This post is part of my 2022 Word Project. You can read what that’s about here.
Sunday, November 5, 2023
4:18pm
I was sorely tempted to quit blogging today. This was almost the “Talk to me about it next year. Or never.” post. But there are only 57 days left and I’m committed to finishing something I’ve started. This is, as they say, the hill I’ve chosen to die on.
I am, however, in a state of mind to rebel. And if I can’t rebel by quitting blogging, I’m going to rebel by eating half a bag of chocolate covered Espresso beans.
How much caffeine is in those things, anyway? I’m starting to feel like an electrocuted cat.
So that happened. Then I rebelled against cleaning. My apartment is a disaster. The organizing project is… disorganized. My weekly housekeeping list has been set up and deleted. Yesterday’s dishes are still in the sink, I’m down to one clean bath towel, and I don’t care.
Next I rebelled against the countdown/count up board. The board went from a simple counting project to an aspirational project to a chore where both of us stood there day after day wondering what do we write now? Ralph bailed out of the project a month ago. I lasted until this weekend, when I decided that I had no idea why I was imposing this requirement on myself.
I’m still counting. I’m not aspiring. I have 90-plus aspirations already, and not enough years left on this earth. I decided to actually DO something this weekend instead of aspiring to it.
Then my little headphones stopped charging today. For whatever reason they decided to shut down in the middle of some random episode of Survivor so I fidgeted with them for a minute then threw them on the table and got my big headphones. And then when my big headphones decided not to connect I threw those on the table and stopped listening to everything altogether. Because I’m done with headphones that don’t work. I’m done with technology telling me what it will and won’t do. Nobody ever needed to watch an episode of Survivor so badly that they needed to spend a half hour or hour or some indefinite length of time fidgeting with connections and chargers and Bluetooth and finding device finding device finding device.
So I rebelled entirely against technology and deleted about a dozen apps off my phone. I deleted games. I deleted streaming apps. I deleted apps to track the beer I drink and apps to make restaurant reservations and apps to buy bagels. I deleted my timer app.
I decided that after a couple of months of experimenting, I know exactly how I spend my days. I work, I exercise, I cook, I clean up after cooking, I occasionally wash bath towels and that’s about it. Do I need a graph to tell me that? I decided that I am going to spend my days exactly how I spend my days, no more and no less. I do not need to calculate where the minutes got spent.
Maybe if I spent less time fidgeting with a timer app and getting it to work and fixing the entries it put in wrong and recalculating the ones it overwrote, I might actually have time to do something else.
The “what else” is I did my puzzle today. And did not time how long I spent. I put football on in the background and listened to it without headphones. I ignored the dishes and laundry and the garbage in the hallway outside the front door that hasn’t been picked up since Thursday.
Oh, I also rebelled against garbage pickup. I put the pail out on Thursday and they didn’t show up to pick it up. Nor did they pick it up on Friday. As of this morning it was still sitting there and a normal person might ask, but CL, isn’t the dumpster right across the parking lot? Why didn’t you just bring it out?
And the answer is: because I don’t get paid to take the garbage out. In fact, every month my rent includes a line item for garbage disposal. As far as I’m concerned, unless they want to deduct three days of garbage pickup from my rent, it can stay out there until the rats find it. I’m a rebel, remember?
So yeah, I almost rebelled against my blog, but to be fair, it’s not the blog, it’s the fact that it requires a computer to do it. And if there’s one thing I’m in full rebellion against, it’s technology. So maybe I will write a little less. And maybe I will backfill a few days because I didn’t feel like opening my laptop. But I still have my notebook and I still write every day, sometimes a few times a day depending how much of a rant I’m on.
And now I’m going to make a cup of tea and eat some more chocolate covered Espresso beans. I hear they’re the hallmark of a rebel.
Photo: oh, are there some boxes on the floor to clean up? Too bad.