His name is Riley. He enjoys following me around, lying over my feet and becomes impatiently loud when he cannot do so.
In two weeks, he has successfully eliminated my eating out habit, canceled several happy hours, and prompted me to work from home whenever I can.
He’s still quite a puppy and I wish I could take him on long walks around San Francisco. Morning jogs and evening strolls. Not yet though. For now, we enjoy racing up and down my hallway together.
After reading a great review on Trent's The Simple Dollar of the Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp, I found myself yearning to sink into it's pages and quickly ordered a used copy from half.com. I found the book fantastic, quite inspiring and yet it has sent my every day activities into a whirlwind. In a nutshell, (and I really urge you to check out Trent's review for more info, it's beautifully written) the book heralds forming habits and routines about one's creative practices.
Habits, routines, rituals. Such a lovely idea. The order organizational systems can offer to an otherwise chaotic mis mash of activities, people and events that compose a day, has always been quite alluring to me. Let me explain.
I was one of those kids that loved the two or three weeks before school started. I kicked them off by detailed review of my favorite self-improvement books, "How to Get Straight A's" and "How to Do Better in School", two proud finds from Scholastic's "Book Orders" (anyone remember these??). I cleaned out my bedroom, spent days organizing my desk into the perfect workspace, complete with pencils lined in order of size beside a stack of pink rubbery erasers in my "tool drawer", journals and art work stacked neatly in my "creative drawer" and old birthday cards and letters arranged by date in my "letters drawer". I meticously sorted through my closets creating long lists of the various outfits I could wear and the days on which they should be worn (a fashion spread in the magazine Girl's Life has inspired this: "Smart On Mondays! Fun on Tuedays! Cute on Wednesdays :)... Casual Fridays..."... cheeky friggin magazine). Oh and the planner, the planner was the best part. Preparing detailed order of days, "Wake at 7am, dressed with brushed teeth by 7:30 and downstairs for breakfast, leave at 8:30, snack at 4pm, 2 hours of math homework, 45 minutes of piano practice..." and so on.
But most of all, I worshiped the day when my Mom packed my sisters and I into the family Astro van for.... back to school shopping. This was, the day of all days for me. Seriously people, I think it rivaled with Christmas morning. Picking out the shiny new binders, the colorful folders, the endless dividers to section a thick stack of college ruled paper into "History: Notes", "History: Homework", "History: Class Work", "History: Projects" and so on.
I wasn't just an anal kid. A month into school, my drawers were a mess, file system failed in favor of the quick 'stuff everything into the backpack' and my homework assignments were turned in half completed, if not altogether late.This much loved organization process that I gingerly spread out over a period of weeks much in the same way one slowly savors their favorite desert to the last drop, was my childish attempt at harnessing my unruly creative mind, controlling the rather hellish social experience that was grade, middle and high school for me, and perhaps the first of my many attempts, at escaping being present.
Reflecting on my childhood, it's clear that planning wasn't the hard part, it was the learning to live within the habit I envisioned. The hard part is finding the discipline to shape hours of messy life into a routine and actually complete the plan. Intrinsic to executing a routine is sitting down in the present, focusing on the moment and carrying out what might be a much anticipated event (however mundane it may seem). I might of created the perfect workspace, the perfect to do list, but I also created a lot of expectation and a lot to fail at.
Ann Lamont talks a lot about this in her book, "Bird by Bird", she writes something like, if you want to be writer, you have to write. Yes, that means you actually have to sit down and write. I recollect this now, as I, freshly graduated with malleable days I am trying to form what Tharp calls a "creative habit", a way I can actually do everything I talk so much about.
Creating a habit, delineating my days, can thus be a bit nerve racking for me because it sets up a clear path of failure. Between demanding job, planning a wedding (yes the big day is October 11), managing en-crazed social life (I sometimes think my financee has more friends and events to attend than God), and trying to get a workout in each day, my goal of "practicing my writing" seems to often get sunk along with any goal of ritual. My mind feels like a cobweb of possible routines, all stretching out in this and that direction.
It also doesn't help that I am still in the fearful point when it comes to writing, the blank page can be quite terrifying and procastination has been a long time friend. Oh yeah. And this blogging thing. I am definitely dealing with "post traumatic blog syndrome". The concept that people are actually reading what I am writing didn't really sink into now. It doesn't matter if it's only 5, it's more than one (aka me). That I will force myself to get over. But what I want to throw out this:
What are your habits? Does your day have routine? How do you keep them?
I find other people's daily rituals, routines and traditions so very interesting, probably because I have a lot of trouble keeping one myself. Voyeurism and procastination often go hand and hand.
If you're a creative person or a blogger, how do you practice? How do you settle down into day? Is there action that sparks your routine?
At Blogher08, I sat listening to bloggers read excerpts of their work. At the end of day one I found myself caught, like fabric on a zipper, to these words:
“Stories”, she said, “we come 8,000 miles to tell stories.” I then recalled all my hesitations, critiques if you will, surrounding the art of blogging. A few are as follows:
“Simply trivial”
“Valorizing the individual experience”
“Normalized narcissism”
While my skepticism never disappeared, with the discovery of my first blog, I became quite voyeuristic if not stalker like towards this Internet phenomenon. Loitering first for ten or fifteen minutes and then hours in others lives, perceptions and thoughts. A tight anxiety soon began in my stomach, crept up my chest and nestled in my throat when reading blogs, especially those that wrote about subjects like women and media or art, topics I felt so passionate towards. Years of therapy had taught me all too well what this snaking anxiety meant. I envied them. I envied their ability to transform their thoughts into words and leave them to linger in the vast unknown void we call the Internet. The possibility of where those words could go, what they could turn into in another’s mind, how they could be translated, remembered and most of all how one felt when released of those words.
I soon started talking passionately, excitedly about blogging. About it’s populist potential, it’s subversive ability to turn corporate and brand name hegemonies on their heads. It’s reversal of the information flow, a mass of information moving from bottom to top instead of top to bottom, the displacement of the editor and publisher. My excitement went on in waves. People would ask “Well Allese, have you thought about blogging?” and my answer was always no. I was scared of my own voice, that it would not express what I wanted to, that I could not control it, make it say what I felt.
But I am writer or rather I write. I began at seven in the medium of poetry and have filled journals up until this point with the details of my life. Decent or not, I have 16 years of writing to name. Freshly graduated from UC Berkeley, meaning I now have time, I am committed to attempting something, though not sure what, with a medium that I love.
If you’re a writer you must write. At Blogher08, I made sense of the blog within the context of writing. “Stories” she had said. I looked around a room of nearly a thousand women and became deeply impressed, we are all telling stories, I thought. Stories were at the heart of sacred, pre-modern communities and tumbled under the grand entrance of nineteenth century objective truth, science, reason, and enlightenment ideals. It seemed to me at that moment, in the middle of the grand ballroom in the Saint Francis, that people had found the most democratic medium to revive one of our oldest, most revered traditions, the art of the story. Blogging is a way to entwine lives across a vast technological void.
I am quite excited to join.
