dianaschnuth

If I’m planning to blog every weekday, and I want my entries to have any sort of substance, I need to start writing them earlier in the evening. By this time of night, ideally, my computer should be off and I should be relaxing in my yukata with a book and a cup of tea (or a glass of iced tea, being that it’s summer and all). I shouldn’t still be sitting at my computer, listening to a Slowdive remix and trying to string together cohesive sentences.

Anyway.

I’ve taken to reading the Zen Habits blog recently. The author, Leo Babauta, offers some great ideas for simplifying many different aspects of life. One entry that resonated with me recently focused on setting priorities and building your life around those priorities — or, rather, paring down the responsibilities that don’t support those priorities.

This has always been a challenge for me — the paring-down part, I mean. There’s so much that I want to do, and dropping any of it seems like quitting. Granted, once it’s off my plate, I feel liberated, but actually giving up something — like, say, administering a website, or quitting a podcast — is so hard for me.

But at least, with those, there’s a clean break. I have literally dozens of personal projects that are in various states of completion. Video, photography, web design, interior decorating, even just cleaning my disaster of a desk — whether I’ve gotten halfway through and been distracted, or I’ve only just started sketching out ideas, it’s still in the queue, if only mentally. I can’t just let those go.

Back to setting priorities, though. That’s tough. What are the five most important things in my life? By important, do I mean meaningful, or vital to my survival, or some combination of the two? If I’m being pragmatic, I’d put my job at the top of the priority list. I need my income to — well, to keep up my current standard of living. To keep this particular roof over our heads, and to keep our two cars insured and gassed-up (OK, Aaron usually pays for gas, not me), and to buy the food we like to eat, and to enjoy the leisure activities we prefer…

If I were being less pragmatic and more personal, I’d say that my husband and his happiness are a major priority of mine. That said, what am I doing on a daily basis to ensure his mental and physical well-being? If I’m not actively doing things to make him happy, what right do I have to claim that he’s a priority in my life? Or is it that it’s a priority for me to be around him as much as possible, just because he makes ME happy?

That’s when I start to think: what are my priorities REALLY? Am I being hypocritical in my actions versus these so-called priorities? What do I need to do to align my life with my priorities — or, if you prefer a different nomenclature, my “values”?

Who am I, really, and how can my actions and environment reflect that?

Spending the day at home, lethargic and crampy, and now recovering from a fucked-up dream I had after I called in sick and went back to bed.

A few weeks back, I had a dream that Aaron was going to divorce me, and not even a bizarre life-and-death confrontation with something in the back yard — a knife-wielding robber, as I recall — was going to change that. Last night, I dreamt that Aaron had a girlfriend (attractive and athletic) named Noi, and that they had more sex than we did, and that he was trying to quit smoking (when I hadn’t even known he’d started).

Two related dreams makes this into a trend, so I’m starting to wonder what in my subconscious is throwing out these dreams. They keep bringing back that horrible feeling I had during the week in September 1997 when Aaron and I had broken up over something I had done, and I felt like there had to be something, anything I could do to fix things, but all the grains of sand were falling through my fingers the harder I tried. Except that this is worse, because nothing is really wrong when I wake up, but that awful feeling is still there, lingering.

So, how insecure am I, really? And what about? Is it that I feel physically unattractive, or that I’m not intimate with Aaron as often as I once was, or is it that our lives are so intertwined that I’m scared of what would happen if I lost him (in one way or another)?

I just wish I could make my brain chill the fuck out and quit spinning out these stupid fictions.

I’m feeling like that a lot lately, like I’m just running alongside things, trying to hop back on. There’s so many things that I want to get done, and I need to realize that they’re not all going to get done at once.

I have a bad habit of putting off things I don’t feel like doing. It’s not very mature of me, really, but there you are. Worse, instead of doing something else productive that’s further down on the list, oftentimes I’ll just ignore my next-up list entirely and veg out with a video game or the internet.

