Still Staying Good

I’m happy about something and this is it: My life hasn’t been getting any lamer. There are no days that I reflect on and think, “Those were the days…” I don’t have a kick ass career or anything, but I like the job I got at Folsom Street Coffee. They even gave me a promotion. Ahem, General manager, ahem. I’m not making heaps of money, but I’m able to get by and still have free time to do cool stuff like go on canoe trips. I talked with an old high school friend today who said that he sometimes works 90-hour weeks at his accounting firm. I nearly had an anxiety attack on his behalf. I’ll take free time over superfluous money any day. With this mentality I’m not exactly on a fast-track to the top of any ladder, but small things keep working out for me, e.g. the promotion at work. I also recently got this cool work trade/study arrangement at Om Time yoga studio. I work there a few hours a week, and they let me take yoga classes for free. Doing more yoga is making me consider becoming an instructor, but that’s a-whole-nother topic worthy of its own blog post. I’ll admit that the monotony of having the same schedule every week wears on me sometimes, but that ought to be cured by my next random opportunity. Pat was living with his dad up Sugarloaf, and their house burned down in the Fourmile fire, which is awful, but they’re going to rebuild with insurance money and hire Miles and me to help out this winter, which is cool. I’m delighted at the prospect of learning a trade. Something done with one’s hands and the fruits of one’s labor is a tangible, useful thing. In six months, I could learn skills more valuable than what I learned in five years of college (Though I weigh the value of college in more terms than just fiscal ones. I’d probably be incapable of the kind of self-reflection needed to make this blog post, were it not for the growth I underwent during those five years.) This isn’t exactly a heyday for over-educated youths, so knowing a trade is a great way to hedge my bets, should my other intellectual dreams (writing, teaching, who knows?) fall through. I bet I’m not alone in this logic. I wouldn’t be surprised if colleges see a decline in applicants within a few years. Back when I graduated high school, my impression was that I was a zero if I didn’t go to college. But by now high schoolers must be hearing about how all a bachelors degree will get you is a mediocre job and a boatload of debt, so those on the fence will probably say no thanks when the college recruiters come around.

Time marches on

Today the average temperature was six degrees lower than yesterday's. By comparison, yesterday's average temperature was only about a half a degree lower than the day before. What I'm getting at is that, relatively speaking, from my subjective point of view, it was cold today. If any one day can be marked as the start of fall, today was it.

Working in a coffee shop, I get to talk to a lot of people about a lot of things, and as mundane as it may be, weather is a common topic. Today, everyone was marveling at the onset of a new season and the passing of another. Almost without exception, everyone also commented on how quickly summer went by. People say these sort of things all the time: "Such and such just breezed right by." "I can't believe it's already blankety blank." A summer is a fixed piece of time consisting of 91 days and about 7 hours. That's how long it is. Period. But there seems to be a consensus in the world at large that this particular summer went by more quickly than expected. It's as though the collective consciousness felt time constricting around it. Maybe this isn't our imagination. Maybe there are things we don't know about time, and maybe for the last few months time, space, and the whole shebang contracted around us little sentient things, making us remark on how fast a season was progressing.

Maybe. But what's more likely is that winter spilled into spring, spring blazed quickly into summer, and summer cooled quickly into fall, making anyone with a keen eye for weather comment on the long winter, and the short spring and summer. But there probably is a lot we don't know about time too.




The sun sets on summer

Don't Let the Bedbugs Bite

There's been a bedbug scare in my building. Our neighbor to the east already moved out, and our neighbors below are on the fence. Mary Kate, whose room shared a wall with our bygone neighbors, has been getting bitten for the last couple of weeks. My room is farther away from the apparent bedbug source, and I've yet to get a bite, but I was getting concerned that they might start making forays or a full fledged exodus my way. My fears are a bit relieved now, because the whole building got sprayed and fumigated yesterday. To prepare, I stuffed all my things (clothes, books, etc.) into black trash bags and put them out in the sun to cook. Hopefully the problem is solved, because it seems like bedbugs can be a plague on your life. When you have them, everything you own, including your epidermis, becomes toxic waste. I stopped telling people about the issue, because they'd react with sympathy, then silently recoil. I think people are so afraid of bedbugs, because they're so elusive. In the two weeks that Mary Kate was getting bitten, she failed to find a single culprit, yet fresh bites appeared regularly. They're like terrorists, making anonymous attacks, and then assimilating back into the surroundings.

Yesterday when my place was getting fumigated, I couldn't help but think about the precepts I took at the vipassana retreat, one of which being not to kill. As I sat there, sipping ice tea and reflecting, thousands of tiny sentient creatures were murdered, and I was partly responsible. But I can't see how bedbugs and I can live symbiotically. They just come to feed on my flesh without bringing anything to the table. The best I can do is acknowledge their deaths, and hope that they reincarnate as something less vampiric.

From here on out

I have my own place again, and I'm paying all my bills, so I'm busy, and I think that's just the way it's going to be from here on out. Since that's the case, I simply can't and won't make plans for the future that end in: "when I have more free time." My time is right in front of me, and if none of it is free, then tough shit, enjoy whatever's filling it. I can't go to work and already be anxious to leave; I can't be in the middle of a busy week and be craving the weekend. Every moment I need to be aware and appreciative of the passage of time. I'm finding that I don't really care how fast or slow it goes by, just as long as its significance and preciousness has an impact on me. I don't want to bide my time, or think of how things could be better, because this is it. This, right now, is all there is.


On my way to work

My New [Real] Piano

Ain't she a beaut?

My new [theoretical] piano

Here is a mockup of a piano I might get. How do you think it fits?

Nail in the coffin

I read an article in the New York Times yesterday that quite nearly, almost entirely, very near completely dissuaded me from seeking a career in journalism. The article is about burnout among young journalists in the world of online media, and you can read it here

Let me pull an illustrating quote: "Young journalists who once dreamed of trotting the globe in pursuit of a story are instead shackled to their computers, where they try to eke out a fresh thought or be first to report even the smallest nugget of news--anything that will impress Google algorithms and draw readers their way."

And now that the internet is able to quantify interest by page views of a particular writer's story, some papers and magazines are paying their staff on that basis. Testifying to the stress, my friend and fellow journalism classmate Jean Spencer, who interned at the Wall Street Journal last spring, said that for the first few weeks she had a cathartic cry after each grueling day.

The article quotes a journalism teacher who says, "When my students come back to visit, they carry the exhaustion of a person who's been working for a decade, nor a couple of years."

This topic is on the high stress of internet media specifically, but almost all media is on the web now, so the exceptions are probably few. I still want to write, so my education wasn't for naught, but do I want a job like the ones in this article? Hell No.

Disconnect

Sometimes it's hard reconciling past versions of myself with my current self. It happened the other day when I tried to express an opinion I once strongly held. I was at a loss of words, and while trying to express myself I realized I hadn't even thought about that particular topic in years. I figured the opinion just needed to be dusted off and re-articulated, but not so. Numerous changes big and small in my worldview had rendered it totally null and void. I no longer had the ideas and convictions to even remember exactly what my past point of view was. I was pretty confused for a minute or two, until I figured out what had happened, and then I dropped the conversation.