you can’t necessarily get a banana 12 months out of the year, but it would also be a world where Jeff Bezos doesn’t buy a second yacht to follow around his first yacht because the first yacht doesn’t have a place to land his helicopter. 

I’ve been thinking lately about the phrase, “From each based on ability, to each based on need” and even now, all these years after I first read it, I still think it is one of the most beautiful ideas I have ever heard of. I think we can nudge our lives closer to that idea. 

It would have to start with nudging one another. It would have to start by spreading the word a little, which is what I am doing here (to all of my non-existent readers).

This post was not supposed to unspool into my own take on post-late-capitalist utopianism. All I had planned to do was tell you that after feeling down about my life yesterday morning, I worked on getting my shit together a little. I worked hard at work. I ate clean all day. After work I went running even though it was cold (I ran a 10k and my time was TERRIBLE!) and then I made a simple dinner and then I read a book for a while and then I went to bed on time. Yesterday was one of my (treasured, but hard to pull off) RWR days, where I ran, wrote, and read all in one day.

I worked at making my own life a little better yesterday and I will try to do the same thing today. Living a good day is like adding a dash of hope to the next day. So this morning I have a little more hope than I did yesterday morning. Maybe that’s why I’m thinking on a world that is better. 

I hope your day is better today and I hope it makes your life a little better.

Be better.

Be best.

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The Wonderful Return of Being Boring.

Today is Monday. So get this: I just had the closest thing to a normal weekend that I’ve experienced in the last 14 months!

There was nothing amazing about it. In fact it was pretty mundane. I went to see a coworker’s kid perform in a little play at an outdoor theater. I went to BOTH Target and Walmart. I planted some new seeds in my window sill garden. Yesterday I made a frittata and as I was getting started I realized I was out of cheese, so I just hopped in the car and drove to the store and bought some cheese, without even feeling any trepidation about it! No Greco-Roman mental wrestling about the ethical implications of making an unplanned grocery store trip. I even went to a thrift store on Saturday! 

Now I am not saying life is back to normal. It will be a long long long time before we get back to whatever “normal” was, and we probably won’t ever get there anyway.

But what I am saying is that this past weekend was the closest thing to life I have experienced since the quarantine began. And that is a good thing.

I should say here: I’m fully vaccinated as of about a month ago. And YOU should go get vaccinated too. Everybody should. If you’re not inclined to protect yourself, then do it because it protects the people around you. This is not complicated.

After the so so so many months of quarantine, it was so very nice to be able to return to even the most mundane aspects of living in a society. I walked around Target slowly and just looked at all the stuff and I even touched some of the clothes! Can you even believe that? What joy it is to be alive.

It gets even more exciting! I have PLANS! With other people! PLANS TO SPEND TIME WITH HUMANS! Later this week I am going to go with a small group of fully vaccinated people to get drinks! DRINKS, I SAY! I have not had proper drinks in more than a year. I think sometimes about whiskey and I wonder, “How is whisky doing? How has whiskey been without me all this time? Will whiskey remember me???”

And even more exciting! Next month I am taking a trip! Yes, A TRIP! I have requested vacation days and everything!

I’m slowly trying to get my head in gear for that. We have all — well most of us anyway — internalized the Covid caution over the past year and I think that for some of us it will take a little bit of time to be able to deprogram ourselves out of that. I think that the fact we still have to do mask wearing is actually a good thing. The masks function kind of like training wheels for us as we begin to take those tentative steps back into the world. When I walked around Wal-Mart this weekend, I could often hear the sirens going off in my brain telling me that I shouldn’t be inside, that there were too many people in the store, that my trip wasn’t essential.  Then I’d have to calmly remind myself that it was okay, that I was vaccinated, that I wasn’t going to hurt anybody with my germs, that it was okay to do something non-essential. It will take some time for those sirens to quiet, they’re on a hair trigger after the last 14 months, but with time, they will fade.

While it is true the pandemic is not over and while it is true that the pandemic may never entirely end, it is also true that we are probably through the worst of it now. We are entering a new phase of this whole thing and by all accounts, this phase is so much better.

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Am I in a bad mood? It sounds like I am in a bad mood.

 

On Monday I got my second shot of Moderna and it really knocked me back a step yesterday. It felt like a hangover or the first day of getting the flu. I would have called in sick to work, but I really couldn’t because there is so much going on right now. I’m not going to go into detail about that here, but suffice to say that the new life routine I built for myself (and which i have written about here before) has all but collapsed. 

The problem now is the same as the problem that prompted me to build a new routine in the first place, mainly that my work life is aggressively trying to eat the rest of my life and simply will not stay within the boundaries we agreed upon. 

