All I want for Christmas is a bunny suit

Sometimes I get the overpowering urge to clean everything in the apartment, a memetic trait I inherited from my mother. I jokingly refer to it as "vacuuming for fun," which is not so very far from the truth. It's reassuring to have things clean and in order, and even if there are other things - surfing the internets, reading, smothering my cat with affection - that are more overtly enjoyable, I find myself in spare moments armed with sponges and spray bottles, ready to do battle with the bathroom sink.

This usually coincides with a burst of unexpected energy; today, for instance, I had a cup of tea, which still hasn't quite worn off. (I'm extremely sensitive to caffeine.) I got home, fed the cat, emptied out the refrigerator, and started scrubbing. I then moved on to the kitchen counter, home of the microwave and the seedy, crumby residents of its underbelly. Not bad for an evening usually spent playing Puzzle Pirates. That done, I ventured into terra incognita: the top of the refrigerator.

The fridge being taller than I am, it rarely occurs to me to use it as anything but a place to store my cereal boxes, which don't fit in the cabinets. To my horror, I discovered a thick layer of grime coating its surface, the inevitable byproduct of life in Los Angeles: anything near an open window, or stored on a patio, is covered with the work of Jack Smog. (He also does lungs.) The effect lessens with proximity to the ocean, but it's still enough to make you consider moving someplace with better air quality. Like a cleanroom.

Suppressing the urge to dry heave at the three years' worth of accumulated sludge, I hopped off the chair I'd been standing on and ran to the sink to wash my hands and regroup. It took me a couple of hours to work up the nerve to climb back up, but I finally managed to get the top of the fridge to look like its regularly textured self. 

Lessons re-learned: 1) Just because I can't see it doesn't mean it doesn't need to be cleaned; 2) Los Angeles air is filthy, and so, in all likelihood, are my lungs. 

Write on

For someone whose inner monologue tends to sound like Dobby, this blog post from the Harvard Business Review gave me pause... and got me to hop back onto the ol' blog again.

The past few months, to use cliched shorthand, have been something of an emotional roller coaster. Two weddings, two funerals, and two graduations, the attendant whirlwind such huge life changes tend to bring about, and a partridge in a pear tree, haven't exactly conspired to make the urge to write a vital part of my routine. But rather than flog myself with Ann Landers' proverbial wet noodle, ensuring a continued lack of productivity, I just need to write. Easier said than done, of course, but that's par for the course for most things worth doing.

Stay tuned for further updates on flying a (tiny!) plane, blacksmithing, scuba diving, meeting Patrick Stewart, and making Chris Hardwick laugh!

Kaizen smash

While I've always been goal-oriented, I'd be hard-pressed to define myself as a self-starter. Rather, I start things, but have difficulty completing them unless I have a firm deadline. And unless this deadline holds some kind of imminent doom, I tend not to take it too seriously.

This morning I signed up for the LA Triathlon. This means I have 269 days left to train my sorry carcass to swim, bike, and run without keeling over or soiling itself before the finish line. To quote the Talking Heads: "My God, what have I done?"

So with September 30 less than 9 months away, bearing the promise of more physical activity than I've probably done in the previous 27 years of my life combined, I think it's safe to say that my feet are being held to the proverbial flames...

I think I'm learning Japanese, I really think so

One of my big goals is to learn Japanese. I like the word polyglot (isn't it funny?), and I'd love to be able to refer to myself as one. If I maintain my tenuous grasp of the English and Spanish languages, re-learn the German I studied briefly so that I am capable of doing more than simply ordering bratwurst and hot chocolate, and add Japanese into the mix, I will achieve polyglot status.

Aside from my affection for anime, video games, and Japanese culture in general, I decided to focus on learning Japanese for a couple of reasons. My sister and my boyfriend both studied Japanese for several years and are fluent, so A) I'll have people to practice with, and B) I can use my dim competitive streak to my advantage. I also plan to visit Japan at some point - hopefully next year - and it would help to be able to say things other than cat, very, and cute. (I exasperate my sister by using very - "totemo" - as a sort of catch-phrase. I pronounce it incorrectly, making it rhyme with totoro, and use it at inappropriate times. I love it.)

Yesterday I started listening to part of a language learning lesson in an attempt to gradually absorb conversational Japanese. I bought the set meant to allow you to learn a new language on your commute, despite my commute being about two miles. (I was planning to re-start walking to work, which would have made the commute 45 minutes instead of ten, but the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions.) Anyhow. I learned the word for car, and how to say that it exists and is little; there were a few more words that I should have picked up, which I didn't exactly, but I made up for this by improvising. My boyfriend listened as I showed off my new vocabulary, and explained that most of what I'd just said wasn't actually Japanese. Oops.

I could at this point say that I'm bad at Japanese, or simply that I haven't devoted enough time and energy to learning it yet. They're both currently true, but latter explanation is definitely more optimistic. Here's to learning proper Japanese, and to the long, slow crawl towards polyglotism!

Killing time

“Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.”

― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

I decided to go through my email draft folder this afternoon. I had about 60 drafts in it, and I didn't have the foggiest idea what most of them were. I tend to send myself emails of things I like or want to remember - recipes, quotes, Craigslist postings - and I found lots of random stuff in my unsent drafts.

One of the treasures I unearthed was the quote at the beginning of the post. It reminds me a little too much of the rare workday in which very little happens, and how much I dislike those days. I experience the loss of time more keenly now than I did when I was younger, and I do my best not to let moments slip by when I could be doing more. This is not to say that I multitask - I try very hard not to, though it's a difficult habit to break - but if I have a spare moment I'll try to combine things that don't cancel each other out.

I used to use my email draft system and a lot of notebooks filled with scribbles and sticky notes. I've since gravitated towards Evernote to store everything from grocery lists to potential blog post topics. I miss notebooks to some degree, but in general I feel like this is the time period I've been waiting for all my life: Tablet computers, programs that save to the cloud, social networks that let you keep up with people you otherwise might have lost touch with between reunions, and technology that allows you to be portable without completely disconnecting from everything. There's so much to fill our time with. I guess the challenge is to keep from oversaturating ourselves to the point where we don't mind watching time die.

Blah de vivre

Today has just been kind of a "meh" day. I had trouble concentrating at work, and in general I've been tired and unmotivated. I decided to push ahead and try to get stuff done anyway.

* I've been meaning to do laundry for a few days now, and finally decided to just get it over with. I'm very happy to have clean clothes, even if I've only folded two-thirds of it so far.

* I cooked dinner today, even though all I wanted to do was order a pizza. Warmed up some rice and a can of black beans, reheated some macaroni and cheese in the oven, and chopped up an acorn squash to use as part of my mother's recipe for "calabasitas." One of my goals is not to let any of the veggies in my fridge go to waste, so I'm forcing myself to be creative. There are probably fancier ways of cooking acorn squash, but whatever works.

* I gave my cat's litterbox a much-needed scooping. I can't believe I let that creature sleep on my pillow.

* I've written a blog post. I promised myself I'd blog every weekday, and so far I have, however devoid of insight or content it might be. I see no need to be a perfectionista when staying within the letter of the law does just fine.

I've set the bar pretty low today so I can just step over it and fall into my pillows, but there's always tomorrow!

Regret vs. dreams, part 1

Today's quote, courtesy of John Barrymore by way of Lifehacker: "A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams."

While Lifehacker took the "age ain't nothing but a number" approach, I instantly thought of the opposite: no matter how young you are, and how much time you theoretically have left, you're just waiting out the clock if you've given up on making your dreams a reality. By this metric, I know some people who have been old a very long time. I was one of those people once. More on that tomorrow later.