Cirque du Malaise

I recently read this article: 9 productivity tips for working at home. I work at home, writing, all day. It’s not easy, and I’m always interested in how other people manage to pull it off. Some of these so-called tips were like, dur. But the whole time I was reading the blog post, I was shaking my head “no.” Maybe I'm weird (I am), but what works for other people doesn’t seem to work for me.

For me, every day consists of a lot of pacing, peeing, stalling, cleaning, spacing out and waiting anxiously for the mailman. To be fair, I’m equally if not drastically more unproductive in an office environment. But over the years that I’ve been a freelance writer, I’ve started to learn what really works for me. So if you are looking for my advice (trust me, you’re not), here are my tips, amended:

They say: Track your time by hand.

My actual calendar

I say: If “by hand” you mean the genius, multilayered, complex Excel spreadsheet and iCal calendar (with 7 different embedded calendar subjects) that I spend my time obsessing over instead of doing actual work, yup, check.

They say: Pair up with an accountability partner.

I say: Does my split personality count?

They say: Work with someone else in your home.

I say: Oh hahahahahahahaha that’s funny. Right Michael? Remember the last time we tried that? I’m pretty sure we watched all 3 seasons of Arrested Development in a week.

They say: Leave [the house].

I say: You sound like my therapist.

They say: Dress for work.

I say: I do this! Well, what I mean is, I take the time every morning to put a bra on (under my sweats that I already was wearing) and to put my hair in a ponytail. If it’s good enough for the mailman, it’s good enough.

They say: Reduce web clutter

I say: Twitter actually helps me concentrate, and if you don’t believe me, watch this:

They say: Psychologically reinforce self-discipline. Instead of getting up in the middle of a project, reward yourself with a snack once you’ve gotten it done.

I say: I can’t concentrate when I’m hungwee so that doesn’t really work for me. I’m more into fanatically monitoring my blood sugar all day. This is also why I can’t work from the library. I have to be within 30 seconds of food at all times.

They say: Answer phone calls and emails in batches.

I say: I wholeheartedly agree with this direct quote from the article: “There are few things more distracting than answering your phone in the middle of the project. After hanging up, your concentration is shot and you have to start all over again.”

And that’s why I don’t answer the phone. Pretty much, ever. The telephone is the scourge of humanity, in my opinion. I have a lot to say about how evil the phone is. But I don’t find email distracting at all. In fact, as a writer, it helps me stay in the flow of writing, sometimes.

They say: Reduce physical clutter.

I say: I throw shit out.

I’m really into making pottery. I don’t talk about it all that much, partly because it’s hard to talk in words about something that happens purely from the right side of your brain, and partly because, well, it’s my thing, and I don't always feel like sharing it. Sometimes it’s nice to have just one thing that you don’t share with anyone else. I go to a pottery studio once a week and make things. And usually my favorite part of these evenings is putting in my iPhone earbuds, blasting some Chopin, and tuning everything and everyone else out.

Last night though, was different.

I was feeling sad when I got to class. I have terrible jet lag this week, it’s been rainy and glum in Mill Valley, and then, fuck it all, Steve Jobs died yesterday.

I know it’s a little weird to get emotional when a public figure dies. I did not know Steve Jobs and I really do have bigger problems to worry about. But Steve Jobs was that rare public figure whose existence actually did touch my life, personally, and the lives of those around me. He impacted my own life deeply with his brilliant product innovations at Apple, but also with his creative vision, in which way he was truly a role model. THINK DIFFERENT. He was a legend, and he really did the change the world. He definitely changed my own life. Everything I’ve ever done that matters, I did on a Mac.

So when I got to pottery, I was feeling heavy-hearted. I didn’t really want to be there. And I definitely didn’t want to talk to anyone. I wanted to stay home and worry about what’s going to happen to the world without someone like Steve Jobs in it.

I put my headphones on, and I started throwing pots. But then, a funny thing happened.  I somehow ended up talking to the guy next to me — a new face at the studio — and ended up having a really meaningful evening. He was a visiting ceramic artist who gave me a whole bunch of insightful tips about how to throw on the wheel. Some of them were useful practical tips: “Get in, get out.” “Keep your elbows in close.” Others were more philosophical.

