All posts in: life maintenance

adventures
10 Jun 2013

a mighty weekend

FRIDAY

  • Invented some questionable vanilla-cornmeal cupcakes with a lime buttercream frosting after work.
  • Accidentally watched a hockey game at a friend’s place. I sure accidentally watch a lot of sports in this here romantic relationship.
  • Forgot to bring invented cupcakes with me. Of course.

SATURDAY

  • Ate a cupcake for breakfast.
  • Accidentally went to the Pride Parade.
  • Looked at three apartments
  • Left money and an application on one. Like all adventures in Boston real estate, crossing fingers it works out, but also hoping that maybe it doesn’t and we have to keep looking.
  • Made a domestic arrangement with The Boy – he would do all the laundry and buy all the groceries, I would make him a highly-detailed grocery-list and stay home and clean. It takes about 2-3 hours to do laundry, so that was a lot of cleaning. Good thing I had every single dish in the entire apartment to wash.
  • Did I mention that potential-new-apartment has a dishwasher? And free laundry in the building?
  • Made a broccoli salad. It was good, and I don’t even like broccoli salad.
  • Did a significant amount of wedding planning.
  • Watched the Season One finale of Game of Thrones.

SUNDAY

  • Made waffles. Second weekend in a row. I was fitted for my wedding dress two weeks ago and had it taken in a smidge. Watch me have to get it taken right back out in a month.
  • Made salted caramel brownies.  A month or so ago, I made this recipe three times in two days with no issue whatsoever. This time, I burned the caramel TWICE, sending noxious smoke into the apartment while The Boy taught a trumpet lesson in the front room. Ahem.
  • Ran 2.69 miles. Got really sweaty and exhausted.
  • Flat-ironed my hair into an oblivion and trucked out to the end of the orange line for a barbecue with some of The Boy’s teacher friends. Ate two meals, three desserts, and drank what appeared to be an entire bottle of wine. Natch.
  • Force-read the last 50 pages of a book before passing the heck out at 9 p.m.

adventures
29 Apr 2013

spring things

1. April in Boston, man. It’s a dream. The sun shows up in the morning, birds chirping, etc. The sun is still up when I get out of work. Things are getting green again, flowers are everywhere. Lovely cool breezes and sunglasses.

On Friday, we ran the Southwest Corridor park and discovered there is a secret enclave between Mass Ave and Back Bay, a brick-paved throughway lined by flowering trees where rich people play tennis and walk their dogs. A secret city garden.

Yesterday, I wore a pair of shorts. And flip-flops.

Sure, I was a bit freezing when the sun went down, but oh, I can’t resist you, Boston in April.

2. April in other parts of New England – also excellent. Two of my favorite Boston friends invited us out to Newburyport for the day to attend the Newburyport Literary Festival. Junot Diaz being his genius self in the morning, some guy who lulled us to sleep in a darkened theater talking about the history of music and pianos, and Matthew Quick (Silver Linings Playbook) and Evan Roskos (Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets) riffing on mental illness and art in the afternoon. Good food, better company. When we got home, The Boy asked why we don’t hang out with these particular friends more often – “They are funny, we always have a good time, they make me feel good.” Agreed. That is my favorite part about living here – my universally talented, hilarious, and amazing friends that I am so lucky to have met.

3. Let’s talk about cleaning. Last week I had a lot of time on my hands, so I cleaned. I cleaned every day. I cleaned until my place was about 95% spotless. I’m still experimenting with time-monitoring apps, so I can actually tell you how much time maintaining a high-level clean cost me: 30 to 90 minutes. Every day.

And now that my routine is resuming, my house, of course, looks like a pile of garbage. Does it really take 30 to 90 minutes a day, EVERY DAY, to keep my home looking like civilized adults live in it? That is a daunting prospect. That’s a lot of manual labor (especially after a long work day), and would I choose cleaning over reading? Running? Writing? Going to bed early? Hanging out with those friends I keep going on about? Going outside and enjoying April in Boston? I don’t know, I don’t know. Perhaps I am doomed to live out the rest of my days in relative filth.