That being said, I am still doing okay in the mornings. I still manage to do my silly little daily drawings (posted on IG @standard_kink) and I have still mostly managed to keep writing a few hundred words here each morning. So even though it has been two steps forward and one step back lately, at least I can still be proud of that one net step forward.

The demands of my work will lessen somewhat over the next couple weeks and I will try to put it back into its box and maybe try (again) to talk to some people about how to keep it there. At that point I can focus more on the things I have been failing at: I haven’t been for a run so far the entire month of April and I have not been able to spend any time in the evenings writing because during the time I have allocated for that I am still working. Yesterday I worked an 11 hour day and that was less than the day before.

The part that I did not take into account when I set about designing a daily routine, was how little control I have over the demands that are placed on me. And that’s life, right? I am single and have no children. And yet I feel like the world is just pushing back against me constantly. What is it like if you are carrying around all the things I have chosen not to carry: a family, a mortgage, a too-expensive car payment? One has to wonder why we built a world that seeks to crush us. Nothing about the world or society or country or culture that we find ourselves living inside of is in any way naturally occurring or preordained. We made it this way; from our cars that go WAY too fast and run on fossil fuel, to our houses that are WAY too big and terrible for the health of the planet, to our political system that doesn’t seem to work anymore, to our economy that seems constantly on the brink of collapse while only serving to make rich people richer … and on and on and on … we made things this way. One has to wonder why.

Obviously there are answers to all this, but I don’t have the time to get to them right now because I have to go take a shower and get ready for work. Which is, I guess, an illustrative example of the problem.

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Failure and/or Success.

So I was only partially successful yesterday, but it’s not my fault!

Yesterday was Day One of this sort of new daily life routine I’ve been planning out for a little while now.

Here are the ways in which I failed and/or succeeded:

FAIL: I’d planned to wake up at 6am and go for a short run. I did not. It was 37 degrees yesterday at 6am and I do not have any cold weather running gear.

SUCCESS: I did still get up at 6am though. I used to get up at 6am all the time, but it has been getting harder and harder as quarantine has stretched on, so simply being conscious at an appointed time was nothing to sneeze at.

FAIL: After work, I did manage to go for a run, but after the run and after dinner, I have about 2 hours on the schedule that I am supposed to focus on fancy pants smart things like writing and reading, which huge parts of my life, but which have fallen away during quarantine. Well I did not do any fancy pants smart things because my right shoulder was KILLING ME. I frequently have shoulder problems (I think because I sleep on my side, but my ad hoc quarantine desk set up doesn’t help), so I spent my fancy pants smart guy time last night lying flat on the floor with a heating pad and when that didn’t work, I switched to a bag of frozen peas on my shoulder and that seemed to help for awhile.

SUCCESS: Not to bury the lede, but I DID manage to go run. Not a great run, but it was chilly and overcast after work and it was the kind of day when I normally would have just said, “Eh, it looks gross outside, I’ll go running tomorrow.” BUT I DID NOT DO THAT! I went anyway. I try to at least do a 5K whenever I go out and yesterday I did about 3.6 miles in 47 minutes, which is a TERRIBLE time for a 5K, but did I mention that I’m a trail runner??? So I go running where other people go hiking. I go running up the trails and through the woods where other people go mountain biking. I go running in places where other people hike out with their cameras to get pictures of all the nature. It helps that I live across the street from an open space preserve the size of the city of San Francisco.

FAILURE: I’m supposed to go to bed now at 10pm on the dot (because I have lost of trouble sleeping and so making myself get in bed always feels like admitting my day was a failure (Am I the only one who experiences this feeling?), but I didn’t go to bed until about 10:30 because while I was prostrate on the floor, I found the movie Motherless Brooklyn on TV and OGM! do I have a lot to say about that thing, but I will save it for another time. 

SUCCESS: Okay, just ONE thing about the Motherless Brooklyn movie … I successfully predicted the plot of the movies simply from watching the trailer once a year ago. I didn’t even feel like I’d figured anything out last night, because I figured out the movie a year ago, but still, being SO RIGHT is a kind of success of its own.

Last night I tracked down a Youtube morning yoga video and I replaced the morning run with the video and OMG! It kicked my ass, so maybe I will swap out the morning run with the morning yoga. Interestingly, it did not seem to aggravate my shoulder as I did it this morning. Perhaps that kind of stretching and such is actually what I should be doing to prevent myself from hurting myself while I sleep? This getting old stuff is some bullshit, BTW. Aging is not for the faint of heart.

I recognize how silly it is to be on Day Two of anything, but I do feel better than I have in quite awhile. It has taken a year, but I might finally be figuring out how to get this quarantine life to suck a little less.

Okay. That’s it for now. More tomorrow.

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