Author: JennyDetroit (Page 22 of 43)

Read while you eat

February 1, 2021 / / 0 Comments

This weekend, I decided to stop wasting time on the internet.

I HAD been practicing “digital minimalism” very well until Covid hit, and then suddenly I felt compelled to read more news and consume more media on the internet. After all, I didn’t want to miss important, potentially life-saving information. So I fell back into old habits of reading Twitter threads, Reddit threads, and the like. All in the name of keeping up on Covid stuff (and then eventually the election).

Now that the election is over and we have a normal president again, I feel less inclined to check headlines every five minutes. However, my lunchtime scroll through Twitter is still a thing. Until today.

Today I began the first day of a new habit: Reading a book at lunch.

My lunch break is a “me-time” respite from teaching and being around other people. I am an introvert, so being around people can exhaust me.  At lunchtime, my M.O. is to hang out in my classroom, eat lunch, and scroll the internet (mostly Twitter).

The problem was that scrolling Twitter wasn’t making me feel good. It wasn’t enlightening reading; instead, I felt anxious and upset (usually) due to some fresh outrage about MAGA/Qanon insanity or #CatholicTwitter in-fighting. I was only reading these threads because of FOMO (fear of missing out).

This weekend, though, I realized that I wasn’t reading enough books, wasn’t setting aside time to read more books, and wasn’t using my lunch break in a healthy way. I had fallen back into that stupid internet-addicted habit, so it was now time to make a new habit.

My new habit is this: as soon as the lunch bell rings, I close my laptop, take out my lunch, and open my book. Then I read while I eat.

Today I read a chapter in The Golem and the Jinni. It was fantastic. Best lunch break I’ve had all school year. No Twitter-induced anxiety, no dumb outrages, no mindless scrolling. I read a chapter in a book I’m enjoying, ate peacefully, and got some needed “me-time.”

I know it takes several more repetitions before something becomes a habit, but I’m excited to see this one stick. I *want* it to stick.

My lunch-time-book-time plan feels like a game-changer in my reading habits.

Symbols for Me

January 31, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Last week, a student did a presentation about symbolism, and she had a couple of activities for the class to help them practice using symbols in their writing. One of her exercises was to think of a symbol (or symbols) that represented who we are. I tried my hand at it, since I like to write alongside my students, and started coming up with symbols for myself.

One was a 1970s Ballantine Adult Fantasy paperback with a wild, psychedelic cover.

Even though I was born in the 1980s, I’ve always been a bit of a throwback. I love old black and white movies, swing jazz, Beat writers, 60s psychedelic rock, and old-school fantasy. I don’t try to be strange or outlandish, but sometimes I can’t help it. I’m a weird person. And I often find myself outside the mainstream. I think the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series fits all of these qualities: old and dog-eared but still kinda interesting, weird and psychedelic, and outside the mainstream.

The other symbol I came up with was a wooden sword from the Renaissance Festival.

This one symbolizes me because it’s essentially a toy sword, but way cooler than something you’d find in a Toys ‘R Us, and I’m not the kind of person who wants to wield an actual weapon or be a real knight, but I like to pretend, I like to play, I like to imagine. The wooden sword is a tool for the imagination.

And because the Renaissance Festival only happens once a year (and I didn’t always get a chance to go when I was a kid), the wooden sword holds a special kind of allure: rare and precious, something long sought-for but rarely achieved.

Just to be clear: I’m not saying that I’m “rare and precious” or “something long sought-for but rarely achieved.” Instead, I mean that my desire to get one of these swords symbolizes so much of my life: wanting things that are hard to find, desiring something that seems just out of reach. The Renaissance Festival sword is every longing of my heart, every wish I wished as a kid.

My last symbol symbol for myself is this:

A cup of black coffee.

Why? I’m bitter and make people jittery.

Another Lost Weekend

January 30, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Once again I’ve failed to use my Saturday wisely. Many worthy and important things could have gotten done; instead, it was T.V. time. An episode of Jim Henson’s Storyteller Greek Myths (much more tragic and somber than its fairy tale counterpart); an episode of The Crown (which led me down the rabbit hole of Googling all the stuff from the episode to see if it was real; sadly, some of it was); and then Ken Burns’s Jazz ended up being on PBS when I turned off Netflix, and I watched that for half an hour.

Yikes.

I am so bad at getting my work done when I have *actual time to do it.*

Instead, I waste such time, and when the eleventh hour arises, I scramble like mad to do all the work I’ve been putting off for too long. It’s bonkers and unhealthy, and I wish I was better at being disciplined.