I watched him give a demo on how to throw off the hump. This is where you take a huge pile of clay, sloppily center it on the wheel, and then make little objects (bowls, mugs, whatever) from just the very top part of the wedge. In this way, you can pop off a whole bunch of things really fast without having to keep wedging, centering, and cleaning off the wheel. It also gets you away from the rabbit hole of being obsessed with centering the entire lump of clay perfectly, which can be a real time consuming OCD endeavor.

My favorite part of watching him throw off the hump was that he kept spinning these beautiful creative pieces, cutting them off the hump of clay, holding them up for everyone to admire, and then smashing them on the floor.

He said: “pottery is not precious.”

And this is what I love about pottery. You can’t take it too seriously. It’s a transient creative format. You can focus everything you’ve got on the most brilliant piece of artwork you have in you, but there are a million things that can go wrong. Even if you manage to throw it successfully, cut it off the wheel without warping it, carry it to the shelf without tripping, and trim it without fucking it up, you never know what’s going to happen in the bisque fire, or the subsequent glazing fire, or when some silly person picks it up to admire it and then accidently drops it. There might be an earthquake, or you might put a glaze on it that ends up sucking. You might get it home, only to have it break in the dishwasher, or slide off the edge of the table, or maybe the handle just breaks off one day. The thing is broken before it was ever born.

You’ve all probably heard the fable about Achaan Chaa, the Buddhist master, who loved his tea cup. His disciple said, how can you teach us about non-attachment when I see you always use that same mug? In the words of Mark Epstein:

“You see this goblet? For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”

Pottery is all about nonattachment and it’s also about getting over yourself.

I left the studio in a great mood last night, grateful for a few lessons learned. And then I came home and watched one of the many Steve Jobs videos circulating around the Internet in memorium, the one in which he said:

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

I’m turning 40 quite soon. How do I feel about this?

Let me illustrate by telling you about a nightmare I’ve been having: I’m driving a giant truck speeding down a freeway; the brakes don’t work; I can’t slow down; there is a big-rig on fire spinning out of control and about to jackknife into me; oh, and I’m going backwards.

That pretty much sums it up. Thanks, brain.

This morning I had a meeting with a longtime friend client, Cynthia Simon. She said, “How are you?” and I said, “I’m freaking out about turning 40.” Cynthia — who is a beautiful, stunning, radiant post-40 woman herself, laughed and said, “You’re doing fucking great.” I appreciated that — mostly because of the swearing. But, I’m not actually doing that great. I’m doing pretty terribly, if you want the honest truth. I’m kind of losing my mind about it.

I just so happen to be reading By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham, a novel about two self-involved yuppie New Yorkers in their early 40s who constantly refer to themselves as “middle aged.” Really? Middle aged? I asked a few friends of mine this weekend — women about my age or slightly older — whether they think we are in fact “middle aged.” They all basically agreed that we are (as did Wikipedia, fucker). I nodded as if I could handle this information on a cerebral level, but inside, I was quaking with terror and rage at this concept.

In my mind, “middle aged” applies to people who have gray hair (that they don’t, ahem, color), retirement plans, and grandchildren. “Middle aged” does not under any circumstances apply to people who have barely figured their shit out, are single, live paycheck to paycheck, and still remember the sordid moments of their bohemian childhood quite vividly. Yes, my grandmother was technically just a few years older than me when she became a grandmother, but things were different then.

Incidentally, I had a lovely session with another of the intuitive Cynthias in my life —Cynthia Mellon — and she informed me that I have what’s called “renunciant karma.” She explained that in other times and cultures they might have called this “nun karma.” Remember when we were teenagers and endured tragic breakups with our boyfriends and then exclaimed in a tone of abject despair: “That’s it! I’m just going to be a nun!” Ironically, I actually am, apparently, going to be a nun. You win again, 13-year-old Joslyn.

Still, the middle aged thing is not sitting comfortably in my mind.

What does this all mean? I wish I had a nice tidy answer for you. But at the moment, all I have is this recent shoe purchase to tide me over:

Would a middle aged person wear THESE?

I only fell down 4 or 5 times when I tried to wear these today. I’m gonna push through. A homeless dude at the Whole asked me why I was wearing them. I said, for practice. He said, for practice for what? And I said, to be good at it. And he said, kindly, that he would teach me how to play the bass guitar if I need to be good at something.

