Eudaimonia

Everyone wants to be happy, and if they are happy, they want to be more so, or more consistently so.  There are countless books on the subject with various successes, trendy cover art, and mysterious titles.  I prefer Aristotle. 

For the great bearded one, if I may paraphrase, there is a distinct difference between happiness and pleasure, and of course they should balance each other.  (Think scales—not Yin Yang). Pleasure comes from the delights, both physical and mental, of the outside world, each other, even.  Happiness comes from a virtuous life (balance again) and achieving goals.  I like this idea, and I think some of my pleasures are getting in the way of my happiness.

With that in mind, I have concocted a little experiment in discipline and happiness.   My thesis is about half done, which is fairly behind schedule but doable.  I know that I want to write this damn book, and I know that it will feel good to finish it and to have it as a physical thing in the world instead of a phantasm that lives half in my mind and half in pieces on my computer.  I also know that it will feel better than a 1000 instant pleasures, but those 1000 instant pleasures are sooo….instant.  The book is not.  It is the opposite.  Arduous, even.

So, starting some soon but future date, I am going to buy an middle-expensive bottle of champagne (I am open to suggestions here, by the way) and put it in the back of my fridge.  That done, I will not consume any alcohol until the full first draft is finished, put into one document, and printed as a whole for the first time.  I am a little intimidated by this, but the possible benefits seem to outweigh the danger of failing or of being really cranky for a couple months.

·         First, I think rewards work.  And since I can’t really afford to send myself to Fiji every time I  accomplish a long and complicated task, I have to take something away to make it a reward.

·         Second,  there are other benefits to not drinking for a significant amount of time that will further my other self-improvement efforts, mainly weight loss and thriftiness.  Fringe benefits, if you will.

·         Alcohol is probably the pleasure that most often gets in my way.  It makes other things harder, including getting a good night’s sleep, waking up and getting up, working out, and putting in a full day of getting shit done.  Ideally, after a period of enforced abstinence, good habits will overcome this.  Ideally.

·         I know that peer-pressure is predominately imaginary, but I could use a reminder.  I can go to a bar with my friends and order a diet coke.  Really, I can.

The thing is, I really have no idea how long it will take me to finish the book.  At least a month, possibly all summer.  And during that time there are major events, the graduation party of my best friend, my parents’ 40^th wedding anniversary, a going away party, and of course all the little summer events that spring up around people who work significantly less those months out of the year.  So I think I’m going to have to give myself a certain number of forgiveness passes.  Literal, physical passes that I will have to hand over to someone if I decide to break my fast a little. 

an inevitable side-effect of 4 years of drinking beer

I wish I weighed less and was in better shape.  In this, I am the antithesis of unique.  Boring, in fact.  However, it is one of the many paths on my way to self-improvement, so here I go talking about it.

Connected also with my desire to save money and be more fiscally responsible as I prepare to leave the cozy nest of post-grad University life, I bought a coupon for a month of “Women’s boot camp” from Groupon last month.  Apparently, so did a thousand other people.  So tomorrow morning I have an “assessment” appointment.  I have no idea what is entailed in this, but I have a theory, since it took me 2 weeks to score the appointment, that is it really a ploy to stagger the 1000 + people who bought the Groupon to keep classes small.

It’s amazing how close this tiny, insignificant hurdle came to making me strategically forget about the whole thing.  Luckily, I have a blunt and insensitive friend who, on hearing my plans for a 5-day-a week, boot camp style, kick your ass fitness class, his response was snort and a “yeah, right.  Good luck with that.  I give you two days.”

Now I have to at least do three.  But actually, I am pretty determined to see it through and do them all, unless, of course, it sucks way worse than I think it’s going to.

As to the previous post, last night was a first night on a luscious new mattress, and thank god I actually slept through the night with only normal nightmares.  Exercising daily is one way of preventing sleep paralysis symptoms, so maybe I can keep that in mind tomorrow morning.

Sleep Paralysis

I have a fairly common sleep disorder called sleep paralysis.  Standford’s Sleep and Dreams website has a fairly good explanation of the science behind it, and is even sensitive enough to throw out words like “terror” and “panic” in its fairly clinical description of the process. It falls short.

Henry Fuseli comes closer.

