Wish Me Luck.

Today will be a good day. Today will not be a great day.

My current operating philosophy is that most of the days of our lives are unremarkable. Quick: what were you doing 14 Tuesdays ago??? 

You have no idea at all.

And that is the point.

So what I’ve been trying to do is make sure that the ho-hum standards days are at the very least, good.

So what’s good?

Good is a day when we do more than work and more than stress and more than simply call it a success when we manage to cloth and feed ourselves. I have started getting up at 5am and OMG it is terrible, but it isn’t actually, it is just hard.

I make coffee and do one of my silly little drawings that I post each weekday on Instagram (standard_kink) and I sit down to do a little bit of writing. Even 20 minutes is 20 minutes of writing that I wouldn’t have gotten done otherwise (today, for instance, I am writing this). I’m about to go do yoga for a half an hour, then I will clean up at leave for work at 7am.

I will work hard, but I will not let it consume me. I will leave (more or less) on time at 4, I will drive back here and then I will go for a run. I have budgeted an hour and 15 minutes every day for a run. The problem I’ve been having lately is that I’m still getting used to waking up at 5am, so by running time I have been just all tuckered out like a little baby. But some days I still manage to run and today I am going to get it done. I am not a good runner (I’m actually pretty slow and bad at it), but what I lack in talent or physicality or speed, I more than make up for in … actually, I’m kidding, I don’t make up for any of that in any way. And yet, I will still go.

 

After running I will clean up and make dinner. I’m largely off of meat now, so learning how to cook new things has been a challenge, but I’m learning.

After dinner I have an hour budgeted to write. Then another hour to read. Then I am supposed to go t bed SO EARLY because that is the only way to make getting up at 5 sustainable.

What I am describing is not a spectacular day, not one for the history books, but it is a good day. To you it may sound downright miserable, and I get that, but to me any day when I can run, write, and read (RWR) all in the same 24 hours, that is a good day. Since, in the long run, I am not going to remember this day anyway, I might as well make it a day that I can feel good about. 

Who doesn’t need more of those in their life?

Right now it is 6am. Wish me luck.

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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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How to Succeed in Life!

 

Below is an easy 4-step self-help book I just wrote. Success 100% guaranteed:

1. Have rich parents.

2. Be good looking.

3. Don’t develop too bad of a drug habit.

4. Take every opportunity to publicly explain your success without mentioning Steps 1 - 3.

That’s it! Welcome to your new life! Congratulations!

Stay tuned next week for my forthcoming book, “How to Succeed in Politics!”

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Systems.

 

Recently I ran across a quote I like from a guy named James Clear from his book Atomic Habits:

“You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.”

I have not read Atomic Habits because I try to steer clear of anything that has the whiff of a self-help books, because I think it is a fairly exploitative genre, however I have head about a couple of books recently that seem to be carefully straddling a line between self-help and just — you know — topic-oriented non-fiction. Clear’s book seems to be one and Greg McKeown’s Essentialism is another.

I have heard both of these guys on podcasts and … I’m not sure. They seem like nice people, but I also suspect they may be on that Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk, Donald Trump axis somewhere … white men, amIright?

Anyway, my point is simply that I agree with Clear’s quote above. Your goals only really matter to you, it is the work you do underneath them that makes all the difference. This is why I write here all the time about the schedules and diets I am trying to refine. However I also thought about it the other day when I was walking through Target and half the lights were out because California is trying to avoid rolling blackouts. It is also what I thought about when I talked to a friend up in Portland who is backing in 112 degree heat with no AC, just sitting in front of his fan and trying not to move for days at a time. 

We are a nation of people and those people all have a lot of goals, but we do not seem to be a nation of effective systems, which begs the question of the level we will fall to.

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The Butterfly Part.

 

Let us recap: Previously on this blog …

Since about February I have been trying to figure out how to construct a life. I’ve been trying things out. I’ve been looking for ways to protect my personal life and time from my job which is constantly trying to expand beyond its box. I’ve been testing out better sleep schedules. I’ve been testing out different diets, different foods, different ways to spend an evening. 