That really happened.

I just finished reading Man's Search For Meaning, by Viktor Frankl. (I should say that I just finished RE-reading it, since I've read it before, but thanks to the magic of old age forgetfulness, I can now re-read books I read when I was younger and it's as if for the first time. Perk of dementia.)

Food for thought:

More and more, a psychiatrist is approached today by patients who confront him with human problems rather than neurotic symptoms.

In other words, just cuz you're miserable does not mean you're maladjusted. After all, life is kinda hard.

And also:

Edith Weisskopf, before her death professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, contended, in her article on logotherapy, that "our current mental hygiene philosophy stresses the idea that people ought to  be happy, that unhappiness is a symptom of maladjustment. Such a value system might be responsible for the fact that the burden of unavoidable happiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy."

Well said, Edith. A legend before her time.

Takeaway: It's okay to be sad, depressed, miserable, and just generally over it sometimes. Don't let the positivity propogandists tell you otherwise! "Mental hygiene," ew.

I was editing an article for a client, Dr. Susanne Babbel, in which she described a simple journaling exercise about hope. This exercise is intended to give trauma victims a purpose in their life, but it’s basically straight out of the pages of The Artist’s Way, one of my favorite creative projects.

Hope is kind of a hangup for me right now.

Last year while at a retreat I was given a piece of red string to tie around my wrist with a wish. The idea? When the bracelet wears off, the wish comes true. I wished for “hope” — in other words, the possibility of some of my personal dreams coming true. The red string was tenacious and stayed on for months until it was ratty and gross. It finally fell off on one arbitrary but markedly hopeless day.

Recently, I’ve been re-reading Viktor Frankl’s masterpiece Man’s Search For Meaning, which recounts his experience in Nazi concentration camps in the 40s, and his theory that only those with hope and a purpose for their survival made it through the war, despite their physical conditions and the things that happened to them in captivity.

Hope. It’s all about hope. Freud thought it was all about desire, but it’s all about hope.

I need to work on this. So, I decided to try Susanne’s Hope Exercise.

First, you make a list of things you genuinely enjoy doing. Things that give you peace and put you in your right brain (that’s your creative mind — the one where you lose track of time). Not things you think you should like doing. So not, in my case, things like “practicing yoga” or “going to Burning Man” or “eating mushrooms.”

1. Writing
2. Reading novels
3. Hiking Mt Tam
4. Cooking
5. Going to the movies
6. Taking pictures (heart you iPhone)
7. Making pottery
8. Picking flowers (especially late at night off the neighbor’s lawns)
9. Making things for my imaginary spice company, Simple Basic
10. Lying around listlessly in the sun

Second, make a list of things you would like to achieve in your life. This is big picture, blue sky stuff.

1. Write a book
2. Make actual money off a personal creative project
3. Have a family (not picky about what kind, very picky about the participants)
4. Go to France
5. Learn to speak another language (ideally, French)

Third, make a list of baby steps you can take to get going in that direction. This takes an “off the paper, into the world” mentality that I rarely possess.

1. Take a writing workshop (I’m trying to manifest one at Esalen later this year. And by “manifest” I mean “get around to putting a deposit down for it.”)
2. Spread the gospel about Recovering Yogi relentlessly while working on my side project with Matthew Teague Miller, a children’s book we’re writing called The Clam Before the Storm.
3. Steal a baby. (Just kidding.) Alternate plan: Elope with gay BFF in Thailand later this year. (Again, kidding. Sort of.)
4. Pray to money gods while making a plan with my cohorts Leslie and Vanessa to really do this France thing. Next year.
5. Pull out those Rosetta Stone CDs I bought off Craig’s List and develop an iota of self-discipline about my French lessons!

Now, the good part: you share it (like I’m doing here). This turns it into an incantation. Saying things out loud makes them real!

Recently I was talking to a friend about dudes who claim that their “feelings were hurt” for highly trivial reasons subsequent to displaying shockingly sociopathic lacks of feelings during breakups. No one in particular. Just, you know, in general.

