Brain Dump: November

I don’t love November.

Traditionally, it’s a busy month for me, one laden with stress and anxiety. 2011’s version is proving to be no different.

This year’s November started off with a freak Halloween snowstorm, which left us without power for five days and nineteen hours. Let me tell you, no suburban plight brings you closer to moral collapse than sitting in the dark for six days with nothing but your thoughts, particularly when those thoughts center on the fact that you broke up with your girlfriend a week before your one-year anniversary. That sucks no matter who you are.

November also happens to be NaNoWriMo, short for National Novel Writing Month, in which participants attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. I’ve completed NaNoWriMo twice, but this year I find myself languishing with little time, energy, or motivation to produce anything other than emotional brain vomit: a nonsensical stream-of-consciousness rant largely concerning the aforementioned romance issue. At this point, I’m many thousands of words behind schedule, and there’s a good chance it’s not going to get done, which disappoints me. I’m not one to half-ass something.

I also haven’t felt like much of a writer lately regarding this website, which has resulted in increased link posting and far fewer long-form articles than I’d like. This is my fourth month writing QLE, so I guess a little slump is inevitable once the initial novelty wears off, but it still disappoints me that the site isn’t operating at a level I’m happy with.

November is also the month of our annual tournament in Old Sturbridge, Massachusetts, which attracts over 500 competitors every year. I’ve never loved competing. It stresses out my shy and introverted side, and my heart rate increases just thinking about it. I’m much more used to competing now than when I was younger, and I have to do it to set a good example for the students, but it remains a source of dread nevertheless.

And of course, underlying these issues are the usual drags: student loans are looming, the days are growing shorter and colder, and my thesis has taken a back seat to the above grievances.

However.

Times like these are when our perspective becomes most important. We may not be able to control the things that happen to us, or the obligations we have to go through, but we can control how our mind deals with them. Making it through to the other side comes down to two things: focusing on the positive, and reframing the negative so it doesn’t seem so bad.

For every stressor, annoyance, and bummer November throws at me, there are many, if not more, things to be thankful for and happy about. It is the month of Thanksgiving, after all.

For example, I love my Kindle. Thanks to this little $79 guy (and said power outage), I was able to rip through all 656 pages of the Steve Jobs biography in about two weeks. Finishing a big book like that was tremendously satisfying and gave me a feeling of accomplishment I haven’t had in a long time. I’ve now moved on to Stephen King’s memoir, On Writing, and I’m really enjoying it. The Kindle makes me want to find time to read. I do, and that feels fantastic.

I also love my yoga class. My dad had been going to our local yoga center for a while, so to get my mind off things, I decided to stop in and try it out. I had taken a men’s yoga class while working on my master’s degree and loved it, but it only lasted eight weeks. I tried doing P90X’s yoga video once a week at home, but at ninety minutes, Tony Horton quickly fell out of favor with me. Taking a class is so much more satisfying and rewarding. Yoga people tend to be very warm, calm, and inviting, so meeting them is a pleasure. You get to sweat like hell and forget about everything else bouncing around in your head for a while. Plus, the strength and flexibility training has been an invaluable asset to my martial arts ability. I’m going three times a week now, and I absolutely love it. Having something to look forward to on your schedule is always great for lifting your spirits.

As a nerd, I’m psyched that Apple finally released iTunes Match, which enables you to upload your entire music collection iCloud and access it on all of your devices. It took more than 24 hours for iTunes to match and/or upload my 13,000 song library, but now all of my music is only a tap away wherever I go. I don’t have to haul my dinosauric iPod Classic around anymore or deal with picking only 32GB worth of music for my iPhone. That makes my life easier and simpler, so of course I’m all about it.

My friend Rich has also been teaching me how to play chess. I’m terrible, but I still find the game very enjoyable, and it’s a good brain workout. A new hobby is a great distraction from what ails you.

Despite all these new sources of joy, the negative things can still find a way to overwhelm and get you down. The only way to overcome these pains in the ass is to reframe the way your mind thinks about them. I could stress out about not finishing my NaNoWriMo novel this month, or I could simply tell myself that it’s just for fun anyway. Whether I write 50,000 words or 5,000, that’s still more than I would have written otherwise. Something that’s supposed to be a fun creative endeavor shouldn’t stress me out.

