Sorry this is coming in late (But also, my WordPress stats counter tells me that people are looking at my archive of old posts, and I have to say, there’s a lot there. So please feel free to look back through what I’ve written in the last 8 years on this blog) and it is only a link, not my words.
But. I have made a decision.
I am going to stop arguing. Online, at least.
In all the years that I have been arguing online, and arguing in person, and also hating myself for doing it, I have never been able to come to this decision, because I have always felt there is value in arguing the point, in standing up for my side. I don’t always see that value, because the internet is a terrible place for argument on the topics I generally argue, which are almost all political; but I have constantly told myself that there is value, and thus I need to keep doing it, even to my detriment.
Until I read this.
This is the culmination of a series of essays, which the author lists and links in this one; I recommend reading all of them — but also, he, like me, is wordy, so that’s a lot of sauce to drink down at once. Maybe just start with the one I’m linking. It’s on Substack, but it’s free to read. I will have more to say on this, which I’ll try to post next week on the usual day. For now, read this.
Got this image from this blog, which says the same things I’m saying, but nicer, and almost a year ago.
All right. I have something to say.
I have several things to say, actually. And I suspect that once I start saying them, even more will bubble up to the surface, like noxious gases from the bottom of the primordial swamp (Or hey, maybe like the scintillant bubbles in effervescing champagne; I probably should shift out of the habit of being maximally dark and depressing. See, there’s another thing I should write about, breaking free of the morass and floating to the surface and freedom, blpblpblpblppPOP!), and soon enough I will have once again exhausted either my readership or my store of ideas. But right now, those things are stacking up, taller and taller, and the ones at the bottom are being squished. Time to Jenga them out of the pile and set them up in their own little spaces.
It’s time to blog.
The first thing I have to say is actually something I’ve said several times already, in various arguments around social media; another reason for me to get back into writing these things. (Yet another reason is that I just said “thing” three times in one sentence: I’ve let my edge get dull, methinks.) You see, I’ve been arguing a lot. It hasn’t gone well. I’ve already destroyed one acquaintanceship (Terrible word. There needs to be another word for the relationship you have with people online who are on your Friends list on Facebook. This guy was not my friend, but I knew him, and we had common interests and values in some areas. So what is that? Normally I’d say acquaintance, or something more specific like coworker or neighbor or my local witch doctor; but what is that when it’s someone on social media? “Mutuals” is a term I appreciate from Twitter and Instagram, meaning someone you follow who follows you; but that doesn’t apply to Facebook. Oop – lost the thread. See? I really do have too much to say. I’m picturing these parentheses as the thin curved walls of the bubbles as they rise up from the depths of my poor swampy head.) and pissed off I don’t know how many people; and so far as I can tell, I have changed zero minds. I know it’s because of the way I’ve been debating these things. Not things, sorry: these issues. The details of it should wait for another post, because I’m too far along the tangent now, but the point is, I realized some time ago that, rather than engage in acrimonious debates with individuals on social media, I should take their topics, and write about them here, where I can make the points I want. The arguments just make people mad. Really, I don’t have them to change minds; I have them because I want to speak my piece, to say what I think – and this is the right place to do that.
I know that the people I have been arguing with, the people who are, in a word, wrong, will not come and read these blogs; but the point is that I haven’t been convincing my opponents anyway, so the arguments have been a waste of time and energy and have produced little more than anger and bitterness, and probably only solidified people in their (wrong) opinions. But maybe if I write a post about the issue, and present my ideas here, people who are interested will read the piece, and maybe spread it in conversation or on social media, and hopefully people will be able to gain some information? Or some inspiration? Or some alleviation of their own turmoil? And maybe that will make a difference.
The question for today is this: do I have a right to not wear a mask?
I know, it probably seems like a dumb question. Because really: who cares if I have a right to not wear a mask? It’s the reasonable and decent thing to do; why would anyone want to not wear a mask during a pandemic? Heck, there are people who love the masks, who have decided to continue wearing them even after the pandemic is over, and bless those people.
But there are millions of people, several of them on my Facebook feed, who hate the masks, hate the restrictions, and REALLY hate the vaccine (I hate to say this, but I’m going to need to write, again, about why vaccines are good and anti-vaxxers are bad. I apologize in advance. But that’s not this post, so let’s let that one sit down in the swamp for a little longer. Down in the toxic murk, where anti-vaxxers come from and where they belong.), and if you talk to them about all of this, at some point they will say “The government shouldn’t get to tell me what to do, where to go, whether or not I should wear a mask or put chemicals in my body. What about my rights?!?!”
