Growing a Flower Took a Long Time.

Yesterday I did something we could all do a little more of and I went through and purged my closet. I spend so much time thinking about the things in my life that sometimes I fear that I have gotten this minimalism thing backwards. The whole idea is to spend LESS time and effort worried about your things. I have come to realize that for me part of this years’ long project is about doing it well and that it takes time. Am I a little more obsessive about it than I need to be, well sure, but what fun would it be to not.

I probably cleared out about a third of my closet yesterday. I folded everything up nicely and put it all into the top of my coat closet. I’ll let those things sit there for awhile just in case it turns out that I do need them.

Many of those things were items of a work wardrobe I have not worn in the 16 months since the Quarantine started. I tried everything on and looked in the mirror and I realized how much I disliked much of those clothes. There isn’t a deeper meaning here, I just didn’t like the way they fit or how they made me look. I’m a short guy and it can be hard for me to find clothes that fit well, especially work shirts and polos, etc. When I moved here at the end of 2019 I had to assemble a work wardrobe quickly and so I took what I could get. Next month, I am supposed to start going into work about 80% of the time, so by next month I will need to have a rebuilt work wardrobe. So I have a new little project: I need work clothes. 

When possible, I like to be deliberative and so now I get to be deliberative about this. I get to ask questions about how I want to look and to some degree, who I want to be, when we go back. 

As much as the purge itself, this is really the thing that we should all be doing a little more of, not fretting about our appearance, but expending some time and effort on our own lives, to check in and make sure that we like what we are are doing and that we like who we are. 

I’ve been prone to make GIANT life changes in a way that often seems to come out of the blue for people who do not live in my head, but I have a good thing going right now in life and so I am trying to do the harder work of noticing and making the smaller, mid-course corrections that keep one’s life on course.

So, small as something like a closet purge may seem, it is important. It is the kind of life maintenance that I have perhaps ignored at other times. It is like the weeding of a garden, no one weed puled makes the garden healthier, it is the accumulation of all that small effort that makes the garden healthy.

Oh, and if you’ll allow me to tortue this gardening metaphor fully to death, over the weekend, my first ever flower grew. I planted some wildflower seeds forever ago. The resulting plants have been green and leafy, but last week I notices a bud had sprouted and finally, just yesterday, it opened up into a delicate little white and yellow flower. 

How great is that?

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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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How to Feel Grateful When You Don't Wanna.

 

I’m in an odd little funk today. I have a bunch of work I need to get done today for my job and I’m feeling a little weird about it. Tomorrow night I will begin my first post-Quarantine trip and I am very excited about that! But there is this pile of work between me and that.

Interestingly, this might be one of the first real “vacations” I have taken as a professional and grown up person that is specifically happening because I need some time to chill the fuck out away from work. Most of the times I have taken vacations they occurred because there was someplace I wanted to go or an adventure I wanted to have. This is that too. This trip basically fell into my lap (a friend put it together), but I was going to take some time off no matter what. My boss even told me recently that if I didn’t use some vacation days, she’d make me. That was very nice of her.

I’ve explained to people before that I am not a workaholic. In fact I’m the opposite; I’m just doing what I have to do to do my job well. Lately that has just required a lot. The stress of it kind of ruined my weekend too, but that is a longer story.

Perhaps it is because I know that tomorrow I’ll get to check out that today already feels like such a slog. I don’t like feeling this way at the start of the day. 

But we carry on, right?

Attitude matters, not to get all self-help-y on you. Sit up straight. Smile. Grit your teeth and get your nose to that grindstone. 

