Finding Myself

I’ve been blogging full-time for six weeks now. It’s both good and bad. Obviously, I love the work. But as many people have warned, I’m going a little stir-crazy.

In my former life as a box salesman, I got daily contact with my co-workers, including Jeff and Nick. This is a small universe, to be sure, but it’s a universe. Now I go most days just saying “hello” to the folks at the gym. I need to get out more.

I’m going to look into some sort of class during the summer term. What should I take? Art? Computers? Personal finance? I don’t know. The truth is, I can do anything I want now. But what do I want to do? That’s a tougher question than it sounds.

One thing I know I need to do is work less. I ought to be able to get my blogging done in four to six hours per day. So far, however, I’m allowing myself to be distracted, mostly by e-mail. I stayed up until one o’clock last night, whittling my inbox down to 80 messages. It’s back up to 110. There must be a better way to cope, yet I know this is something that each person has to deal with on his own. I just need to find a system that works.

Part of the problem is that I want to give individual responses to everyone. That’s just not practical, though, especially when I get questions or requests that are longer than my blog posts! I end up shunting those aside to read later, but later turns into weeks, and then months.

I’m not worried, though. From everything I’ve read, the first few months of working from home are difficult. It really is like having a new identity. I just need to fumble around and find out who I am.

(As a postscript, I’ll note that I’m tremendously pleased with how I’ve incorporated exercise into my life. It used to be an afterthought — now it’s my top priority, even over my websites…)

180 Degrees

It feels so good to finally break through a barrier. Or two.

The last week has been awful. I haven’t been able to write. I sit and stare at the computer screen, but nothing comes. “I’ve lost it,” I think. “I’m doomed.”

I try to find other things to occupy my time, but all I can think about is that I cannot write. I had 4-1/2 days during which nothing came. It was like pulling teeth to get even a basic weblog entry done.

“There’s a lot of fluff around here late,” one Get Rich Slowly commenter noted. No kidding. Believe me, I know it.

Yesterday afternoon, I could feel things changing. I had lunch with Michael Hampton, and the conversation jarred something loose. It removed whatever had been obstructing the writing process. I took the long way home from Monmouth, which also helped. I exchanged a bunch of e-mail with Lauren Muney. I went to bed early.

Today I went to work for the first time since noon on Friday. I expected to be making sales calls with David Gingerich, my replacement, but he had called in sick. I stayed in the office to answer phones, but it was slow. What I really did was write. And write. And write. And write.

I wrote four posts for Get Rich Slowly and four posts for Get Fit Slowly. In many cases, I took articles I had begun to piece together last week and rework them to final form. Before, I would look at these pieces and want to give up. I just couldn’t see how they were supposed to end up. Today it was easy. Today I could see how to get from point A to point B.

I also took my bike into the shop to get an overhaul. I’m ready to ride.

Now I’m sitting in my favorite chair listening to XM 81 (BPM – dance music), waiting for my sweetheart to come home. We’re going to Gino’s. I’m going to have clams.

And to think that two days ago nothing was going right…

Finding the Future

I’m at an interesting place in my life, a place it had never occurred to me I’d reach. My little personal finance blog has taken on a life of its own. It’s a business. It’s a brand. Sure, it’s a small business and a small brand, but that’s a start.

But what do I do next? For a long time, I’ve believed that a book was the next natural progression. But what sort of book? I have three discrete ideas kicking around in my head — which one do I pursue? And how do I find a publisher? (This morning on the drive to work, I found the seed for a fourth idea.)

The answers to these questions have become a little more clear during the past several weeks. I’ve had conversations with about a dozen very smart people, all of whom have opinions on this subject. Some believe a book is The Answer. Some believe a book is A Mistake. All of them are wildly supportive. Whom do I believe? How can I know which path is best?

Fortunately, I don’t have to decide just yet. I have time.

My favorite advice so far has come from the bold Penelope Trunk, who is a force of nature. “You’re fat, right?” she said. Penelope is not one to mince words. “The best thing you can do right now is get fit. If you get fit, you’ll gain confidence. If you gain confidence, and if you look good, you’ll be in a position to do whatever you want. You’ll have flexibility.”

I laughed at the boldness and simplicity of her suggestion.

“I’m not joking,” she said. And she wasn’t. “Don’t do a book. Get fit. Spend all your time working on your site and exercising. In the months it takes to do this, be thinking about what Get Rich Slowly can do for you. Brainstorm ideas. A book is not the way to go.”

Though I’m not convinced a book is a bad idea, I think Penelope’s other suggestions were fantastic. Some of them were mind-blowing, actually. Her vision for my site is even bigger than my own. Talking to her made me realize that perhaps my goals are too modest.