That’s what I want to address first. What about my rights? Do I, in fact, have the right to not wear a mask? Do I have the right to keep my business open, which means the government does not have the right to shut me down for purposes of quarantine? Do I have the right to refuse a vaccine?
First, let me say that rights are slippery buggers. I don’t fully understand them, and I won’t pretend to. There is a long and complicated – and fascinating, and important – debate about what a right is and why we have them and which ones we have. So while I have an opinion about this issue of the right to not wear a mask, I freely admit that there may be and probably are factors that I have not considered; I may be wrong. If I am wrong, I invite correction. But here we go with my opinion.
The simple answer is no. I do not have the right to not wear a mask. Not a natural right, nor a moral right. Not an inalienable right, and not a legal right. The Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Magna Carta, the Bible – none of them say anything about your right to a bare bottom half of your face. A law or regulation requiring you to wear a mask is not a violation of your rights.
Because what would be the basis for it? Again, rights are complicated things and nobody has an incontestable definition of what they are and where they come from, but essentially, the three main sources of rights are: our identity as individual rational human beings; the laws of society and the social contract; and God. God, so far as I know, has not decreed that humans don’t need to wear masks (Indeed, the Abrahamic God seems to be more in favor of covered faces than not). The laws of society are exactly the ones that people are arguing about, because they mostly mandate masks, and the social contract is the main focus of the rest of this writing – and it also probably mandates masks. Our identity as individual rational human beings is the source, according to John Locke among others, of our right to life, liberty, and property; most of the Constitutionally-enumerated rights derive from this. We have the right to speech because we have individual thoughts and opinions, and the free expression of those is a recognition of the value of our individual thoughts and opinions. We have the right to bear arms essentially as a means of self-defense and protection of our continued existence – because I can only exist as an individual rational human being if I’m alive, and my ability to defend myself is a protection of and a recognition of that essential right to exist. My ability to choose my own destiny implies the right to do so, and that’s why I can’t be wrongfully imprisoned. And so on.
But there’s no right to not put cloth on my face. It is not a necessary condition of my individuality. It is not a reflection of a defining characteristic of my reasoning mind. It is not even an inherent preference: in cold weather, most people prefer to cover up their faces as much as they can get away with. When I was a kid in Massachusetts, my favorite piece of winter clothing was a ski mask. And not because I liked robbing banks: because it kept me warm.
There are exceptions, of course, which we all know about (mostly because smug twerps have used them as the basis for false claims to avoid following the guidelines and restrictions) – someone with a phobia or a health condition that might prevent them from safely wearing a mask has a right to refuse to wear a mask, because there is a right to life and to the prevention of bodily harm; nobody has the right to hurt me, nor to force me to hurt myself, in a preventable way. But masks are generally harmless, so we’re going to stipulate those (rare!) occasions where people can’t wear masks with the general statement that people who can’t wear masks are obligated to try to find an alternative that does work for them, that achieves the same purpose as a mask but does not cause harm. And regardless of whether or not someone can wear a mask, the essential obligation of mask-wearing remains.
So let’s get to that. Because while I don’t have a specific right to refuse to wear a mask, that doesn’t mean I should be forced to wear a mask for no reason: the presumption for any question of rights and obligations should be that the individual has every right unless there is a reason to restrict it; that is, all things being equal, I have the right to wear a mask, to not wear a mask, to wear 25 masks stacked on top of one another, to wear a Michael Myers mask while I drive around – I should be free to do whatever the heck I want provided it does not harm anyone else or infringe on any other rights. (The Michael Myers thing is probably an infringement on people’s general well-being. But I think it gets the Humor Exception. Different topic.) What I said above generally holds true: my ability to choose my destiny implies a right to actually do that, to make my own choices and live as I wish to. Every action or inaction should be presumed to fall under my general right to liberty and personal sovereignty – unless it is shown to have an impact on others. If it has an impact on others, then it becomes a question.
