I have a theory that the days I begin with writing are the ones where I speak less. I don’t ramble in conversations, and maybe I make less time for them in the first place. It’s like this part of me that longs to be heard is fed in the morning, and I feel less of a need to open my mouth just to hear my own voice. Like in the same way that stretching in the morning means I’ll crack my knuckles less throughout the day, or having a big breakfast quells the need for constant snacking. I would like to think that inside of me is a wordometer, a subconscious fitbit that tracks how much I talk and tells me to shut up when I’ve spoken too much. What would that data look like? How would it compare to the people that I’m talking to? As a writer, a performer, a guy – I suspect that I jabber more often than I hold my tongue. It’s an unbecoming characteristic that makes me feel like I might be an asshole after I step out of meetings – if not because of what I said then how I said it, and if not because of how I said it because of how long-winded I was in saying it.
There are people in my life who seem automatically wiser to me, because of the amount of pause they’re able to hold before responding to someone in the conversation. For someone like me – reactive, talkative – these seem like eons when they’re really just a beat. But it’s that beat that seems to allow someone to be measured, say something that actually matters, and doesn’t just cut people off. Maybe that’s the heart of what I’m needing to feel generally like a better person – write more, pause longer, speak less, stop cutting people off. Seems as simple a goal as eating slower. What a life this is, where the most epic goals are also the simplest.
Staring into my phone first thing into the morning is my digital version of waking up on the wrong side of the bed. These are the kinds of days where the first sun I see isn’t the one outside my window, but the tiny icon on my weather app. The first thing I touch isn’t my wife’s soft skin, but the cold glass on my screen. The first voice I hear isn’t my own through writing or meditation, but the familiar voice of one of the strangers whose podcasts I subscribe to. When I wake up and immediately reach for my phone, I’m effectively taking the backseat in my ride through the day.
Going first for my phone before anything else isn’t the cause, but rather the symptom (and perpetuator) of a greater issue of waking up to the hum of anxiety. That may have been caused by going to bed with unresolved thoughts or worries, which may have been caused by staying up too late watching or reading something that might be considered the opposite of a lullaby, which may have been fueled by the need to cram extra things into a day that felt unfulfilled, which was probably due to me not feeling like I had agency over that day because I took a backseat. And the cycle continues.
I keep falling off this wagon of daily morning writing, and maybe it’s unrealistic for me, given my personality and this era of distractions and this life of demands, to expect to keep up such a habit. The days when I wake up and take a walk, then half an hour to sit, then another hour to write – when I drink water before coffee, when I talk to a loved one before an acquaintance – might not necessarily be my most “productive” days. But they’re definitely the most fulfilling. The world is moving at such a pace, that I may go months without giving myself even one of these fulfilling days.
This blog has existed in various forms for almost 12 years now, and I keep having to remind myself that it’s not about clicking the “Publish” button, but rather sitting down to write in the first place. I’ve stripped my site of analytics and comments for the very reason that those features could end up informing how and why I come here, which can then drive my entire day. Constantly, I have to remember that maybe the only one who really truly cares about all of these words is me, and that’s more than okay.
The odd theme of the week has been moving walkways. It started off with an email from Christine Sun Kim on a project we’re working on, about the history of elevators, which led me down a rabbit-hole on Elisha Otis, who invented elevators as we know it and demonstrated one at the World’s Fair by putting his son in one and chopping the rope it was suspended from with an ax. Later in the week, I learned the term genericide – and how the Escalator brand fell victim to it by becoming the common term for moving staircases. Meanwhile, despite the government shutdown giving me much more agency over my time, my morning meditations have been more chaotic than ever. It ends up that I’ve gotten used to shaping my days around external requirements. Without them, I’ve been walking through my days without handrails, which is both liberating and strangely uncomfortable. When I know what’s “required of me,” I end up allowing the demands of other people quell my own needs for daily fulfillment. Clearing my inbox takes precedence over clearing the thoughts swimming around in my head. Responding to everyone else’s needs get in the way of my own basic prerequisites for life – sometimes even meals and staying hydrated. In my meditations, this has meant that I’ve found satisfaction of being on a mental moving walkway of sorts. It’s easy to have peace of mind when you know that the day ahead is paved with ticking off assignments. But when face to face with the prospect of making headway toward my life’s purpose, sitting still for 30 minutes feels like a bloodbath.
