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More busy-ness

by MAÔ, posted in Work

I’ve been working out a 168-hour timeline for the week, planning out days. Without overlap, it looks something like:

  • 56 hours – Sleep
  • 50 hours – Job
  • 10 hours – Writing
  • 10 hours – Dining/meal prep/shopping
  • 9 hours – Side hustle
  • 7 hours – Reading for pleasure / studying
  • 6 hours – Podcast & video recording/editing
  • 6 hours – Yoga/exercise
  • 4 hours – Music gigs
  • 4 hours – Meditation
  • 3 hours – Radio show
  • 3 hours – Nothing

Now, I rarely sleep 8 hours per night. I haven’t been as faithful in my yoga practice as I should be. And I do write sometimes during gigs when I’m not singing. So there is overlap.

The problems come when other things creep in and I have to decide which items to omit from the daily list. And things will crop up. Date night (which should be every week). The film that I just have to say (a lot coming out this summer). And other activities that require some measure of concentration on my part – I’m thinking of the garage that needs an overhaul right now.

And I look at Benjamin Franklin’s daily schedule in awe, and can’t help but wonder how he managed it. (Of course he didn’t, but it didn’t stop him from trying.)

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Endgame

by MAÔ, posted in Film

Avengers is… well, done. I’ve been considering the movie since seeing it a few weeks ago. Without spoiling it for anyone, I guess I’ll just try to work through some thoughts.

Knowing that the MCU had to wrap up this first chapter, I had some opinions (as we all did) about how it should be done. I think the movie did a decent job of it, and even left some openings for future changes – though likely not to be capitalized on. Ten years ago Iron Man gave birth to a whole new system of filmmaking, and we’re still seeing the ramifications of that throughout the entertainment industry.

There are some characters that will likely never appear in the new films again, and that feels somewhat devastating. At the same time, actors age. Comic book characters don’t. Rather than pull a Red Skull or Spider-Man and change actors out, better to close doors on characters and open doors to new ones.

I laughed during the movie. Very nearly cried a couple of times (Downey Jr. and Holland about did it, thank you very much). And I left feeling neither disappointed nor contented. It was an end to the first part, and it feels final. Some endings don’t feel like endings. Some leave you room to imagine the next adventure. The next chapter.

Some endings are ambiguous. They can be anything.

And some endings – like Endgame – just end.

Walking a fine line

by MAÔ, posted in Writing

I’ve been thinking lately about the types of posts I make here. Some are little thoughts I have about this and that (theatre and performance, or books I’m reading/have read);  advice I’ve been given or came across; bits of motivation; very personal thoughts on loss and struggling; finance and investing; or even poetry. All these things are a hodgepodge of who I am and what I’m thinking right now.

Some of it may be interesting to someone. Many more may not find anything here. Others may not want to read each and every post I make, because who knows what I’ll be writing about on any given day.

I struggle with that – providing content (even content that no one may see) which goes back and forth from business to personal, and relevant to downright absurd. But, it’s who I am.

I started writing this blog because I’d kept a journal since 2015. Some times I’ve written daily. Right now I’m best at weekly in the journal, with other writing thrown in during the week. But it was entirely private, and no one was going to come across it. I may even pull a Dickens and have them all burnt before I go. Who knows…

So I put it up online, just another WordPress blog. And I’ve grown it a bit. I’ve grown a bit myself. Now it’s out there for anyone to see. Maybe no one will. But it’s out there.

Counterintuitive

by MAÔ, posted in Writing

The oddest little thing has come to my attention. When I was writing one or two blog posts a week, I always seemed to find excuses for not doing them. I was always too busy.

Now, with a daily post, I don’t seem to run out of things to say. I can knock out three or four every time I sit in front of the computer. Most are short. Some are longer, and may take me three-ten tries to tie them up. But I am able still to move through my thoughts in an easier, more-streamlined way.

It’s either the commitment (though I had committed to twice a week before, which I let slip), or it’s the routine, or it’s writing so often that I don’t worry about the quality of work as much. As long as it’s grammatically correct and (mostly) spellchecked, then I’m pretty happy with the result. Even if it’s a lot of nonsense, tomorrow is another day.

Week’s Highlights

by MAÔ, posted in Social, Writing

Some of the things that caught my interest this week.

If you’re thinking about how you’ll make it to retirement, here are six suggestions from NBC’s Kelsey Butler in January of last year. I’ve been thinking about retirement accounts a lot over the past couple of months, having blown through three of them over ten years.

The Tim Ferriss podcast with my hands-down favorite author Neil Gaiman. I first read Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek last spring (listened to the audiobook, twice in a row on several trips across Florida). Gaiman’s Neverwhere I read as a high-schooler, and that was my first introduction to the author. I’ve since read just about everything he’s written, including the Sandman series (straight through and then with the annotated editions from Leslie Klinger), American Gods, Stardust, and The Graveyard Book, to name a few.

If you have an Aubible subscription, get Sam Shepard’s True West, the West End production featuring Kit Harrington (Game of Thrones‘ Jon Snow) & Johnny Flynn. It’s a free download for subscribers (up to two Audible originals each month), and it’s really good.

Unroll.me. I was slow to get this one, but it really works! I’ve gone from a couple hundred emails a day down to less than 30. I’ve still got some clearing out to do, especially across multiple email addresses. but thus far, this has been an amazing help. Plus, its single daily email with previews of each email you’ve rolled (not unsubscribed but not individually let in) gives me one place to see if there’s anything there that I need.