The question here is does my not wearing a mask affect other people? And the answer is yes. My breathing, my talking, my sneezing and coughing, without a mask on, has direct and tangible impacts on other people: I can spread a virus to them. It’s provable, it’s known – it’s common sense, really; we’ve all been spat on by close talkers, all been sneezed or coughed on by people who didn’t cover their mouths, all been asphyxiated by the bad breath or our fellow human beings. We all know that a bare mouth and nose in a public space has an impact on other people. As soon as we learned the germ theory of disease, and the properties of viruses, this impact became more clear. Honestly, it’s not clear to me that any of us should ever go without masks: even without Covid-19 as the main reason, we still give each other colds and flus and a dozen other infections simply through bare breathing; maybe face coverings should be universal.
The question then becomes one of burden. Is it reasonable to ask me to wear a mask to protect other people from my spit-propelled infectoids? Is it more reasonable to ask other people to avoid those infectoids? Is the means of prevention a greater burden than the risk of said infectoids getting on with their infecting of other people? If they do get infectionalized (Sorry – like I said, it’s been too long since I wrote, and it’s like a peat bog inside this brain of mine.), does the potential harm they might suffer outweigh the burden on me of prevention? Because again, while there is no enumerated, defined right to not wear a mask, the presumption should be that someone who doesn’t want to wear a mask doesn’t have to wear a mask; individual liberty should be first and foremost in our minds, all the time.
I’m actually going to leave those questions alone for now. Because they are determined by specific circumstances. Basically, the answer is that wearing a cloth mask when I am out in public, in enclosed spaces, within six feet or so of other people, is a lesser burden than the risk of infecting someone with Covid-19. So I should wear a mask during this pandemic. I don’t know if it’s a lesser burden than the risk of infecting someone with the flu; it may be. It is interesting to realize that a generation or so from now, mask-wearing may not even feel like a burden; it may just be the norm, and this whole debate will just be silly. But my topic here is a right: do I have a right to not wear a mask? I do not.
The same argument applies to social distancing, to handwashing, to avoiding handshakes and hugs and so on. It applies to weddings and funerals, to in-person classes and live sporting events. It applies to keeping your business open and serving customers during a pandemic. All of it comes down to the same thing: you are presumed to have the right to do whatever the heck you want with your time and your property; you have control over your own destiny – unless and until it impacts others. All of those activities and preferences, for in-person church, for birthday parties, for holiday gatherings with family, for traveling in planes, trains, and automobiles: all of them create a risk of spreading Covid-19 to others. None of them are necessary for an individual’s continued existence. None of them are rights. I do not have a right to have a wedding or a birthday party or a funeral in the manner and at the time and place of my choosing. All things being equal, I should be presumed to have the liberty to choose my wedding and my funeral arrangements; but not all things are equal during a pandemic. I can still be an individual rational human being without seeing other people in large groups in enclosed spaces without masks and closer than six feet.
There is some question of work: the right to work and to derive an income from work is a right we have, as it is both an expression of our rational selves and a necessity for the continuation of life; there has to be some negotiating around that conflict. If, for instance, society can provide me with an income sufficient to keep me alive and essentially free, then that would compensate for the loss of my ability to work as a waiter or a bartender, for instance. Or if my work can move online, as my job teaching high school English did, then that means I can continue the necessary parts of my human existence, without imposing a risk on other humans that might prevent them from continuing their existence. I do not have a right to make my income however I want. I do not have a right to do my job only in the way I want to do it. I do not, unfortunately, have the right to keep open the business I worked my entire life to create. It breaks my heart to say it, but it’s true: my entrepreneurship, my blood sweat and tears, my lifelong dream – I don’t have a right to any of those. I have a right to exist, and to work to continue my existence. I don’t have a right to thrive: and if my thriving puts other people at risk, as it might during a pandemic, then I don’t get to thrive while putting an undue burden of risk on other people.
Put it this way: if I had a right to keep open my beloved mom-and-pop store, what would that mean if my business failed? If another mom-and-pop store opened right next door to mine, which had lower prices and a better product? Would I have the right to take some of their money? Would I have a right to force customers to come to my store? Would I have a right to demand taxpayer money from the government? Or what if my store caught on fire? What if there was a hurricane, or an earthquake? If I had insurance, then I would get the coverage I paid for – but you don’t need insurance to get your rights, you just get those. And there is, sadly, no right to have my dreams come true, or to keep them from being taken away by a pandemic.