All the minimalists that I follow always eventually get around to talking about what you should do AFTER you have purged all of your stuff, because it isn’t really about the stuff, it is about the life you are trying to make for yourself, and eventually they get around to gratitude. About how important it is for people to recognize how much they have in their lives and to feel grateful about it all. I’ve been trying to do that more. Sure, my job is hard, but I am happy to have a job. Yesterday I drove down to the beach for no reason and sat on a log as the sun was sinking into the sea and I just watched the way the light played on the water and it was a nice and peaceful moment and I’m thankful that I got to have it. I have people in my life and tomorrow I get to take a trip with them. I have a place to stay and people who will welcome me. I feel gratitude for all of that. Or, I’m trying to feel it, at least. I’m not good at this part yet, but I’m working on it.

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Tips On Not Buying A Decorative Owl Statue.

Like many people, I spent a lot of Quarantine trying to make my home more comfortable. This was no small task for several reasons. I had only lived here about five months when the lock down started and when I’d moved here I’d done so with all my belongings packed into my little 4-door hatchback. It was me and a cat and some backpacks filled with clothes and books. And that was it. In some ways it was the culmination of a decade spend slowly and deliberately shedding things and slimming down my life. It is possible that when I got here to Monterey I was living as light as I ever will (though I do still harbor the secret ambition to just live out of a backpack, but more on that some other time).

The problem with having only an economy-car’s worth of things though is that it makes the actually-living part somewhat difficult. For instance: nowhere to sit. That first weekend I bought a couch that came in a box and inside of a couple weeks I had a Craigslist kitchen table and a microwave and soon after that a TV and some bookcases. But that was about it those first few months.

One weird thing to know is that I live in an absurdly GIGANTIC apartment. The cost of modern housing being what it is, I have learned not to complain about this, but it is one of those odd ironic curve balls that life throws sometimes. I work for a public university that occupies a decommissioned Army base. I live in the old Army housing, which means that they don’t have studio apartments or anything (because the army had no need for that sort of thing), so I live alone in a two bedroom apartment designed for a military family. When I got the job here I told the housing people I just wanted the smallest, cheapest thing they had, they said, “Sure thing; it’s a 2-bedroom with a garage and a balcony.” God has a sense of humor.

So those first few months this place was pretty bare. A friend of mine called it ‘The Empty Place.”

If you’re into the aesthetic version of minimalism (which I kind of am, but that is really a secondary part of it for me), then you’ve no doubt seen the simple clean lines of white and gray rooms on Pinterest. Always with beautiful old wood floors and great light. Open concept floor plans and lofty ceilings. Kind of Frank Lloyd Wright crossed with the star ship Enterprise sort of look, but with more plants. Well my apartment is not that. Wall to wall cheap-ass carpet in most of the rooms. Old wood kitchen cabinets the color of wet cardboard. One living room wall is unreasonably long. The whole place is just damn weird. Bad design. Roman Mars would be very unhappy with this apartment.

I put my brain to it and tried to figure out how to make this a pleasant home without filling it with a bunch of crap … then Quarantine came along and things got … strange.

Like many people, I was forced to spend so much time here that I noticed every weird uneven-ness in the walls. I noticed every piece of crap joinery on the door frames. The place began to annoy me and rather than feeling like a minimalist, I felt like someone who didn’t know how to make a home, like someone who didn’t know what to put on the walls. And that isn’t actually me. So I went about fixing it. I bought another couch in a box, delivered by a singular intrepid UPS driver. I started my little window sill herb gardens. I bought some rungs and had ordered prints of pictures from my various travels. I even bought a cool black minimal desk for my living room. Throw pillows. Guest bedding. Lamps. I briefly even considered purchasing a decorative owl statue (Did not but it because it didn’t do anything but look like an owl).

By anyone else’s standards, this place is still pretty bare, but I think it is pretty about it.

One time I read an article about the way fancy restaurants and bars are designed and decorated. The guy in the article explained, “people love restaurants because the kitchens are practical and simple, but even better is the sense of plenty: lots of wine, lots of candles.” That made an impression on me and I wrote it down in the Notes app on my phone.   

Simple, but with a sense of plenty.

