Balancing

The shelf next to my desk is a mess. Piles, piles, and piles. Things I should do or should have done. Things I haven't let go. Things I haven't put away. The mess distracts me.

In my email is a Paul Jarvis piece about enough that has me thinking about the difference between what I want and what I need. I want the shelf clear, but what I need isn't as obvious.

I make pushes toward minimalism. They are half-hearted. I like the minimalist idea, but I love the facts of family life and the clutter of living. I'm in the living room where my daughters' paintings hang on the walls, knick-knacks from friends and family decorate the mantel, and blankets are strewn on the comfy couch. I wouldn't change much of it.

As for the messy shelf, some of it I'll put away after this, but much of it is in limbo. I have a couple projects there that I'm not ready to abandon but on which I'm not ready to work. The shelf is a parking lot. It looks messy but it doesn't mess much with my life. Not unless I think about it too much.

Jarvis's concept of enough I call balance. I imagine that tightrope walkers don't remain long in balance as they cross the wire. Balance is something we return to. We fall out of balance, wave our arms madly, and hope to come back into balance before we fall, but we are always moving out of balance. We can also keep working to return to balance.

Minimalism, enough, messes, balance, these are all transient states. Accepting that, I look over at the shelf and see less mess, more possibility.

I've written often about wanting a clean desk, but I'm often working on something new that comes to me in scraps and loose pages, notebooks and computers, file folders and empty coffee cups. The mess accumulates. Wanting a constantly clean desk is a fool's game. Returning to a clean desk, that's an art.

I'm ready to clear off some of my desk and shelf now. It might give me some ideas.

Hot Toddy

Having been sick for five days and struggling to sleep with an exhausting cough, I made my first hot toddy last night. How a man so fond of whiskey has gone this long without trying such a thing is a mystery. Coughing so hard it hurt, I got up, and while walking (and coughing) downstairs, asked my phone for a hot toddy recipe:

• 2 Tbsps bourbon
• 1 Tbsp mild honey
• 2 tsp lemon juice
• 1/4 cup boiling-hot water

I heated the kettle, measured bourbon, honey, and lemon juice, then poured not hot water into the mug. Not hot enough water. The whole thing was cool by my first sip and the honey was still a bit congealed. Oh well. It only worked about as well as hot tea or cold water but tasted better. Lying in bed, waiting for sleep, dreading the cough's return, I revised the recipe:

• 4 Tbsp bourbon
• 1/2 Tbsp honey
• 1 Tbsp lemon juice
• Water just off a rolling boil to fill my small mug

Microwaving bourbon sounds like a crime but maybe I can steam it over the kettle somehow. I'll work on that. Got to do something about this cough.

A comment on the website suggested a simpler approach:

I substituted bourbon for the lemon and honey. I also substituted bourbon for the hot water. Fantastic! Would make again.

I respect that minimalist approach but would add a cube of ice and call it the near-perfect hot toddy.

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At work today, a colleague suggested the following version:

• 1 shot Fireball
• 1 tsp honey
• 1 tea bag (lemon ginger, lemon ginger turmeric, or whatever)
• 1 wedge of lemon
• Water to top off the mug
• 1 Halls Cough Drop added at the end

She suggested I get comfy, sip, enjoy, and pass out. I very well might.

State Of Syracuse Weather

Syracuse's mayor presented the State Of The City last night. It was a good show. The speech was held up on the hill with windows overlooking the city. The lights dimmed and the blinds slowly rose revealing the world outside. The plan was for us to see Syracuse's nighttime skyline in panoramic vista. Instead we greeted a wall of white snow.

The mayor could have complained or joked about terrible weather. That's what I'm used to hearing. But he didn't complain and that's a lot of why I voted for and support him. He said it was like we were in a snow globe. Beautiful. He embraced the weather and referred to us as "the titans of winter." Oh, I like that.

At XO Taco prior to the speech, I wrote the following in my notebook:

I'm starting a pro-snow campaign in Syracuse to change the mood. I'm not expecting this to be the mayor's primary initiative. Some things I have to do myself.

If I were mayor, I'd gather the weather reporters and media executives to present the case for changing the talk around the weather, setting a new tone. It's not a conflict of interest like choosing sides in a political race. Just present the weather in a fairer light.