All I have is a right not to have my life taken away because somebody doesn’t feel like wearing a mask.
The last thing I’ll say about this is that anyone who claims to have a right to not wear a mask, or to get a vaccine: you do have that right. You can choose to say no to masks and vaccines. It just means you can’t be around people. At all. If you are willing to quarantine yourself in such a way that you have no risk of spreading the virus to anyone, then you have the freedom to do whatever you wish in terms of refusing masks and vaccines: because your choices will not have any impact on other people, and so your individual freedom prevails. But if you want to live in society, then you have to help society live. That free choice, to be a part of society or to leave society, is the final protector of your individual rights. Again, it is a complicated choice, because not everyone can survive separate from society, and a choice that leads inevitably to my death is no choice at all; society has some responsibility to provide for my continued existence if I can’t have that existence outside of society; that’s why society has a responsibility to provide a minimum income, basic needs, to all members of the society who cannot provide it for themselves. And our particular society does not do a very good job of that. But that’s a topic for another day.
For today, wear your mask. And if you can, get the vaccine.
I’m doing this a day early, because I already have the answer from this week’s experiment: exercising every day is not a good idea.
Of course there are degrees. I may have simply overdone it: I went through pretty serious workouts every day this week, and that may be the main reason why it seemed like too much. I’ve also had some stress and some trouble sleeping because of moving and such, and so I haven’t been as healthy in general as I should be; maybe that’s why.
But for me, this week, it was too much. So I’m resting today. I may work out tomorrow, but more likely my exercise this week will just be moving.
That’s part of the issue. My wife, who knows more about exercise than me (Like she knows more than me about pretty much everything) pointed out that working out when one is sore and tired is asking for an injury. And since we are moving this week, I couldn’t risk that — and wouldn’t want to risk it anyway. So let’s be clear: good exercise includes rest. It needs rest. Part of me thinks that if I work out more, faster and longer, that it will work even better, will make me lose more weight (Or more fat, really — one of the things I have to keep in mind is that, since I do weight training, I’m not going to lose a lot of pounds. Muscle weighs more than fat, so as I build up muscle, even if I lose a lot of fat, I won’t lose “weight.”), will make me stronger. But it isn’t true. I’m sure there are professional athlete types and body builder types who work out every day, but first, they are younger than me and so they recover faster and easier; and also, that’s what steroids are for. Most performance enhancers don’t actually make your muscles bigger or stronger: they shorten recovery time so you can work out again sooner.
So when people are turning to illegal and dangerous substances in order to achieve a faster pace of exercise, maybe I should calm the hell down, is my point.
I will say that I still had fun exercising this week. I like working out. I like riding my bike more than I like going to the gym, which tells me I may want to focus more on that; because I think the key to long term exercise — which is absolutely the best kind, you want to build habits that last a lifetime, so that even if you never hit some pinnacle of buffitude, you stay active and always have a way to work in some physical exertion, which will never be unimportant to overall health and well-being — is fun. Making it enjoyable is entirely necessary to exercise. I listen to music (Also necessary because my gym tends to play the most awful music imaginable — I can’t imagine who sets the music system to EDM, since the majority of the clientele are retirees, but whoever it is, I hate them.) and I give myself breaks and stay away from the specific exercises I really don’t like; things like that. I go at a time of day that is convenient for me, and because I am an introvert, I go by myself and don’t interact with anybody, or I go with my wife who is equally introverted and together we don’t interact with anybody but each other.
But still, I prefer riding my bike. I like the feeling of the wind, I like the forward progress of it, I like the changing views, I like seeing other people passing by. I’m lucky because Tucson has a wonderful bike path that goes around the whole city in a 100+ mile loop (I’m also lucky because it was recently named for a long-time county supervisor who had a lot to do with creating the path, and that man’s name is Chuck Huckleberry, which is one of my favorite names of all time — so now it is the Chuck Huckleberry Loop) and so there is an excellent place to ride, but I’ve pretty much always liked riding my bike and usually been able to find a place to do it. I am happy that I have put in the money for a good bike; it’s been worth it.
That’s it, really. Exercise is hard and you shouldn’t overdo it, but if you find a way to enjoy it, you should do so, for only so long and only so often as you feel comfortable doing it: because exercise is a good habit, and it is best in moderation.