I guess that is what I have tried to do here, but I still feel weird about it because even though I am still mostly surrounded by things I care about, I do still feel like I could get rid of most of them in a heartbeat. So my minimalist brain shouts at me, “If you can live without them at all, then you should get rid of them now!”

A few months into Quarantine, I realized that all I really needed to live in this apartment is a mattress and a bar stool (the kitchen has a counter bar) and that's it. So why do I have all this other stuff???

The part of me that wants to live out of a backpack also wants to throw out the couches and the rugs and the lamps and the throw pillows. Most days it is a challenge not to over-purge and throw out my flatware. I’m not kidding. I have one set of bamboo utensils. Why do I need more than one knife, one fork, one spoon?

The answer of course is: other people. 

What kind of life are you designing for yourself when the only place to sit in your entire phone is on your one bar stool? It’s a life that doesn’t have anyone else in it. And I know that I would like this life to have other people in it. The loneliness of Quarantine has taught me that. 

Even though I only NEED a mattress and a bar stool, I don’t WANT the life that would create for me. I want a life where I host fucking dinner parties. Right now I could host a small one, but only because I have a table and chairs and haven’t thrown out my flatware yet. Now I just need the people. That part of life is slowly beginning to happen now that we are poking our heads out of our homes like suspicious meerkats.

It isn’t about the stuff, or the lack of it, not at this point in my life anyway. It’s about simplicity with a sense of plenty. The simplicity part I have locked down, now I have to work on the sense of plenty. And that is the work of a life.

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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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To Duvet or Not to Duvet.

I have a small and unimportant quandary.

So I’m a minimalist. I don’t actually enjoy using the term that much because it is ironically freighted with so much baggage as of late, but that is what I am. I am more interested in not owning much than I am in the austere aesthetic, though I do kind of like the aesthetic.

Over the course of the quarantine I have put more effort into making a comfortable home than I would have otherwise. So I probably do have more stuff in my apartment than I would otherwise and lately I have been feeling weird about it. So I have been thinking about going through everything again and doing a purge. So that is Data Point 1.

Here is Data Point 2: During quarantine I had to turn my guest bedroom into my home office and though it still has a bed in it, it isn’t really arranged properly to function as a guest bedroom because it primarily functions as an office and a cat napping area right now.

Now on to Data Point 3: Within the next few months I will be transitioning back to in-person work (though I don’t know exactly when that will happen). I am also beginning to hear from (fully vaccinated) friends and family who want to come out and stay with me, which is lovely and also something I had hoped would start to happen. After all, I live on the central coast of California and have an extra bedroom (because this two bedroom apartment is actually the smallest and cheapest place I could find. That’s a long story and not important right now).

So add all of that up and it means I have to start transitioning my guest bedroom back into a guest bedroom. Since I’d only lived here about five months prior to the pandemic and because the “extra’ bedroom was the last thing I was worried about furnishing, it was never really outfitted properly and was not a particularly pleasant room to be in, though people had slept in it.

Now I am beginning to think about how to make a pleasant and welcoming space for guests to stay in and almost without exception these will be people who are NOT minimalists and who — in some cases — actually think I’m kind of crazy for living the way that I do.

I’d like to provide a pleasant experience for people who come see me, because quarantine has left me feeling terribly lonely and there is little I’d like more than to see people, but, being a minimalist, I really bristle at the idea of buying a whole bunch of stuff I’m not going to use 90% of the time to cram into a room that I don’t use most of the time. I’m staring down the barrel of having to buy extra towels and bedding and probably some bins to organize the towels and the bedding and I need some more lamps (the light in the guest room kinda sucks if the sun isn’t out) and probably a chair and a rug and … other stuff? What goes in a guest room? I’ve never really had to equip one before. 

It feels like my natural inclination to make a bedroom look like a monk’s cell (that’s basically what my own bedroom is like) is probably not what a normal person would think of as pleasant after they had to take a weekend off work and make a long drive to come and visit me.