As much as I can already feel the nervousness and anxiety of this weekend’s tournament, I can just as easily envision the feeling of relief when it’s all over. It’s just one day. One day of nerves and excitement, and it will inevitably come to an end. Those feelings aren’t going to last forever. When I wake up Saturday morning, every minute that goes by brings me closer to the end of the day, when I can finally breathe a sigh of relief and relax, win or lose. It’s going to be a big day, but when it’s over I can enjoy a long drive home listening to my favorite music, and then it’s smooth sailing to the holidays.

As for the breakup, I can’t have any regrets about my performance or the person I was for the past year. When you look at the big picture, it was really, really great. My expectations were a little mismanaged, but what can you do other than remember that for next time? If something doesn’t work out, something else will.

Sometimes there’s so much going on in our heads that it can be impossible to think straight, and that’s when we get overwhelmed. As I’ve said here before, there’s only a finite amount of space between our ears; keeping everything locked up and bouncing around in there is a recipe for a mental breakdown. That’s where the brain dump comes in: writing down every single thing on your mind in one huge list. Every phone call you have to make, assignment you have to do, errand you have to run, person you have to talk to, thought you need to capture, anything and everything. Once it’s down on paper, you can stop worrying about it. You don’t have to think about it, and you won’t forget it because it’s written down. It’s out of your head. Emptying your brain frees and calms your mind, which makes it much easier to breathe.

I still don’t love November, but emptying my mind out here helps me put things in perspective. The good things will last forever; the bad feelings are temporary. November is just a bump in a very long road, and it’s only a matter of time before December 1.

Tri-dentity

I’ve been struggling lately with the concept of having multiple identities and not knowing which should be my primary identity.

Like most people, I have several big interests that make up who I am. Writing is one, martial arts is another, and so is music and bass playing. Depending on the time of day, I might say any one of those is my favorite. There are times when I’m so obsessed with writing, but just as often I find myself frustrated and with nothing to say. Likewise, there are times when I adore playing my bass, and there are times when the music escapes me.

Sometimes I wish I could just do one thing and get really, really great at it. Sometimes I wish I could practice playing bass all day, every day. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have anything to do but write this website. Sometimes I wish all I needed to focus on was my martial arts training.

I got to work out with a champion tournament fighter today, and I found myself thinking, “Wouldn’t it be great if martial arts was my life?”. I would love to be able to work out every day and train without having to worry about anything else. But tomorrow, I’ll probably wish I didn’t have to work so I could write. And the next day, I’ll probably want to play my bass for eight hours.

Part of this struggle comes from only having so many hours in the day. I want to be awesome, and I feel to truly master any of these skills, I’d have to fully immerse myself in only one of them. If I want to be a world class bass player, I need to play every day. If I want to be a respected writer, I need to write every day. If I want to be a certain caliber of martial artist, I need to train every day.

I guess what it comes down to is trying to figure out who I want to be for the rest of my life. I’m finishing my formal education and looking for what’s next. Do I want to be Andrew Marvin the Writer, the Bass Player, or the Black Belt? Or something else? I suppose I’ll always be all three, but which do I want to become known for? Then again, who says I have to choose?

So goes the quarter-life crisis, I suppose.

Steve

The morning after Steve Jobs died, I was sitting at a traffic light, watching cars go by on the Berlin Turnpike.

I had woken up sad, with a feeling of “Oh no… that really happened.” I didn’t know I could feel such emotion over the death of a public figure, but then, it doesn’t seem to happen very often. I wasn’t even a thought in my parents’ minds when President Kennedy was assassinated. I wasn’t alive for Elvis or John Lennon. I thought Michael Jackson’s death was unfortunate, but I wasn’t close enough to his music to be affected in the way millions of others were.

But the morning after Steve Jobs died, I found myself wondering if those people in their cars knew what had happened. “Does that person know? Does that person? Or that person?” I wondered if they felt the way I did, or if they had just frowned and said, “That’s too bad” before going about their lives.

It’s weird when someone dies because everything still looks the same. If someone was looking down on Earth from space, nothing would appear out of the ordinary. They wouldn’t be able to tell that anything had happened. But today, you don’t need to go any further than Google’s homepage to realize that something is wrong. Someone is missing.

