Work and Leisure

Hrm, haven’t been doing too well with the blogging every day thing, have I? One reason is that my entire last week was taken up with busy work, as I wrote about last time. I felt like I was constantly working all week and just not accomplishing anything. Makes it hard to find time to write a blog post, which is (let’s be honest) also not really accomplishing anything. I haven’t been doing too well at making the most of my leisure time, either. In fact, I don’t really feel like I’ve been making leisure time a priority. It’s either working, feeling like I should be working, or doing “maintenance” (things like washing dishes, making dinner, paying bills, cleaning, errands, etc.). I took most of yesterday and tried to have fun, but it didn’t really take. I went to my neighborhood holiday parade, then went on a bike ride, found a new lunch place, ate a great sandwich and drank an orange cream soda outside while listening to a jazz duo play down the street, then went and read in the park (the benefits of living in Southern California in December, I guess). Should have been a hands-down great day, but I never really got into it. I kept having this vague feeling of anxiety or unease, and wasn’t really fully able to just relax. That bothers me, because that’s one thing I’ve always been pretty good at. Ah well…

Along these lines, this morning I read this:

The only object of work should be immediate enjoyment…. Work in general should be subordinated to the enjoyment of life–it should be regarded as a necessary interval in the day’s leisure. But this very distinction between work and leisure is born of our slave-ridden mentality; the enjoyment of life is the activity of life, an undifferentiated performance of mental and manual functions: things done and things made in response to a natural impulse or desire.

Herbert Read, Anarchy and Order: Essays in Politics (1954 [1938])

Who Ain’t a Nobody?

Herman Melville, on the philosophy of early nineteenth-century London brick makers (with a bit of brick-making onomatopoeia thrown in):

“What signifies who we be, or where we are, or what we do?” Slap-dash! “Kings as clowns are codgers–who ain’t a nobody?” Splash! “All is vanity and clay.”

From Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1854).

November 26, 2008

It’s so easy to get led astray from our best intentions. I initially started this blog to help me keep a sense of balance in life. I typically go from long periods of intense work to long periods of intense inactivity, each of which is accompanied by its own set of stressors. The idea behind blogging was to write something every day about life, work, balance, or just whatever, to help keep everything in perspective. Almost immediately, I started second-guessing myself, thinking “oh, I don’t have anything interesting to say today,” and not making a post. That tendency has gotten worse, until I only post occasionally when I feel like I really have something to say. Well, I’m going to start trying to do it every day again. We’ll see what happens.

So anyway, here’s a few of the things that have been going on (in no particular order):

• It rained really hard all night last night, the first time in a long time here, and now it’s cool and cloudy and wet and like a proper fall, finally.
• I finished some articles and got them sent off to journals (see previous post).
• The left pedal is stuck on the Runwell and I’m worried that I’ve mangled the spindle so that it won’t come off the crank arm.
• I’ve sent off inquiries to two part-time jobs I found on Craigslist.
• I finally signed up for eBay to bid on an old bicycle in my area, lost, and disliked the experience so much, I will never eBay again.
• I turned 29 years old.
• I started two new articles.
• I finished reading Herman Melville’s Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1854).

So yeah, I’m going to try to write about stuff like this more often, hopefully every day. I don’t care if nobody reads it really, it’s more for me than anybody else.