Or I need to find an apartment with a dishwasher.

4. Can we also talk about iced coffee? It’s my favorite thing, and it’s almost time to start cold-brewing again. I’ve been using Pioneer Woman’s method for a few years now, but holy crap that cheesecloth drives me nuts. Anyone sitting on an iced coffee secret? I suppose I could just buy a bigger iced coffee receptacle and cut the time spent wrestling with cloth to once a month?

5. I am still doing Required Reading, but that should be over by the end of the week. I’m looking forward to dipping into something new, something shiny. I want to read a beach book. I want to read the new Sarah Dessen. I want to read Animal Vegetable Miracle again. Maybe next weekend will include a book, a picnic blanket, and an iced coffee.

goals
23 Apr 2013

things you do when you can’t do the things you do

It is hard to make any statements or judgements regarding the last seven days because, well, I am not sure that this seven days can be compared to anything else in the history of The Weeks of My Life. Or maybe the weeks of anyone’s lives, I don’t know. A holiday weekend followed shortly by a large-scale national tragedy, followed by unscheduled downtime in which I basically joined The Boy in his spring break, and a day-long, Stay-In-Your-Houses-This-Kid-Is-Armed stand-off. For good measure.

Oh, and this was also the week I didn’t read any books… or watch any TV or movies, listen to podcasts or audiobooks, or read anything substantial on the Internet beyond my emails.

Weirdest. Week. Ever.

I will confess that I did not achieve 100% abstinence. You try not watching the news or reading anything on Twitter the next time your city seems to be on the brink of descending into violent chaos. I also read about 50 pages of Janie Face to Face, which has been a trip because I was totally into Face on the Milk Carton…. when I was about TEN. And I just realized that I didn’t even read book #4.

Other than that, though, I did pretty good. And by did pretty good, I mean…

I ran a lot

The weather was gorgeous all week, and after five weeks of coercion, of “pretty please,” of running solo, The Boy is finally more into it than I am. Ran Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday again. Only one run under 2 miles. Completed Couch to 5k in just under 7 weeks. Said this phrase: “Hmm… we’ve already run 3 days out of the last 4… I know – let’s just do a nice short run into town and then buy a bottle of wine and take the bus home!”

I Instagrammed my cat a lot

What can I say? The weather’s warming up. I don’t want to say she’s cuter when it’s warm. It’s more like a different season of cute. Winter cute, snuggled up with blankets and cuddling on my chest, is ending; Summer cute, sprawling out of the floor and sleeping in spots of sun, is here.

I socialized

I know that I am a person who puts off making phone calls, doesn’t return Facebook messages, who begs off weeknight socializing nine times out of ten. This week, though, I answered my phone, I chatted with friends, I went out more than once, without thinking of a single excuse. Highly unusual. Maybe I am not as anti-social as I assumed, but really just someone adept at keeping herself busy, even when that busy-ness gets in the way of other things that are good to do (like interacting with other humans)

I did puzzles

I love puzzles. I pulled out a copy of Games Magazine and decided that in the absence of books and Internet surfing, my default “I don’t know what to do and I don’t really feel like being productive” activity would be puzzles. This was pleasantly nostalgic because I think I got my hands on my first Games Magazine in about third grade. Also, puzzles make your brain smarter. I’m not sure the same is true about Twitter.

And, I cleaned the CRAP out of my apartment.

Everything was put away, everything vacuumed, everything folded and everything scrubbed. I actively cleaned up after myself. I did the dishes every day. This was surprisingly time consuming, but that’s exactly why I was doing it.