Surely there is a middle path here that I can find a way to navigate, but I simply have not yet found a way to navigate it. Probably this is what Pinterest is for, right? 

The other thing that bugs me about all this is that at least while the room has been my workspace, I was USING IT. Once I turn it back into a guest room, I will barely be using it most of the time. I would love to give it some kind of hybrid function, but I already have a dining room talke (where I am typing this right now) and a small desk in my living room where I also sometimes write. So I don’t need it to be a home office after Covid. I don’t have any other space-requiring hobbies. I don’t secretly make jewelry or anything, so I don’t know what hybrid function I would try to jam in there.

I also kind of hate how much time I am going to have to spend thinking about all of this. I’m going to end up saying things to myself like, “Maybe I should have a backup duvet …” and that is just going to make me go insane.

Look, I said at the top that this was a SMALL and UNIMPORTANT quandary. At least you know I am being honest with you.

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As Foretold by the Prophecy.

I’ve owned a plant for a very long time. His name is Fred. He’s lived in three states. He’s a pretty cool plant. I bought him at a Walmart in Hanford, California sometime around 2003. I have no idea what kind of plant he is. My mother says he’s an “avocado plant” which I think means she thinks he’s a very small avocado tree, though I have my doubts.  The thing I admire so much about Fred is that he simply refuses to die.

As you might imagine, I am not a very good plant keeper, so the fact that Fred is alive at all is testament to some weird quality about him that has nothing to do with me. Right now he is sitting on the window sill in my living room, his spindly green arms spread out against the window. If you try to sit under him on the couch it is like sticking your head into a little tiny pocket jungle. 

Once it became clear quarantine was going to last longer than expected (remember “15 days to slow the spread”?), I remember looking at Fred and thinking, “I should get some more plants.”

One of the carve outs in the modern incarnation of minimalism seems to be that you can have as many plants as you want. Like, you can own nothing but a single fork and a sleeping bag, but also so many plants that your studio apartment develops its own weather system. No one knows why this is acceptable, but every functioning philosophy of life has its own inborn contradictions, that’s why it can function.  

Rather than buying plants (How was I going to do that without leaving the house?) I bought an herb garden kit online and went about planting seems and raising parsley and basically — you know — becoming a farmer. Let me tell you, I am bad at this. I would peer down into my little planters and look at the withers stems of oregano that I killed by either under or over watering or maybe not giving them enough sun or maybe too much. Who knows? Surely science has not cracked this mystery yet. I think my success rate as a farmer so far hovers in the 30-30% range. Let me tell you though, I can grow the shit out of some parsley, apparently. 

I discovered you can order small succulents online, so I have some of those too! My success rate there is 75%, I know because I bought 12 and haven’t yet had the heart to throw out the three dead ones. 

Recently the Grocery Outlet where I shop — I love the Grocery Outlet precisely because it is an outlet and the inventory changes all the time — started selling plants! I bought two more succulents and so far they are doing pretty well. I can not tell you how much better my sad window sill herb gardens look with a couple of not-dying-yet plants thrown in.

One time back in about September when Covid cases were pretty low in my area, I drove about six miles to a little nursery in Seaside and I bought a couple of plants (which are now long dead) and I had that Covid anxiety and I remember thinking, “I probably should not have done this,” but the nursery was entirely outside and i went early on a Saturday and no one was there but the employees, but even still, I told myself I wouldn’t do it again.

The other day my mother mailed me an article about “Easy Care Houseplants” and I initially looked at it and thought, “well this is great, but I can’t go out and look for these particular plants.” But then I realized, one day soon I can! I get my second shot next week and then I have the two week waiting period AND THEN! I shall return to that little nursery and I shall announce, “It is I! And I have returned! As foretold by the prophecy!”

I read recently on the website Twitter.com that if you add, “As foretold by the prophecy” to the end of any statement it adds some gravitas.