In any event, the next few weeks are going to be filled with a lot of soul-searching and introspection. If you see me deep in thought, it’s only because I’m trying to decide what to do with the rest of my life!

Trivia: I’ve written the word “exercise” (or some form of it) several times over the past few days. Every time I’ve misspelled it “excercise”. Where did that come from? I never used to do that.

Surrender

Some days are cursed. Some days everything goes wrong.

Most of the time I slog through those days, trying to get things turned around. Sometimes it works. Today, however, I’m giving up. My body and mind are telling me I need a break.

It’s Star Trek and video games from now ’til bed time.

The Devil in the Dark

When I was a boy, I loved Star Trek. For nearly twenty years, Portland’s KPTV (channel 12) broadcast the series at 4pm every Sunday afternoon. We didn’t have a television for much of my childhood, but most of my friends did. Whenever possible, I would watch Star Trek.

When the series was released on DVD a few years ago, I bought the first season, but I never watched it. It’s been gathering dust.

A few weeks ago, I decided to make some clam chowder. This is a laborious process. Though I enjoy it, the work takes a couple hours, and much of it is mindless. “I should watch something on the computer,” I thought. “I should watch Star Trek.” And so I did. I’ve been watching one episode a night ever since.

Many of the early episodes are truly awful — there are good reasons the show struggled to stay on the air. But by the middle of the first season, things began to click. The writers and producers discovered their characters and figured out how to tell their stories.

I plan to do a full review of season in about a week, but I want to take the time to mention one of my favorite episodes: The Devil in the Dark. On an important mining colony, a mysterious creature is terrorizing the workers. This mysterious beast can move through solid rock, and it dissolves anyone it touches. Fifty men have died in just a few months. The Enterprise is summoned to eliminate the problem.

Initially, Kirk and company intend to destroy the creature. But, as he is wont to do, Spock begins to suspect that there’s something deeper to the problem. He’s right, of course. First of all, the life form is silicon-based, something that is seemingly impossible. Second, it is highly intelligent. And finally, it is merely defending its nest, which has been disrupted by the mining activities.

Watching the episode tonight, it was shockingly obvious that this is where my appreciation of inter-species friendship and communication originated. It was from watching this episode of Star Trek when I was a boy that I developed an appreciation for other animals, and began to suspect that other species might harbor intelligence that we, as humans, could barely comprehend. From there, it was only a small jump to similar philosophical positions.

Many of these Star Trek episodes don’t stand up well upon re-viewing. I haven’t seen them in twenty (or thirty!) years, and what I loved as a boy is sometimes almost unwatchable as an adult. (The Corbomite Maneuver is mind-numbingly bad.) But The Devil in the Dark is as good as I remembered. Amazing that much of the framework of the adult J.D.’s belief system can be traced to one hour of television made in 1965…

The Princess and the Pea

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. — Tolstoy

Nick and I just had a conversation about those incidents that scarred us in our youth. The crazy thing is that to adults — even to us as adults — these things seem trivial. Yet they’re the kind of things that shape our lives.

Fear of success

When Nick was in third grade, the church camp (Drift Creek) began to offer a week for kids his age. Nick wanted to go more than anything. At Bible school that summer, kids could earn a sort of scholarship to Drift Creek for accumulating points by memorizing Bible verses, etc.

Nick worked like crazy. He needed 1500 points to earn the scholarship, but he wanted to be sure. He earned more than 3000 points, far more than any other kid in Bible school. He was excited — he’d get to go to Drift Creek Camp!

But on the last day of Bible school, he found out that no scholarships were being offered to third graders. He’d done all that work for nothing. He was devastated.

As a result, Nick says, to this day he finds that he’s afraid to put all his effort into something. Somewhere in the back of his mind is the expectation that there won’t be any reward for the effort.

Dazed and confused

When I was about ten or twelve, our family made a visit to one of Mom’s aunts or uncles or cousins in Beaverton. We didn’t see Mom’s family very often, and both my parents were on edge. I think Dad always felt inadequate around them, as if he were being judged.

The house seemed like a mansion to me. I grew up in a run-down trailer house, and this place was enormous, filled with all sorts of expensive furniture. Jeff, Tony, and I ran around with the other kids while the adults sat in the living room, talking about adult stuff.

Because I was beginning to feel older, at some point I decided to join the adult conversation. In my memory, I went into the living room and sat down on the couch. I’m sure, however, that as most kids do, I plopped down on the couch. In any case, when I sat down, I dislodged an enormous painting that had been resting on the back of the sofa, causing it to fall to the floor.

Dad was livid. He took me outside and spanked me, probably one of the last times he ever did so. He was irate because I had embarrassed him in front of these people around whom he felt uncomfortable anyhow. I was dazed and confused. I couldn’t figure out what I had done wrong. In my mind, I had just tried to sit down on the couch. I had tried to do something good: join an adult conversation.