And that’s the real take-away, I think. Usually, my days feel rigid. There are things that must be done at certain times – commuting, working, laundry, shopping, bed, etc. I can fill in the cracks with things of my choosing, but most of the time I am not really choosing them. Most of the time, I am just doing habitual things because they are habitual. Eliminating habitual things forced me to actually think about that extra time. To make conscious decisions. I didn’t feel like I was pouring sand into the cracks of an already full life. My free hours opened themselves up before me.

I could paint a picture. I could clean the kitchen. I could sit with The Boy at the kitchen table for thirty minutes after dinner, chatting. I could walk into town for some groceries, call my sister on the phone, or work on the family budget or send an overdue email. I couldn’t pick up a book or turn on the TV or do most things on the Internet, but the simple limitations opened up other options.

Not a lifestyle change, but definitely an exercise worth repeating a few times a year.

(Says the girl who broke her fast with three episodes of Switched at Birth…..)

 

books
09 Apr 2013

my many numbered days

It’s been a month since I started reading 168 Hours, and I wish I could have a nice review for you here. I can’t, because I told this guy I live with that he would like it and while I was busy working on my Dream List, he stole it from me. And took it to work with him every day to read on the train. And then it went overdue and days passed and eventually it turned up in some the car of a guy named Josh. Such is life.

Instead of reading 168 Hours, I downloaded a 168 Hours app and started conducting my own time survey, or whatever Vanderkam calls it, I can’t remember because I haven’t set eyes on the book for weeks. It’s not a good app – it’s clunky and easy to click on the wrong thing and I’m not sure what happens to your data once a week resets on Sundays – buuuuuut it’s fun. High strung Type-A fun, but judge lest ye judged.

Right now it’s 9:00 p.m. on a Tuesday. I can tell you with certainty that in the past 72 hours, I have designated my time as such:

  • 1 hour and 19 minutes cleaning my apartment. It was pretty filthy.
  • 40 minutes running errands not related to groceries.
  • 29 minutes buying groceries.
  • 29 minutes preparing dinner (thank you crock pot!!)
  • 1 hour and seven minutes eating dinner (we were watching the end of The Descendants on Sunday night, so I couldn’t eat very fast because I was crying. That isn’t even a joke)
  • 1 hour and 18 minutes  eating lunch
  • 1 hour and 43 minutes watching the season premiere of Mad Men
  • 38 minutes showering, recovering from shower, and blow drying hair
  • 25 minutes “puttering around the house”
  • 1 hour and 26 minutes “getting out the door”
  • 21 minutes waking up
  • 16 minutes  preparing for bed
  • 23 minutes running
  • 3 hours and 17 minutes commuting (most of which time was spent also reading)
  • 2 hours and 34 minutes just plain reading (most of time spend on The Tragedy Paper)
  • 2 hours and 50 minutes on creative writing pursuits
  • 3 hours and 34 minutes working on The Artist’s Way tasks
  • 13 hours and 10 minutes working
  • 1 hour and 48 minutes at the dentist
  • 2 hours and 20 minutes sitting on an “alumni panel” of a program that I am not an alumni of…
  • 24 hours and 35 minutes sleeping
  • And, 26 minutes blogging. Sorry guys.

It was probably not fun to read those numbers, but it is fun to know those numbers, to look at them, to cringe and feel proud as such. I think keeping a Time Diary is similar to keeping a Food Diary – the act of recording makes you more aware of how you spend your time, which makes you improve the way you spend your time. 25 minutes “puttering around”? That means that I actually could not think of a single category of thing that I wanted to do, that I should do. But how many more minutes would I have if I didn’t have my silly little app on the back of my mind, encouraging me to do something more… uh… categorizable? Thinking of how to categorize your time also a valuable task: like this librarian learned in cataloging class, how you sort data implies a value system. How you sort YOUR data implies YOUR value system.

The moral of this story is: who needs to read the book? Just download the app instead!

That was a joke. But seriously, where is that book???

 

life maintenance
10 Mar 2013

28

Have I mentioned that I can’t ever remember how old I am? I can’t. When there comes a time that I need to think of how old I am, I panic a little because I can’t remember if I’m the age I think I am, or the age I’m going to be. If he’s around, I’ll ask The Boy. “How old am I?” I ask. “How old are we?”