Having just read James Clear’s Atomic Habits recently, you’d think I’d know how to develop small habits that will make my life run more smoothly. Alas, I feel like most of my days are filled with too much to do and not enough time to do it, and then when a weekend like today rolls around, I’m so burned out that all I want to do is veg.

I wish I knew how to make my normal weekdays not so stuffed with things to do. I’m sure this is a common feeling for many people. The question I have is why are we all so busy all the time? Is it modern life that’s made things busy? Is it our jobs? I don’t work a high-powered corporate job or anything; I’m a high school English teacher. Is it having to work and raise children that makes things so busy? I know others who work and have kids and they don’t *seem* particularly stressed or overburdened (maybe they just hide it really well…). Or at the very least, I don’t see any of them turning a perfectly good Saturday into a wasted “lost weekend” of vegging and avoiding work.

Why do I do this to myself? What kind of small “atomic” habits can I develop to avoid this cycle of over-work/giving-in-to-acedia? I think it’s interesting that I’m self-diagnosing my problem as acedia, because that implies this is a spiritual malady and not necessarily something I can “life hack” away. With all things spiritual, prayer is often the first priority, so maybe my problem is lack of prayer. Maybe I need to work on my habits of prayer and see what else will fall into place after that. Small habits of prayer might lead to more small habits elsewhere.

Maybe next Saturday can be a little less lost.

“Replacing the objective of growth”

January 29, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Consider, for example, the distance between our need to protect and regenerate Mother Earth and an economic model that regards growth at any cost as its prime objective.

Of course, some regions — very underdeveloped areas, or countries recovering from war — need their economies to grow rapidly to meet their people’s basic needs. But in the wealthier parts of the world, the fixation with constant economic growth has become destabilizing, producing vast inequalities and putting the natural world out of balance. Unlimited expansion of productivity and consumption assumes human dominance over creation, but the environmental disaster it has brought about has shattered the assumptions of that thinking. We are part of creation; we do not own it: to some extent, it owns us; we cannot live apart from it. This crisis or breach is a sign of our time.

The disruption of Covid has turned the tables, inviting us to stop, alter our routines and priorities, and to ask: What if the economic, the social, and the ecological challenges we face are really different faces of the same crisis? What if they have a common solution? Could it be that replacing the objective of growth with that of new ways of relating will allow for a different kind of economy, one that meets the needs of all within the means of our planet?

Pope Francis, Let Us Dream, p. 60

Avoid Cliche

January 28, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Today in class the students learned about cliche: what makes something cliche and how to avoid using cliche in one’s writing. The activity we did to practice avoiding cliche involved looking at a photo of a starry night sky and writing descriptions that avoided the obvious cliched descriptions like, “The stars shone like diamonds.”

(This lesson and activity, by the way, was taught by one of my students. They’ve all been taking turns teaching the class about literary/rhetorical terms and facilitating writing activities to reinforce the lessons.)

Since I try to write alongside my students, I too participated in the activity. My attempt was as follows: “The stars were flecks of milk painted on the faded gray of an old barn.”

I’m not sure I like this description, but it does make me laugh to think of the stars as flecks of milk. It’s definitely a weird way of describing something we typically think of as beautiful.

Anyway, I avoided using a cliche.

How to Feed the Ysbaddaden Muse

January 27, 2021 / / 0 Comments

It’s no secret that I’ve been working on side projects lately instead of writing Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess. I explained part of my anxieties already, but the other annoying thing about being away from a novel-in-progress is that everything’s been forgotten. I can’t remember what’s happened in the story or what I wanted to write about next.

I probably should keep a notepad nearby and record major events, arcs, settings, etc. (and proper names), but so far, I haven’t used that strategy.

So now, as I hope to reembark on my journey into the novel, I have to go back and reread at least the last three or four chapters. It’s not the end of the world, but all that rereading time is time spent NOT writing. And what I most desperately want is to be writing this novel, getting words on paper, and finishing it.

Maybe as I reread, I’ll do the notepad thing. If nothing else, it’ll save me time rereading next time I get in this situation.

Another thought I just had — unrelated to rereading my manuscript, but related to my slow-going with Ysbaddaden: Perhaps I haven’t been taking in the right input. I’ve been reading the pope’s new book, The Golem and the Jinni, C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, and I’m about to start reading Nella Larsen’s Passing (for my teaching work).

But maybe I need to mix things up and read/watch/listen to stuff that’ll feed my muse specifically for the Ysbaddaden story. Stuff like medieval Arthurian romances, Appendix N books, 80s fantasy movies, old school heavy metal and prog rock, The Smiths, comic books like The Sandman series. These are all influences on my Merlin’s Last Magic world, so maybe I need to go back to those influences and draw more sustenance from them. If nothing else, it’ll be a change of pace and that might shake something loose in my imagination.

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