On Petards and My Imbalanced Work Life.

I don’t write about my professional work life on here. I will allude to it occasionally because I am proud of it and because it takes up at least a third of my normal day, but if I am going to continue to insist that working professional people can ALSO have public creative lives, I need to respect the boundary between those two things just as I think that employers should do.

That being said, are you familiar with the phrase “gird one’s loins”? It means to prepare for something difficult. I have a lot of difficult work to do over the next couple of weeks and I’d hoped it would not come to the point where I have to rev up into high gear, but alas, I am really going to need to knock it out quickly and in quantity.

You wouldn’t know this, but I just had to do this over the holiday break. I was hoping to not have to do it again, but here we are. So this phrase “grid your loins” has been on my mind the past couple of days. So I looked it up and the derivation is kind of unclear. It wasn’t that I couldn’t find a source, I actually found so many that they all called one another into question. Apparently in this phrase “loins” does not refer to genitals, though I’m not sure how that is the case. As far as I can tell,  the phrase basically means to put on a belt … I guess. The idea being that in good old biblical times, people wore clothes that were more flowing and so if you had to move around a lot, you didn’t want your clothes flapping in the way and so you would put on a belt.

That still seems kind of genital-related to me … or perhaps “loins” used to more refer to an area of the body? Like when we say “stomach” we can mean the organ that digests food or the lower middle section of one’s body … I don’t know. I don’t have the time to do a lot of research on this because I try to write one of these each morning and so what these blogs lack in quality at least they make up for in being uninformed!

You know what is another fun idiom???

“Hoisted by your own petard.”

There is a great joke about this on the show Community when Jeff asks Britta what she thinks a “petard” is and she says that it is like a leotard, which I think is what we all kind of think. Like getting hoisted by your own petard means some schoolyard bullies hooked your 80s workout leotard to a flagpole and hoisted you on up.

Well that is not the case!

A “petard” was a kind of medieval explosive used in warfare and “hoist” still meant “lift” but in this case it means to lift by way of explosion. So to be “hoisted by your own petard” actually means “blown up by your own bomb” and that might be just as good of a way to describe my next few weeks as the “girding” thing.

Anyway, I will try to avoid it, but I may not get to write here every morning for the duration of these next couple of weeks, but I will do my best. Though I am kind of tired of doing my best all the time. It is exhausting! I would really like to be able to just do my most C+ all the time and have that be okay.

.

.

.

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.

.

.

.

The Last 6 Months.

 

I had the day off of work yesterday thanks to one Mr. Cesar Chavez and so I did not do any of my normal weekday stuff except for my daily journal. I keep a bullet journal (I think I have talked about this before). Well yesterday I filled up the current journal and when that happens I always take a minute to flip back through it and I write a little note about the life and times recorded in that journal.

Well the particular journal I filled up yesterday spanned September 2020 - March 2021 and let me tell you dear friend, a whole lot happened during that time period. 

It was almost impossible to shift my brain back into September of 2020. I mean, the Former Guy was still President, there were no vaccines, we hadn’t gone through the winter Covid death surge yet … just … so much … we have lived through so much just since September and it was basically only six months ago. On September 22, 2020 the total number of Covid deaths in the US was 200,768 and as of last night that number was 552,033. So more than half of the Covid deaths in the United States occurred in that relatively narrow window of time. We have lost so much and so many in such a short period. It’s staggering and yet, I think it is actually underappreciated. I know so many people who have - either constantly or only occasionally - behaved as though they are special, as though they are virus-proof, as though the rules of morality and good conduct simply do not apply to them during these really bleak times. And when I consider the quarter of a million people who died just during the lifespan of my little journal, it really shakes me. Assuming that I live through this period, I’m going to have a much darker outlook on humanity. And that shift has taken place mostly in the last six months.

One of my fears is that as soon as we get through all of this, our culture is simply going to memory-hole the whole thing. The people you know who were reckless and stupid will simply behave as though they never were. We will rush to get back to something like normal. I’ve heard some talk about the need for a Covid memorial, something in DC like the Vietnam Memorial. A place we can all go to to remember what has happened. A place that helps us to not forget. I think that would be a good idea.

Until then, at least I have my little journal.

.

.

.

4 Week Self Check-in.

There are some good things that have so far come out of this new life schedule that I have built. 

I feel better. Not like life-changing-ly better, but just better generally. That should not be a huge surprise, because I was feeling pretty busted and burnt out there for a while. The schedule has forced me to feel a kind of responsibility to myself. I think that is a good thing. Life being the what it is, it is easy to forget to look after yourself.

I’ve been running more. A LOT MORE! Not as much as I’d planned on, but significantly more. I’m so appreciative of the recent time change; I have so much more light after work. I’m budgeted for 90 minutes of running, but lately I’ve been going for more like 2 hours. I have gotten to do so much more exploring! Yesterday I ended up on top of a hill and I could not only see the ocean at the horizon, I was high enough that I could see the ocean itself spreading out giant and dark blue all the way to the edge of forever.