We are twenty-eight. Today, I am twenty-eight.

I’ve lost track of whether or not this feels like an “old” age or not. I am just now getting those grown-up things that real grown-ups get – a full-time job, modest financial security, a wedding and soon, a husband. It’s hard to feel “too old,” even though many folks achieve these things at 22, 23.

Also, I woke up today with a pimple. A pimple! I washed my face before bed like a diligent old-lady, and wake up with a pimple. The pimple of a 16-year-old, let me tell you.

I don’t know how old folks-who-might-still-be-young are supposed to celebrate their aging, but I just did it with food.

First, breakfast: out to the local cash-only dive for eggs, cheese, lox, sprouts, and avocado on an English muffin, with bites of The Boy’s corn bread French Toast on the side. And coffee.

Then, I made myself a birthday cake.

Then, some salmon & pasta & fancy Italian wine.

Then, Pitch Perfect, which is not a food, but who cares.

I am not that old, but I am really old; either way, it’s almost 10 p.m., so it is time for bed

 twenty seven | twenty six | twenty five | twenty four

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books
09 Mar 2013

time is on your side

If I had to make a list of the things I have spent the most hours of my life worrying, stressing, and fretting over, I think time would be the hands down, number-one, top of the list. I worry about being late. I worry about being early. I worry about not having enough time to finish assignments and work tasks before they are due. I worry about not having enough time to accomplish what I want to accomplish in my tiny, insignificant life. I actually expend time thinking about how I don’t have enough time. This makes zero sense.

This is all part of the perfectionist Cycle of Self-Hatred, where you set very high standards for the way you conduct your life and then beat yourself up when you aren’t “on” 100% of the time. Even though the reason you might not be “on” 100% of the time is because you are full of anxiety because of said high standards.

The cycle. I’ve been mired in it for a few weeks now. I’m still mired in it, I guess, maybe for life, but it’s been bad these last weeks of winter where I am feeling cooped up and carbed up and it’s too cold to clean my apartment much think complex, coherent thoughts. I am spending my time worrying and soothing my worry-brain with mindless Internet and then feeling crummy about wasting so much time.

Yesterday I picked up Laura Vanderkam’s 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think (on a recommendation from the reliably awesome Janssen of Everyday Reading. I’m only a few chapters in, but man, but as much as I hate the axiom “Right Book At The Right Time yadda yadda yadda,” well, shit, here I am.

In case you couldn’t tell, I am a huge sucker for nonfiction that captures conventional wisdom in a straightforward manner. Blame Michael Pollan – I read In Defense of Food in 2010 was taken to my knees. Nonfiction that takes an everyday concept – food, time, whatever –  and reminds you of what you know about it, in your bones, as a human. That you shouldn’t eat food that has ingredients in it that you don’t know what they are. That you shouldn’t spend time on activities that don’t give you pleasure or reward. Then, they reveal some secrets you probably didn’t know – that skim milk is full of additives to make it taste more milky, that the average American chronically underestimates the amount of free time they have in any given day.

And then, the good stuff –  little mind/life tweaks to help get you back on track to feeling normal. Some simple ideas to get your body and brain back on the right track, out of the cycle. Not feeling like a manic perfectionist or a yo-yo dieter or a worried lump of indecision who is surely going to die before she ever gets the chance to do X, Y, or Z. Just normal.

Here are some Time Tips from the few pages I’ve read of 168 Hours. I suspect that at least 50% of you who read this will say “yeah, duh, everyone knows that,” but the other half of you are probably high strung nutsos like myself who tend to forget the obvious under duress. So this is for you.

And for me, in five days, when I forget everything useful I’ve learned in life and succumb to the cycle.