I am not really a big “feelings” girl myself. Never have been. Don’t like sappy movies; not crazy about over-processing things; once had a boyfriend who would get mad at me for not squeezing his hand back when he’d squeeze mine. (The latter is a first world relationship problem and I kind of wish I’d hung in there longer on that one.)

Don’t get me wrong. I have feelings. LOTS of them. Lots and lots and lots. Boy do I have feelings.

I’m just not very good at talking about my feelings. And especially not with someone I have feelings for. In fact, if I am talking to you about my feelings, chances are it’s cuz I don’t have any. For you.

Still, I think I understand what feelings are all about.

I used to work for a yoga teacher who was big on the Marshall Rosenberg school of Nonviolent Conflict talk. In this paradigm, every conversation sounds something like this:

“Dude, when you disrespect me, I feel hurt.”

See what I did there? I simultaneously let Dude know that he/she disrespected me, without actually assigning Dude the blame for my feelings. Cuz, in reality, no one can make you feel anything. You’re pretty much in charge of your own feelings, sadly.

When we were on yoga retreats (aka yoga “bootcamps”), we would exercise this type of nonviolent speech according to a predefined shortlist of acceptable feelings. The list looked something like this:

List of Possible Feelings

• Angry
• Sad
• Hurt
• Happy
• Shameful

Occasionally people would try to sneak in other feelings like “bored” or “irritated,” but Teacher would gently put them in their place and let them know that “irritated” actually means “angry” and “bored” actually means “sad,” or whatever.

○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

A few years after I learned how to communicate in nonviolent conflict terms, I found myself in therapy with a live-in boyfriend who we’ll call DB. At some point during our short-lived attempt to repair our godawful relationship, our bargain therapist suggested that he get better about talking about his feelings and that I, in turn, practice listening and respecting them. I was game.

Until, that is, the night that DB decided to exercise his right to have feelings. The conversation went something like this:

DB: “I’m gonna go out with my friend Ryan and get some beers.”

Me: But we have plans?

DB: But I feel like going out with Ryan instead.

Me: What? That’s not cool.

DB: You’re doing it. You’re not listening to my feelings.

Me: What?

DB: I said that I feel like going out with Ryan.

Me: Wait. Do you think that “going out with Ryan” is a feeling?

DB: That’s what I said.

Me: [Blank stare.]

Needless to say, therapy didn’t go anywhere, and neither did our relationship.

The end.

(I've discovered a new literary tool — when you can't think of a good ending for a story you just end it with "The End." Works literally every single time!)

1. ennui
2. pathetique
3. tres bleak
4. nostalgique (Thanks to my friend Ben for coining this one. My new favorite.)
5. coup d'état of the soul
6. cirque du malaise (Love this one so much I just bought the domain name.)
7. chagrin (Thank you, Vanessa)
8. affreux = simply awful (Again, Ben)
9. joie de noir (Y'all should follow my superfly witty friend Michael on Twitter for more of this action)

I need a #10 to round out the list. Anyone?

And in honor of depressing French poetry, I'll leave you with a little Anaïs Nin. I found this in an old diary from my epically morose Anaïs Nin phase in my early 20s. It's fittingly melodramatique.

...At that early age she was bemoaning the irreversibility of life. Already she was aware of how the past dies... She watched every minute of the day as she lived so that nothing would be lost. She regretted the minutes passing. She wept without knowing why, since was young and had not yet known real suffering. But without being fully aware of it, she had already experienced her greatest sorrow... She did not know it then, as most of us never know when it is that we experience the full measure of joy or sorrow. But our feelings penetrate us like a poison of undetectable nature. We have sorrows of which we do not know the origin or name.

(From Winter of Artifice)

Going to author talks is one of my favorite things to do. I love hearing writers discuss their writing process and where they get their inspiration. It makes me feel like less of a weirdo.

Last night I went to see Michael Krasny (from KQED, our local NPR station) interview Abraham Verghese, who wrote Cutting For Stone — a novel I read recently on the recommendation of several friends. (My oldest bestie Karen actually bought it for me for Christmas — thank you Karen!)

It was a packed house of blue hairs, and me and Karen. Nevertheless, it was a lively crowd, and a compelling evening. Verghese is witty and brilliant, and Krasny is always a great moderator (I saw him interview Salman Rushdie a few months ago—one of my favorite author talks and the partial inspiration behind my new tattoo.)