So around the end of April or beginning of May, I can buy some of these “Easy Care Houseplants” I’ve heard so much about. I can maybe give up on my failing career as a farmer and bring to an end my slow murdering of herb plants.

Maybe. I kind of like dotting on the seedlings and watching the first green shoots emerge. Maybe I will cease killing plants by getting better at keeping them alive. I don’t know yet. Thirteen months ago, when all this pandemic business started, I never would have guessed I’d spend a year of my life counting my toilet paper rolls or jotting down the daily death totals in my journal. And I never would have guessed that I would have spent so much time and energy keeping delicate little plants alive.

Even though I have proven to be terrible at that last part, I still manage to take some inspiration from Fred. I look at his thick hearty leaves, dappled by April California sun beams and I am reminded that these little plants want to live, they want to grow. They want to keep on going. Fred keeps on going. I can keep on going. Maybe one day I will be able to get some of this fucking oregano to keep on going.

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On the Acquisition of Musical Plastic.

In the mornings while I sit here and do my silly little daily drawings and write these silly little blog posts, I listen to music on my laptop. I realized recently that I hadn’t been listening to music. I think podcasts have taken over my life. In the Before Times I listened to music mostly in the car and I haven’t used my car much in the past year and so without even meaning to, I stopped listening to music.

So recently I have been looking for ways to inject more music into my life.

I don’t have a little Alexa robot, because it has just never struck me as something I need in my life. I don’t have Spotify because I still just use my free Pandora that I’ve used for just about forever, and I am very conscious of not signing up for crap that has monthly subscription fees. I kind of abandoned iTunes years ago when it somehow became the central hub of Apple’s walled garden, and as much as I appreciate my iPhone, I’m just generally over Apple and their $60 dongles and faux minimalism. 

There was a hot minute when I considered buying a record player and becoming the guy who puts on a nice piece of vinyl in the mornings and then I came to my senses and I was like: I don’t buy things I don’t at least kind of need, I don’t need a record player, and how am I going to shop for records during a pandemic anyway?

I thought back to times when I had music in my life to deconstruct how I’d done it. There was a specific moment I remember when I lived in San Diego. I was walking back from a store listening to my iPod and walked into my apartment and plugged the iPod into a little speaker dock and the song switched from my ears to the speaker and flowed out into the room. That great! So I was like: do iPods still exist? And then I remembered that I have this iPhone and can do basically the same thing wirelessly now. So I looked at Bluetooth speakers and quickly discovered that is one of those weird rabbit holes where some people take these things extremely seriously. And I don’t know … I am always weary of that. Much like there are people who are super into vinyl, there are people who are super into their Bose. I feel this way too about the Beats by Dre stuff too. It just seems that generally in this life people get real precious about various forms of expensive plastic. I mean, to each their own, but I don’t know … it doesn’t suit me. Especially since the weird thing I am precious about is not owning a lot of stuff. So the Bluetooth speaker thing is out because it makes me think too much about it and I have enough weird shit to think about already.

Then I had a marvelously retro idea: I should just get a radio. Remember radios?!? 

So I looked at radios online and as I was reading about all the “features” that radios have (which have not changed in like 40 years) and ended up thinking to myself, “My phone can do all of this.” So radios are out. (Admittedly, I do already own a small emergency radio, it is solar charged and it can charge my phone with a hand crank!)

Thinking about the phone again brought me full circle and I realized that I already HAVE this phone that can play music, I already HAVE a laptop that can play music, I already HAVE a smart TV that can play music. I have access to Youtube and some access to Amazon music (via Prime, which I do pay for, but only once a year) and there are like a million streaming radio stations and, as mentioned, I have my little free Pandora. I already HAVE all the STUFF I need. 

My problem was not a lack of expensive plastic, my problem was me and how I live. So I have gone about fixing that, which is actually much harder than just one-click buying a record player.

I have found places in my day where I can incorporate music, where I can return it into my life. One of those places is right here, each morning while I sit at my kitchen table. 