One of the most helpful tips I’ve learned about meditation is that it’s not about being in that state of zen or clarity, but actually about those moments when you realize your mind has wandered, and you make an intentional choice to table that thought and go back to your center. Meditation can appear to be about getting to a state that you can then coast on, but as I enter my third year of regular practice, it’s becoming clear that this is truly an activity. It requires a certain vigilance and attentiveness, much less a moving walkway and more like a series of suspended bricks that like you need to scale like Super Mario. The present moment is not a ride that will whisk you along, but rather a never-ending collection that must each be caught, otherwise missed. This can sound stressful, but like most things in the universe there is a rhythm to be found, a groove to catch. In fact, finding that and staying in it sounds like a much more exciting life than simply finding enlightenment and staying static forever.
The government might have shut down but the politics definitely haven’t. I had to delete the NYTimes and Washington Post apps from my phone just to cut my habit of checking for breaking news every spare moment (of which I’ve had plenty lately). How did I get here? To the place where a forced mandate to stay off work means I obsessively keep tabs on when I’ll be able to return. Haven’t I been longing for a break? A moment to reset so that I can get to a pace of life that’s actually reasonable for a human being? It’s been two weeks, and I feel like I’m still shaking off the momentum I carried over through the holidays from 2018. Like I’m still in the middle of a rolling stop but I can’t get myself to fully step on the brakes. I blame D.C.
A lot of people who love this town say they do because it’s a “thinking city.” Whether they live here or are just visiting, people are here to share their expertise. It’s true that everyone here has an opinion on the state of the nation and the world, and you’d be hard-pressed to get through a day’s worth of conversations with people without someone giving you a piece of their mind about the president, or the mayor, or the way the mayor swears they’re the president of somewhere. The thinking city has been a vice for me, in the same way I was magnetized by New York as a city of the hustle. All these cities are driven by a pillar of Western civilization – D.C. for the politics, New York for the chase for a dollar, LA for the vanity. If you had asked me what the Bay was about when I was still living there, I would’ve said it was the activism. But that was ten years ago. Now, it’s about enterprise – scaling up – someone could argue that whether it’s the activism or the tech, it’s always been about the progress, but I just don’t apply those as the same thing. It’s a shame, how the birthplace of the Third World Liberation Front is now the landing page for America’s captivation of international attention. Maybe it’s still the same gate, just a different direction of traffic.
When I move to LA in the spring, I’m not sure that it’ll be the best move if I’m hoping to grow away from being self-centered and driven by the desire for recognition. Dahlak left town because he said he didn’t like how the city made him look at other people, as individuals to either measure up against or brush off as irrelevant.
But maybe I want to be irrelevant. Wouldn’t it be nice to live somewhere where everyone sees or hopes to see me as such? It sounds like a mutual relationship. Maybe moving to where everyone wants to be recognized is exactly the perfect setting for me to go anonymous. Because as long as I’m in D.C., I can’t not play the game. I can’t not be a thinking person, and thus I can’t not be a part of the herd, equally vulnerable to the trappings that cause us all to wander and react in unison. So yes, I moved to New York to hustle, and I moved to D.C. to politic, but how interesting it will be to move to LA now that I’ve (supposedly?) shed my desire for fame. I can finally exist somewhere not in center stage, but in the nosebleed seats. The view from there must be great.
It’s been a little bit over a week since the Government Shutdown, which has put me out of daily work at the Smithsonian. When the last big shutdown hit in 2014, I had just started my job and was still adjusting to a life of structure as compared to the artist-freelance-vagabonding life I had transitioned out of. Within those three weeks I updated my portfolio, made a bunch of music, edited an iLL-Lit music video, and chilled out all in between. Five years later, I find myself in a completely different place.
From looking at my day-to-day movements, it would seem like I’m still on the clock. Even without the Smithsonian work in the picture, I’ve amassed so many side projects, chores, things in need of maintenance, and other commitments that I’m still ending each day exhausted. It definitely seems like a better alternative than just sitting around. But if a forced break can’t even force me into a break, what can? Have I institutionalized myself into a worker bee, feeling the need to put in labor even if there is no boss or pay staring me down?
