/reader

The office is eerily quiet. A and her posse are out of town for a work retreat, and I'm the only one left behind sitting in their pod of desks. I miss chatting with them and being yanked from my daydreams when they come by with treats. Their absence reminds me how much happier I am now that A is around. To her I owe a great deal.

While walking to my desk this morning with hot chocolate, envelopes, and legal pad in hand, I had the realization that I am currently living the dream job I so desperately wished for while drowning at my last job. I live in New York and work in a cushy high-rise a short subway ride away. I like the people I work with. I have friends to keep me company at work. I have a healthy work-life balance. I don't have to go in every day, but I can to take advantage of free food and amenities, and even when I do I usually have enough energy to read and write when I go back home. This is the life I wanted. It's not perfect, of course — I don't feel as intellectually stimulated as I want to be and I'm not sold on my job security — but I think it's important to recognize a good thing when you have it, and a good thing I certainly have right now. At least, to quote Vonnegut, if this isn't nice, then I don't know what is.

Usually when I post poems on here you can infer that I'm struggling to write, or struggling in general, or both. I've been trying to rouse myself out of catatonia but most days I don't succeed and end up in bed by 8. (Cue nightmares.) Most surprising to me is that I don't feel lonely. I'm grateful to avoid what I think might be the most unpleasant feeling; on the flipside, the cure for this ennui (caused by hurt? disappointment?) is much less straightforward.

The gem which inspired me to write today is Bill Watterson's 1990 commencement speech to the graduates at Kenyon College. I put it on my shelf after agonizing whether to categorize it under "art and the creative process" or "life and philosophy". Content like this that defies categorization is my favorite to consume; it blurs the lines between things I care about and shows me how they're all connected.

There are so many good lines in this speech. Some made me think about my writing on this blog:

It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves. (...) If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood.

Trying to write on this blog regularly has been the most rewarding and humbling experience of my life. Most days I can nary come up with a single original thought. Even when I do come up with something half-baked it inevitably gets shoehorned into the same stiff, weary words and sentence structures I use and overuse.

What follows is really good advice for any creative:

I've found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories.

(...)

We're not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquify our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery—it recharges by running.

You may be surprised to find how quickly daily routine and the demands of "just getting by" absorb your waking hours. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your politics and religion become matters of habit rather than thought and inquiry. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your life in terms of other people's expectations rather than issues. You may be surprised to find out how quickly reading a good book sounds like a luxury.

I've been starting to feel this way, that daily routine has completely absorbed my waking hours. (Hence me not writing anything original the past few days.) I know I've been letting myself get swept away by the tide of time in order to distract myself from thinking about people leaving my life and the part I play in their departures, but reading this made me want to snap out of it for the first time in a while.

Anyway, I highly recommend reading the rest of the transcript or listening to the speech. I don't know why it surprised me that the guy who made my favorite comic strip is also clever and wise in speech. In some parts it's as if he's talking directly to me.

We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. Sooner or later, we are all asked to compromise ourselves and the things we care about. We define ourselves by our actions. With each decision, we tell ourselves and the world who we are. Think about what you want out of this life and recognize that there are many kinds of success. (...)

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. (...) Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake.

(...)

You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. (...) To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.

When I tell A's coworkers about my job many of them try to suggest alternate paths to me, as though where I am right now is not a position anyone should ever be content in, even as I insist that I like where I am and what I'm doing. I'm used to hearing this from my parents and I've learned to tune it out since they'd say the same regardless, but it carries a different ring when it comes from the people that work in the same room as you. Hearing Bill tell me that it's okay to be satisfied and content is a warm hug from someone I've looked up to before I even knew I could do that.

 

Her gesture then was as gracious as everything about her. Choose her well, she’d said. What words. I wanted someone exactly like her, just twenty years younger, which was how old she was when she stayed at my great-grandmother’s in Egypt after escaping Germany, when all the men in the house, having watched her play the piano in the living room, swore they’d lost their minds over her…She loved me and I loved her. Choose her well. No one would have said it in just that way, or found words so spare and quick to help dodge the heartrending elegy in her voice. She was the only person with whom I could discuss ideas—not academically, which is how so many professors pour notions into our heads, but ideas with a completely human dimension, which is what ideas are in the end, not lifeless slugs devoid of human features, but sentient figures of what we live with when we can’t even tell a feeling from a thought and can only sketch what is bound to miss the mark. Look for the human, she would say when she wasn’t asking me to think American—even if there’s no proof you’re right, look for the human. What a pleasure to spell out my thoughts with her, when she’d ask what did I think such-and-such an author was really, really thinking when he wrote that piece? Then, turning to music, she’d say, This was what Beethoven struggled with when composing this sonata. “Do I know this for sure?” she’d ask. “No. Do I have any proof? No. But am I right? Absolutely.” […]

As it turned out, Look for the human was what I never forgot. I passed it on to those who listened. It was, however, almost impossible for others to practice, having never met Flora.

