The best blog to check every day is written by a person a lot smarter than yourself, who collects facts and synthesizes them a little quicker than you, who is also humble and barely mentions how adroit she is at the things she chooses to do. She is interested in subjects adjacent to areas you’ve always been interested in being interested in, and she keeps the poetry to a minimum.

She has a strong narrative voice. She avoids cliches and formulaic thought patterns. She isn’t trying to impress you because she is living her authentic life and documenting the evolution of her mind. She has at least one dietary restriction and a tattoo of a young Joan Didion.

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I’ve decided to go to graduate school, to lose 120 lbs, and to write about it as a way of scaffolding the experience. The work I’ve been doing as a home health aide is emotionally rewarding but I do not intend to do it forever. I made the decision a month ago and have since rested on the laurels of having made a decision. No progress toward implementation.

I’m turning 35 at the start of next year and when I do I want to be very good at a daily routine, time management, living, laughing, loving. That will entail a level of self-introspection I am unaccustomed to. I will need to make plans and follow them, even when I’d rather be scrolling through my phone or reading fiction. A few years of sustained effort could change the trajectory of my career, but the waiting has to stop and some day has to be now.

Nothing annoys me like historical fiction. The presumption that detailed social and historical analysis can be sloppily grafted onto a love story. The mortifying dialogue where characters explain things to each other a toddler would have known. The subtle editorializing from the author, who is slyly judging a fake story about past events recorded by whoever had the loudest voice. The petticoats!

This is another chamber of the science fiction problem — how do we endeavor to make the familiar strange and the strange intimate? Say you’ve come up with a vivid anthropological framework to set your alien culture in, how do you make portions of it incomprehensible and unknowable enough to disorient the reader and make them cling even harder to familiar elements of the story?

I’m finishing “Ragtime” by E. L. Doctorow and it doesn’t annoy me. I love how Doctorow enumerates things, he doesn’t just give you three or four examples, he really digs in with a carefully curated list that rolls across the page like a parade. Yes, he has written Emma Goldman and Harry Houdini into the novel as characters; neither of them are caricatures of their most memorable features. It reminds me of “The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay,” the way it takes time to dawdle in a fascinating bit of obscure history which turns out to be a curlicue in the filigree of the main story.

Speaking of L’Histoire, I finished “The Wordy Shipmates” and it was pretty good. It was like a puritan tell-all, not as long or as formidable as a comprehensive history but following the the intellectual curiosities of the author. I read half of Hollinghurst’s “The Spell” and after checking it out twice I let it be. I think he’s crackerjack but his characters need to get in therapy and stop all the numb, thoughtless sex.

I listened to Murakami’s “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” and he found a way to encapsulate a state of mind that is perishable and hard to capture. I’ve never wanted to run a marathon but I’m thinking about it now.

It has been two weeks without chewing tobacco and a few days since I last used a nicotine patch. My physical cravings are retreating, but having removed a powerful coping mechanism that I’ve had since puberty has forced me to deal with things. When I start to feel frustration I have a sparse tool kit to turn to. Exercise helps, but that’s at the end of the night. That said, I’m glad I’m going through this. I’d highly recommend quitting a comforting addiction to learn where your emotional black ice is.

Revelation: This is why people quit smoking, start yoga, go on a cleanse, and clean out their closet all at the same time — once you remove one buttress the rest of the shit show starts to teeter. Like, I have to exercise, because I have to have a way of physically rewarding myself and wringing stress from my body. I have to pack a lunch each day because I’ll overeat if I don’t have my meals portioned in advance, and I have to get enough sleep or I can’t wake up in time to pack a gym bag and a lunch. I suppose I’ll start meditating.

Wonderful successes! I can put on socks much easier since I started stretching at the end of my work outs and my soreness the next day is mitigated with a protein shake. Although gaining 40 lbs and not exercising for 6 months has made me less of a PT stud, I still know how to follow an exercise regimen and expand on it. Today I worked on my glutes — did some fire hydrants, some glute bridges, lunges, squats — and tomorrow I’ll hopefully be too sore to do anything but biceps.

My beloved has started a youtube channel for Let’s Plays and I occasionally appear in his streams. He’s a superlative human being, even if he prounounces minutia “min you tie ay” and one day we’ll be so internet power couple you’ll remember fondly how you were there from the beginning; if either of us could fucking stick to a schedule or not be smothered by our inner critic.