“I think about that incident several times a month,” I told Nick. He was shocked. “I’m serious,” I said. “All my life, I’ve thought about that incident several times a month. It is a deep part of who I am.”

Lie down on the couch

As an adult, it’s a challenge to cope with all of this baggage from my youth. Looking back, it seems so inconsequential. I know that Mom, too, fights some of this. She has often shared stories about the things that happened to her as a girl, the things that messed her up. When I hear the stories, I tend to dismiss them as trivial, just as you’re probably dismissing my story above as trivial. But they’re not trivial. These little things do lasting damage.

But how can a parent or teacher actually know which trivial things are going to do the lasting damage? Is it possible for a person to grow up without any sort of psychological scarring?

“People are strange,” I’m fond of saying. “They’re no such thing as normal. Every person is strange. But we’re each strange in different ways.” It’s not just my family that’s messed up — Kris’ family is messed up, too. So is every family. So is every person.

As of this moment, I am technically debt-free except for my mortgage. I haven’t actually paid the final debt, but I have the money in the bank to do so. This is an enormous step for me. Defeating my debt is akin to defeating the demons from my youth. It’s a sign that the adult J.D. is asserting himself, is denying that the things that happened to the young J.D. will actually control his life.

I’m not out of the woods yet, of course. I may have my financial life under control, but I’m still a fat middle-aged man who eats like shit and who never exercises. I have some very real social anxieties. For some time, I’ve considered seeing a psychologist to discuss some of my poor behavior patterns. Maybe it’s time to actually do so.

Rain Ghost

“Do you think it’ll rain” — Dad, whenever it rained heavily

It’s pouring outside. The autumnal Oregon rainfall set in two or three weeks early this year, taking away the last few days of September, and making early October swampish.

Right now the rain is roaring down in torrents outside my office window. Whenever it rains like this — whenever it is stormy — I’m reminded of my father. He loved this weather. All my strong memories of stormy days revolve around him.

I remember working with him outside in the rain, building things, digging things, burning things. I remember driving with him in the rain. I remember how he especially loved a stormy day at the beach.

At various points throughout his life, he owned a boat. In his final years, he kept this boat tied up in Astoria. I’m convinced that the only reason he did this was so that he could have a place to enjoy the storms of autumn, winter, and spring.

Dad has been dead more than twelve years now, and I don’t think of him on a daily basis. But there are certain things — songs, smells, occurrences — that will freeze me in my tracks, as if his presence were palpable. Stormy weather always does this. Always.

Emotional Eating and Self-Regulation

One of the benefits of having a popular weblog (not this one, obviously) is that your readers send you lots of interesting reading material. Here are a couple of blog posts that are actually closely related to each other:

First up, at Brazen Careerist, Penelope writes about four weight-loss tips from her month in the mental ward. This is raw stuff:

Understand that any weight problem is an emotional problem.
Take time off so you can change bad patterns.
Don’t be a snob. (In other words: know thyself.)
Stop using your life as an excuse.

Trunk writes:

I’m telling anyone with an eating problem — if you are overweight or underweight — [life] can wait. Stop kidding yourself that [other stuff] is more important. People are always worrying that they will mess up their career by stopping their work to fix themselves. But the worst job is the job that you use to avoid your personal life.

I immediately ordered Breaking Free from Emotional Eating, which somebody recommneded to me long ago, but which I’ve conveniently ignored. Emotional eating is what I do. I need to stop it.

Meanwhile, here’s a related article on creating a habit of self-regulation. The author writes:

If you do ANYTHING that requires self-regulation, then that makes it EASIER for you to have self-regulation in EVERYTHING.

Self-discipline is one of my weak spots. It always has been. I don’t know how to change it, how to improve. This article claims that even practicing good posture on a regular basis can improve self-regulation in other areas of life. I’m skeptical, but I’m willing to give it a try (especially since my posture is poor to begin with).

Someday I will be a whole, complete person. I just wish it were today.

(P.S. On a related note, Dave sent me this story about mindless eating.)

The Early Bird

The last time Kris left town, I was a lonely man. I felt lost. She’s been gone all this week, too, but I’m not lonely yet. “Do you miss me?” she asks when she calls. I hesitate because I know the right answer. But I tell the truth.

“I haven’t had time to miss you yet,” I say. And I haven’t. I’ve been on the go non-stop ever since she left. If she were home, this would be one of those weeks during which it feels like we never see each other. In a way, this is good, I suppose, but ultimately it’s running me ragged.

I sat down at six yesterday afternoon to read Mark‘s story for the Woodstock Writers Guild. I dozed off. I slept for three hours, slumped in my easy chair. I woke at nine, cursed myself for missing the writers group meeting, and then trudged upstairs and went to bed.

