Instead of Blogging.

Things that I have done recently instead of writing blogs for you to read:

- Worn a lady’s denim jacket (it fit surprisingly well)

- Gone on a small town Downtown beer-tasting beer-crawl.

- Worked on the design of my personal shipping container home (I’m making progress!)

- Reading Mary Roach’s “Packing for Mars”

- Secretly – and in the middle of the night and in the dark and in my bed with the sheet pulled over my head – started doing research on what exactly it would take to hike the Trans-Catalina Trail

- Working

- Fantasizing about quitting my job

- Fantasizing about quitting my job

- Very carefully planning and budgeting for how to live in a world where I have quit my job

- Watching a lot of Hulu

- Attending an unsanctioned class reunion

- Carefully tracking how incredibly fucking boring my life is in my “lifestayle journal”/”Unicorn Dream Diary”

- Learning how to work an iPhone (it is much harder than you would think!)

- Hiking the Hollywood Sign

- Trying to write (but actually just spending depressingly long periods of time sitting in front of my laptop without writing anything)

- Crying in the shower in the mornings

- Sleeping in a sleeping bag on my bed rather than sleeping in the bed itself (Later, when someone asks, this would be a pretty good example to point to in regard to when exactly my behavior started becoming “erratic”.)

- Trying to be ruthlessly frank and honest with myself – and really doing some serious soul-searching, including but not limited to self-doubt and not a small amount of self-loathing – about whether or not I really can get my base pack weight down to less than ten pounds and twenty liters.

- Trying to figure out how Twitter works (it is much harder than you would think!)

- Thinking about blogging*

- Cleaning up cat shit

*While none of these things are necessarily superior to blogging, some of them verge on the having of an actual life, which in and of itself may be superior to blogging. Conversely though, the having of an actual life might very well give me better stuff to blog about. I mean, how fucking fascinated would you be right now if I were a writer/hobo? What strange and bizarre and probably better blog would that be?!

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On Work.

If you have not yet read Mary Roach or any of her books, well then you are unforgivably behind the curve and you shouldn’t even bother because you will never be as cool as those of us who have. That being said, she is a talented writer and her books are the funny/smart/accessible realm, falling somewhere on that spectrum in between Malcolm Gladwell and John Hodgeman.

There are many many snippets of her writing worth being repeated here, but below is a passage in “Packing for Mars” that I quite liked. She is writing here about a conversation she had with a cosmonaut psychologist about a Soviet space mission that had to be cut short because one of the cosmonauts (Zholobov) had some sort of nervous breakdown:

My notes say things like, “self-organization of dynamic structures of interpersonal relationships in human society.” But what he had to say about Volynov and Zholobov was clear and simple. “They were exhausted by overwork. The human organism is built for tension and relaxation, work and sleep. The principle of life is rhythm. Who out of us can work nonstop for seventy-two hours? They made them sick people.”

This passage made me think of the famous quip by the British humorist Jerome K. Jerome: I love work; it fascinated me; I can sit and watch it for hours.

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