Each day, I encounter my to-do list of about a dozen items, which range from small tasks like mailing off a package, to huge lifts like revamping my website (a can I’ve been kicking down the road for like a year). I look at some of these things and wonder why I even put them on my to-do list, and then wonder why I have a list in the first place. I know why. If I don’t, I’m floating in this abyss of unnamed things that literally need to get done, otherwise I’m letting myself or someone else down. But then there are all these other existential to-do’s that pile on, that are toward making me the person I want to be. Studying a new language routinely, writing daily, calling home. Things that I wish were just second nature, but instead are piled onto a list that stresses me out the more they stack. It looks a lot like the kind of box we see so many people become dependent on, to the point where when they finally get a vacation or even retire, all they can do is long for their inbox.
That’s not the life I want. But in the meantime, the tasks that pop up on my phone are the tricks, and the hit of serotonin I get when I mark it complete is my doggy treat. How do I use this shutdown as an opportunity to start climbing out of this cycle? How do I approach that without turning the process into a task of its own?
Like every elder millennial, I aspire to live in an apartment that looks like it could be on the cover of Kinfolk, only to fuck it all up because I can’t resist purchasing cushions that look like slices of dragonfruit.
Me, a minimalist
When I was living in Beijing, I remember going to Ikea and being floored by how aggressively people would evaluate the merch before deciding to buy it. They’d hop up and down on stools, kick tables at the legs, slam cabinet doors over and over again. Never had I seen somebody be so methodical about buying a $10 Lack table. Maybe it’s the byproduct of growing up in country where virtually all cheap things are made. You come to expect things to break, even if they look like they won’t. You’ve seen too many shiny things turn into heaps of garbage to trust something by how it looks on the showroom floor.
If you want to experience a nice little mindfuck, join me in watching BBC’s Century of Self back to back with that new Marie Kondo show on Netflix. The former is an expose on Edward Bernays, who has been credited with splicing democracy with capitalism (#goals, right?). He transformed America (and then the rest of the world) into a society that procures materials based on want as opposed to need. Because of him, humans no longer bring life to objects – objects bring life to humans. He convinced corporations and governments to communicate how material possessions are methods of self-expression, that the things we use, wear, eat, are seen around, helps us convey who we truly are. By doing so, he jumpstarted the industries of public relations, fashion, and luxury – on the premise that these things once reserved for the elite were now democratized.
The latter is a show about average Americans who need a lady to come over from Japan to teach them how to get rid of their unmanageable amount of junk.
The Kondo show seems to indirectly respond to the conclusions that one would draw upon watching Century of Self. I inevitably end with “I need to get rid of my shit!” and proceed to convince myself that I’m being less of a materialist by obsessing over every single object I own. But the problem isn’t material objects, but rather the dollar value placed on things – whether material or ephemeral. I live amidst a generation of “experiences over objects,” which has left a bunch of industrial-era fields in the dust, while propelling tourism, digital assets, and the monetizing of self and others. “Doing it for the gram” is the new form of a shopping spree, and I’ve been trying to catch myself when I pull out my wallet with the thought of “treat yo self” or “you deserve it” in the back of my head. Yes, I talked about this a year ago, yes, it’s still a struggle.
The problem I’ve found with my own relationship with so-called materialism is that it’s still based on a vision of material objects that’s been marketed to me. It’s not completely unhelpful to go about shopping based on quality and longevity over desire to acquire more and more – but I’m not sure our society has had proper training against our own materialistic impulses to go about this methodically. I end up falling into the trap of sometimes buying more expensive, minimalist-looking things, tossing away useful objects that don’t “spark joy” in the moment, but still not getting to the heart of why the acquisition and spending of money gives me such a high.
Whenever I flip through an issue of Kinfolk or Dwell, or some other publication that romanticizes the idea of living inside a MoMA gallery in the forest, I end up realizing how difficult and expensive it would be for me to live that lifestyle. I also realize that, as someone who works in museums everyday, I really really really don’t want to call one home.