  • You have 168 hours to kill in a week. Even if you sleep 8 hours a week and work 40 hours a week, that is more than enough time to do some stuff. Whatever that stuff is that you decide you want to do. If you don’t believe me, schedule out your next week, fifteen minutes at a time, and see how hard it is to fill the slots. Or, take Vanderkam’s advice and do the reverse: chart out your hours for a week – jot down when you do what – and then take a good hard look at your data.
  • I repeat: You have enough time. (See also: Daring Greatly)
  • Okay, so you have enough time, but you don’t know what to do with that time. I mean, you have some ideas of what you should be doing, what you want to accomplish, but that doesn’t lead to anything you are going to do instead of surfing the internet. Vanderkam’s suggestion to list 100 Things You Want to Do In Your Life is a good place to start, especially because you don’t frame it as a series of goals. This isn’t a Life List or a 101 in 1001 days or a 30 before 30; it’s just you and a piece of notebook paper and 100 Things You Might Like. You might hate them all, but that’s okay, and it’s a good place to start.
  • If you’re still feeling stymied, think about what you like to do and what you are good at. Do those things, even if those things are “sorting the sock drawer” and “reblogging pictures of cats for your friends.” Start your dreams from where you are and where you’ve been.
  • Did I tell you that you have enough time?
  • You meaning me.

 

 

 

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life maintenance
07 Mar 2013

high school high

High school is on my mind lately. Maybe because I was actually *in* my high school just a few weeks ago. Maybe because I read a lot of YA so I have high school on the brain more than most. Maybe because yes, my ten year high school reunion is this year. I will not be able to attend, but don’t worry: last night I dreamed the entire thing, start to finish. It was in the school cafeteria, girls were wearing prom dresses, and my parents were there singing in some kind of a cappella group.
See that little red sign on the right-hand wall? My locker was just past that for three years. After the first year, I noticed that it didn’t actually lock, so I yanked it open every day without doing the combination. A few lockers down was my friend Kevin. His locker had a large hole in the bottom through which you could spy on a classroom. One afternoon Kevin stuck his leg down there and we locked him inside, because he was over six foot and about 120 pounds and he wanted to see if he could do it.
There was a day that I went to my locker after school was out and there was a boy there waiting for me. This was a boy with whom I exchanged smiles and waves in the hallway for months – he was a Senior, the drum major, and way too cute for me. And there he was, waiting for me at my locker.
He’d seen me dancing with another guy at the Winter Snowball. He wanted to know if we were dating. If he’d been waiting at my locker the day before the dance, the answer would have been no. Afterwards, the answer was “kind of.” I was with the other guy, the guy I danced with, for the rest of my days at that high school. My life went in one direction, not the other. In fact, my life went in plenty of directions that you couldn’t have predicted if you were reading about High School Jessica in her own YA novel, her own really boring Teen movie. High School Jessica skipped AP English took extra science classes and math, all the way through Calculus. Slightly Older High School Jessica thought she would get a journalism degree.
But then again, I also make a living dealing with the same books that inspired debates with my English teacher. I marched toward my persistent high school passion as a full-grown adult, and I still read books set in high school. I still think about my high school boyfriends (and almost boyfriends) more than is probably necessary.
Things change, things stay the same, etc.
(That does not mean I am sad about not being able to attend my high school reunion. No, no, no, the horrors. I can’t even manage to spend an hour in the auditorium watching my sister play the oboe without making posts like this no THANK YOU.)

 

books
01 Mar 2013

march

1. Today is the first day of March. March means my birthday (a holiday I usually like), St. Patrick’s Day (a holiday I usually hate), some basketball, there is some sun out when I get out of work at 5 p.m., and we all hold a sliver of hope that maybe, MAYBE the snow and freezing air and stuff is done with for the year. Just maybe.

2. If it’s light out after 5 p.m. and it’s not freezing or snowing, that means It Is Time To Start Running Again. Super excited! I am thinking of doing the Couch to 5k again because I find it much easier to get excited about  exercise when it’s only 20 minutes and I get to walk half of the minutes.

