Snow days

It has been 6 snow days in a row, and I'm using them as a chance to step back, slow down, and work on accepting the idea of anti-progress, while at the same time looking for lessons in the simple things in life. Here's what I did and what I learned in that time.

1. Started using Twitter. On @thewhistletree of course. I am still in the trial phase of being a twitter-person (is there an consensus on twitter terminology yet?), and I see both pros and cons.

Pro: I feel super connected to the pulse of life in all the places I'm interested (not as connected obviously in arenas of life that I don't seek out and follow, of course, but how much would I really want to spend my time reading things that aren't relevant to me?). I have a rapid-fire changing news feed that always gives me something to look at and occupy my brain cells, and it is sans-baby pics (it's like I get to start an all new Facebook account and selectively choose only the most interesting people to be friends with). And there's no facade that connecting with someone means you're "friends" or socially connected other than on the web.

Con: There is always a rapid-fire changing news feed for me to occupy my brain cells. This is probably the only con, but it's big. I quit Facebook because I thought it sucked away my attention from important things and weirded me out how much I was being updated on the mundane details of the lives of people I'm not very close to. I thought this was a bit poisonous, tilting me to worry about how my life measures up compared to other people at my stage of life. Twitter changes that in making the issues I follow much more pointedly important to me and makes me feel pretty good about spending my time on them. However, I still see some opportunities to fall into the same old trap of becoming down on myself for not winning an award for writing the best feature article of the year or not applying to all the cool field research internships that I keep seeing pop up. But shouldn't I just be able to avoid this by changing my mindset toward constantly judging myself and my accomplishments? It certainly doesn't seem like avoiding all social media is the answer. There would always be ways to be critical of myself.

Diagnosis: I will keep tweeting for now! I think it will just be a process of discipline to put the phone down and pick up a book or open up the laptop or pick up the stack of grading. I will get better with practice. For now, I'm pretty psyched about twitter so watch me tweet away and if you've got twitter tips and lessons for me, a greenhorn twitterer, please send them my way. I keep feeling like I am doing it wrong and I'm not quite sure how to best go about learning twitter-speak syntax norms.

2. Painted almost the entire house. Six rooms to be exact. And it was a lot of work. My husband and I went at it over the past three weeks and essentially finished it off in one marathon day this past weekend. It involved learning how best to preserve paintbrushes, balancing breaks with the ticking time-clock on paint-drying, learning where the paint tends to splatter, little expletives when we made boo-boos, a refreshing feeling when switching from large-scale rolling to the precision work of edging, and an engineering and geometry challenge of painting a 20 foot stairwell using the articulating ladder and 2x4 my dad lent us. (This resulted in one little scary accident when the ladder slipped off a stair and bringing Santosh surfing on the 2x4 down the stairs as the ladder bashed me in the shins, but we're both OK. It taught us to be more vigilant, and the rest of the time we pretty much mastered the art of teamwork between climbing & painting and spotting roles. I'd argue the spotter role was harder...). Finally at 2 a.m. that night, I pushed my way through the bedroom furniture that was congregated in the middle of the room and climbed into bed, paint speckles still hardened in my hair, and tried to fall asleep amid the paint fumes. It was pretty hard actually, and my sleep schedule is still completely messed up because of it. But waking up the next morning to completely different colored rooms was pretty cool. All that was left to do was take all the blue tape down, with one more trip up the scary ladder into the stairwell, and then packing up the apparatus in the car for me to return to my parents when I drove down that night for the Superbowl.

Lesson here: setting up a home is hard work. And it never stops! Now we are on to trying to figure out where to hang pictures and posters, and what to do about our complete lack of an entryway in this super snowy slushy winter. Is there a point at which it becomes easier? I do feel that now that the painting is done, it's more tweaking and organizing that we're doing. Like finally finding a way to file away receipts before they become crumpled inky paper monsters on the dining room table, and organizing the stolen hotel shampoos my husband likes to hoard in rescued shoe boxes from our growing cardboard trash monster.

3. Shoveled my fair share. I finally ventured out around 4:30 yesterday to put a dent in the shoveling as the sun set and while my husband finished work. There was a lot of snow! It's perplexing to waddle through knee deep snow and think, how do I make this into a smooth, nicely manicured sidewalk space? How do I uncover the car from the giant snowdrifts that somehow surrounded it on every side? Well, it's just a question of repetition. The laws of physics say if I keep carrying snow from one spot to another spot, eventually all the snow in the first spot will be in the second spot. So that's what I did. First I found a good Spot, the only one left really, at the (newly designated) "end" of the driveway. (Really just halfway down, since it'd be crazy to shovel the whole thing for just one car parked at the street end!). All the other spots were already towering above me, and I couldn't reach or throw snow high enough to use them as my depositories. So, sherpa-like, I picked up snow, I walked it around the car, and I pitched it into the lovely depths of the driveway (soon enough, that tower became too big too). It was daunting how repetitive the task would be, and how never-ending it felt, but it was gratifying to know that the task would inevitably be accomplished if I just kept going. In this stage of my life when every task seems to lack any clear guaranteed road to results, this felt so refreshingly unusual. So I kept going, and going, and going. Stopping every once in a while to check my phone, taking breaks, not rushing. It was nice.

4. Read a book for a whole day, and finished it. The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer. Biggest takeaway: I'm not the only one who has voices in my head saying "get a job" and "doing something that doesn't have a steady paycheck isn't allowed!" AKA, anything otherwise is slacking, not being a responsible adult. Amanda had them, and she ignored them, and made up her own ideas of success. She just went out and did her thing, and figured out how to get the money along the way. She trusted others to pay for her contributions, and in turn, worked her tail off to live up to her supporters' expectations. She probably worked ten times harder than most people who work 9-to-5's for a paycheck from a faceless corporate office. Because she knew who she was doing it for. And then in turn, those supporters supported her ten times harder than any stale business transaction ever would. Why does this ring so true to me? Why does this feel like a revolutionary idea in our capitalist, cut-throat world? I've been so at a loss for answers as to why life feels so hamster-wheel-like. Work, get money, buy stuff, try to de-stress, eat and sleep. The Art of Asking starts to scratch at the surface of this problem. What is a more authentic way for money to change hands? Or even, what is a more authentic way for us to use our support systems for our basic needs and stop our desperate cycle of scrambling to do everything all by ourselves? It's a lonely, lonely way to get what you need in life, I think. I think it would solve more than one of our problems if we leaned on each other more to get the things we need. I think I would really like living in a world like Amanda's, where people are not afraid to ask each other for help and joyfully rush to one another's aid when they hear the call.

Snow Days summary: it's been pretty great. I take the gift you've given us, Mother Nature, of time. I'm still struggling to be OK with soaking it up without judgment or guilt, but I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to practice. It's OK with me if you keep on snowing. Every once in awhile we humans and our progress need to be put in our places. I think the more reminders of this, the better.