So it’s been a solid three weeks since I last did this, but I don’t intend to just give it up after two habit-testing attempts, so here it comes back again. The intervening three weeks have really been more about survival: I had to finish the school year, I had to grade, I had to sleep, I had to keep my spirits up. So that’s the habit I’ve been trying to maintain every week for the last three weeks: sleep, work, live.
I’d like to report that I stuck with all three things every day for the last three weeks. I suck at sleeping — which is not news — but it’s not a question of habit, it’s a question of stress; when I wake up at 2 or 3am, when I’m stressed, I start thinking about the thing that is worrying me. Believe me, if I could break that habit, I would; now that it is summer, the habit will be broken for me, which is nice, but kind of not the point of these posts, these attempts. I am good at the habitual grading of papers every single day; but that’s not a habit I want to maintain — and it too has been ended for me this past week. Living and keeping my spirits up? Sure, that’s a thing I want to keep doing. I’m sure it will be quite a bit easier now.
So I’m moving on to new ideas.
If you recall, three weeks ago I decided to give up snacking, particularly gum, per my wife’s suggestion. I did it for the week, and it wasn’t terrible: though I admit I cheated a time or two, once because I honestly forgot that I was doing it for the week, and I grabbed some chips at Costco and snacked on them; once at school because I wanted the snack and I said, “Screw it.” I also ate donuts at school because donuts were available — it was Teacher Appreciation week, when we don’t get a raise and people don’t treat us any better, but they do bring us food and shit — along with cake and a few other gift-snacks. So it wasn’t a perfect abstention from snacking.
I never chewed gum, though. Not once. So, success.
Really, the main point was not to munch on my salty snacks once I got home. They’re my main food vice, and there are times when I get out the bag of Cheez-its and forget that I’m eating them until I’ve downed way more than I should have; that’s the habit I was looking to break, really. And that I did not do.
But like the video game stoppage the week before, it didn’t really amount to much. I didn’t feel healthier, I didn’t feel better, I didn’t lose weight — but I also wasn’t miserable, and I didn’t fall asleep at 8pm, which is one reason I do snack sometimes, because it keeps me awake. Basically I proved to myself that I don’t need to snack, but that I am a bit happier when I do.
The last week or two has actually been something of a better test: because I really haven’t snacked unless I’ve been hungry or craving something; and more than once, I decided to avoid snacks because I didn’t want to ruin my dinner. And that has been — just fine. So maybe because of the week without evening snacking, and maybe just because I’m steadily growing more aware of what I eat and how I eat it, I think I’ve actually got a pretty good handle on my snacking. So again, success.
This week I think I’m going to go with exercise. I go to the gym, and I ride my bike; but in both cases I’m very on-again, off-again. A little bit because my wife likes going to the gym with me, and she hurt her wrist pretty seriously back in January and has been recovering ever since (It’s her drawing wrist, so we’ve been taking it very seriously), so she hasn’t been able to do much gym time, which often means I don’t go, as well. But I’ve also come to understand that I can go without her and it doesn’t actually bother either of us too much, so I have to give up that excuse. Again, it’s been rough trying to survive for the last month, so I haven’t really gone, and now that the school year’s over I want to get back into the habit. I also want to spend some of this summer getting into better biking shape because I’d like to get myself to work like that as much as I can next year.
So that will be this week: every day I will either go to the gym, or I will ride my bike. I will probably give myself an exception this coming Saturday, as we are going to move starting that day, so my “exercise” will be cleaning and/or lifting heavy things. But we’ll see. Between now and then, it’s every day workouts for me. (Yes, I already did one today. It hurt a lot. Part of the reason I want to get back into the habit more.)
This morning I played a video game for the first time in a week. I gave them up last week as part of my ongoing project to try to change one of my habits for a week and see how the change affects me. I wanted to change my video game habit because it’s been a constant for essentially all of my life; because it can get pretty invasive; and because the games I’ve been playing lately are brainless and dumb, and that makes me feel lame. I mean, if I was a serious gamer, who participated in some MMORPG or online tournaments, then it would be a waste of time but at least I’d be involved in something; I’d be part of a cultural moment, of some kind. I’m rarely involved in those types of things, and I often feel bad about it — for instance, I’ve seen neither Game of Thrones nor the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, so everything on Twitter right now goes over my head, instead of just most of it going over my head.
