every walk is a sort of crusade
Saturday morning I swam for the first time in over a month (all the pools in town close over the holidays). The first thing I did when I got home was make a shake, a sandwich, and finish all of the leftovers from the previous night’s dinner.
Then I sat down to work. But instead I fell asleep.
I keep thinking about that play, Our Town, I remember we did it at my high school and at the end of it…you know, the person dies and they get to kind of revisit…it’s a little bit like It’s A Wonderful Life, it’s the same thing. They get to look at their life and they miss eating breakfast, you know, they miss seeing their sister walk to school. And you start to realize it’s just the minutiae of life that’s wonderful. We think that being a Maverick or being a big shot or winning this prize or having these significant … moments, whether it be a wedding or an achievement, a prom, a party, or whatever it is, the Oscars, these things, we think that they’re going to be the good stuff. And the good stuff is like waking up in the morning. The good stuff is the stuff that’s for free, it always is. And that’s what I mean when I say ‘wax the corny’, but there’s that line, I forget who said it, ‘the secret to life is enjoying the passing of time’. To me that is essentially…if I had to do Boyhood in a pithy little statement, that really is it.
~Ethan Hawke, “waxing the corny” on when people ask him what the movie Boyhood is about and why it is so moving (Nerdist Podcast 625)
The lessons learned over 10+ days of meditating (I was with the grampies last week, meditation wasn’t happening there) are less of the altered-world-view type, more practical. But they’re still lessons.
On the radio the other day they played Mozart’s Piano Concerto 21 and mentioned that there was a study done somewhere (Sweden? Switzerland? I couldn’t find it) that concluded that women who listened to this specific concerto during lamaze classes and while in labor had a much more pleasant experience giving birth (how they prove this I have no idea). But interesting concept.
So today, I decided to give it a try. Not having a baby, but since I was struggling to produce any meaningful work, I thought listening to Concerto 21 might help me birth out some good results.
So far: not working. But you did get this post. You can thank Mozart and KUSC for that.
Being back in California has been great. Adjusting to this new life of part-time daycare, working from home, Paul always gone: less great. I’ve struggled to get into a groove and spent a lot of the past four months feeling exceptionally tired and stressed, like I was spinning my wheels.
I’ve never been big on New Years resolutions, but there is something nice about the beginning of a new year and a clean start. So I decided to step back and evaluate: what can I change? Starting from the top…of the day.
Mornings, to me, have always set the tone for the rest of the day. They are also one of the few windows during which I have time to myself. And I get to choose how to use it.
In 2014 Paul started his intern year, and I started actually adhering to my own rule about not running in the dark alone (especially with a kid in tow). This threw a monkey wrench into my previous schedule of early morning runs or swims.
So instead, I’ve been getting up around the time that Paul walks out the front door (at 4:45…yes, seriously, sucks to be him) and squeezing in some work before the Kraken arises.
It’s great because I get work done. It sucks because by 7am I feel lazy and drained, have already spent over 2 hours staring at a screen, had 2 cups of coffee, and am usually still in my PJs. Apparently 20 years of voluntarily subjecting myself to various forms of physical and psychological torture before the sun comes up is a special kind of masochistic behavior that is hard to de-program. Because slow mornings make me feel lethargic and crappy and like I want to go back to bed. All day long.
So I started there. I decided to change my mornings.
First up: movement.
Despite my contentious history with Lululemon, I’ve loved doing yoga the past few years (WHATTUP PEACOCK). But I cannot afford to pay $15 per yoga class right now.
As someone who still can’t touch her toes, I’ve always been skeptical abut the value I would derive from instructional yoga DVDs. But I decided if I was serious about this then I had to risk it. So I sucked it up and spent $3 on the Pocket Yoga app. Five different types of workouts, three options for duration, difficulty, and environment for each. Good place to start.
Second: peace of mind.
My father has been on my case for years…YEARS (like almost a decade)…about meditating. I know it wouldn’t hurt to slow down and be more mindful. I also know that as soon as someone tells me I need to do something for my own good, I will refuse to do that thing.
After 7 years my father finally gave up on trying to convince me to meditate, so I finally started to seriously consider it. But every time I actually tried to sit down and do it I had trouble starting.