Celebrating the weather will lift the city's mood. We live in winter sometimes from late October until the first days of May. We get a lot of snow. This morning it's nine degrees with a fresh layer of snow and some ice. We can say it's too damn cold or declare that it is nine degrees and people are still out walking, driving, shoveling, beginning their days. We can cheer the DPW for making all the roads safe. We can celebrate a sky that is eggshell blue and bright with sunshine. It really is a beautiful day in our neighborhood.

This reminds me of the push a few years ago in North Dakota to drop North from the state's name. Ridiculous, right? But North sounds and feels colder. South Dakota is in no way tropical, but it sounds more inviting than North Dakota. Dropping North might seem foolish, but it would have a positive effect on the feel of the place. And the feel of something is often much more important than we care to admit.

Here in Syracuse, we don't have to change our name, just shift the tone from being snow victims to becoming snow titans. We can show gratitude for the chance to talk with neighbors as we shovel, to brush off a colleague's car as we wait for ours to warm after work, to come in from the cold and be offered a mug of coffee. We can marvel at how inches, sometimes feet of snow fall, yet the day goes on as if it were spring with cleared roads, open businesses, and a thriving city.

If we hear, see, and read reports celebrating winter, we can begin accepting it. Acceptance is a step toward happiness and happiness is powerful stuff.

I'm pro-snow, pro-winter, and bet your chilly ass I'm pro-Syracuse, the city of winter's titans.

This Is Insane

Alan Jacobs, in a post saying he's done with blogging quotes the following from Buzzfeed:

This is why algorithmic time is so disorienting and why it bends your mind. Everything good, bad, and complicated flows through our phones, and for those not living some hippie Walden trip, we operate inside a technological experience that moves forward and back, and pulls you with it. Using a phone is tied up with the relentless, perpendicular feeling of living through the Trump presidency: the algorithms that are never quite with you in the moment, the imperishable supply of new Instagram stories, the scrolling through what you said six hours ago, the four new texts, the absence of texts, that text from three days ago that has warmed up your entire life, the four versions of the same news alert. You can find yourself wondering why you’re seeing this now — or knowing too well why it is so. You can feel amazing and awful — exult in and be repelled by life — in the space of seconds. The thing you must say, the thing you’ve been waiting for — it’s always there, pulling you back under again and again and again. Who can remember anything anymore?

I'm sad that Jacobs is leaving blogging. His blog is weird and wonderful, frustrating and confusing, challenging in the best sense. I want good challenges to read, to overcome, and with which to be in conversation. (I've challenged myself to stop ending sentences with prepositions in order to understand why such a rule ever existed. I get it now and agree. Challenges are good.)

Much sadder is the Buzzfeed writer's abdication of her responsibility to choose a lifestyle. She labels anyone opposed to that lifestyle as "living some hippie Walden trip." She uses "you" to mean me and loses her argument because I'm not that "you" and ain't ever going to be.

Like Alan Jacobs, I disconnected from Twitter "and the thought of going back...prompts nightmares." I walked away from Facebook wishing I could have burned it down on my way out. These are my choices as to how to live.

The Buzzfeed writer isn't "using a phone," she is choosing to be used by a phone while complaining about it. Narcissus didn't complain while being turned to a flower. Her phone is a well engineered navel but she chooses to relentlessly, hopelessly, and pitifully gaze into it, as if doing otherwise would mark her as a freak.

I say, choose to be a freak.

Screw the mainstream, the social norm, the wisdom of the crowd. Keep a paper planner, play vinyl records, walk instead of driving, leave your phone home on purpose, ignore the news out of Washington, and so on. If the culture dishes out sewage, why choose to eat it?

Instead of that question, she asks, "Who can remember anything anymore?"

I can. I remember a girl smiling at me in fifth grade because I wrote it down in solitude thirty years later. I remembered a tiny shard of that memory and the rest came back over the course of an hour of writing. I freakishly reflected on life. This was twenty-one years ago, before I had a smartphone, back when that Buzzfeed paragraph would have seemed ridiculously dystopian, impossible to believe.

The life she describes is worse than ridiculous. It's insane. It sounds horrible to this Walden hippie, to this freak. I'd rather be either of those things than the "you" she thinks we all must inevitably be.

And damn it, Alan Jacobs. Keep writing your blog.