Category: Journal

bohemia

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

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I had to start my day in Sellwood again. There’s some construction going on at 28th and Woodstock that’s really obnoxious. There’s a weird amount of traffic there, and the worlds worst flagging crew, all for some construction that doesn’t seem to need a road closure. I talked with some of the other arts people to put together some plans for a kid performance at our annual fundraiser coming up at the end of February.

Wednesdays are my long days, so work was busy and long but mostly unmemorable. I got to take like 35 minutes helping a single kid who was having a bad day on the playground because he felt like his best friends were icing him out (is there ever an age when trio dynamics become easy?). Those experiences mean a lot to me: it feels nice to know that my presence, me specifically, was the difference between a shitty day and at least a regular day for this kid. It’s also nice to make real in practice my abstract belief that the biggest interpersonal and emotional disasters are really just problems to be solved with the right words given to the right people. Some days I have to take that as more of an article of faith than others.

I had another beautiful little moment: a 6 year old boy, I’ll call him RT, with a very sweet spirit and disposition had been hanging off of me all day. I always feel bad when it’s really busy and I have to drift around putting out fires and mediating disputes and cleaning messes, and I can’t take the time to give a child attention that they’re asking for. RT came up to me before snacktime and gave me a sheet of paper (in the picture above) with the handwritten lyrics of his favorite song and sang the song to me. I love these moments. It would be such weird and offputting behavior as an adult for me to walk up to somebody else and just stare into their face and sing them a song. But kids don’t know that, and I feel privileged to be the person to share that moment and to give the validation he was seeking.

There were other people in the waiting room at my therapist’s office, which has never happened before. It was really disconcerting, and they were two children, siblings, who quarreled occasionally and made my head hurt. I am very tolerant of children being children, but I learned yesterday what the circumstances are that lead me to have a children-should-be-seen-and-not-heard reaction.

I’ll keep what went on in my session to myself, but in short I came closer to speaking the truth about what I want for myself out loud than I’ve ever been able to, and I was able to find a pocket of sheer terror and vulnerability. I used to live my whole life there. Now that I feel much more secure, all of that panic and shame and anxiety lives in my dreams and hopes for the future.

edgefield

Matthew EilarLeave a comment
On a tuesday, I woke up early enough to have a proper breakfast. L was home from work, so I got a chance to apologize for being snippy with her a couple evenings ago.
When I got to work, I had the presence of mind to remember that I didn’t have that much time to finish some lesson plans for the batch of programs I’ll be starting next week, so I wanted to buckle down and work on them. I pulled something out from my student days, the Pomodoro technique. In a nutshell, this is about breaking tasks down into 25 minute chunks, and then staying focused on working for 25 minutes (called a pomodoro) and then taking a five minute break. After two, then four pomodoros, you take longer breaks. Very simple, but usually I can stay focused for 25 minutes without straying off topic, and I like the fact that it builds in the human need for breaks. One of the stranger things about it is that sometimes I have a hard time deciding what to do in that deliberate five minutes of break time. It makes me realize how much of the smartphone time and internet browsing I do is complete bullshit, because when I have the choice of how to deliberately relax, they don’t appeal to me.
At some point in the day, I read this post by Seth Godin about uncertainty. It’s short, so I’m just going to copy the whole thing:

Often, the most important work we do doesn’t bring a guaranteed, specific result. Usually, the result of any given action on our part is unknown.

Uncertainty implies a range of possible outcomes.

But a range of results, all uncertain, does not mean you are exposing yourself to risk. It merely means you’re exposing yourself to an outcome you didn’t have a chance to fall in love with in advance.

A simple example: the typical high school student applying to a range of colleges has very little risk of getting in nowhere. Apply to enough schools that match what you have to offer, and the odds are high indeed you’ll get in somewhere. Low risk but a very high uncertainty about whichcollege or colleges will say yes.

That’s not risky. That’s uncertain. It takes fortitude to live with a future that’s not clearly imagined, but it’s no reason not to apply.

Another example: If you speak to 100 people, it’s uncertain which 40 people will be impacted by what you say. But the risk that you will resonate with no one is small indeed.

The question to ask every organization, manager, artist or yourself is, “are you hesitating because you’re not sure the future will match your specific vision, or is there truly a project-endangering risk here?”

A portfolio of uncertain outcomes is very different from a large risk.

I haven’t completely processed that all yet, but it’s blowing my mind that it’s possible to divorce the emotional risk aversion of uncertainty of outcome from risk of harm. I feel like some things that I’m trying to get better at right now (meeting people and getting a new job, for example) are classic examples of things that have little risk of harm, but a lot of uncertainty of outcome. The more I focus on lack of risk, the more comfortable I will get. The more I seek certainty, the more likely that I’ll trip myself up and get discouraged.