Most descriptions and stories I read describing this focus on the hallucinations, but not what it does to you after, so I’ll try to capture that here.  I hate starting a piece by commanding a reader to “imagine” anything and generally the use of the second person in essays without a designated reader, but it is currently five AM and I cannot think of an alternative way of setting this up.  Maybe later I’ll come back and change it to another perspective, but probably not.

Imagine you are in bed, eyes closed, ready for sleep to come and gently take you.  You’re thinking about the day you just had and the day you will have tomorrow.  At some point, you fall asleep, but the only indication of this is that your thinking becomes a little fuzzy and unfocused.  You’re still aware of everything real: the feel of your pillow as it slowly warms beneath your face; the breathing and shifting of the lover next to you; the TV program turned down low, and though you can no longer really follow the plot, you can recognize the voices of familiar cartoon characters; the ceiling fan blowing on you; the snoring cat making your right foot too warm.

The distress starts benignly enough.  You wish that you could shift your head a little to a cooler part of your pillow, or maybe even move your right foot from under the cat and into the cool breeze of the fan.  But you can’t; you’re asleep after all and can’t move voluntarily.

Then your cat shifts, walks up your body and lays on your chest, as cats do at inappropriate times.  You think that this should have woken you up enough to be able to move, but it doesn’t.  Your cat starts to bite your face.  You still can’t move.  You try as hard as you can to speak, because of all parts of you, your tongue feels the least locked in place.  You call to your lover’s name, or say help me, or whimper, or at least you think you do, but you can’t be sure because it doesn’t quite feel the same as real talking.  You lover reaches out to comfort you, but what he/she says doesn’t make sense.  “Apples or Oranges?  Apples or Oranges? Apples or Oranges?”  He/she starts to pinch your arm because you can’t answer his/her question.  You’re clearly dreaming now, but you can feel your lover pinching you and the cat biting your face as clearly as you can feel real things: the now hot pillow, the fan, the bunched sheet under your arm.  You fight to move, to scream.  It hurts the way it hurts when you try to lift something far too heavy.

All at once, it happens.  It makes a small noise like a rubber band snapping.  You pulled yourself awake, and reality becomes a solid thing around you because you can once more move through it, manipulate it.  The cat is irritated because you jerked your foot when you woke.  Your lover was just barely touching your arm, but shifts away, still asleep because he/she is now used to your spaz -attacks in your sleep.

You get a glass of water because you can.  Your arm still hurts where your lover pinched you, you check your face for scratches you can still feel.

You shake it off and go back to bed.  It’s been about forty five minutes since you first fell asleep.

The next time, you see your door opening out of the corner of your eye.  You think you hear someone crawling in.  You’re pretty sure that nothing just crawled into your bedroom in the middle of the night, but you can’t be sure until you turn your goddamned head and look. But you can’t move.  And so on. It can happen once or a dozen times a night.

When you panic, you don’t think clearly, so you hyperventilate to get extra oxygen to the brain.  While not a truly comfortable sensation, you take for granted how much this really helps.  Except you can’t do this when you’re asleep.  You breathe like everyone does when asleep—slow and shallow, like nothing at all is wrong.  The sensation is like being hugged too tightly from behind.  This is the real reason why you can’t let your lover spoon you.  You don’t want to dream, twenty minutes later, that he/she is unknowingly squeezing you to death. 

Each time you pull yourself out of sleep it gets harder because it’s exhausting.  Each time you lay down, forcing yourself to be voluntarily still, you’re more tired that the last.  In the early morning you wake your lover because you can’t help it.  The next morning you can’t remember which parts of that conversation were real.

The worse part about sleep paralysis is not the nightmare.  The worst part is that each time, no matter how many times it happens in a night, you can’t distinguish the real sensations from the dreamed ones.  Is something crawling on your hand or not?  Once I wasn’t convinced a spider was real until it was still there when I got up to go to the bathroom.  The pinching and the scratching are indistinguishable from real sensations because the nerves are actually firing, a side effect of the chemical imbalance that causes the disorder.  The subconscious gives shows you an explanation for this sensation with a convincing hallucination.  My subconscious is a cruel, but creative, freak. 