I’m listening to Cold War Kids right now. I like it.

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How to Have a Good Day.

Most days don’t feel like anything. This is not a quarantine post. It’s just that most of the days of our lives run like sands through an hour glass and who wants to remember that? Do you know how many times I’ve paid an electric bill in my life? Do you know how many I remember? And why would I?

One of the things I’m trying to do lately with the changes I’m making in my life is to find a way to have more good days, not GREAT days, mind you, just low-key good days. Days that didn’t slip away.

Over the last few years I came to a slow realization about what I like to do on a normal, boring, otherwise forgettable day and I have turned it into a simple little metric. I’m going to tell you what it is and at first you’re going to be all like, “Well that doesn’t sound that hard to pull off!”

But I assure you, it is.

Are you ready?

Here it is: Run. Write. Read.

That’s it! 

If you can manage to fit those three things into a normal workaday, normal forgettable, normal day kinda day, then you will have had a good day. 

This is when you go, “Well I could do that!”

Oh yeah buddy? Well give it a try!

It is harder than it sounds.

Let’s do the math: I sleep for 8 hours (obviously the first 6 are in the morning and the last 2 are at night), I work 8 hours a day, but (as they keep telling me) I am “required by law” to take at least a half hour lunch, so really my workday allotment of time is actually 8.5 hours end-to-end. 

Add those up = 16.5 hours, which leaves me 7.5 in a day in which to live my life. 

I get up at 6 and I start work at 8:30, so I have allotted 2.5 hours in the morning. This is for the yoga I haven’t been doing (did some today though), I shower and clean up, I do one of my silly little daily drawings that I post on my artsy Instagram account (@standard_kink), I write a blog post like this one, I listen to a couple of morning news podcasts, I drink coffee. Around 8:15 I drink a meal replacement protein shake and put on my work clothes (Just a t-shirt and a button up. I have worn jeans the entire quarantine. I don’t own sweats).

Okay, so that’s 8 hours of sleep, 8.5 hours of work, 2.5 hours in the morning doing cool stuff, which leaves me precisely 5 hours when I log off work at 5pm. At 5pm I immediately change into running gear and head out the door. (I have to do it this way so that I can draft off the last of my work energy to get me out the door. If I waited until 5:30, I wouldn’t actually go. Plus, the sun sets just after 6pm here right now, so I have to go at 5. Lately I have been running for about an hour. I come back, I shower and clean up, and I start making dinner. Lately I eat pretty much the same thing every night (jasmine rice with sauteed veggies and fish. Throw in some curry powder, some onion powder, soy sauce and black sesame oil … *chef’s kiss*). I watch Youtube while I eat (often the first half of PBS News hour). Then I do the dishes.

By the time all of that is over, it is usually about at or approaching 8pm. Two hours remaining.

From 8 to 9 I have scheduled time to either write or read. Last night I sat down to read and ended up reading until almost 9:30.

BUT! And here is the cool part, because I had written a blog post that morning, I had TECHNICALLY written already (Though considering the writing of a blog post to be “writing” is kind of like in Interview with the Vampire when Tom Cruise in living on rats; it will do the trick, but isn’t really anyone’s preference). 

So yesterday was a Run, Write, Read day! I closed the book about 9:30 and still had about a half hour to kill my brain on Twitter.

I plan to have more RWR Days in the future. Those days make me feel like I did something. Like I didn’t just live another day that will forever slip away, like sands through an hourglass.

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Along the Way.

Okay, so today marks the beginning of Week 2 on my new life schedule. So far, so good.

I learned some things last week and need to make some small changes, but overall, I think I did a pretty good job designing it. I’ll give the schedule itself 4 out of 5 stars.

