Rest days
This is an email about me not knowing what I want to write in this email.
The advantage of these little missives is that they are extemporaneous, and that transience lets me write about things that feel a little more natural. And yet, I've started and deleted a couple hundred works about the following topics:
- My love of the weird Jack Kerouac / Charles Mingus mashup This Beat.
- My efforts over the past two weeks to leave my laptop at my desk, in an effort to decouple myself from the omnipresent stress of there always being something to work on (and, secondarily, to use my iPad more.)
- The relatively wild week it's been for my side projects, and the joy of waking up to a couple hundred Spoonbill signups.
Mostly, though, I just feel tired. This is a good tired: this is an end-of-the-week, sweatpants and jazz and chapbooks tired.
In anything demanding, I think the rest days are as important as the work days themselves: things only grow stronger when you let them rest, when you nourish them with good food and sleep and tranquility.
I am still trying to get better at embracing my rest days, and this is one of them. I have a hundred things I could be doing, but here is the agenda for my day:
- Send this email.
- Clean my kitchen. (I tried to make focaccia di recco last night. It didn't turn out great, but the failure condition of focaccia di recco is basically "you end up with cheesy bread", so all things considered it was fine.)
- Go bouldering.
- Go to an Oscars party. (I have not been super up to date with movies this year, but I saw Moonlight and will be displeased if it doesn't win a pile of awards.)
- Watch I Am Not Your Negro.
- Sleep.
It's not a small day, but it's one devoid of programming and filled with sitting, which is how I think I prefer my Sundays. Maybe -- if I'm lucky -- the sun will come out, and I can go for a nice long walk. Who knows. It's Sunday, and it's a day for rest.
Other fun stuff
- I wrote about spending my time wisely, and resisting the urge to roll my own dependencies.
- I've gotten into the habit of picking out my three favorite things I've discovered every Saturday. Here's this weeks', featuring Jean Arp, Tom Haugomat, and a bunch of Romanian soda.
- Here's a two minute video of corgis jumping into a pool from a water slide. It's as good as it sounds.
Have a good Sunday. I hope your phone never drops to low battery.