Happy Fun Cog

In the past week, I've finally noticed two things that have been right in front of me all along.

1. After a separation of about 10 months, I'm seeing my old friend Ritalin again. I used Ritalin every day for 13 years. One of the things that I was never able to work around was that, when I would take a full dose (two five-milligram pills), there was always a 15-30 minute period where I struggled to focus on whatever I was doing because the Ritalin had kicked up my heart-rate significantly and given me minor stomach spasms. This week, the obvious hit me - break up dosage. If I take start with one pill then take another pill about 30 minutes later, I don't get that nasty feeling at all. And that in turn makes it easier for me to focus on and/or enjoy whatever I'm doing.
   
2. In the year plus that I've lived in Framingham, I've struggled to find a place to write. I always knew that I needed to find some place other than my apartment where I could sit and do creative writing, but everywhere I looked was just wrong. All the nearby Starbucks locations are too busy and don't have any good writing surface other than a sparse offering of tables that are usually taken. The diners are all small, noisy, and the kind of places where doing any writing gets you looks from the patrons and questions from the waitresses (I am deeply fond of these diners, though). At some point this week, I was driving down Route 9, something I do at least once a day. My mind and my eyes were wandering at a stoplight and I found myself looking at a coffee shop. Now, I'd seen that coffee shop every day for a year, and had noticed it enough to remember it's name. But I never thought about it beyond that until this week. Today, I finally went into the place and was really impressed. Granted, Saturday afternoon isn't a perfect sample for atmosphere or crowd levels, but there is a TON of writing surface. I immediately became affectionate and possessive and decided that, not only would I stop going to other coffee places in Framingham and give this place all my business regardless of whether or not I planned to sit and write, but that I would start going there weekday mornings on the way to my shrink's office so I could give them more of my money and therefore help keep the place open (it's an independent store).

I've been in my apartment on this beautiful holiday weekend, being all productive 'n shit, but have been driven to distraction and anger for the past few hours by a rigmarole* of loud noises, namely motorcycle noises. As I believe that I've noted in this blog on previous occasions, my apartment is on a main inter-town route on the Western fringe of the Boston area.

I don't know if it's because it's a combination of rural environment with easy access to large cities or if there's something specific about the population, but Western Mass has a lot of motorcyclists, more than I've ever seen in any area that I've ever lived in (Arkansas, Vermont, and various regions of the Boston area). These are the types of motorcyclists who specifically drive large Harley-type bikes.

As such, I have a lot of loud motorcycles driving by my apartment on a regular basis, and there are people who live in the neighborhood who have motorcycles as well. I know why motorcycles are loud; beyond the stylistic element, there's the safety element, namely that the sound of motorcycles lets people in cars know that motorcycles are about.

But as an introvert I loathe loud noises, and the motorcycles are driving me insane. Today has been especially bad - one of my neighbors decided to spend a few hours in his driveway, revving his Harley's engine. I spent a lot of time being angry about it. A journal entry I was writing quickly devolved into me just writing paragraph after paragraph of hateful words about these people, their socioeconomic status, their intelligence, the size of their genetelia, etc.

And now I stop myself, and I think, what's the point? What do I gain from being angry about it? Is there anything I can do to stop it? No. Is there any benefit in basting in my own anger? No. In fact, it makes it hard for me to do anything else because I'm so wrapped up in the emotion.

So, really, the only thing that I can do that's actually helpful, that's actually beneficial to myself and what I'm trying to accomplish (namely writing), is to do whatever it takes to stop being angry, whether that's closing all my windows to block out the noise (which means I don't get to enjoy the breeze) or giving myself a homemade lobotomy with an ice pick and reality television.

I think one of the appealing things about anger is that it makes you feel like you have some control over an environment, by dint of your emotional interaction with the situation. But when what you're angry about is a part of the environment, something you can't control, then you have to realize that the only thing you can control is how it impacts you. Hmm...


*I object to the spelling of this word. There is very clearly an "uh" sound between "rig" and "marole"

For the record, the title of the post refers to that famous quote from Tom Cruise's delightfully assholish character in Magnolia, "Respect the cock, tame the pussy." I felt compelled to mention that because it has been brought to my attention that people don't understand every reference or segue that makes sense in my internal dialogues.

Like many posts in this blog, this is about writing, and personal creative goals as a whole. I've never been a methodical person, and that wasn't a problem for a long while. But now I find myself wanting to take my personal creative interests seriously because it turns out that a life of doing one's job in a half-assed manner and getting drunk or stoned at the end of the day isn't particularly fulfilling. And so in finding myself in this situation, and also finding myself in need of going to at least one tae kwon do class a day for at least three days a week, I find myself finding myself with a very small window in which to find time to do creative things that I find fulfilling, such as writing.

Thus, the question of how one is to be methodical about creativity.