Slowly, very slowly, my body is getting better at sleeping. For a while there (months) I couldn’t really get to sleep or stay asleep, but I’m getting a little better at it. The running helps because by the time it is time to crawl into bed, this body is worn out.

I have consistently been doing my silly little stick figure drawings each morning and while there there is not much in the way of great artistic value to them, few things in life feel better than having a project that takes a very very long time. I have no idea how long I’ll keep doing those, but I just so enjoy starting the day by doing something … anything … even if it is just an embarrassingly simplistic drawing of a zookeeper giving a goat a hat.

This here blog. I have been pretty consistent about writing here. Now, same as above, the quality ain’t nothing to brag about, but I’m sitting here and I writing this and let me tell you, that isn’t nothing.

My diet is better. At least during the week. It is pretty standardized and what it lacks in spontaneity, it makes up for in for in reliability, ease, and not-being-junk-food-ness. I’m slowly learning to enjoy cooking … a little.

There is, however, much I am still failing at. My shoulder and arm are still giving me trouble and so the morning yoga has just been out the window lately. Yesterday though I was finally able to schedule some physical therapy appointments! AND they don’t start until AFTER I get my second shot, so that’s good.

In the evenings, running long and then cooking take up more time than I’d expected, so I have not been writing as much and I have not been reading as much. After work is supposed to go: run, clean up, make dinner, write, read, sleep. I’ve found myself running out of time to fit all that in after work, but I’m working on it still. I may need to adjust the schedule a little, but I’m not convinced of that yet.

The weekends: I still haven’t worked out a good schedule for managing my weekends. I want to allow time for laziness, but right now that’s all I’m allowing for. I need a better plan than this.

I will tell you though, the single biggest achievement to come out of all this effort, is that I have made some progress toward de-centering work in my life, which was a big part of the point of all of this. If I am not on the clock, but find myself getting stressed out about work, I will tell myself, “Jamie, that is not what this time is for,” and I will redirect my attention to the schedule and whatever I am supposed to be doing right then. That, that freedom right there, is perhaps why I have been feeling better generally. I feel more like a person, as much as one can under the continued quarantine circumstances. 

You know, the number of things I have read that said like, “The keys to being happy and healthy are to have a routine, eat healthy, exercise and get sleep” would blow your mind, but you know what, I don’t know that I’d ever actually understood that those things were not being prescribed all hippy-dippy by someone selling healing crystals. They were being prescribed as a discipline; eat healthy doesn’t mean “no junk food” it means eat healthy. Sleep doesn’t mean, “Make sure you get some” it means prioritize it. And like any discipline, it’s hard. One would think that attempting to be better should trigger some instinct in the body that makes it easy to do, but the opposite is true. It’s not hard to change oneself, it is hard to improve oneself. The two are not the same and I think I always kind of thought they were.

.

.

.

Everything Ever Given Gave Us.

 

Like the rest of the world (or maybe just Twitter) I’ve been deriving a lot of psychic glee the last week watching the saga of the gigantic Ever Given ship wedged across the Suez Canal. Why was it so fun while it lasted? I think because it was simply the absolute stupidest possible problem, caused by all the problems of our world and simultaneously wreaking havoc on the very systems that create all those problems.

The boat is too damn big. It’s bigger than the Titanic. We make them that big now so we can fill up all those containers with crap we don’t actually need. We ship it all around the world so that there’s new junk to buy every time we go to Target, which is a place we should not be going anyway because there is still a pandemic going on.

And then the boat gets stuck because when the French were digging that canal in the 19th century, no one then alive could have ever imagined we’d have the hubris to build boats so big.

And then the boat is good and stuck and the entire world economy - which ain’t really that great even when it is functioning the way it is supposed to - starts to get backed up because it turns out that this one dumb canal is of out sized importance to our ability to move junk around.

And now the boat is unstuck. 

What a bummer.

I think that for the last week this one dumb boat kind of began to expose what a silly silly silly world we live in. It started to pull back the curtain a little bit on the fragility and idiocy of the systems and structures we little humans have imposed on the world and on ourselves. But god forbid we ever be forced to actually look at the world we have made. So they dug that sucker out as fast as they possibly could, because the alternative would be that people might start to ask questions like, “Does this whole situation seem unmitigatedly stupid to anyone else?”

I’m so sad to see you go Ever Given, you are up there in the pantheon of boats now. You, The Pequod, The Love Boat, Boaty McBoatface, the aforementioned Titanic. I’m so sad to see head up the Suez, out into the Mediterranean, and off to your ultimate destination. You taught us so much Ever Given, and yet we hardly knew you. I hope that sink very soon.