— André Aciman, Roman Year: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 22, 2024)

Notes:

• DK Recommendation? Loved it!
• Book Reviews
  • NY Times: “Roman Year“: An Exile Revisits the Squalor and Grandeur of 1960s Italy
    • “Aciman evokes the passing of time in rich, meandering prose, rebuilding 1960s Rome in sentences suffused with light and sound and memories — the taste of an artichoke, the smell of bergamot and of Crêpe de Chine perfume. From the bewilderment of arrival, the young Aciman moves through denial toward a gradual acceptance of his new life. “Roman Year” is both an affecting coming-of-age story and a timely, distinctive description of the haunted lives of refugees.”
  • Guardian: Memento Amore

To make matters a bit worse, I haven't felt good about retreating into the places that I typically do. A lot of my blogging friends are in pain over the election. My Mastodon feed is depressing, as is most of my RSS. So, I haven't really had a place to just breathe online, which has led me to avoid the internet more than usual. Granted, that isn't a bad thing, but in this weird, uneasy time it's always nice to have a place to fall back, feel apart of, and relax.

Something else has been bothering me. I think Hurricane Helene did a bit of a number on me. I think it triggered a bit of that old survival mode I've talked about before and that's just been simmering in the back of my mind. "You need to be better prepared, you need to get your shit together" is just one of the many messages bombarding me each day.

I'm never the best version of myself when I'm in survival mode. I want to start discarding things, working out, and preparing myself for the worse. So, when you take the recent hurricane, my lack of employment, a potential scary election result, it's made for a rather unsettling time for me.

Last year, I dropped some weight, mainly because I bullied myself. I had gotten into one of these survival modes after a health scare, and I didn't extend myself any grace. I called myself soft, fat, and worthless, more times than I would like to admit. For some reason, I tie my added weight into a failure of masculinity (I'm pretty sure it's because of my father, who despite being significantly overweight never fails to not mention my weight and make comments. I listened to him lecture me on my weight as he took his eighteen different prescriptions earlier this week.), and that sort of pressure and stress definitely doesn't help.

I'll never forget ranting to my wife about what a soft piece of crap I'd become, and she asked me where this was coming from. At the time, we were watching Battlestar Galactica and I mentioned how Admiral Adama had called his son Lee soft when he had gained weight, and they were ill prepared for the Cylon attack. I remember my wife getting loud, and saying, "And what war are you fighting? Right now, are you at war?" It stopped me in my tracks, because I really didn't have an answer. I was putting that same sort of pressure on myself, like everything I was doing was life or death, and destroying myself in the process.

I need to lighten up. I've always been wound too tight, and it's only getting worse as I get older. Recently, I journaled about how I struggled to enjoy so many of my hobbies and interests because of my frustration with their associations. For example, I was playing WWE 2k24, which I would only play because it was free with my PSN account. I refuse to give the WWE any money, since they accept millions from the Saudi government. The match I was playing featured Hulk Hogan and The Ultimate Warrior, two childhood heroes who turned out to be absolutely terrible human beings in real life. I was trying to relax and play a video game and instead, I sabotaged myself and my little escape from the real world. This happens all the time now because I don't want to support this actor, or this film company, or this TV channel, or this store, or this sport. It's just become too much. I'm literally ruining every bit of fun in my life over stuff I have very little or no control over.

This has been an on-going issue for me for a few years now, and I keep trying to embrace a more peaceful life and I realize now, I really need to focus on this a bit more. I have got to stop expecting the worst, and realize that if the worst comes, I'll just have to adapt at the time. I ran across this short little video of Bill Burr and well... it made me feel better. It truly is what I'm aspiring to do.

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Here’s a completely wacky mix of links in no particular order:

• Kevin with his partner in crime Chris have launched a premium newsletter. If you’re into handheld gaming Overkill is a site you may want to check out;
• Reaper has shipped Ping, a neat little tool to do website monitoring. I love this type of small projects that do just one thing;
• Zlatko sent me Zenpen a side project he’s curating and it’s such a lovely website that I had to share it;
• I started using Feedbin to sync all my RSS feeds and that means I now have a public RSS feed for my starred items. If you want another way to discover new content maybe give it a sub;
• My friend Mattia has published the first magazine for his “Wandering Through Life” series;
• My friend Rob is reconsidering all his life choices while he records all the lessons for his upcoming course on landing pages;
• You should let Shen send you an email;

That’s all my very tired, very overworked brain can conjure up at the moment. As always you can still leave a “Hey I was here” mark on my guestbook and you also go explore the growing archive of people I interviewed for the People and Blogs series. So many good blogs out there.

That’s all I have for today, the blog’s been very quiet lately but my mind’s not in great shape at the moment, way too many things have happened one after the other and I’m late with basically everything I have to do and so I’m spending all my mental energies working and trying to catch up and get back on track. Wish me luck!

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

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