Me, on the other hand, I had some trouble getting on board entirely. I give myself 2 out of 5 stars. Most of my own problems so far have been related to the ongoing shoulder pain. This has made it hard to stick to the schedule. For instance, I’m supposed to be doing yoga in the morning right when I wake up at 6am. I only managed that ONE of the mornings last week because the shoulder is just too stiff and painful in the mornings. I did not do the yoga this morning, but I after being very gentle with my body and getting a lot of sleep over the weekend, I am willing to (cautiously) say that I think the shoulder is a little better today.

Similarly, in the evenings after my run, I’m supposed to make dinner and then spend time writing and reading. Most of my evening time is currently scheduled for these activities, but I’ve had trouble with these because after sitting at a desk working for 8 hours during the day, it hurts the shoulder to then spend more time sitting at this desk typing away on a different keyboard. Reading is a little easier, but it has been difficult to concentrate when the shoulder intermittently starts to throb and/or spasm. So that has been fun.

Under normal circumstances I would have already gone to the doctor, but these are Covid times and going to the doctor just isn’t worth the additional risk that would create for myself and others. So I have been doing the little arm exercises I learned in physical therapy a couple years ago when this happened. I do my little “spider walk” stretches up and down on the wall throughout the day. I do the one where I put a rubber band on my fingers and open and close them. That all seems to help a little.

So what’s ahead for this week? Well, I need to dial in the schedule a little, but I also need to get ready for the time change next weekend. This winter has been hard and I don’t know that I have ever been as adversely affected by a time change as I was by this last one. It was dark when I started working and dark again by the time I finished. I’ve really appreciated these last few weeks where I could at least get an hour of running in between the end of the work day and the sunset. 

Next week is going to be awesome! I will get an extra hour of running time! Last week I was doing 3 or 4 or 5 miles. Once the time changes I can start working toward the longer runs I really like: 6, 8, 9 miles. I haven’t run a half-marathon since 2019 and I was in much better shape in 2019, but low key it is my goal to be able to do that again all on my own and I have plenty enough trails right outside my door to be able to do it. It will take awhile though to get my body back into that kind of state though.

Also this week, I have to figure out a plan for the weekends. I feel I’ve had enough success with the schedule I built for the weekdays that I could probably figure out at least a broad template for the weekends. I’m not sure how to do this yet. It’s funny, when you start to think of your time as your own, as something you can spend however you want, you are forced to ask yourself what you, in fact, WANT to be doing with your time. So it becomes not simply a question of time, but really a question of values and priorities.

These are the kinds of problems I enjoy solving: the kind that do not come with a clear set of instructions and which require some real work and evaluation. For most of quarantine all I did not the weekends was eat pizza and drink red wine. Turns out that’s not actually what I want to be doing, but I had to actually stop and pay attention in order to realize that.

So we will see. I have the next 5 work days to work out a solution to the weekends.

Like I said, so far so good. 

Not great, but you can’t get to great without passing good along the way.

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Iceberg, Ahoy!

Today I have been thinking a lot about Sarah Ruhl’s book 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater.

As the title indicates, the book is a series of micro-essays. It is a charming and interesting book. Some of the essays are almost poetry in and of themselves. This is one of my favorites:

11. An essay in praise of smallness

I admire minimalism.

It reminds me of a pretty little iceberg.

I have been thinking about that book because I am in a creative rut right now. In many ways this is less about my creative life than it is about my actual life. For better or worse, I have never been one of those writers who thrives in adversity. Sadly, I am one of those writers who thrives when I’m busy. Some of my most productive writing periods have been when I had non-writing and/or non-academic jobs, working 60+ hours a week and dealing with all kinds of other junk. I’m good at writing when it is a haven. I am bad at writing when my day is wide open. And oh man let me tell you, my life is waaaaay too wide open right now.

I’ve been trying to find a writing project just to get my fingers typing. I wonder if there might be something interested in playing around with what is called “flash nonfiction” because I know nothing about flash nonfiction. I guess I know that it is short and true. Maybe that would be a good name for a project.

This is likely not going to be good writing, but it isn’t supposed to be. If I have learned anything about writing in the nearly four decades I have been alive, it is that most writing isn’t good and a great deal of it shouldn’t even be done with goodness in mind.

