I’m definitely a creature of habit. I fall into certain patterns, and am both emboldened and reassured by said patterns. Doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally venture outside of a prescribed norm, it just means that I derive a fair amount of satisfaction from the repetitive nature of certain things.
For instance, I have a fair number of things that I like to do in a 24-hour period to make that amount of time, for lack of a better word, worthwhile. Justified. Not wasted. Whatever I choose to call it. I’m hardly old, but I can’t really call myself young, either, and less than 2 years away from the start of my forth decade on this planet, I’d best not waste a terrible lot of days.
Generally speaking, between Monday and Friday I like to think that a combination of work, working out, writing, and socializing should be part of each day. On the weekends, remove the “work” part of the equation. If I only do one of these four things, well, that’s a waste of a step towards my impending mortality. Two is generally acceptable, three is the goal, and four is just putting forth a superstar effort worthy in the annals of the “Cool Kids Hall of Fame”. Assuming such a Hall exists, of course. These days, it’s probably digitized and given a “.com” afterwards, but that’s besides the point.
Around the beginning of this year, I started to cut back on the daily output of writing, mostly because the pressure I was putting on myself to come up with something worthwhile on a daily basis was making my already retreating hairline make like the French during the Nazi invasion. I invented the “Friday Rambles” motif as a way to further relieve the pressure, and yes, add a bit of pattern to my writing routine. The way I saw it, if I flat out promised I’d deliver one each Friday, well, that would instill in my basic morality the overall wish to fulfill such a promise. Mostly it’s worked, with the notable exception of the time that girl showed up high for our supposed date and through my routine so thoroughly off that I temporarily forgot what a verb was.
Routines are sometimes a burden as much as a blessing, though. Boston’s been a routine for me for as long as I can remember. Nine years and counting living in (or really, just outside) this city, and while I have plenty of memories outside of this city, those all exist in a time which seems tantamount to ancient history at this point. The last time I lived full-time somewhere else, Kurt Cobain was still alive, nobody had even heard of Quentin Tarantino, and everyone’s conception of the Internet was based around AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve. I left home with a 2.4K modem. And that’s not a typo. If I logged in clean-shaven, by the time I’d check my email, I would have to shave again. Truly these were the Dark Ages.
Routines are established by a person to provide both order and comfort. So much of Boston and the surrounding areas give me peace of mind. I know how to get places, even if the way itself is often convoluted. I know the general demeanor of the citizens, which means I know better than to actually engage a stranger in basic dialogue lest I be told to shove something personal into a place painful. I know sveral bars away from tourists’ knowledge, I know the best places to watch Red Sox games, I know the best bridges along the Charles. All of these pieces of information inform my general state of being and provide a sense of place and comfort amidst an incredibly vast and unknown world.
It’s not even the truly far-away locales that remain mysteries, however. New York is in many ways as foreign to me as Beirut, and I’ve been to NYC more than half-dozen times in the past year. The problem with routines is that you get so accustomed to one particular scenario that, even in its vast imperfection, it becomes preferable to any unknown, even those which ultimately might be better for you. I assume Boston has been the best place for me over these past nine years, but I don’t really know. The Commander left my apartment nearly three years ago, and I’ve been in the basically same furnished place since. Oh sure, some of the decorations have changed. I’ve got a sweet TV with surround sound that supplants my need for social interaction most of the time. But in essence, a lot has stayed the same.
I haven’t stayed the same, but I often wonder how much I would have furthered changed had I not been in the basically same routine for the past few years. I’ve had vast changes, to be sure: the final, overdue break from Harvard life, the break from my life pursuing theatre as my passion, the break from Jenny, my longest relationship ever. All changes that were necessary, painful, and helpful all at the same time. But all in all, I can’t help but sometimes feel that my routines have sometimes prevented me from truly evolving in the way I should.
It could of course be all the beer in me now, consumed with a co-worker, as per usual after a long day at work in a pub near our office. Maybe tomorrow I’ll look back on this entry and wonder who hacked into my site to post this little rant. But my ties with Harvard were a routine. Theatre was a routine. By the end, even dating Jenny was a routine. Not to diminish the feelings involved, or how hard ending that relationship was, but for so long I couldn’t imagine life without Jenny---not because I felt I couldn’t deal with the aftermath so much as “dating Jenny” was something I was, I did, I had incorporated into my self-identity. Dating her was what I did, defined part of who I was, and defined me in the eyes of others. I wasn’t always happy in that relationship, but I generally never thought about life without her, because that was tantamount to thinking about a person I didn’t even recognize anymore.
And so it’s a pattern, in general, of not being able to be fulfilled with a life without Element X, without really being cool with me as a stand-alone entity. And yea, that’s all New Age-y to the point of me basically installing an “aromatherapy.exe” file upon loading this blog, but it’s true nonetheless. It’s grood…I mean good…and great…great and good…to get satisfaction from a really good cardio workout, or a 2,500 word essay, or a few pints with friends in the neighborhood bar. Nothing wrong with that at all, so long as those patterns don’t become crutches.
So I’m going back to New York for the first time in five months in a few days, and I’ll be visiting Chicago for the first time in years soon after that. Might blog there, might not. Might get some running in, might not. Gonna let things just suss out as they do. It’s hardly an upending of my life, but it’s a bit of a start. It’s taken a few conversations with a few lovely ladies recently to figure out exactly how tightly wound I’ve been these past few months. This shell I’m in has been created through forces both external and internal. Thing is, only I can truly unpack myself from this shell. Which is in a way cool, because I have agency. Which is terrifying, because it’s up to me, and my instincts have been about as good as that guy in “thick head” series of commercials for Mug Root Beer. (“Honey, this isn’t YOUR brand of lipstick on my collar!”)
It’s not about moving from a defensive to an offensive position so much as moving from a defensive to a receptive position, in the end. Not attacking the world, but not being quite so hesitant to approach it, either. I have things that work, and those things are pretty great. But I have more than a hint that there’s more out there, and I just need to put myself in a position to experience it. And from there…well, we’ll see.
It’ll start Thursday, on a bus bound for Port Authority. Should be an interesting trip. Nothing routine about it at all, and that’s the way it should be.