Because I moved here shortly before Quarantine dropped on all of us, I didn’t really much of a life to speak of when we went into lock down and I have realized — much to my horror — that as life begins to start up again, it means that I have to begin anew the work of building a life for myself. 

I’ve done this sort of work before, but usually it was because I was in grad school a couple of times and, say what you will about grad school, it comes with a built in cohort of people. This life doesn’t, not exactly. I’m blessed with a handful of great coworkers who are fun people to grab dinner and a drink with occasionally, but because they’re my coworkers I can’t just call them up and be like, “I’m lonely!”

I have a couple of friends in the Bay Area, but more than a hour away, so that limits our interactions.

So in the weird period where the world is open, but not fully up to speed yet, I’m concentrating on myself and what I can do to build up a life that I like, so that when I eventually have to go meet people and try to make friends and — god forbid — try to date, I will at least be a person who has his shit together and has something to offer.

With all of that in mind, I’ve been doing the basics: getting enough sleep, drinking enough water (never once paid any attention to this before like a month ago), I am more consistently doing yoga in the mornings, I’ve been scouting out new running trails, I’ve been trying to both clean up my diet and remove most meat from it (two things I have needed to do for awhile), I’m also going to cut back on the booze and try to dry out for a month or two. Red wine got me through Quarantine, and I will always appreciate that, but Quarantine has ended here in California and now I can’t justify the extra 600-800 calories in a bottle of Malbec. I’ll still grab drinks with people out in the world, but both meat and booze I’m just not going to bring into the apartment anymore (with the possible exception of tune, I’ve been eating a lot of tuna and rice lately).

I also purchased a scale recently because I was convinced I’d put on 20 pounds during the big Q. The reality is that I weigh about what I did when I moved here. I know I have lost muscle mass and put on flab, but my weight has about netted out, so that’s something. I figure that just by losing the wine, the pizza, and the potato chips I’m off to a good start. Add to that a cleaner diet that involves actually eating the fruit I buy, and now we are off to the races. On a day when my job does not eat my life, I can get in about half an hour of yoga in the mornings and I have scheduled time to run for about an hour in the early evening. In the latest interaction of my daily schedule I have built in time specific to writing, which I hadn’t really done before. If you add up all of these small changes I’ve been working on, you start to see how full on habits could emerge. That is the idea. I always get ambushed by life and work, so each time I try to make improvements, only a few end up sticking, but that’s why I keep trying; some of them do stick, it just takes time and effort.

Such is life.

One thing I have learned from earlier attempts is that if I can actually have one of these good days (yoga, clean food, a reasonable work day, running, writing, reading) I actually sleep better (I toss and turn a lot lately) and when I sleep better, I wake up feeling better, which makes it easier to have a good day, and a good day means I sleep better, which means it is easier to have another good day, and on and on and on … but that cycle is somewhat difficult to get into to, but I’m trying to get back into it.

When I feel bad about my failures in these efforts, I find some grace in reminding myself that everyone in the world has endured a terrible trauma over the last year and a half (and in some places that trauma still endures) and so we can’t really judge this new life we’re entering into the same way we might have judged our previous lives. In some ways the fact that I have to build a new life from scratch here in this place is actually kind of thematically fitting. I did the chrysalis of Quarantine here, I just need to now figure out how to do the butterfly part.

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Inconsistent Failures.

 A friend of mine joked once that the third post on every blog says, “Sorry I haven’t posted in awhile.”

That’s a funny joke, but it also speaks to something very true about our human tendency to let our ambition outrun our execution and I have got to tell you, I am feeling that lately. Back in February I started thinking about ‘redesigning” my life so that more of it would belong to me and less of it would belong to my job. I gave it a shot in March and had a good month. Then in April work completely consumed my life again. In May I have fine tuned the re-design and I was all clear to leap into it, but then I kind of just … didn’t?