So if my video gaming was at least marginally cool, I wouldn’t feel so bad about it. If I felt like the video games I played had some positive place in my daily routine, I wouldn’t feel bad about that, either — so if I had a following for my video game reviews, or if I wrote for games, or even if I played the Sims and used the opportunity to work on my storytelling, all of that would fit in with my more-complimentary views of myself. Solitaire, though? Mah-Jong? Freaking Candy Crush? How do I feel good about those? Surely I would be better off without them: more focused, more productive, more — interesting.
Turns out: nope.
The big lesson from this past week is this: I don’t veg out because I am addicted to video games; I play video games because I need to veg out. This entire week, the times when I would have been playing video games, but I wasn’t, were all spent doing something else that wasn’t terribly productive. Mostly scrolling through Facebook and Twitter, which I did more of this week than normal; I watched far more videos, which I usually just scroll past. Losing the video games had a minimal effect on my habits and productivity.
I did try: I tried to read more, and I tried to do some research on the Democratic candidates for President for 2020 (Okay, only on Elizabeth Warren. She’s been my pick since 2016, honestly, and I wanted to look into her policy proposals more. I think I looked at her website for ten minutes? Maybe fifteen?). But the issue was, I’ve been exhausted all week: I’ve been having pretty serious insomnia; and this is the hardest time for teachers because we have to drag both ourselves and our students through the last few weeks; and there have been stressful things going on for my friends, which has affected me for their sakes; and I’ve been trying to find a new place to live. So it was not a good week for productivity: it was, if I may paraphrase Monty Python, a week for lying down and avoiding. Even my reading, which is one of my other preferred relaxations and escapes, was no good for this week: I’m reading a history of philosophy, written by the mathematician/logician/philosopher Bertrand Russell, whom I admire enormously, but who is always more interested in math than anything else, and whose writing requires quite a lot of focus and effort to get through with full comprehension. So even reading was exhausting.
But when I did find the time and energy to be productive, I did it well: I pursued housing diligently all week; I kept up with my classes and got a lot of grading done; last night I finished a lengthy short story I’ve been working on as a present. I’ve been blogging faithfully all week, and with some pretty substantial posts. It’s been a productive week, considering my circumstances. Just — not because I stopped playing Solitaire.
Leaving behind the video games didn’t make me happier, and didn’t make me more productive. So back they come.
I did learn that if I’m going to pursue anything serious on social media — try to expand my book sales or the following for this blog — I need to improve my use of the platforms. There is no reason whatsoever why I didn’t find new accounts on Twitter and new blogs on WordPress for me to follow; I just didn’t. So I think there will come a week soon when I set aside time every day to do that, and see if I can make a new, useful habit.
Not this week, though. This week is still everything stressful: my friends are still struggling; my rental search is still ongoing; schoolwork and students are still dragging me down. I’ve slept better this weekend, but we’ll see how that goes when I go back to work.
So this week, I asked my wife what I should give up.
She said, “Gum.”
“I don’t chew gum,” I said.
She nodded. “Exactly. Think how easy it will be.” I laughed, and she added, “You think I’m going to make it hard on you? Really?”
I love my wife. And so I’m going to take her suggestion.
I am going to make it slightly harder on myself: I’m going to give up snacks for the week. I come home pretty much every day and eat some kind of salty finger food, pretzels or peanuts or Cheez-its or potato chips; and we frequently have a little ice cream or a couple of cookies for dessert. I rarely eat those things because I’m actually hungry; just because I want some comfort, something to keep me awake. I don’t think I need to use food for that. So I’m going to give all that up, and only eat the major meals, and maybe an apple in the afternoon — I am a teacher, after all; apples sort of come with the job, right?
But if it comes down to it? I’ll let myself slide on everything that isn’t gum.
This is the end of my first experiment in week-long fasting; for the past week, I have not intentionally listened to music in the background. I did play music in class (Tool’s “Die Eier von Satan,” because that was this week– and it was wonderful, as always), and I watched videos that had music and went into stores that had music. A few times my wife turned the radio on in the car — once yesterday specifically when I said that I was looking forward to listening to music again, because that’s what you do for the people you love, you skirt the rules (or just straight break them) in order to make your people happy — but since she is not as attached to music in the car as I am, and she has a lower tolerance for mediocre overplayed pop on the radio than I do (Also a lower tolerance for heavy metal first thing in the morning, and though I can listen to good grungy metal any time, I do have to wonder: who seriously wants to wake up to Korn? Really? Discord and screaming is how you want to start your day?), she is more willing to have the radio off while we drive around, so it has been mostly quiet on the road this week.