3. I am kind of stuck in a little reading rut. I haven’t finished a book in a week, which means I’ve been reading the same handful of books for at LEAST a week, most of them more. Boring. Boo.

How did I get so reading-impatient? How did my attention span become so small?

Oh wait, grad school.

4. Did I mention my birthday? Did I mention that I am old? So, so, so old. So old that this past week, my 10 year high school reunion became a thing on Facebook, and people that I thought I had completely forgotten and did not care about are making little red boxes pop up on my notifications and wow, I am old. If we could just refrain from taking about a 10 year college a cappella group reunion for a moment that would be great…. oh wait, that happened yesterday. Suddenly having urges to delete my Facebook account.

5. March means it is time to start looking for a new place to live. This is exciting (yay! a fancy new apartment! or at least one with a shower head that is taller than my own head!) but horrible. Mostly horrible. I’m angsting about leaving my neighborhood – I like it, but finding a place we can afford that has reasonable amenities is difficult. I try to get hyped up about another neighborhood, which is supposedly up-and-coming, so I Google it, of course, limit my results to posts in the past year… and find a bunch of articles about how 5 women got robbed at gunpoint near the T station IN THE PAST TWO WEEKS. Gaaaaaaah.

6. March also means I am going to two comedy shows. One is that rescheduled WTF podcast… and one is Nikki Glaser, of my favorite podcast, and it’s tonight! And it’s being taped for Comedy Central! And it’s free! Let’s stop being sick and melancholy and get excited about March! And also get dressed, because it’s morning and that’s what you do. Especially if you might be on TV later

 

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life maintenance
26 Feb 2013

a plague upon your house

So I have been sick for a few days. Actually, I have been sick for most of 2013. I was well for a week or so earlier in the month, but who can really tell. Memories are fleeting; coughs, persistent.

There is probably nothing less interesting than reading about someone’s physical maladies, especially when they are stricken with the commonest of colds, but I just really can’t do much of anything beyond the basics: haul myself out of bed, haul myself to work, pour coffee in, leave piles of stuff all over the couch. I can’t even read, really: my eyes get a little blurry after a few minutes. I’m using that excuse for why I can’t put my laundry away, too: I can barely see my dresser drawers.

I’m not even that sick, but I think the virus has gone directly to my brain. My neurons are slow. I’m not sleeping well. Someone I share a bedroom with is snoring. Someone else I share a bedroom with woke me up last night at 2 a.m. with ten consecutive kitty sneezes. It’s just a sad sneezy time over here. I might need a minute to recover. Read amongst yourselves.

books
15 Feb 2013

look out, jackson-town

Tomorrow, I leave for Jackson.

Isn’t it fun when there is a song that describes exactly what you are about to do with your life? Ask me about the time my sister and I took a train to Chicago and played Sufjan Stevens on our speakers, for the benefit of all of our fellow passengers. Actually, you don’t have to ask because that was pretty much it.

Speaking of my sister, my sister called me last night and said, “I wanted to tell you about this book I can’t put down. It’s called Seraphina.”

Speaking of my other sister, she is going to pick me up from the airport tomorrow!

Speaking of my other-other sister, there is probably nothing I love more than looking at her Tumblr.

I miss them. I missed Thanksgiving and Christmas and I haven’t been home since July. I’m going to read some books on the plane. I’m going to pretend like I’m not making a thousand wedding decisions that are currently wiring my jaw shut, or traveling by air, or that my trip isn’t desperately short, or that I’m leaving Peach here with minimal human interaction, or that I didn’t buy my sister a birthday gift yet, or that my review is not done, or that we didn’t do laundry because of the storm so I will be arriving in Michigan slightly smelly and throwing my suitcase directly into the wash.

None of that. Happy trip fun times! Sisters! Mommy! Daddy! Corgis! Vacation days! Plane books! I’m thinking Aristotle, Dante, and Brene Brown.

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