There are so many categories of action items and responsibilities that I feel like I need to address RIGHT NOW. Zen podcast. Diet. Cleaning. Blogging. Posting and printing vacation photos. Editing vacation video. Hell, even organizing my GTD system (which isn’t nearly in the clockwork state I’d like it to be in yet). I need to come to terms with the fact that everything isn’t going to get done instantly, even if I’m productive as hell every evening. Which I’m not. And I shouldn’t have to be, not after an eight-hour day at work.

I need to stop pushing myself to do all this crap I can’t reasonably get done, and just relax and enjoy what I have going on. I’ve really got it easy, in the grand scheme of things, and I need to just chill the fuck out.

The key, for me, is eliminating any possibility of alternatives. That’s how I get things done. It’s not even that I need to choose the best alternative, or the most reasonable, or the most sane; it’s that there cannot be any other choice. Period.

That’s how I succeeded (and later failed) in my first round of dieting: if I had the mindset that there were foods that I just COULD NOT EAT, period, I was fine. There was no other alternative; it was protein and non-starchy veggies when I went out to eat. As soon as someone pointed out that I was choosing to eat that way, and it wasn’t a life-or-death dietary imperative, that’s when the weekend trips to the buffet started, and occasional slices of pizza. They wouldn’t kill me, after all, and it wasn’t like I did it all the time…

It’s not just dieting. In college, I was notorious for skipping class, especially before 10:30am. If there wasn’t an attendance policy (and sometimes even if there was), then class wasn’t mandatory unless there was a quiz or test. I could sleep in and not feel the academic pain, theoretically. That’s one reason why it took me seven years to get my four-year Bachelor’s degree.

Some things just need to be black-and-white for me. You do this. The end. You wash your dishes every night. You go to work on time every morning. You stay within your Weight Watchers Points limit for the day and the week. You brush your teeth every night and every morning.

You’d think these would be second nature. No one else seems to have problems doing these things like a normal adult. Except me.

I’ve mastered a very few of these sorts of things. I make my lunch the night before, because I know I won’t have time to do it in the morning. Therefore, there’s no option: I have to make my lunch before bed. Same with putting out my clothes — I can’t see my closet in the dark of morning, and Aaron will be sleeping, so I can’t turn on the light.

It’s time to apply that same sort of mindset to other responsibilities.

Maybe, after I master physical responsibilities, I can work on maintaining positive self-talk and attitudes this same way. There’s no other way to do it; anything else is toxic to me personally. Sounds kind of hippie-dippy, but it just might work.

Ironically enough, having an online journal has really fragmented my personal journaling in general.

I have diaries and journals dating back to when I was… let’s see… seven years old. For posterity’s sake, my first-ever diary entry went a little something like this:

6|28|’83
Today I had My Blood Test. I was a little Nervice. Tomorrow I Have My Tonsils out. I’m a bit Nervice about It. Bye-Bye!

(Thank goodness my entries got a little more engaging over the years. At least, I hope they did…)

I didn’t really get into regular journaling until middle school, though. From 7th grade through high school and early college, I can string together a set of nine volumes (plus a sheaf of notebook paper and a spiral-bound notebook) that chronicle the happenings of my life, with only a few months-long breaks in the action.

In my later college years, the journaling started to fragment, moving to random notebooks and text files and whatnot. Once I started blogging — officially, late 2002 — most of my thoughts were finally consolidated into one place.

However, everything I need to journal is not safe for public consumption. I suppose I could write unpublished entries in my blog, but that always leaves the possibility of an accidental publishing to the world. I’d rather keep a private text file on my computer for rants about individuals, or weird dreams I’ve had, or talking about life events that the world really doesn’t need to know about. Plus, I’ve been known to write longhand in a journal I keep in my purse. (I haven’t done that for a few years now, but I did that for a good year or two, around 2006.)

So, despite my prolific writings online, my inner musings may be lost to the ages if I don’t end up printing them out and saving them in their own rightful volume, next to the other chronicles of my life.

Granted, these precious chronicles of my life are stowed in a box in the extra bedroom, but still…