Leave it to the Government Shutdown to get me to finally trim my toenails. It’s a habit of hygiene that all my life has been perpetually tedious, even though it only requires five minutes every few weeks. The fact that there has always been a mental block insisting that I don’t have time for a five-minute task every few weeks, says less about my laziness than it does about my ability to prioritize myself. I think about the emails to strangers, the articles about topics I don’t really care about, the smalltalk with people who I have nothing in common with aside from the mutual understanding that we both don’t really care to know each other better. What did they do to deserve more attention today than my own toenails? Or my journal? Or my parents? It makes me wonder if the selflessness that I practice is misplaced, or if my attention is hijacked by my propensity for unboxing the new. I appear each unfamiliar encounter is a mirage of endless possibilities, and I never learn, even when most of them end up being a time-sucking thinkpiece or an errand that I have to get to now that I know about it. I feel like I need to be way more intentional about where I direct my generosity of time and energy, and as a default prioritize myself. This may seem obvious to some, but it’s completely against my own nature. I was raised to look for those in need, to always approach people trusting that merely the chance of our encounter meant that they were worth the time. But the result of that means I piecemeal myself faster than I can regenerate. I offer help for things that I’m not great at and don’t have anything to do with me, at the expense of the things that I’m actually meant to contribute to the universe. I spend time with random people while I carry the daily guilt of not calling home enough. I lose sleep over things I see on the internet that don’t have any real consequence to me or even the greater scope of society. But still, I’m always in a hurry. I sprint-walk everywhere I go, get impatient in lines, talk hella fast, eat hella fast, and don’t always get a full-night’s rest. In exchange for what? The chance of serendipity? My fault for reading The Alchemist and probably misinterpreting the role of coincidence. Over the past years, taking time for myself has meant being a better person to radiate out to the rest of the world. Finna get grounded in 2019. Starting with my talon-ass toenails.
You do this every year. You convince yourself that you’re not a tool for the Gregorian New Year, that you’re not the basic kind of bitch who makes resolutions. You take note of the thinkpieces that are written for those who think they’re better than the basic kinds of bitches who make Gregorian New Year resolutions, and instead resolve to construct resolutions that you call by any other name. Last year you told yourself you weren’t going to “do,” you were just going to “be.” You ended up doing a bunch of things you never set out to do, and not really being the kind of person you set out to be. Okay, that’s a lie. You wrote that for the irony of that statement. You were actually pretty great. Sure, you didn’t read the books you listed as books you’d finally read, but who in their mid-30’s really has time to read A People’s History front to back? Instead, midway through the year you got obsessed with the idea that what Kanye is doing is performance art, and you listened to his entire discography front to back. You finally get Yeezus!
You also oscillated a bunch between going with the flow, and treating your life like a garden of sculpted bushes. Where each bush is, like, a routine that, if you followed religiously for the rest of your life, would make your life, like, super optimized. One of those bushes was journaling. The last post you wrote before this one was in June, so that bush is either really nappy or really dry depending on where you want to take that analogy. Remember how you spent your birthday with Lovely in the forest, spent 2 days learning about ayurveda, compiled a list of all the things you should and shouldn’t eat, and then went on to completely not incorporate that into your life whatsoever? That was right before your Kanye obsession. It was a response to the nervous breakdown you had in January leading up to Sundance. It was the moment you spent the next 6 months referring to whenever you reflected on a time in 2018 that seemed like there was less to do and more to be.
This past New Year’s Eve, you did the countdown while Deadpool 2 was on pause. There’s probably something deep to say about ringing in the new year by watching a movie sequel for the second time. You didn’t start 2019 with a bang, nor did you clumsily stumble into it. Actually, upon reading the post you wrote a year ago, you sort of started it off exactly like last time, except with less guilt for waking up late. And despite it sounding like you spent the first two paragraphs bagging on yourself, you’re actually pretty proud of who you became over the course of 2018. You took more time to breathe. You were in nature a bunch. You came across all these moments where you could’ve lost your cool, and you didn’t lose your cool. You spent less money on alcohol. You quit Facebook!!! But all of those things are still things you did. Who you became, who you will continue to be, can’t be checked off like a resolution, because to resolve is to find closure. Here you go with your thinkpiece about how your resolutions aren’t actually resolutions, because they’re openings. Look at you. So deep. SO DEEP.
