Tag: #Habits

  • Getting Back to It, Again

    So, I’ve been doing this stay-at-home-dad thing for the past five years, and I keep thinking that when school starts back up for the kid, I will instantly fall right back into my reading/writing routine. I can excuse the first year, because it was the first year and I didn’t know any better. But the past four… Yeah, I know better, but I still won’t believe it.

    The issue that I have is a very basic human issue; I get knocked out of my pattern, and it is difficult to restart the healthy habits that I had.

    See, From January to June, we have a solid work/school schedule for everyone in the house. It’s a routine that we all can get behind and live within. And then Summer Vacation comes, and it blows everything up, and we’re all floundering, and waking up at different times every day. It’s just a wonder chaos, but its chaos compared for the first half of the year. I don’t accomplish a whole lot over Summer, but it is summer, and with a kid around, things do get lazy.

    Then the school year starts up, with the new routine, and schedule. There are clearly some kinks in the system as we get rolling, but the schedule works itself out, and we all fall into place, right?

    No, because the old habit got broken, and we have to reestablish a new habit. And that takes time. As it does every year. Every year it is the same thing; gotta work at getting back into the groove.

    But I keep thinking that “this year will be different.” That this year I will fall right back into doing all the stuff I want and need to do. There’s this huge stack of books I need to read, and I think that I will get right to it… but the reality is that at first I have to work at it – force myself to sit down and start reading. And then there all these emails of stories and flash pieces that I need to respond to… but again, I have to force myself to just set aside fifteen minutes to just get started. And don’t get started on the other creative writing projects that I have – some of which are stuck in the nightmare land of “Unfinished Outline.”

    I do know how this ends. It ends with the new habit being established. The work is completed. That feeling of accomplishment returns. It just takes a little effort every day. And sometimes I have to write a pep talk blog post to get me back to work.

  • The 7 Habits of People Who Are Complete Failures, Or Who Stopped Eating Sugar

    So, I made a mistake recently by reading a click-bait story that was on my Google News feed about the 8 habits of successful people, or some shit. I know it was a listicle about habits of certain types of people because my news feed is now inundated with these types of articles…

    8 Habits of Caring Spouses

    10 Signs of Above Average Kids

    23 Annoying Things Super Rich People Never Do

    1001 Words Well Adjusted Emotionally Solvent Adults Always Say

    And then I began to notice that some of the good habits of happy and successful people happened to also be the bad habits of sad, lonely and failure people…

    Did you know that getting enough sleep is good, unless you sleep too much?

    Then it’s bad to stay up late, unless you are staying up late to read and do self-wellness shit.

    Taking the time to enjoy good food is a good habit, while enjoying food too much can be bad.

    Don’t get me started about the gym! On the whole, it’s good to go to the gym, unless you obsess about body image by going to the gym too much.

    And you know, they never site their sources for this information. Did the Mayo Clinic do a 20-year research study on the habits of people who always are positive in the morning? Is that where this information is coming from. Or is this just some dude (Or AI) coming up with click-bait to fill up their site with content?

    It’s content; I know it’s content.

  • To Dare is to Do

    I have written about my current inability to finish reading a book. I start one, start the habit, then something happens, and I get out of the habit. This has everything to do with discipline, and my complete lack of it. Maybe I made the mistake in believing that the Pandemic would give me to opportunity to reset my life, and to create new, better habit, or at least correct things. But unemployment, remote school, and the feeling for the first two months of the pestilence that we were going to die… It made some easy things very difficult to accomplish.

    But the Pandemic is coming to an end and we will start living close to normal lives again. In that spirit, I am giving reading and finishing a book one more shot.

    I pulled down Donald Barthelme’s 60 Stories and started again. “Audere est Facere,” seems to be the idea here. I might fail again. And thus, try again, and sadly, fail again. I know what the right thing to do is, and I just need to keep trying. Everyone gets knocked down, not everyone gets back up.

    Now after having been very dramatic about reading, the other thing is that I do want my daughter to have the habit, the good habit, of reading, and I have to set the example. I have to show her that reading is important, that it’s enjoyable, that it’s the right thing to do. Really, there is my motivation. Just try again.

  • No More Late Night Snacks

    Spring is here and Summer isn’t too far away. The seasons of rebirth and change is upon us. I think I have mentioned that I have put on twenty pounds of the course of the pandemic, and before that, I had put on a stress ten pounds from my former shitty job situation, my mother’s death, and moving away and then back to NYC. Food was the only thing giving me any comfort, and ice cream was my best friend. So, I’m front loaded now; just completing my slow transformation to middle aged white male – balding with a belly. As you can read, I’m not too happy about this.

    I am trying to wrap my head around getting back to a healthy lifestyle, as I don’t think I have really ever had a healthy lifestyle. I just sort of lived, and it all took care of itself. Well… those days are over, and I have to move this to the forefront of my thinking. This week, I am starting small; no more snacking after 9pm. This might be low hanging fruit, so to speak, but I think it is the lynchpin of the issues I am having. Mainly, no discipline. I want to see if I can go a week without snacking, controlling my behavior. If I can do this, then I think I can move on to more complicated things.

    And the complicated things are; running, maybe daily; eating better, or at least what we all can agree on as a family; and the really ambitious one, hiking.

    But before I can get there, I have to say goodbye to my 11pm ice cream break.