I’m a young member of the Apple community in the sense that I’ve only been cognizant of the company’s existence for maybe seven or eight years. I got my first iPod in high school, but I never used a Mac until I got to college. My university had outfitted all of us with Lenovo ThinkPads, so it wasn’t until I applied to Apple’s Campus Rep program that I received a glossy black MacBook and subsequently saw the light. I had to give that machine back when the program ended just a few months later, but I had already been converted. I received my first Mac, a 2009 15” MacBook Pro, as a graduation present, and it’s still my main machine today. Like so many others, I’ll never go back.

If you were to construct a pie chart of my identity, it would be composed of several things. One slice would be for karate. Another would be for music. Another would be for eastern philosophy. And another would be for Apple. Each one was added to the pie chart in a moment of discovery, when it changed my life and shaped who I am today. These moments are the foundation of my identity. The day my parents dragged me into a karate studio, which led to fifteen years in the martial arts as a student and instructor. The day I came home to find a Dave Matthews Band DVD playing through the home entertainment system, which led to an intense passion for good music and nearly ten years of learning how to play the bass guitar. The day my college philosophy professor walked into class and taught me that we aren’t just bags of skin, which began instilling the tenets of Buddhism and Taoism that continue to bring me comfort and inner peace on a daily basis.

Apple, too, changed my life. The day I opened up my first MacBook, I started to care about things I previously had no knowledge of. Things like design, typography, simplicity, and minimalism. Stuff like creating things that are insanely great. Paying attention to detail. How to give a great presentation. Making sure everything in my life contributes positively to it in some way. Eliminating things that don’t, things that have no meaning for me. Without Apple, I wouldn’t have discovered all of my favorite writers who inspire me every day. I wouldn’t know that computing can be a joyful experience. I wouldn’t know that no one needs permission to be awesome.

Steve Jobs’ spirit drives Apple, and it will continue to do so many years into the future. So, to say that Steve Jobs changed my life is not an exaggeration.

I can understand why some people don’t get it. For them, Steve Jobs was just a businessman, a CEO of a technology company. He made consumer electronics. I don’t ask anything of these people other than that they stay quiet for the people who do get it. For millions of nerds and geeks around the world, this is our Kennedy, our Elvis, our Lennon. It’s been said that Steve Jobs didn’t just create a company. He created a culture. For people who wanted to think different, and for people who cared about changing the world.

I use his creations every day. To communicate with friends and family. To make things I’m proud of, like this website. To learn and satisfy my curiosities about new things. To listen to music I’m obsessed with. Every day, Steve’s creations make my life easier, simpler, and more fun. They inspire me every time I pick one up. But most of all, they never fail to bring me joy.

So many great things have been written about Steve since Wednesday. My emotional blathering here is only a drop in the bucket, but I felt the need to say something. I can’t really express how thankful I am to be a part of this community, and I am proud to consider Apple a part of my identity. I have Steve to thank for that. While we never came close to meeting, I am privileged to have lived alongside him, on the same planet, at the same time. I will miss him, and I’ll continue to remember him in my quest to do great things.

Thank you, Steve, for showing us it’s possible to put a ding in the universe.

Three Entities

I’ve never been one to say, “There just aren’t enough hours in the day!”, but lately, it’s all I can think about.

Yesterday, I posted links to three great articles around the web. That’s it: just the three links. Barely a word of commentary. I felt conflicted about that because, while I enjoy linking and responding to posts from other writers, I want to maintain a balance between link posts and original articles. That’s not to discredit the three articles I linked to; they were all tremendous, which is why I recommended you read them. But since this site is so young, I’m concerned with establishing it as a serious, professional creative endeavor. I don’t just want to post links and call it a day. That makes me feel guilty, and even though this site is a labor of love and shouldn’t contribute additional worries to my life, it’s the fact that I care about it so much that makes only posting three links weigh on my conscience. When I can’t put 100% of myself into this website and make it as good as I want it to be, I get bummed out.

I’m in a tough position right now because three entities are competing for my time and attention. One of them is this website. Another is karate. I have three hours of workout + meeting twice a week and classes to teach in the evenings. I love and need the workouts, but on days like today, when I get home at 1pm and only have two hours to shower, eat, post something to the site, and make it to work on time, it can be frustrating. Especially when I read a handful of great, exciting articles like I did yesterday, and I wish I had time to sit and write some of my own. But the reality is, this site is not my full-time job, so sometimes, a link will have to do.