This book I'm reading, Wild Mind, has lots of great creative writing exercises that can help you get your writing mind in shape, but I'm still left with the question of how to get to the point where I'm actually sitting down, writing. So let's talk about how to actually set the table at which I can sit and write.

First, there's internal physical chemistry. Caffeine, a high-protein diet for clear thought, and possibly 'smart drugs' (legal ones). I can experiment with these things in an effort to find the write (heh) combination. It will take time, but I consider this the simplest element of the equation.

Then there's external environment. I've set up a desk for my computer in a good little nook in my apartment and even have a keyboard tray for ergonomic reasons, but a) this room is close to the street outside, which is a major inter-town route along which many loud Harley-ish motorcycles zoom and b) I have a next-door neighbor who is desperate need of not only front teeth (both top and bottom) but also an for understanding that making noise for the sake of making noise is an ultimately fruitless way to find meaning in life, and that his little yapping machine of a dog is never going to be an obedient dog no matter how many times he shouts at it in a 5 minute span because it is a fucking chihuahua that obviously abuses crystal meth.

So there are difficulties with my apartment as a writing environment. Unfortunately, the library in town has very limited hours and none of the coffee shops around here have any atmosphere other than serving as a caffeine fueling stations for patrons of the ubiquitous strip malls.

There are some things right at hand that can help me write, such as music; classical or ambient music always calms me down without making me sleepy, and I usually turn some on before I start to write. Perhaps I can also use music as a way of leading up to writing? Perhaps listening to music as I putter around a bit, cleaning up because a neater apartment makes it easier to write?

More important than all of this, though, is the simple act of writing. I need to do it every day, whether it's creative writing or maybe just writing a stream-of-conscious daily journal (though, come to think of it, that might be a good way to lead up to creative writing).

All of these questions and thoughts come down to the same thing, which is respecting myself, my intellect and my wishes. I can brainstorm all I want, but the key is to understand that this is what I want to do; writing fulfills me like nothing else, so it's something that I have to pay attention to and work on each and every day.

Here's a link to a series of pictures from the most recent US space mission to repair the Hubble telescope. In looking at these pictures, I am amazed to realize that I have lost so much of the childhood wonder I felt for space and how humans explore it. I don't consider it a big deal to have lost the amazement; when you think about all the shit one has to deal with in one's personal life starting with college and moving on into the Real World, it takes far more of a conscious, deliberate effort to stay amazed than it does just to shrug it off, crack another beer, and turn on the television or computer.

But these pictures are... something about them, or maybe it's a combination of these pictures and my mood, something is taking me back to what I felt as a child which is amazement at what machines humans have developed for exploration and how vast space and the universe around us is. When you look at these pictures and you look at something as relatively mundane as the launching pads for the shuttle, it's easy to dismiss them as something that you've seen a thousand times whether it was those actual objects or ones like them. It's hard to get excited about a big chunk of metal when the Republicans are saying something crazy about Obama or some evil paparazzi has taken an upskirt photo of some starlet climbing out of a car (and hey, even though the photographer was wrong for taking the picture and the website was wrong for posting it, there's nothing wrong with me looking because hey, it's not like I approve or anything and yeah, I know that I'm generating page views which is just going to encourage things like this to happen again but believe me, I'm not doing anything wrong it's everyone else's fault).

You look at this big chunk of metal and you don't think about all the manhours (and womanhours) and billions of dollars that have been poured into designing and building this thing, this thing which looks just like some generic piece of human industrial folly with lots of piping, and you don't think about how incredible it is that this one thing has cost more money and time and engineering genius than could've been generated on a whole continent over a period of centuries in times past, and you don't think about how this is representative of man's redifining that thing which defines all humans which is the Earth, that all humans and all animals are of the Earth but now we're building machines to take us beyond all of that, machines that could redefine our existence.

You look and you don't see. You look and you don't feel. You are numbed to so many of the things that make life so interesting and so amazing. Then while you're taking your lunch break you click on a link that takes you to pictures that make you feel like a wondering child again and you want to cry at your desk because life is so beautiful and so amazing and it's so hard to remember any of this with all the bullshit and poverty and lying politicians and manipulative media companies that define the world as we know it.

So you look and you wonder and you feel amazement and joy. Then you consume some more caffeine, take a piss, and get back to work.

Happiness is an open stretch of road on the way to work, window down, high school anthem on the radio. The sun warming from orange to yellow, the air still pillowed with evening's cool damp.

At the time I got my BA in film, I could consume foreign movies by the bushel, as well as "classic" movies from the 40's and 50's that, to the modern viewer, were like fingernails going across a chalkboard.

But my ability to watch movies for the sake of the art of film has diminished greatly over time... actually, that's a negative way to state this fact: I get bored with movies much more readily than I did before. Case in point: Mean Streets by Martin Scorsese. A classic piece of American cinema, an intense portrait of New York City in the 1970's, starring some of the greatest acting talent of that generation. And it bored the shit out of me. I just put the DVD back in the Netflix envelope and will send it out because I've watched about half of the movie, an hour, and can't imagine spending another hour at it.