Enter Headspace: the super hot meditation app that everyone and their mother is talking about. 10 minutes of guided meditation first thing in the morning. Turns out the guidance, for me, is very helpful. I’m still on the 10 day free trial, so we’ll see if I’m ready to buck up and pay money by the end of this.
SO! New morning routine, as of last week:
It’s not the normal cardio extravaganza that I’m used to, the risk that she will wake up and I won’t be able to do a complete yoga sesh exists (and has happened once), and I realize that an n of 7 is too low to reach any sort of real conclusion, but so far my days have been better. I’m diggin it.
To be continued.
Hours of fun.
Happy new year!
Christmas is done, time for resolutions and new levels of productivity and cleaning up the diet after 2 months of figgy pudding and mashed potatoes and See’s Candies.
…and then, three days before New Years, I found out that I’m not going to be able to work out for 2 weeks due to a minor health issue (long story, I’m fine.) Woe is me, time to eat half a pumpkin pie. But after that it was TIME FOR CHANGE. Cleanse the body! Get ahead on work!
…but there are a lot of leftovers the week between Christmas and New Years. And a Breaking Bad marathon. January 1st is a better start date anyway.
…until a trip to Vons for diaper cream and tortillas on New Years Eve (stocking up for a CRAZY night) resulted in me coming home with a one pound bag of Red Vines. Which I am on track to polish off, by myself, in just under 2 days.
So as I sit here on the couch with the first day of the new year already behind us, eating red vines and drinking left over champagne, watching I Love You Man…here’s to better habits in 2015. We can do this. Together.
Starting tomorrow.
foggy smoggy view of century city
Monday I had a bad day. If I had to rank them, it would be up there with one of the worst days of 2014. Mid-afternoon I decided I needed to move, so I took Spike up to Runyon Canyon (one of the perks of working from home).
It was nice, the views were cool, no celebrity sightings (boo). I was still kind of in a mood on the way home.
Then, while stopped at a light, I glanced down and saw that the car in front of me had a bumper sticker that said, “Keep our planet clean. It’s not Uranus.”
…and my day got better.
Have a great Christmas.
I just don’t even know what to do. The tomatoes are taking over not just the garden but that entire section of yard. That sad little plant you see hanging out of the garden box on the bottom right? Those are our (previously huge) basil plants. The planter to the right has also been taken over by tomato vines.
And the crazy thing is, THERE ARE LIKE 2 TOMATOES IN THAT MESS. How???
Marsha showed up last week and when I showed her the first thing she said was, “Oh yeah, it looks like there might be too much nitrogen in the soil so it’s not flowering.”
What.
Turns out, I should never doubt what Marsha says when it comes to gardening. Via SFgate gardening section:
Since tomatoes hate imbalances in soil nutrients, they are prime indicators in the garden when any deficiencies or excesses exist. Adding an overabundance of nitrogen fertilizer can cause abiotic disorders in your tomato crop. …
Perhaps the best indication that a tomato bed contains too much nitrogen occurs when the plants produce lush foliage but little or no fruit. … Besides fostering heavy leaf coverage, extra nitrogen causes vines to grow to great lengths with few tomatoes to support.
Exactly.
Those white ropes you see in the picture? A whole system Paul rigged to hold the plants up because the vines were so huge and heavy. It didn’t work.
We could add bonemeal or colloidal phosphate to the soil to balance the nitrogen content…but let’s be real. That would mean I’d have to go out and find those things and figure out how much to put where and blah blah blah. We’ll probably just pull everything out and start from scratch.
So in addition to no tomatoes, we also managed to shade or push out any other plants in the garden. All of our squashes have been eaten or rotted away before they were ripe. We got about three tomatoes, a handful of peppers, and one cucumber. Oh, but we did get a ton of basil.
Moral of the story: don’t over fertilize your tomatoes early on, and watch for these symptoms so you can nip them in the bud. Literally.
…and thus concludes Garden Flop 2014.
Running isn’t about what distances you’ve raced, or even if you’ve done a race. … Not enough of us are talking about what a holistic sport it is, or should be. It’s about staying fit and pushing yourself to achieve and surpass goals, sure; but it’s also about personal and spiritual growth, creativity, mental clarity, and emotional stability. I find these things in running. Even if I can only do a couple miles at 10-minute pace.
~Jamie Quatro, author & runner, from an interview in this month’s Runner’s World
Rambulatory Ambulatory 