.

.

.

What I Learned in the Merchant Marines.

If you are the good and wise citizen of the world I suspect you to be, then no doubt you have been watching the situation in the Suez Canal and thinking to yourself: So basically our entire world-wide capitalist system is moving closer to collapse because one ship got stuck??? Good system. Smart economy.

To be fair to the people driving the ship, there was apparently a huge dust storm and I imagine it is hard to steer a boat that big through a fairly narrow canal when you can’t see anything. I don’t know what kind of collision alarms a ship like that has, but I’m guessing not many because those things are so god awful big that by the time the alarm goes off, simple physics would dictate that there’s nothing you could do to avert the collision.

None of that is what’s interesting to me about this though.

Last night I saw a picture of all the shipping traffic that is now diverting down around the Cape of Good Hope in order to avoid the Suez entirely. There are whole fleets of ships that diverted south, now racing down along the coasts of Africa like they’re 16th Century spice traders. 

The picture made me a little sad because there are just SO MANY ships and I immediately thought to myself (because somehow everything is about me), “Man, I would really like to sail around the Cape of Good Hope!” 

I used to tell people that after high school I joined the Merchant Marines for a few years, but not knowing much about the Merchant Marines, when they asked follow up questions I’d just say something like, “You know, some bad things happened and I don’t really like to talk about it.”

But if I HAD joined the Merchant Marines, I wonder if I would have gotten to sail around the Horn of Africa. I wonder how much of the world I would have gotten to see. I’ve resigned myself to the fact there are places I’ll never get to see, maybe that is one of them. 

I try not to dwell that much on the paths I didn’t take in life. Truth be told I’m happy with most of what I have done and the other stuff I have at least come to terms with, but it was a kind of funny feeling to look at all those ships, denoted as little arrows. I thought about how in reality each of those arrows was a gigantic steel ship with people working on it and sleeping on it, making meals, and drinking coffee and maybe absently gazing out the window through the rain to that dark little smear of land at the horizon, Cape Town looking back at them. I wonder if they think to themselves, “How amazing has my life been? Good thing I joined the Merchant Marines after high school, because otherwise I never would have gotten this job and so wouldn’t be getting to make this amazing journey.” 

Or maybe they’re sitting there sipping their coffee and thinking, “How for the love of god, did they get a ship THAT stuck in the Suez Canal??”

.

.

.

The Wisdom of The Crowd.

 

This will have to be a short post today because I am running a little behind schedule this morning.

BUT NO! The crowd shouts, HOW WILL WE GET THROUGH OUR DAY IF WE DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT???

Well calm down, that is why I am here at all.

OKAY, SORRY FOR OVERREACTING! The crowd shouts back in unison.

 So I did a pretty good run yesterday, about 7.25 miles and I got really far out into the wilderness and there was ALOT of going up and down hills. And the day before I did a respectable 6.67 miles and that was similarly rough terrain, but add those two things up and last night my body just threw in the towel. Even my hips were like, “Nope, we are done working for the day, sorry.”

It is so weird that this body can be running up the side of a hill and then an hour later I can barely stand up from a sitting position on the sofa.

YOU CALL IT A SOFA? The crowd shouts.

Yeah, what do you call it?

WE CALL IT A COUCH! WE ALL AGREED. The crowd shouts.

My grandmother used to call it a davenport.

WELL FUCK THAT NOISE! The crowd shouts.

Anyway, I guess that all I’m trying to say here is that having bodies is weird. I have spent most of my life trying to make my mind big and make it work good and only the last ten years or so have I even been aware of the fact that a body - even one as C- as mine - can do cool stuff like run up the sides of hills or backpack up into the mountains or propel a kayak out into the ocean. Yet here we are, where doing that makes one unable to bend down enough to turn on the bathroom faucet.

And look, of course I’m joking. I’m lucky for the body I have. I’m surprisingly healthy and my legs work and my eyes work, etc. I’m not actually actually complaining. I think what I’m saying is that I’m aging and it makes me want to squeeze all the luck I still can out of this body while it can still do stuff. There are so many hills out there that I haven’t run up the side of yet. Part of aging is the realization that a life simply isn’t long enough for us to get to run up and down every single hill out there, but I’m happy this body has time enough still to run up a few more of them.

WE CAN NEVER TELL IF THESE POSTS ABOUT RUNNING ARE SUPPOSED TO BE HUMBLE-BRAGS! The crowd shouts.

No, they’re really not, it’s just that these are the things I think about and no one reads this blog anyway and none of you are real, I made up the whole crowd.

WELL NOW WE ALL HAVE EXISTENTIAL ANGST BECAUSE WE DON’T ACTUALLY EXIST! The crowd shouts.

Believe me, I know how you feel.

.

.

.