Maybe this is something that comes with having a job and less free time. One demands more satisfaction when satisfaction has more meaning.

Some kind of cap or skull cap for balding, non-Jewish men. I mean, am I the only one whose scalp is cold every damn day? When it was winter, I wore my knit cap at my desk (the same cap I wore while outside). People gave me strange looks, but what are you going to do? I'll tell you what you're going to do. You're going to write a blog post about how someone should invent something that would fix it. I am an empowered and informed member of society. I am special. Now hurry up and invent something, goddamn it. I'm cold.

I ate a bowl of tasty vegetarian fare, a (supposedly) Hungarian recipe of wheat bulgher and eggplant, about 4 hours ago. My stomach is now rumbling for more. Traditionally, I react to this kind of situation with a snack, usually something like cereal or toast. My recent focus on, and success with, losing weight has made it easier for me to resist the urge to eat.

Resisting the urge to feed this late-night hunger is similar to resisting the urge to distract myself, with alcohol or daydreams, from thinking about another Saturday night alone and how it makes me feel. It makes me feel bad, for the record, even though the idea of Saturday night as a necessarily social occasion is a flawed one. In the past, not being aware of this hunger has led me to try to deal with it impulsively, namely by going out to bars and drinking because a) that meant I was around people and b) that meant I was drinking, which made it easier to be around people.

There is this hunger, this hunger in my stomach and in my head. But hunger should not be avoided. It can be healthy. It hurts, yes, but thoughtlessly seeking to sate the hunger hurts even more; it's just a matter of how aware you are of the pain. I'm not saying that I should be satisfied with being alone on a Saturday night. Rather, I'm saying that hunger for something can be a point of contemplation.* My physical hunger, if I choose not to sate it tonight, can teach me that being healthy is not necessarily making yourself feel good all the time. My mental and emotional hunger, which I cannot sate tonight, can teach me that I have to appreciate those times when I am not hungry and live my life in such a way where I don't need to go hungry every goddamn Saturday night; reach out to more people socially, be more focused on and consistent with dating, etc.

*I say this as someone for whom food and shelter has always being a guarantee.

I'm reading a book about optimism right now, though it might be more accurate to describe the book as a study of optimism versus pessimism. As anyone who as read a few posts in this blog knows, I am a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist, so much so that I always spell the phrase as died-in-the-wool. One of the things that I'm learning from this book is the long-term impact of pessimism. In looking at the impact of difficult situations, pessimists regard individual points of failures or short periods of struggle as huge, overarching narratives that represent not, say, the fact that a particular piece of software you're responsible for is a buggy sumbitch, but rather the fact that you're a stupid, fat stinky piece of failure who's fat and who is hated by all and who will die alone and you might as well eat worms because nobody likes you.

I jest, but the fact of the matter is that almost every (work)day for me is a period of time saturated with tension and overshadowed by failure. I am filled with massive amount of resentment towards my co-workers. That there should be some friction between us is understandable because we've worked together for 5 years in some cases and many of those years were intensely chaotic and dysfunctional, marked by high stress and leadership that was either totally absent or totally incompetent. But none of that justifies the lenses of intense negativity through which I regard the people around me.

Someone commented a few posts ago that perhaps I should change the way I oft describe passages of events in this blog because the angry way in which I described things perpetuates the negative perspective, grinds it into the daily fibers. I'm not going to admit that this person is right because, hey, what's the point of being a resentful pessimist if you can't use said qualities to protect one's ego?

But there's a better way to live and write, and maybe one day I'll get there.

Also, you all suck and we're all going to die.

One of the things that I've come to realize about myself lately is that I resent it when people need me or want to lean on me. I first started noticing in the context of my job. I'd catch myself becoming intensely angry over people looking to me for help, and eventually I saw the absurdity of it. I work in software support. People are supposed to look to me for assistance.

I think this is rooted in the fact that I don't want to lean on other people myself. I don't want to rely on anyone but myself. This is an illogical wish, and I know that. But growing up, I felt that the biggest sources of pain in my life were the emotional needs that I couldn't fulfill internally and so looked to others. I didn't look to myself to answer the question of whether I was a good person or if I was smart or creative or loved. I don't reckon that anybody, especially an adolescent, is really capable of that.

Still, as I tried to regroup from the emotional fragility I felt as I plunged into depression in my early teens, the thing that I told myself night after night, the thing that I literally chanted to calm myself down, was that I should never rely on anyone, that I only had myself.

I never did stop turning to other people for reassurance or help. The only thing I got out of it was a great big steaming plate of resentment and self-loathing for my inability to be truly independent. And now I'm turning that senseless negativity onto others whenever they implicitly or explicitly express their own needs to me.