I’d love to say that it was a revelation. But I suppose maybe I’m past the age of shocking bursts of self-knowledge; I know myself pretty well at this point. I’ve gone without music before, of course, most simply when my music player was broken or when the batteries died right when I got out the door and down the block. So while it was a longer time without music, and more frequent moments during the day when I had to think about playing music and tell myself not to, there weren’t any new experiences.
I did have more thinking time while I was walking my dogs, and I think that was probably positive. I think my walks may become more meditative, more present, less about distracting myself. It’s probably better that way, anyway: I’ll pay more attention to my dogs and what they’re doing, so my big doofus of a Boxer won’t go sniffing after a GODDAMN RATTLESNAKE like she did today. (99% chance it was dead, because it didn’t react to her. But I didn’t realize what she was sniffing at until she’d already gotten within what would have been striking range if the thing felt like striking, and it was a big fucking snake. So now I think I need to be better about keeping this glorious idiot out of the bushes.) But the other times when I usually listen to music: when I first get to work, while driving, and for the hour or so that I have my birb out of his cage in the evenings, going without music just made the time quieter and more melancholy. I think it has made my mood a little bit worse for this past week, and I don’t really see any benefits.
However: I did go for the whole week without breaking my fast. I’m pleased with that. A week was long enough to give me a pretty good sense of what the thing I was going without meant to me, what part it played in my daily routine. I didn’t learn about myself so much, but I did solidify my opinion about one of my unconscious habits; so now I think it will become — has become — more of a conscious habit, and I like that a lot.
Therefore, I’m going to keep doing this.
This week I will be giving up video games. Again, they’re not a large part of my day, but I play a round of Candy Crush pretty regularly, during breakfast, while I have the birb out; and I play Solitaire on my phone and have gone through various farming/sim type games over the years, several of which have taken up time in idle moments, and sometimes they have crept into other moments, and have tempted me away from things I should be doing so that I can accomplish a goal or win an achievement. I just played a round of Candy Crush, wasted ten minutes, won nothing, felt frustrated. So I want to see if the loss of the frustration is worth the loss of the entertainment and the rush of victory — tiny victories, but victories easily won, so generally positive for my mood but negative for my time management.
This morning I am thinking about giving up. No, not like that — giving up something, as Catholics do for Lent, as Buddhists do as part of their daily practice. Fasting, essentially, though not necessarily with food. I am also thinking about taking on new things. I am thinking about habits: how to change the ones I have, how to cherish the ones I want to keep, how to gain new ones despite my general inertia.
I’ve changed habits in the past. Probably the biggest one was giving up smoking. I started smoking cigarettes my senior year of high school, quickly rose — or fell — to a pack a day (20 cigarettes a day, for those who don’t have experience with the short straws of death, a little more than one an hour), where I stayed for almost all of the next seventeen years. Sometimes I’d smoke more, often I’d smoke less; I quit for nine months, and then slid right back into it for another year or two before giving it up entirely in 2008. That was a tough change, because so many things I did were closely associated with smoking: I never finished a meal without having a cigarette, and I never drank coffee or alcohol without adding burning tobacco fumes. Whenever I talked on the phone, whenever I took my dog outside, whenever I walked anywhere — always smoking, all of the time. I thought of myself as a smoker as much as a liberal, or a teacher, say. It defined me. I watched the clock all day long, not intently, but always aware of about how long it had been since my last cigarette and how long until I could justify having another one. (My rule was 30 minutes. Unless there was an external deadline, such as getting to work or getting on a plane; then I would chain-smoke as much as possible, to “save up” extra nicotine for the time I would not be able to smoke.) I had to change all of that, and it was extremely difficult, to say the least.
