Penny

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Yesterday was a pretty strange day.

I was up late on Thursday, so I felt like shit when I had to wake up early to get to a training day at our club in Lents. 

Our training days are always terrible and useless, so I took the opportunity to get out my notebook and work on some of the exercises from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. The exercise that I was working on was to think of the events and incidents in my childhood where I felt shame as a result of sharing my creativity. By coincidence, I was just listening to an episode of the podcast Sex, Death, and Money featuring filmmaker Desiree Akhavan. She talked about the humiliating experience of discovering that she had been voted ugliest girl at her school in a poll of her classmates, and using that experience as the material for her first one-woman show in college. She talked about how shaping this raw and depersonalizing experience into a narrative that she was in control of in her art was an empowering experience. I got a little taste of that yesterday, as I discovered that living inside those painful memories of childhood—kids in my second grade class avoiding me after performing on the piano one day, having an uncle take me aside and try and explain to me the difference between a “hobby” and a “career”—was not as painful to me as a child, and the way that my adult sense of outrage and mistreatment and anger retroactively protects and shows compassion to my child self. 

The only thing that happened during the training that is worth capturing is an exchange that I had with A, one of our arts staff. I responded to a question by saying that, “I have a tendency, as a person, to be jaded.” And her response was basically, no shit. She said that she really enjoyed my sense of humor, my sarcasm and irony and cynicism. It kind of threw me for a loop, because that is a part of myself and my personality that I have a very love/hate relationship with right now. I like having a sense of humor. I like having my sense of humor. But I’ve also been working on tempering my reflexive sarcasm, because I’m starting to move towards working on things where I need to have people believe and trust in my sincerity, and that’s hard to ask of people when they think that you’re bullshitting all the time. 

After the training sessions, we walked over to the New Copper Penny to present an award of recognition to property owner and supporter Saki Tzantarmas. I used to live in Lents, and the NCP always looked like a sketchy piece of shit from the outside. It turned out to be exactly that on the inside. Saki has been in the news recently, and it was super weird to be there and a little uncomfortable because I wasn’t quite sure that we were on the right side of how to bring back life to that neighborhood (the truth is that I don’t think Lents will ever come back as long as Foster and Woodstock bring so much traffic through the district). The awards ceremony turned into a surprise new year’s banquet, but the patronizing and weirdly aggressive tone that the leadership team had taken to communicate to us that we wouldn’t be taking a lunch break was so frustrating and offputting, that it took away a lot of the fun that could have been had. 

After work, I crashed at home for a little bit. I was bone tired after that day.

I headed out to bars on Williams/Mississippi with L and her boyfriend and his friends. I’m very picky sometimes, and the whole evening I was irrationally judgey about all of the yuppie motherfuckers and their money that I saw everywhere. I’m just stressed about cashflow. 

I had a good time. Once we went back to one of the friend’s apartments to sober up a little bit, we got caught up in a philosophical argument about existence, and whether there may be something on a level of existence that we could never measure, or observe, or prove. I was arguing this to a roomful of science people, so I had fun.

Once I got back home I fell asleep almost instantly and slept as one who is dead.

palak

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Today—yesterday—was a wonderful day! Which are the hardest to write about, because one wants to sit back and watch the dying embers of joy, not try and capture them and risk destroying what remains of the feeling.

Spent most of my day thinking and processing the implications of my session with J last night. Read through most of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, and I think I’m going to put together a group to go through it and have some peer accountability. Spent some time listening to Ahmad Jamal, who is somebody that I’m going to have to listen to a lot more of. [The throughline, if you’ve been playing at home, has been: Lana Del Rey to The Byrds to John Coltrane to Ahmad Jamal]

I had to watch teens today. It makes me nervous being around them because of how hard they are trying to figure out what the fuck is going on and how much power they have to be cruel to each other. I can’t look at myself with the same compassion yet, maybe some day.

I stopped by the food carts on Hawthorne for some palak paneer fries at Potato Champion. They’re my favorites. I shouldn’t have spent the money, but when I’m hungry after work is literally the point in the day when I have the least willpower. I would agree to anything, like the Godfather on his daughter’s wedding day.

Afterwards, I went over to J’s studio to jam for a little bit. It’s been really hard to find time for us to play together, and I’ve been dying. It’s taken me a long time to be comfortable accepting that he genuinely likes playing with me, and to not be afraid to take real pleasure in the music we make together and the compliments he gives me about my playing. We complement each other well, and both of us have some envy of the skills of the other.

Afterwards, we went to a little restaurant/wine bar in NW and J had a little food while I had coffee and we had a long conversation about being musicians and artists and the project of figuring ourselves out. It was a conversation that was so white hot with truth & vulnerability & honesty & love & ambition & want &

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.