Breaking cleanly from the starting gate

Everyone who is anyone knows that I’ve been reading books about horse racing lately; therefore, I feel it is worth a blog post to advertise the fact that I’m stopping. I know that it’s shocking and that I’ve devoted miles and miles of cyberspace to praising horse books, but I think I finally managed to OD on horse-related non-fiction. At least, that’s what I was thinking when I woke up repeatedly last night from horse-related nightmares.

Now, to be fair not all of my nightmares last night were about horse racing. Some of them were about work and some of them were about some asshole stealing both of the bumpers off of my car. Most of them, however, were about horse racing. I’m not even exactly sure how they were about horse racing; I only know that I kept waking up in a panic, concerned over paddock boots and “break clean” from the starter gate. To make matters worse I was in that hazy intermediate state of coherence and kept having to reassure my soggy mind that there was no part of my life that resembled a horse race.

The terrible thing is that I was on such a g.d. roll with reading horse books. In the last two weeks I’d swept through three, one on Secretariat, one on Seabiscuit, and another on Ruffian. I started a book on Man o’ War last night and I fell asleep reading it. In hindsight I think it was the book on Ruffian that really did me in though…There was a lot about riding towards the light with shattered ankle bones toward the end.

Anyway, this has developed into a very belated and boring post so I’ll stop while I’m still ahead (or at least not that far behind). I’m going to retire with some very tame literature this evening – I’m thinking something about the prairie at about the 5th grade reading level. Any book that mentions the use of sunbonnets to preserve a racially-charged paleness of the skin is like a sedative to me.

I'm sure pretty I've never washed a window

I am trying to write and I find myself very distracted by the idea that we might be getting a house sometime soon. It’s not for certain; in all honesty it’s not even all that likely. But it is a possibility and I’m the kind of person who finds possibilities very distracting. (As an aside I’m also having trouble coming up with something to write about that doesn’t center on houses and nostalgia; I have a hunch that I should be reflecting more on the world at large instead of thinking about chickens and escrow.)

I was writing recently about how I never expected to be the kind of person who would buy a house. First and most dramatically, I never expected to be able to afford to buy a house and without the fortuitous (ha!) explosion of the market, I never would have in this sunny state. Secondly, I figured that house buying was for squares with, like, kids and Precious Moments figurines. As I’m light-years away from anything so domestic, I didn’t think that buying a house was in the cards.

But here’s the thing: I’ve always been obsessed with houses. I have that misguided impression that the coolness of your living situation rubs off on you and you must strive to find a home that expresses your personality. This is total crap, I know; the kind of emotional sloppiness that sends droves of post-collegiate scoundrels wandering towards the east coast each year. It’s shallow (and we’ve been over my profound shallowness before) to think that your house has a bearing on your personal worth and that there can’t be perfectly decent human beings living in luxury condos. That said, I’m not in favor of settling.

I’m of the opinion that people shouldn’t settle and they shouldn’t buy houses for their alarming re-sale value. Everyone should get really teary eyed over their house; they should covet it and clean it and not foreclose on it even when that seems sensible. Obviously I’m feeling a bit scattered and emotional at the moment and I do believe that housing decisions should be made with the purest clarity of mind and the driest pragmatism. But after you’ve coolly and cleanly assessed your personal worth and your dividends and your credit score, you should probably gush a little bit. If you are using the words “starter house” and not gushing, you probably should stick to the emotionally stagnant world of renting.

A final thought on this topic and then I’ll leave it for the time being. I don’t think that I ever imagined that I would be old enough to buy a house. And believe me, I’m not old. I’m youthful and snooty bartenders in fancy restaurants card me to the point of rudeness. I suppose I’ve always thought of houses as a fixture of matriarchy – the family seat in the old South and all that nonsense. A home means legitimacy as an adult; it means buying a Christmas tree, cleaning out gutters and washing the windows. It means staying in one place for a long, long time.

It’s disconcerting to think that I might have my own family seat for my two-person-one-dog family. And by disconcerting I mean pleasant and absolutely terrifying.

Hail to otters and others

I have been meaning to write something about what it means to be a person who has stationary (a tangent provoked by receiving a letter from a friend who has both stationary and a business card), but I had something of a revelation while checking my email a few hour ago and I am always willing to put a more immediate rant in front of one that’ll keep. I will also take this moment to note that I haven’t been posting with my usual hell-bent regularity, and to pretend that you’ve noticed. I’ve been busy; I’ve had a recent change in occupation and though I wrote a few things about it last week I decided that they were too dreary and self-reflective for this venue. This, obviously, is a fun blog. If it was a sad blog it would be on Deviant Art and have some dragon background. (Is even typing the title Deviant Art dating me? I think so.)

Anyway, it occurred to me while I was checking my email that I am the worst multitasker of all time. I’m expecting a couple of emails, and I thought (wrongly) that I could just pull up the email and shoot around a couple of messages while still working on an essay. But I couldn’t move forward with one until I was finished with the other – in this case until I had bantered back and forth with a few people, sent off a couple of link to the houses that we’ve bid on, and with the sudden realization that it had been 20 minutes, signed violently off.

This probably isn’t that surprising to those of you who know me personally to be the sort of person who becomes freakishly overwhelmed at the drop of a hat, but as usual, I was shocked. I thought of all of the time that I had spent multitasking in my life – in college when I would never shut down my AIM window, all of the reading that I’ve done while eating dinner and at stoplights, and the rude but cost-effective habit I have of reading my email while on the phone.