 

Maximizing energy

by MAÔ, posted in Biohacking

I’m a little over a month in to a new sales job (one of my many avenues for income). I’m on a strict schedule, mostly, and my mornings are starting much earlier than I’ve been used to over the past four years. So, I’m tracking my energy through an Excel spreadsheet, along with other metrics that I think will influence my well-being and state of mind.

Sleep hours, quality of food, quality of day, supplements taken, and creative hours are among the metrics that I’m listing. I may even start breaking down each meal and time I take it in to see where my energy peaks and troughs are. This may sound somewhat obsessive, but biohacking has been an interest of mine for several years now. It’ll be fun to play around with my performance habits.

The bookmark

by MAÔ, posted in Reading

My last employment contract ended with two-months paid vacation, a box of business cards I shredded, and a stack of bookmarks from last season’s shows. And after thinking on the bookmark, I decided to keep them. Because, when I grab a new book off the shelf and start reading, I may make it 15 or 20 pages and then put it back. It’s not the book I’m devoting myself to now, just a quick jaunt into another author’s thought process. With these readily available bookmarks, I’m not scrounging for scrap paper, using stick notes, or dog-earing a page.

So, though the employment may have gone afoul, thanks for the bookmarks. And the paid vacation time. 

 

1 month

by MAÔ, posted in Writing

That’s it! One month of daily postings. I wasn’t sure that I would have the tenacity to maintain a writing schedule. But, knowing that I had to do one every day made it a little bit easier to write, just about every day.

A friend of mine is a writer, of fiction, screenplays, etc. He says that sometimes his wife will have dinner ready, and he’ll tell her just a minute so that he can finish his thought. But that becomes a paragraph, then a page, and by the time he joins her dinner has gotten cold.

She says she doesn’t mind, because that’s his dream and his work. She can wait for him to eat, and it doesn’t bother her that the food is a little cold. (She won’t eat till he joins her, which I think is incredibly sweet.)

But he says he has to write when he can, because sometimes other work gets in the way. But he commits to writing at least a little every day. Good, bad, doesn’t matter. As long as words get to the page.

Well, on to May!

April Reading

by MAÔ, posted in Books

Books Bought:

  • My 1980s and Other Essays – Wayne Koestenbaum
  • Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books – Michael Dirda
  • Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad – Austin Kleon
  • Critique of Pure Reason – Immanuel Kant
  • Plato: Collected Dialogues – edited by Edith Hamilton
  • The Secrets of Closing the Sale – Zig Ziglar

Books Read:

  • Money: Master the Game – Tony Robbins
  • The Essential Rumi (Translated by Coleman Barks) – unfinished
  • The Intelligent Investor – Benjamin Graham (Revised Edition) unfinished

After listening to the Tim Ferriss Show, mostly catching up on episodes I’ve missed, I heard him compliment Tony Robbins’s Money. I had audio book credits through Audible, and decided to give that one a try. So far I’m enjoying it. Some similar threads to Intelligent Investor – a book I’ve had for years but didn’t read much.

I’ve been an investor, and at times a speculator, over the past fifteen years. Mostly I didn’t really know what I was doing. I had success in school with Finance: Micro- and Macroeconomics; & Managerial and Financial Accounting. But mostly I just played around.

I had my first 401(k) in 2004, when I went full-time with NASCAR (prior to pursuing a career in the arts). In five years I think it went up to just over $10,000. I rolled that over into an IRA actually rather recently, in 2014 or 2015. Then, in 2016, I cashed out that IRA entirely. It was at the height of my dark period, and I was getting out of the country for a while.

I think even though I’m back in the country, I’m still somewhere else. My friend Anthony tells me that it’s been a three-year wake-up call, and now I get to be who I was supposed to be in the first place. Honestly, he may be right.

So I’ve been re-looking into the financial markets – which I did used to enjoy learning about.

I’m also newly into Audible, which I had cancelled maybe a decade ago… I like the physical book, more than I did audio or digital. However, I’m finding much more time spent driving or traveling in general, and the convenience of that audio book is nearly impossible to beat. After going from South of St. Petersburg to Daytona and back a few times last year – enough to listen to Ferriss’s 4-Hour Workweek twice, I decided it was time to re-up Audible.

As for Rumi, just another staple in my go-to perusal section. I’ve been thinking about the tavern-goer:

This drunkenness began in some other tavern. When I get back around to that place, I’ll be completely sober. Meanwhile, I’m like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary. The day is coming when I fly off, But who is it now in my ear who hears my voice? Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul? I cannot stop asking.

If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks. I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way. Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

This is one of those constant quandaries that invades my thoughts, and reading Rumi not only gives it the poetic air, but also expands my thoughts on the problem itself. Knowing others who share your thoughts, your concerns, makes the load of those concerns a little lighter – even if this person has been deceased for quite some time.

My book purchases were impulses mostly. I knew the name Koestenbaum, but hadn’t read anything before by him. Browsings seems similar to Ten Years in the Tub, which I’ve yet to finish, but it’s right up my alley. I read Steal like an artist before, so I wanted to read Keep Going for a while. Kleon always has something fun and inspiring to say.

Two books of philosophy, for my downtime reading… (here’s hoping I get a lot of downtime). And Zig Ziglar came at the recommendation of Godin, and as I’m working in sales right (along with my other gigs) I thought improving those skills couldn’t hurt.