To be honest, the habit bothered me more than the actual smoking. The addiction. I hated not being in control. I hated that it was so damn hard for me to change the way I did things, once I decided to change. I wanted my willpower to be enough to break my physical need for nicotine. It wasn’t, of course — I highly recommend nicotine patches for those who are thinking about quitting — but what was worse, was that my willpower wasn’t even enough to change my habits: even after I got past the craving for nicotine, I wanted to smoke just because I was used to it, familiar with it; it felt strange to put my things in my pockets in the morning and not add my lighter and my pack. I wanted to smoke while talking on the phone just because I had done it for so long, and I didn’t want to change.
But I did want to change: it’s just that my habits told me I didn’t want to. It’s like when I started flossing regularly, which I didn’t do until I was in my 20s (After I had one dentist visit that revealed 16, yes SIXTEEN cavities. Not only did I not floss, but I smoked and I drank unending cups of coffee that were probably 60% semi-dissolved sugar.), and at first I hated it just because it wasn’t what I had done before. It wasn’t difficult, didn’t take too long, wasn’t too expensive or morally questionable; none of the things that make habits hard to adopt. It was just hard because it wasn’t what I was used to. No other reason. Now, of course, if I don’t floss, my teeth feel filthy. Now it would be hard to give up flossing.
So there’s the thing, really. I want to be better at changing habits, at giving up things I don’t want and taking on things I do want. It’s not always hard: I moved to vegetarianism without many qualms, and I quit arguing on debate forums cold turkey; I’ve given up television more than once, and this isn’t the first time I’ve managed to adopt a daily writing habit — though I am a little ashamed to admit that those habits don’t last, that there is always a day when I decide not to write, and then a few more days after that one, and then I’m back to not writing for days or weeks at a time. I suppose, then, that I want to be better about keeping some habits as well as getting rid of others. And it seems to me that the way to get good at this is to practice: essentially to get into the habit of changing habits.
So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to start with one week at a time: every week, starting on Sunday, I’m going to change one habit for the week, either give something up or take something on. It doesn’t have to be something I consider vital and life-changing, like giving up smoking was; it just has to be a habit. The new ones don’t have to be good, either: I’ve always been inspired by Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me, and his subsequent TV shows with the same theme of changing a lifestyle for a pre-determined time. So I may try doing something not so good for me, but maybe something I have wondered about, or feel like I’ve missed out on. (Those won’t be big things. I’m not going to try heroin for a week. Nor, like, picking up a girl in a bar every night. This is not going to be exciting.) I don’t have a definite plan for this; we’ll see where it goes.
The first thing I’m going to give up, for this week, is — background noise. Specifically, music and podcasts and radio news. I’m giving up my headphones and my speakers.
This comes partly because I take my dogs on long walks on the weekends, and I’ve been listening to NPR, except I FREAKING HATE SCOTT SIMON, the cheesy self-indulgent grief monger who hosts Weekend Edition on Saturdays. So I started listening to a podcast, Sunday School Dropouts, which is about two non-Christians reading through the Bible, book by book. And that’s great, but I’m not always in the mood, so sometimes I dial around the radio, and sometimes I listen to the songs I have on the iPod I carry with me.
But sometimes, recently, I have listened to — nothing at all. I have thought my thoughts, instead. Doing that was inspired by and inspiration for this new blog format I’ve been doing, this daily recording of my thoughts in (generally) shorter form than my usual post. I’ve thought about things I’m writing, my novels and stories, and I have had very productive times doing it. This morning I listened to a little of NPR (I hate that maudlin putz Simon, but I like Lulu Garcia-Navarro, who runs the show on Sundays. But I loathe Will Shortz and his damn puzzles, so I shut it off every time that twit comes on.) and then the podcast, and then music. And I realized: I’m not enjoying any of these right now. So what if I listened to none of them?
What if I did that every time I walk the dogs? Or drive to get groceries, or to work? What if I didn’t turn on Pandora first thing when I get into my classroom? What if, for the hour every night I take the bird out of his cage, we sat in silence — and my only music was what he might feel like whistling to me? What would that be like? Would I hate it? Or would I enjoy the peace and quiet? Would it make me anxious to sit in the looming quiet, or would it help me think my thoughts?
So to answer those questions, and to work on my control over my habits, I’m going to try it. This week, no music, no radio, no iPod. No Pandora, no YouTube. If there is ambient music around me, in the grocery store or the gym, that’s fine; but I’ll try not to listen too close, try to block it out and stay in my own head.
We’ll see how it goes. I’ll report on it next weekend.
Just Dusty 