It made me realize how much I wanted a new job and have more people in my life that I could play music with. I need to get going a little bit more with that, develop a little more hustle.
The only thing that happened of note at work is that I got my ass kicked in chess by a 10 year old.
I went with roommate K and friend M to taco tuesday ($1.50 for 4 tacos) at a sketchy ass western bar in Gresham called the Stagecoach Saloon. I had a good time. Afterward, we went for a couple of drinks at Edgefield. I’d never been before, but I love McMenamin’s restorations. There was a super cool urinal (I’m a fan of cool urinals) with working pressure gages above it that I wish I had taken a picture of. We played some darts and shuffleboard.
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After that, we headed to another bar on the property, a cozy place with a woodfire stove. We got too hot and went outside to sit by the fire pit. It was lovely.
Practiced a little piano when I got home. I’m trying to practice every day, although I’m finding it hard to push through with no goals. Went to sleep quickly and with cinematic dreams because the internet wasn’t working, so there was nothing to do while falling asleep then to simply fall asleep.

lentejas

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

rolled out to work a little earlier because i had to go to a training workshop at the site in sellwood. this turned out to be a wild overstatement of what it was, which was to have my time wasted by a patronizing dude that understood about half of what he was talking about while we worked on computers that are too crippled and slow and poorly maintained to run the program that we were supposed to learn. about half an hour into it, i was trying to keep down feelings of how is this my life and fuck i hate my job.

work happened. the most notable and best thing that happened during the day was that the 3rd graders were all rockstars, and we had a good time playing scattegories. I gave them a little free time at the end of the hour, and was amazed to see them organize into a group playing legos on the floor and another group playing hangman on the whiteboard, completely self-directed.

I finally ripped the bandaid off my numbers this month to try and figure out how to get back on track after having to pay for medicine unexpectedly, and tires for my car late last month. it was pretty brutal, and i’m a little freaked out. there’s not a whole lot i can do for a couple more days, but its going to be hard for me to relax until then.

i decided to stop by the store and make myself a proper meal. I made a delicious lentil soup:

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with chicken stock, whole fresh garlic, cilantro, dried pasilla chile and a couple spoonfuls of sambal oelek. unfortunately, i overate. i think all the time about changing the way that I look, at least I have a sense of how much to eat to stay the same size. last night was the first time in a while that I can remember unhappy bingeing, just eating to numb out feelings. money stuff does that to me.

after dinner, i didn’t feel like doing much of anything, so i read a little more of  Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, which I’ve been working on for a couple of weeks. its pretty well written, and I found a lot of the cognitive traps that he describes really provocative. i realized last night, though, that i was getting tired of the formula of description of bias, how we know, consequence, how to hedge against falling for the trap, repeat, and decided that I didn’t want to finish it. i’ve been looking around for a cognitive science perspective book on creativity. I tried sampling Flow by Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi, but found it frustrating in the same way that many accessible positive psychology books are, which is that we understand the measurable beneficial outcomes of certain life philosophies way better than we understand how to adopt them or why they work.

i fell asleep to Friends once again, the one where monica dates hot tom selleck and the one with the grumpy cat video.

skeletons

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

woke up this morning blissfully rested. morning dim sum at HK Cafe with L. pokémon. questionable rice beans and cheese (food safety tbd). saw The Skeleton Twins at the academy. charliework, getting ready for the next week.

sensibility

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

It turns out that there was a coda to last night that I couldn’t have known about before I posted. My brother called me out of the blue. This has only happened once or twice before ever. One of my big goals for the new year was to work on my relationship with my siblings, and so his decision to initiate really made me feel good.

What did not feel good this morning were the many beers I had last night. I don’t know what the connection between the pneumonia and general bad health is, but I’ve been dealing with unpredictable and gnarly acid reflux, which was super unwelcome this morning because I had made plans to meet A for coffee and breakfast.

I met A as she was starting to date one of my friends from college. Sometimes I get a really strong sense of a person, a feeling that I will click with someone. about a month and a half ago, she messaged me out of the blue to tell me about some things she had tried after a conversation we had, which made me feel very happy—that kind of happy you feel for being yourself and for making something good happen in the world and for being the right energy that somebody needed at one time.

I had a great time talking to her. I’m a sucker for good conversation, and I love when it flows easily and everyone in it is both eager to share and delighted to listen.

One thing that’s been sticking with me all day is something she said about the way that she lived in college. She said that some of her friends thought it was weird that she seemed to be putting down roots in the town she went to school in. She explained to me that she never wanted to live like she was holding something back, even if that meant that leaving was more painful. It’s not the way that is first nature for me to live—one of the great freedoms of my life right now is my anonymity, as well as one of my great lonelinesses. But in the moment of that conversation, I felt like it was closer to the way that I want to live now.

After finishing up, I came home to nap for a couple of hours and try and catch up a little bit on sleep debt. When I woke up, I freshened up the house and got ready for having S over with a friend of hers from high school over. After I finished with the Charliework, I started to make some more progress through Mrs. Dalloway.

S and her friend came over. I had never met her friend before, so it was nice to practice breaking in with another person before, and I felt like I was myself. I wish I could cut my glibness and cheapness like 18%, but they are my armor against awkward silences, which I hate even more. We made a trip out to Fred Meyer to get ingredients for dinner and something to drink, and made a more than edible dinner of pork chops, green beans, chard, and salad. It was nice to be social all day but with energy level at a simmer. I’m trying to just roll with how indoor cat I’ve been for this month, but I guess the winter weather had to affect behavior at some point.

We continued the evening with Sense and Sensibility, which I had never seen and have never read. I enjoyed it, and had no desire to pick it apart any more than that.

Made my way through the first two sections of Mrs. Dalloway, then called it a night. I think I may play Pokemon; FireRed until I fall asleep, but I have terrible luck with the game. Twice now I’ve fucked up saving on the emulator and lost like 3 total hours of game play.