Find A Way

My laptop stopped recognizing its hard drive the other night. That’s the drive containing most of my work, including my novel in progress. Odds are it’s still there, just temporarily inaccessible. I had been keeping my work in progress in my Dropbox, but there were some temporary connectivity issues.

I had one of Gizmo’s favorite toys as a memento up on top of a bookshelf where the Karamazovs couldn’t get it. Dmitri got up there, proving once again how I underestimate him. Now he lugs it around the house.

I haven’t been running in a couple of weeks. I haven’t worked out how to do it around my work schedule. Too dark when I get up, too tired when I get home.

I can feel my stress and frustration rising. And my usual outlet, blogging, is harder sans laptop. I won’t be able to get it fixed for a few weeks.

Problems, meet solutions.

I now have a keyboard for my iPad. With my connectivity issues resolved, I can use it to get back on track with writing and blogging. It’s not ideal, but it’s doable.

My apartment complex has a fitness center with one of those treadmill things. Tomorrow I find out how all that works. And Gizmo’s toy will go someplace safer.

The Zen of Cats

I live too much in my own head. I focus so tightly on what I want, what I’m doing, that I lose sight of my real priorities.

If my cats make too much noise trying to get my attention while I’m writing, I shoo them out of the room and shut the door. Obviously they don’t understand this, so it just seems mean to them. They want a little love, maybe a little play time, and instead they get pushed farther away. I feel a little bad about it afterwards.

Yes, sometimes I really need to be left alone to chase that elusive chain of thought. But is it always that important? Is what I’m doing always the most important thing in my life? I love my cats. I love playing with them and petting them, hearing them purr, watching them chase the string. My life is a lot better with them in it.

And it’s not just my cats. It’s everyone in my life. There are those I dearly love that I put off and push away because I want to work on my own stuff. Granted that I need more alone time and space than most for a variety of reasons. But how much of that is genuine, and how much self-imposed?

I need to remind myself of what really matters. As much as I love my writing, is it going to bring me as much happiness and satisfaction as love will? Which makes me a better person? Which is healthier?

I’ve started meditating again. It’s relaxing, and it’s one of the few spiritual experiences open to me as an atheist. And it grounds me. It brings me back from inside my busy little brain to here in the real world with the rest of everyone. A true Zen practitioner can keep herself grounded through any kind of activity: chopping wood, cooking, painting, building spreadsheets. Whatever her activities are, she is there in that moment, aware and fully engaged with it.

I’m nowhere close to there yet. But I want to be. So I’m going to practice. And I’m going to play with my cats when they want to play.

A Quantification of Solace

(Tip o’ the quill to Ian Fleming for the title. “Quantum of Solace” is the least typical of his James Bond stories  - 007 attends a dinner party and hears it from his host, who chides him for a certain lack of compassion. No gunfights, no diabolical villains, no easily seduced and improbably named damsels in distress. But as titles go I think it’s lovely, and while the movie is nothing like the book it works well there, too.)

I like to quantify things. I suppose it’s part of my nerdish DNA – what’s measured is more real somehow than what’s not. You make the intangible tangible. Eff the ineffable, so to speak. And I really enjoyed Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken. So I’ve gamified my own life a little.

I made myself a spreadsheet that I use daily to track certain behaviors I want to encourage in myself: how far did I run today? how many words did I write? how many items on my to-do list got done? I weight them all according to which ones I most want to encourage, and I come up with a score for the day. The spreadsheet shows me what my average for each behavior is and what my best is for each month, as well as tracking them all month over month. The idea is to keep moving the bar higher and to reward myself for good behavior as opposed to just shaming myself senseless for the bad behavior. Each month I review the weights and make adjustments as needed – for example, I took out the “jobs applied for” column since I’m no longer on the job market.

The spreadsheet is in my Dropbox, so I can access it pretty much anywhere. And I make a point of updating it as soon as I can so I can watch the numbers climb. Already I’m writing more (and more consistently) and pushing myself to keep building those good habits. I’m in a regular habit of running, and I’m ramping up the frequency. The whole concept appeals to my competitive side as well as my oft-neglected inner nerd.

Batter Up!

Sometimes life throws you a rough pitch – and not just a plain ol’ curve ball, but one of those nasty ones that looks like it’s coming in fat and easy over the plate, then drops right out from under your bat and whoosh! it’s a strike. It’s not fun. Probably not all that “fair” either, but there it is.

But there’s no point in curling up in a ball. You do what you can. You take a step back and assess the damage. If you can, you learn something from it. You figure out how to hit that pitch the next time. And you step back up to the plate, because what else are you going to do?

You take the next pitch as it comes. And you do your damnedest to knock it out of the park.

I Call It Progress

Today’s expedition went better than yesterday’s. I sat down in the middle of the shop with my back to the door, futzed around with my iPad and read a book on and off. I tried to make eye contact with everyone I could, especially if they were pretty (is it spring again? it’s autumn, right?). I smiled whenever I succeeded in making eye contact.

When a guy sat down in the chair across from me, I smiled and said “hi”. He smiled and said “howdy” and read his football magazine. Nobody frowned and walked away, no one alerted the authorities. Everything was fine.

Also there was an absolutely stunning girl sitting in the sunniest corner of the shop. Twenty years ago I’d have been in love. Now I just feel sorry for the boys her age – there’s going to be a lot of floor-scraped chins wherever she goes.