After the initial interview, Verghese took questions from the audience, which Krasny read off index cards. The very last question was something like: “What is the one message that you have gotten out of your life as a doctor and a writer, the one thing you want to impart to your audience?”

Verghese said: Only Love Endures.

This made me very sad. It’s a really romantic, mythical thing for a novelist to say. But is it really true? Personally, I haven’t had this experience. I’d venture to say that love is one of the most whimsical and least enduring of things.

As for Cutting For Stone, yup, love endures all right. It endures so much that (spoiler alert!) the main character nearly dies as a result of it… and not in a good way.

Admittedly I’m a cynic when it comes to love, and vapid sappiness has never been one of my favorite things, but I’m just not sure I buy into the whole “only love endures” concept.  I think it's a great message for a novel, and one that has been used time and again through the ages..... precisely because it's fiction and fantasy. We so drastically want it to be true.

Oh but you know what does for sure endure? Tattoos. Those bad boys are for life.

When I write articles for Elephant Journal I am often humbled by the agreeable comments from readers who are able to phrase things far more precisely and eloquently than I managed to. (I am also often appalled by the confrontational nature of anonymous commenting, but that’s a different story.)

This week, I posted an article called “Mercury in Retrograde is not a good excuse for you to be an asshole to me.” It's about theism, kind of.

I quoted the marvelous Pema Chodron, and in return, my Elephant colleague Scott Robinson (who goes by the “nom-de-blog” Yesu Das — and yes, I wish I came up with that cheeky play on words) posted two oldie but goodie quotes that I have to share.

The first is from a Somerset Maugham book that rocked my adolescence: Of Human Bondage (yup, I was a book nerd with a flair for dramatic titles, even then):

Yesu Das’s setup: “…in which Phillip, the semi-autobiographical protagonist, met a dissipated and largely unpublished poet in Paris named Cronshaw, who gave Phillip a remnant of a Persian carpet. The carpet, Cronshaw told him, held in it the answer to the meaning of life. Phillip kept the remnant for many years, through repeated failures and almost relentless suffering, as he tried to find what the world called “success” in life. One day, long after the carpet fragment had been lost, Phillip realized, with the abruptness of revelation, the truth that had eluded him for so many years: life does not have any meaning.”

“His insignificance was turned to power, and he felt himself suddenly equal with the cruel fate which had seemed to persecute him; for, if life was meaningless, the world was robbed of its cruelty. What he did or left undone did not matter. Failure was unimportant and success amounted to nothing…(T)hat was why Cronshaw, he imagined, had given him the Persian rug. As the weaver elaborated his pattern for no end but the pleasure of his aesthetic sense, so might a man live his life… Out of the manifold events of his life, his deeds, his feelings, his thoughts, he might make a design, regular, elaborate, complicated, or beautiful… In the vast warp of life (a river arising from no spring and flowing endlessly to no sea), with the background to his fancies that there was no meaning and that nothing was important, a man might get a personal satisfaction in selecting the various strands that worked out the pattern. There was one pattern, the most obvious, perfect, and beautiful, in which a man was born, grew to manhood, married, produced children, toiled for his bread, and died; but there were others, intricate and wonderful, in which happiness did not enter and in which success was not attempted; and in them might be discovered a more troubling grace… His life had seemed horrible when it was measured by its happiness, but now he seemed to gather strength as he realized that it might be measured by something else. Happiness mattered as little as pain. They came in, both of them, as all the other details of his life came in, to the elaboration of the design.”

And then there’s good ol’ Billy Shakespeare, from King Lear:

“his is the excellent foppery of the world, that,

when we are sick in fortune,—often the surfeit

of our own behavior,—we make guilty of our

disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as

if we were villains by necessity; fools by

heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and

treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,

liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of

planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,

by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion

of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish

disposition to the charge of a star!"

Nice, right? Thanks, Yesu.

The man has taste. You can read a blog he wrote about theism here.

My good friend Juliet Seaver sent me this poem, and I love it so much I have to share:

God Says Yes To Me

by Kaylin Haught

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don't paragraph 
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I'm telling you is
Yes Yes Yes