Chris Guillebeau posted an article called How to Write 300,000 Words In 1 Year yesterday, and this part really stuck with me:

Someone once said, “I hate writing, but I love having written.” I tend to think you have to love at least some of the writing part too, but I get the idea. In my case, I write because it makes me feel good, and because I feel like it’s what I’m supposed to do.

If you want to write consistently and thoroughly, you must learn to make writing your job, regardless of whether it has anything to do with your income. It must be what you think of at different times throughout the day, even when you’re doing other things.

Those sentences resonate with me because they’re exactly what I’ve been feeling every time I’ve had to tear myself away from the computer to go to work. I think about the site on the way to work, in between classes, and on my way home. It’s incredibly exciting to feel that way about a creative project, but it’s also frustrating because I’m not yet at a point where I can act on them to the degree I’d like. Plus, since the site has nothing to do with my income, the responsible thing to do, unfortunately, is make it the first thing to go on the back burner.

The third entity demanding my time and attention is my thesis on Middle English lyric poetry, which is the last thing separating me from my master’s degree. It’s also the last thing tying me to academia. Now, I love being an academic, and it’s been a huge part of my identity for the past 24 years, but I’m ready to take a break and pursue writing in a different medium, namely this website.

Having a massive paper on Middle English lyric poetry due is a drag, but alas, the system demands it, and so it must be done. Since starting my thesis earlier this year, I have approximately 14,000 words of stuff written on a handful of poems, but those thousands of words lack any unifying structure or argument. That, too, is a drag. Having a thesis hanging over your head makes it very difficult to write for your silly website and not feel at least a slight twinge of guilt.

Fortunately, I have one hell of a thesis advisor. As he says, “Don’t get it right; get it done.”, which seems paradoxical coming from an English professor, but the notion that a thesis has to be some terrifying behemoth is mostly unnecessary. If I think about how I need at least fifty pages of groundbreaking analysis on 500-year-old poetry, I’ll become paralyzed with fear. Where would I even start? Rather, all I really need is five pages of introduction, five pages of conclusion, and five pages each about eight different lyrics. I’ve been writing five page papers for most of my life. That’s the bulk of the dirty work. A unifying thread will present itself naturally. When you put it in perspective, a thesis is suddenly not so intimidating. I don’t need to agonize and slave over it for months and months. It’s just a big paper. That’s not to undermine the endeavor, but rather to turn an abstract horror into a manageable assignment.

I can do it, and it will get done, but fifty pages is fifty pages, and with deadlines looming, it’s another thing distracting me from what I’d really love to be doing, which is writing this website. I know: life is tough, get a helmet, and all that, but I don’t believe life needs to be filled with things we don’t want to do. Some things, sure, but not most things. There’s only a finite amount of space in your head, and the more things that reside there, the less attention each receives. But, the only way out is through, as they say.

It’s fascinating how issues I’m wrestling with in my head also tend to bubble up in discussion on the internet, seemingly by coincidence. As I was taking a break from writing this article, I was finishing the latest episode of The B&B Podcast. Shawn Blanc just happened to bring up the topic of self-imposed urgency in maintaining his website, which he writes full-time.

It’s a self-imposed urgency. It’s self-imposed responsibility. You know, because I’ve been thinking about this a lot for the past six months now that I write my site full-time. And… you know what? I’m going to show up to work every day, I’m going to work hard, I’m going to do my best, I’m going to try to write as well as I can, and as regularly as I can. And sometimes that only equates to two or three links a day. And you know what? So what? That is me working. Because there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes behind that.

The thing is, Shawn and his wife are expecting, and here I am bumming out about balancing work, school, and writing. But he’s totally right. The only person pressuring me to post every day is me. Would I love to write 1,000 words a day for this site? Of course. But sometimes other things will need to take precedence, and the site will still be here tomorrow.

So, today I’ve woken up early to write five pages on Fowles In the Frith, and during that time I won’t be able to give this website any attention. But the sooner I get those five pages done, the sooner I’ll be able to post something here guilt-free. The sooner my thesis is done, the sooner I’ll be able to pour myself even further into QLE. I’m not excusing what will probably be a dearth of long-form content over the next few months, but I am asking you to bear with me. Before long, I’ll have found some more hours in the day.