I’ve made some changes that have stuck. I’ve been getting up earlier so I have more morning time, but I haven’t been consistent enough with it. Every morning I post a silly drawing on my Instagram (@standard_kink) and MOST mornings I write a blog post like this one. I’ve also standardized my bedtime and I’ve been able to stick with that. My diet is better now than it was a few months ago, I’ve even been eating fruit and vegetables consistently! 

So those parts of the re-design are functioning, but the other big parts aren’t. I’m not writing more, I’m not reading more, I’m only running and doing yoga sporadically. These are the things that the re-design was supposed to be in service of. A lot of the minimalism stuff I read/listen to tells you that what you actually do is what you actual value and if there is a misalignment between what you value and what you actually do, that is a point that you need to deliberately address. So obviously these are the things I need to address. I have built out a daily schedule that (generally) has enough runway in it that I COULD and in fact SHOULD be able to run and read and write all in addition to what I am already doing.

Admittedly it is hard to work a stressful 8 hours and then say, “Well, I need to go out running now even though I’m totally drained and it’s cold and gray outside.” I know that I have it in me to do that because I have done that sort of thing before. I just need to find a way to do it again.

I know that I am lucky to have such small problems in my life, but that doesn’t make them not problems. As I grow older, I really do feel the hallway of the rest of my life narrowing. I feel like I’m approaching a lot of last chances. If the person I want to be is someone who writes and runs and reads everyday, I feel like I’m running out of days to become that person. 

But the one great thing about the relentless forward movement of time is that every morning we get a whole new day. Let’s see what I can do with this one.

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Day 1 (For Real).

Okay, today is the day I am getting things back on track.

I have refined my daily schedule a little more. There is no junk food in my apartment. There is no wine in my apartment. I have pretty clean food to eat this week. I have vitamins and supplements on the way. I have engineered what should be a relatively low impact work week. My running gear is all set out and ready to go for this afternoon. There are books to read set out in my living room. More than all that, I have tentative plans to travel with vaccinated friends to a beautiful lake house in June, which means that I have a whole month to clean up my life and maybe even lose a little of this quarantine weight before I spend time around people again, so that maybe I don’t have to feel so terrible about my body.

So I have a plan and a goal and a timeline. 

Does it get better than that?

I even moved my dusty sit-up bench into my home office where I work all day so that I have to LOOK AT IT all day long. I know how I am and I can make myself do sit-ups if the thing is right there all the time. 

What I have learned over the last few months (having several bad moths and one good one) is that I do genuinely feel better when I living cleaner. I love me some potato chips, I love me some red wine, but I also love being someone who can go trail run a 10k without any real preparation. I like being someone who doesn’t pull their pants up over their little belly bump while they are sitting at the computer. I like being someone who can carry groceries up the stairs without feeling a little winded. I think that I would like being someone who is comfortable talking his shirt off around other people (a type of person I have never been even once).

I’m in my 40s now and this is when the decisions you make really make a difference. I was really fat in my early 20s and I managed to work off that weight. In my 30s I learned that I like to run and backpack and be outside and I learned how to eat better and pay attention to food and that combination of things helped me stay at least a little lean. Now though, I work an office job, I have weathered the anxiety and depression and loneliness of the last year, and I can feel all of that made physical in the way my body looks and feels and so I can’t just keep doing what I did in my 30s, this body won’t let me coast on that anymore, so I have to become actually serious about this stuff. So let’s consider everything so far this year as test runs; the good months and the bad ones, they helped me to figure out what I need to be doing.

Now is the time to actually do it all.

I need to use both hands to keep my work life inside its box and I need to keep myself motivated enough to stick with the clean living long enough that it becomes habit. That will probably take a few weeks to get rolling.

You want to hear something silly? I have even printed up little signs and posted them around my apartment. They are not motivational, so much as they are reminders that I have plans, goals, and a timeline.

Does it get better than that?

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To Breakfast Margaritas.

 

So it has been a few days. I told you I was going to have a rough week and let me tell you, a rough week was had.