I realized, thinking of these instances, that in multitasking I was probably doing a really crap job at both tasks. That’s really depressing. It is depressing to think that you’ve done bad work in the name of efficiency or boredom, and to realize that you might be one of those post-internet zombies who needs two forms of input to stay happy. I hate the idea that I might be that sort of zombie, the kind of person who is always mentally reviewing other options and checking their messages under the table.

This is, of course, related to other recent discussions about the ways that prolonged internet use can really limit a person’s ability to sustain interest over time. We lose our attention-spans and we gain the ability to see a different picture of an otter every day of the year. Don’t get me wrong, fellas, I still love the internet and all of its glory. Hail to blogs and to free information and all that. Yee-haw for Twitter.

But sometimes even I get a little creeped out by the way that a person like me, a person who rarely picks up their circa-1996 cell phone, can get the idea that they are a great multitasker. Multitasking is assumed now, as a character trait and as a habit and we never stop to assess our actual aptitude for it. Fortunately (or unfortunately), I’m a unitasker, hardcoredly.

Friendly failure

Today I tried to type 16 pages and only wrote 7. That is a really crap result to what might turn out to be a very useful experiment. It is also the reason that this post is going to be so enormously boring, since that is about 4 times my daily average in word count.

Lessons learned today in this attempt:

1. My average daily work count might be too low. Only letting this mess sit and then examining it will tell.

2. Inside of people, at the point passed 2,000 words without a set fictional topic, there is only sadness. And ironically, I find this very depressing. I would like to think that deep in side of me there is resilience and a secret store of ass-kicking awesomeness, but I am pretty sure there is just a wealth of sadness. Stupid g.d. emo predisposition.

3. At some point I thought to myself that I would like to write a bunch of profiles on the freaks that I have known. Not the honest-to-goodness freaks that end up institutionalized or living off the government but the everyday subtle freaks. Because it seems to me that I know a lot of hilarious disturbed characters. Unfortunately, I think that that falls under libel or something so don’t look forward to seeing a brilliant expose of coworkers, ex-roommates and my favorite waitress at Applebee’s here.

4. Finally, I want to note that this brain exhaustion is very welcome. I worry a lot that because I am not really tired that I haven’t done anything all day. And this day, which went by in a blur, I don’t have to worry about that.

Now to find out whether 7 single-spaced pages can be pushed to16 pages with double spacing. (P.S.: I know that it can’t. I did college and all of that crap.)

red-flag jerk vocab

I was driving home in the early (the earliest: 12:30) hours of the morning this morning, rocking out to my trademark early-70s jams and it occurred to me that I haven’t been out driving that late in a long while. Okay, well that is not strictly true. I have been out after midnight plenty of times lately, but only when in the glamorous role of designated driver and never by my lonesome. The empty freeway and the Billy Joel reminded me of the fact that once, not so long ago, driving somewhere alone at night would have been notable – I am miraculously antisocial, don’t forget – but wouldn’t have been cause for reflection.

So, I have a couple of notes on this topic and I’m sorry if one of them requires me to say “post-collegiate” and the other one requires me to say “co-dependent,” but I am going to muddle through despite any red-flag asshole vocab. When I was driving last night I was thinking about how I am really passive in the social sense (and the professional/economic/picking-what-to-eat sense) and since moving into the soul-suck suburbs to pursue my soul-suck (ex)career I haven’t been making much of an effort to be social. Part of this has to do with the fact that there isn’t much of a youthful professional demographic here, and that the existing youthful professionals are a little perplexed by a person who quit their professional job to be a shoe salesman.

It also has to do with my strange hatred for my cell phone that developed at some point, causing me to detest using or answering it. But mainly I think the problem is not being a socially proactive person partially because I live an hour away from everyone I know, and also because I live with a person who is very convenient receptacle for all of my socializing needs.

Life, I think, is very hard for post-collegiate co-dependent sorts.

Lofty Aims (and not the messenger)

Today I was writing on the topic of romantic preoccupations and the way that they are used to shield us from actually getting any work done and I had a most unpleasant realization. I was typing cheerfully, tongue-in-cheek, brutalizing the foolish ideas that I held as a youngster about artistic work and it occurred to me that I had just finished a romantic shielding ritual of my own.

I was about to sit down at my computer (after several little procrastination techniques: g-chatting with the b.f., reading the news, orange juice) when I reached, almost subconsciously, to grab a book of essays that I had left on the table and quickly finished the one that I was reading. This was only a lapse of about 15 minutes but I find it very unnerving in hindsight and so will discuss the miniscule event at length. Here I am, writing about the way the way that I used to fixate on finished-product fantasies to avoid the terrible fear of getting started on anything, and I actually put off working on my essay by reading another essay – a finished essay by a skilled writer. That is a finished-product fixation if I’ve ever heard one.

So what is the point of this diatribe? Mostly I am writing it to blow off the steam accumulated as a resulting of finding that although I am writing about the foolish habits of myself in tones of haughty self realization, I am exhibiting the same unproductive behaviors. The problem with the finished-product fixation, of course, is that you never start anything and therefore you never realize the finished product that you have long fantasized about. It’s a technique for eluding the obnoxious parts of reality, the possibility of failure and ect.

I read an article on grit once (Is it a learned trait? All of the richest people in the world have grit in abundance!) and I’m pretty sure that I don’t have it. I’m an alright person; I have somewhat lofty aims and a good enough work ethic when I work for someone else but I’m not amazingly ambitious or driven. Because of this I have to be on my guard against unproductive habits like the finish-product fixation.

And to close, something entertaining, because I’m sure no one clicked on this link in hopes of seeing my personal procrastinator demons laid bare. My main squeeze and I hung up a clothesline in our kitchen because we want to feel like a early 20th century immigrant couple living in a tenement apartment. Lofty aims, indeed.