Be Dynamic and Change
To say I’m a structured individual is honest but would also be a potential misunderstanding. Yes, if it’s a Monday, I can tell you exactly where I will be at 6:45 PM. Same thing for every other work day. On the weekends, it is more of a crap shoot, but in general, I live a structured life. Now, I do this for a clear and concise reason; I’ve got too much shit on my plate and I gotta gobble it all down. In order to be a successful writer, I believe I should be working roughly forty hours a week on some sort of writing activity. When you calculate the amount of time available in a week, you quickly learn that two full time jobs is extremely difficult to manage (throw in the fact that my occupation requires me to work about fifty hours a week, and the timeline gets tighter).
For example, if we assume 7 hours of sleep a night, with an hour to get ready and fall asleep, you have a 16 hour day. Now, rip out 8 hours for work, tear off 20-40 minutes for the commute (round up to an hour for easy math), don’t forget cooking time, work out time, or cleaning the apartment/dishes, and now remove 40 hours for your other fulltime job, carry the one, and you end up with 8 hours of time to do something else. In order to justify reading in my schedule, I count it against my 40 hours a week of writing (I am researching the competition?). So, maintaining a highly structured life is a necessity.
Now, it is important to understand that I structure my world but I don’t let the structure dictate my life. I allow social obligations to override my plan.
I wrote the following three paragraphs months ago. Since then, I’ve changed my ritual again – I do less journaling but I’ve maximized my time for fiction writing (who cares about their own life anyway) and re-added morning reading to my schedule (part of my previous previous morning ritual). So if you want to know my old schedule, take a gander below.
I have an expensive morning ritual. I wake up, drink a water, shower, take my lunch and laptop down to the car, and then stop on my way into work and have an espresso. Now, I have a few things I do without caring about the ramifications – this is one of them. It is costly since I do it every day, but I do it because it grounds myself. It forces me to get out of bed when I don’t want to. I’ve used it to trick myself into thinking I have to be at a meeting (but really I am grabbing an espresso, journaling, and then driving to work).
Personally, I find it weird that our society treats coffee like a necessity. I believe if you are spending the money to drink an expensive coffee, you should sit your ass down and enjoy it at the café. Have a conversation with the baristas, see how their day is going (and truly give a shit), and then maybe read a short article/journal. Ever since I started this ritual, I began to slide out of my slump, I began working out again, and wrote a shit load of short stories while editing my old manuscripts with a new vigor.
As such, enjoy your rituals and use them to maintain your drive. Mine is actually cheap compared to other people’s habits. The only issue, watch out for feelings. Interacting with someone weekly and bonding with them on a personal level could compromise the safe place you’ve built – but I am not talking from experience or anything because my pigheadness will never let me stop writing even if the person I like is standing a foot from me as I write this post.
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Haiku – On Rare Events
warm – soft vegetation
through the ground cover – a mushroom
earth quakes – excitement
~Theodore Maestranzi
Read MoreThe Twelve Brothers
“And now a great fire was lighted in the courtyard in which she was to be burnt, and the King stood above at the window and looked on with tearful eyes, because he still loved her so much. And when she was bound fast so the stake, and the fire was licking at her clothes with its red tongue, the last instant of the seven years expired. Then a whirring sound was heard in the air, and twelve ravens came flying towards the place, and sank downwards, and when they touched the earth they were her twelve brothers, whom she had saved. They tore the fire asunder, extinguished the flames, set their dear sister free, and kissed and embraced her. And now as she dared to open her mouth and speak, she told the King why she had been dumb, and had never laughed. The King rejoiced when he heard that she was innocent, and they all lived in great unity until their death. The wicked stepmother was taken before the judge, and put into a barrel filled with boiling, oil and venomous snakes, and died an evil death.
~Brothers Grimm
I’ve noticed an ongoing theme and I believe it will continue throughout many of these fables – blood is thicker than water. Those who are family by blood are trustworthy. Perhaps, the trope with the stepmother being a villain began at this point, maybe, it was forged into our societies collective consciousness by this single short story. For, this entire short story you see the brothers and their sister work together to survive and make sacrifices for one another – their love is pure and based on an invisible bond (even the quote above calls this out: “The King rejoiced when he heard that she was innocent.” because she could have talked at any point and saved herself by dooming her brothers). Even though the king married her out of love decided to kill her at the stepmother’s behest (not sure if the stepmother is the king’s mom or not, but if she is, then the king chose blood over love). In the end, she gets her comeuppance (see the last line of the quote above). But, while this over arching theme/moral is great, I need to analyze it from a hero/villain moral standpoint. [Click “Read More” to see the more detailed analysis]
Read MoreIt’s All Natural – Arsenic
If you have stuck around this long, you obviously know my feelings towards business and marketing terms. So, if you are surprised here – that’s on you. There are laws in place to protect a consumer from being taken advantage by false advertising. But there are various ways to avoid breeching those laws… like creating a product called: “REAL CHEESE!”. Now if you are super sneaky, you can call the new product (created from pure chemicals and formulated in a lab) “NATURAL REAL CHEESE!”. As a product, and having it trademarked, you can do whatever you want with the term. Derived from soy beans and decomposing plant farts, doesn’t matter, the product is still “NATURAL REAL CHEESE!” and it can be sold as vegan! Imagine that, a cheese product that is vegan. Then there is the vegetarian option: “NATURAL REAL CHEESE!!” that is made from human farts, soy beans, and goat urine – yummmmmy!
My point is quite simple, though I meandered from my original topic, and that is anything can be called natural. In the above case, I can use law to generate an appealing product by naming it one thing even if it is creating from human shit. By creating a legal name for the product, I force you to only look at the surface level and see: real cheese. Not only that, I throw in natural to make you think that it was derived from a natural process like fermentation. This isn’t the case, the process is manufacturing, but the ingredients are natural.
However, the clear issue is the concept of natural. Everything is natural. But I can promise you would have certain feelings to the difference between a strawberry from the side of a mountain versus one grown in a test tube – yet both are natural (since atoms/elements/quarks are all natural).
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