It’s now 6:45.  I think I’m going to go make myself a bacon and egg sandwich.  It’s not on my diet, but I’m too exhausted to fight my subconscious anymore and I fucking deserve it.

Goal One: Writer Status

Some smart ass published author once said “If you’ve written a page, you’re a writer.”  Somehow, I don’t buy this.  But I don’t exactly know where the line is, and I don’t really know on what side I am.

I’ve been self-identifying as a writer for at least ten years, though probably more like fifteen.  The more into the whole world of writing and writers I get—with my MFA program, conferences, the increasing percentage of writer and artist friends—I can’t help but compare my writing habits with others, and often find my own wanting. 

I have a chunk of a book/thesis written and resting that I occasionally poke at it, trying to provoke something, and after a small amount of friendly progress it inevitably bites me, rolls over, and goes back to sleep.  I know that if I write daily or at least regularly, it will get done.  Sometimes I will have streaks of productivity, but these are inevitably halted by something: moving to a new place, stacks of grading left undone, laziness.  Mostly because the rest of my life isn’t organized enough to prevent these interruptions or deal with them quickly when they do happen.

So my first goal, of many overlapping self-improvement wishes, is to write more and more consistently, as well as all the other things that really make “writer” status legit: revising, considering, submitting work, finishing stuff, etc.  Not once and a while, but all the time.  My primary occupation.

I will try to keep this blog, readers or no, apprised of that progress and how my strategies work or don’t work. 

PS.  While I am computer literate, I am new to the blogosphere.  So don’t be surprised if the appearance and organization of this changes.  A lot.  And try to forgive the generally noob state that it is in now.

why and what for

At the end of last week, I turned twenty-five. Big-picture wise, not at all a bad age to be.
I'm at the very (very) beginning of my career, to use such a horrifying word, and have a relationship that may just stick. The scary realization is that, with both of those, I can't know it's "the one." Not really, not with absolute proof-positive certainty. I can believe, hope, trust, put faith in, and bet my bottom dollar, but I can't prove it until I'm dead.
But really, that's beside the point.
The real point is like this: When I was in middle school, my middle-class, white, suburban school held many "assemblies" with various messages: don't smoke, don't litter, NASA needs your parent's money, when your old enough vote, and of course, drinking and driving will kill you dead. The later presentation was called "Alive at Twenty-Five" and toured the country with boom-boxes, sets, skit-actors, beer goggles, an obstacle course, and a totaled Camry. The title "Alive at Twenty-Five" was because, according to statistics, the likelihood of dying in a car crash drops significantly after the age of twenty-five. (Those presentations always had massive logic-jumps when it came to statistics—like since 44% of teens who die do so in car accidents, and nearly half of those deaths are drug/alchohol related, so if you drink and drive you will die with the same likelihood of playing Russian Roulette with 4 of the chambers loaded. I do not condone drunk driving; I just condemn bad math.)
To a thirteen year old, the message of Alive at Twenty-Five seemed to be that if you make it half-way to thirty, you're golden. Because of math.
    And because at twenty-five, you will inevitably

• be gainfully employed,
• be super responsible with responsible friends,
• have finished with the death trap that is college,
• have clear skin
• be able to hold your liquor
• etc, etc.

These ideas about half-way to thirty have been imbedded in my psyche since that tender young age, and it is still difficult to completely let go of them, despite oodles of proof to the otherwise. Twenty-five is the last benchmark before genuine adult-hood. I am now trustworthy enough to rent a car, merely because I was born in 1986.
I have the right balance of luck and intelligence that I've never really had to try very hard. I've rarely had to study, struggle daily for money or a job or stuff like that. The result is that I'm growing increasingly aware of a possible gap. A gap between what I do and what I am capable of doing, between who I am and who I am capable of being, between me and my potential for awesome. If you're thinking "oh, poor you" in a sarcastic voice, I'm right there with you. I've got it pretty good, all things considered, but I have this nagging feeling that I could be more worthy of all of it. So I'm going to try. Put in effort. Work at it with some deliberate and, at least sometimes, focused force.
Part of me thinks of this as an insurance policy. If, one day, forces outside of my control start to make my life truly suck, at least I'll be a stronger, more capable, more awesome person to offset it. Also, I just might be emotionally ready to be a real adult when I'm twenty-six. Better late than never.