And then I remembered that I have this whole website where I can post writing no matter how bad it is! WHAT A WONDERFUL COINCIDENCE!

If you’ll excuse me, now I need to go Google “flash nonfiction” to see what it is. Ig nothing else, I have been reading a lot of nonfiction lately, so at the very least I can start cataloguing interesting information. I don’t know. I know that I just need to be writing more because I am getting a little stir crazy out here in the desert with nothing to do.

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Back to the Grind.

Some years ago when I started writing this blog, the Earth was a different place. It was still ruled by dinosaurs. They had feathers, they were very dangerous. It was a time unlike this one. It was back before Twitter, before Facebook was an organ of a foreign power. I was in my 20s and I had SO MANY THINGS I wanted to just shout out into the world. I was impatient.

I’m still impatient.

The last several years though I’ve been in grad school and that took up most of my bandwidth and so I have not really been here very much. I feel bad about that because I have missed it here.

Back when I was a grown-up with a grown-up job and grown-up responsibilities, there would be days when all I wanted was to sit at my kitchen table and write something to post here. But that was a long time ago. Since then the dinosaurs have all died out, followed quickly and obediently by all the bloggers. I think the bloggers all have podcasts now. That reminds me, I’ve been working on a joke:

Q: What do you call a group of white men?

A: A podcast.

I’m not saying it’s a good joke, but then I’m not a comedian.

What I am is a writer. For better or worse. That’s the thing I have to hold onto right now. I’m in one of those post-grad school type slumps. The freelance gig that was supposed to be paying my way right now turned to vapor, so I’ve been having to look for work while simultaneously trying to figure out my next step in life and as a writer.

None of that is terrible on its own, but I’m no longer in my 20s and going through a transitional life period is far less charming when you’re old enough to have gray hair peppering the stubble along your jaw.

But I’m diligent and I know that one of my super powers in this life is the ability to grind it out harder and for longer than is really even reasonable. It’s how I once ended up running an accounting department without ever having been trained as an accountant. It’s why I have an MFA now after years and so many rejections. It’s why I still go running, even though I am literally the slowest and silliest runner anyone has ever even seen. People who drive past while I am running probably DO consider me a comedian.

For Christmas I received as a gift Rachel Aust’s new book called Less: a visual guide to minimalism. I am a big fan of hers and while so far nothing in the book is really new, it is a beautiful book and it has reminded me that back in 2012 I committed myself to living a life like the one the book describes. A life with less crap in it. I committed to owning less and to carrying around less baggage. I committed to a life where I try to do my best, every day, every time, every chance I get, and in so doing am relieved of the existential dread that comes from living poorly. I’d rather be poor than live poorly.

And let me tell you, it has at least paid dividends in this regard: I certainly am poor.

I also fail at that whole thing quite a lot. Like alotalot.

I’m telling you all of this not because I think you’ll find it interesting - “you” don’t even exists, no one does or has ever read this blog - I’m telling you this because today could have been a shitty day and last week could have been a shitty week. And this whole life right now could just be a shitty transitional period. But sitting here and writing it all out helps remind me that today was not really a shitty day, it just wasn’t an ideal one. That’s not the same thing.

What today is, is my life. It has not been a life well planned, but thus far it has been a life pretty well lived. So I’ve got that going for me.

Sometimes I wonder why I’m the last unembarrassed blogger walking the Earth, but then I realize it’s because I can’t do THIS on Twitter and it would make a really boring podcast and I’m not funny-ha-ha enough to make this kind of thinking into a stand-up act, but what I can do is sit here and think everything out with this keyboard. I think you can think anything out with a good keyboard.

You know who didn’t have any good keyboards? Because they didn’t technically speaking have fingers or an alphabet? Dinosaurs. And they’re all dead now. And I’m still here. Writing. Because I can grind it out.

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