My alarm woke me at four.

After some e-mail conversations with Leo, I’ve decided that best way for me to add time to write into my day is to build it into the front end. Leo suggests getting up at 4am, writing for a couple of hours, and then living life as normal, squeezing in extra writing if there’s time during the rest of the day. This may sound a little crazy to non-writers, but it makes perfect sense to me. I need a large block of uninterrupted time alone, during which I can get things done.

In order to wake up at 4am, though, I’m going to need to take a slightly different approach than normal. Usually I wake up, roll over, grab my laptop, and look at my site statistics and handle any e-mail crises. It’s 4:35 right now, and I haven’t checked e-mail or looked at stats. My goal is not to do so until 7. This may seem obsessive, but trust me: it’s a compulsion I have that I’ve been trying to break for months.

Instead, I pulled on some sweats, grabbed an apple and my pedometer, and headed out into the night. I took a walk around the block in the cool morning air. I communed with the morning cats; I listened to the Western screech owl in the neighbor’s tree; I watched a raccoon cross the road.

The trip around the block is one mile. I walked it in sixteen minutes. I munched on my apple and grogged awake. It felt good. I’ve been sitting at my computer typing for twenty minutes now. That feels good, too.

This plan holds much promise. Ten years ago, during the period in which I lost so much weight, one key to my success was that I got up at 5am most mornings to exercise at the high school track. I walked, biked, or ran a couple of miles, then went home and had a small breakfast. It was a great way to start the day.

I’m going to try something similar this summer. But most of all, I’m going to write.

101 Goals: May 2007 Update

Several weeks ago I shared my list of 101 things I wanted to do in 1001 days. I’m pleased with my progress so far. It hasn’t been stellar, but that’s because I’m not trying to overload myself. I’ve started by trying to tackle several health-related goals.

Tomorrow is the last day of my “one month drinking only water” challenge, for example. During the month of May, I’ve only allowed myself to drink water and two water-based derivatives: mineral water (including Talking Rain flavored waters) and non-caffeinated tea. At the same time, I’ve started my “three months with no alcohol” project.

These were easy at first. Water is fine for a week or two, and I don’t crave alcohol under normal circumstances. The past few days, however, has been a trial. More and more, I’m craving jazzier beverages. I want a diet Pepsi. Or some fruit juice. Or, especially, a glass of wine.

Actually, I’ve only craved the wine under two particular circumstances. Last Saturday, we held a small dinner party with the Bankses and the Jolstead-Woodruffs. Typically at events like this, I’d join in the wine-drinking. This time I didn’t. It was a struggle. Then on Monday, I went over to Craig and Lisa’s for a fine meal of salmon (and other tasty treats). Again wine was on the bill. Again I felt the urge to drink, and regretted that I couldn’t.

But otherwise the alcohol gives me no trouble.

But, as I say, the water is more of a problem. I only have a little more than a day left there, though, so I’m not too worried. I’m going to make it.

Meanwhile I’ve begun my “one week without sugar” experiment. Yesterday was fine. Today was fine until after lunch. After lunch I craved something sweet. In a bold and creative move, I discovered a way to have both something sweet and a non-water liquid, all without breaking my pact. Today at Costco I purchased some jumbo-sized grapefruits. “Those look sweet,” I thought to myself, and I devoured one in just a couple minutes. Then, as I do, I squeezed the juice into my mouth. Awesome! Buying juice in the store would be cheating. But drinking it from the fruit? Fair game, my friends, fair game.

So, after tomorrow, my progress on my 101 Things in 1001 Days list looks like this:

Health and Fitness: give up sugar for one week (3 days out of 7, in progress); drink only water for one month (complete); give up alcohol for three months (1 month out of 3, in progress). I’ve also begun biking again, and Mac has agreed to loan me his free weights.

Financial: fully fund Roth IRA (2006) (complete). No further progress.

Home and Garden: no progress.

Personal: purge wardrobe of anything I haven’t worn in the past two years (in progress); learn to shave with a safety razor (complete); hold a gourmet potluck (scheduled); create the indispensable comic strip library (sketched out).

Self-improvement: no progress.

Adventure: no progress.

Entertainment: a little progress on all three goals.

Photography: no progress.

Reading: I finished one more Pulitzer winner.

Writing: I’ve begun collecting recipes for the Friends Cookbook.

Work: the GRS forums have been implemented; I’m still working on a GRS podcast; Success Daily has a template, and I’ve even written a couple entries, but the site won’t launch for several months; I have some keen ideas for Vintage Pop; I’ve registered domain names for Too Much Cat.

I’ll post progress reviews every couple of months. It’s the only way to keep me accountable!