But I have (so far) survived and now it is Friday and my day should be fairly unexceptional today and that is all I am hoping for.

I should be able to start transitioning back to my normal/better schedule; doing things like this in the morning, working only a 8-hour day, then running and cooking real food in the evening. I’ll need to spend some time really re-tying to devise a way to insulate my life from the invasion of my work life into my personal life. It simply is not acceptable that this keeps happening. I took the job I have for several reasons, but one was specifically because I thought it would fit into a 40 hour week and that has not turned out to be the case. So I may have to reassess some things.

That being said, I don’t mean to sound like I’m bitching. I recognize that I still have it much easier than lots of people out there in the world, but I also am acknowledging that I have some responsibilities to myself here too. No one wakes up in the morning and says, “I’d like to live a life with a baseline somewhere around or slightly above the median quality.” No one is ever going to put that on a t-shirt, nor should they.

How though, do we determine what we do want?

I suppose the answer to that is probably quite easy: we want what we want. You know what you want because it is simply the thing that you want.

That isn’t an entirely satisfying answer though. I mean, it is 7:22 in the morning and what I actually WANT is to be sitting at the roulette table at the El Cortez in Downtown Las Vegas, drinking a breakfast margarita and flirting with the working girls, but I recognize that is not the basis for a good and fulfilling life. So sometimes you can’t really trust what you want. Or at least you can’t trust what that will get you.

Look, I know that in this little blog post this morning I’m not going to come up with a workable framework for determining what constitutes a life worth living, but I suspect this is an iterative process and that the repetition is what makes the progress happen.

So I’ll see you tomorrow.

(Probably not though because tomorrow is Saturday and I don’t usually blog on Saturday, so I will see you Monday. Unless I do somehow end up at the El Cortez by then.)

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April 5th, 2019.

 

Every morning I make a silly little drawing and post it to my Instagram. I’m terrible at it (Can’t draw), but I like doing it. After I post them, I write the date in the bottom corner of the drawing in my sketchbook and today for some reason I wrote: 4-5-2019, which is not the correct date.

I have no idea why my brain did that.

4-5-2019 is of no particular significance (I don’t think), so I guess my internal clock is just a little off today.

But it did get me to thinking: Holy shit, it is 2021!

How the hell did that happen???

Just a minute ago it was 2016 and I’d just moved to Portland. And then the Former Guy got elected that November and we all fell into some sort of Darkest Timeline wormhole and then Covid hit and then a year somehow simultaneously disappeared while also aging all of us ten years.

And now it is 2021. 

We live in the future, I guess???

When I was growing up, I  used to read science fiction that was set in like 2015. They had lasers and stuff. We don’t even have jet packs.

I guess what I’m getting at here is that time is kind of merciless in it’s brutal and inevitable march forward. In a way, I guess that’s good. It means that 2020 is in our rear-view now. It means that a summer of vaccinations and hugs is on the horizon.

But it also means we completely lost an entire year. You know, I moved here to Monterey in October of 2019 and I’d only been here about 5 months when quarantine came down. It usually takes me about six months to settle into a new place, and I never really got to do that here. As Vaccine Summer approaches, I’ve started feeling this odd anxiety about life getting “back to normal” because in this case “back to normal” is going to mean “having only lived here 5 months” and so I will still have to do all the work of building a new life. So the relief of surviving Covid is going to immediately turn into the existential dread of having to build yet another new life from scratch. There is a part of my that likes that I’ve gotten to move around a lot, but the part of me that keeps getting older has come to the realization that every time I move, my life seems to get a little smaller and my circle of people is reduced. I really am worried that one day I’m going to look around and realize I don’t even have anyone to get a beer with. There is a part of me that is a little worried that when it is time to start doing hugs again, I simply won’t have anyone to hug.

This is not the future I used to read about and it certainly isn’t the one I imagined for myself. Though I guess I have to admit, at least we have reached the point in the pandemic where it is even reasonable to begin to really think about having a future that’s bigger than just our dumb little quarantine lives. That counts for something.

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