Anyway, Drag Race All Stars is batshit bonkers right now, I haven’t finished a book in weeks, and you might like this podcast with a Buddhist monk. He’s very very.

I have a bad habit of analyzing a problem, finding a simple, plain solution, and then stalling on that solution for days and weeks, rolling it around in my head. Often the solution will save me money in the long term but cost in the short. I have a suspicion I’m more attached to the problem than the money it would cost to solve it. When I was making New Year’s resolutions I realized I’m scared of solving the manageable problems I have because they will inevitably lead to problems I don’t know how to solve. This is all to say that I bought nicotine patches this afternoon, between home visits.

On a recent episode of the Tim Ferriss show, Tim interviewed Dr. Gabor Mate, an addiction specialist. One of Dr. Mate’s points was that addiction tends to represent self-medication that initially relieves some legitimate tension or emotional distress, which the addict carries on long after the inciting incident.

I started smoking when I was 14 at a friend’s birthday party. I liked the lightheaded feeling it gave me and the secrecy attached to it. I think being a closeted teen may not have caused the addiction per se, but it provided ample stressors for the addiction to take hold. I’ve quit 3 times, once for 7 months in college, once for two months while in boot camp, and the last time after I met the squishy and transitioned exclusively to chewing tobacco. Cigarettes are nasty, but dip is on a whole other class by itself. You’re forever spitting into bottles and jugs, your dental hygiene suffers, the pieces get lodged in your teeth and turn them brown. Certain handsome men you are betrothed to won’t kiss you — it’s a whole big filthy mess.

I’m tired of dip. It’s expensive, it ties your emotional stability to an activity that is secretive and repulsive, and it is more trouble than it is worth. I get very irritated when I quit cold turkey, and my job is essentially to be incredibly patient and kind at all times. I know that all it would take is one shitty day to get me back on it, so I need to relearn certain behaviors without it. No more driving, showering, writing with a lip in, but also no more jugs, no more tobacco scattered across my car’s console, no more refused kisses from the great and beautiful.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Going to the gym is weird. Its this open room where you and a group of near strangers come to find out things about your endurance, your stamina, and your physical limitations. The gym I go to is a casual gym, a starter gym — their free weight area is small, most of the machines top out easily. But I’m not ready to join a bodybuilder/meathead gym and my membership allows me to bring the squishy with me on weekends. It meets my current needs.

I tried to follow Navy Seal Jesse Goggins‘ advice today and “do something every day that sucks” and make a run at my latest cardio goal: treadmill running, at a certain speed and elevation, increasing the length of time each session. I made it halfway to my goal and got way deep in my head, the sort of brain echo that says “ooo that ankle doesn’t feel good, what if you injure yourself, what if you already injured it, what if what if what if” until you either overpower it or give in, and tonight I gave in.

As soon as I did I remembered that exercise is, essentially, controlled injury leading to hypertrophy of muscles and the strengthening of your cardiovascular apparatus. But my win for the night if that I showed up, I failed, I moved on to the weight machines and gave my legs a little grief. I remember how motivating the desire to not “fall out” on group runs was when I was in the Navy, how I always judged people who slowed down and stopped, claiming they couldn’t go on, because every centimeter of my living body was screaming at me to stop and I was focusing on my breathing and trying to keep up. I will remember a particular stretch of concrete that led back to the clinic for the rest of my life, how doggedly I pounded that pavement and always found a few remaining ounces of strength for a burst of energy to carry me home.

What glory days those were. I miss them. Now I have a gym membership, and a routine, a job that I have and a job that I want, and a desire to expand my life to the wide spaces it once occupied. That’s why I’ve been trying to get back into the habit of writing nightly, to be reflective about my life and build strategies to elevate it.

I’ve been working a lot recently. I’m a home health aide, which means I assist old men with the activities of daily living. In the past two months I’ve learned all of the ways you can dress, clean, feed, bathe and move people who can no longer move for themselves. I’ve had comical moments, poignant moments, and experienced the fleeting boredom of sitting in comfortable silence with a near stranger.

Some households run like a machine, drawers labeled, supplies replenished according to a definite routine, schedules enforced. Some have accreted a way of functioning as the illness or infirmity advanced, the evidence of past vibrancy visible underneath a layer of harried improvised solutions to emerging realities.

I sing to one of my patients because it calms him and helps him drift off to sleep. Another is all business — I ferry him from recliner to bed, attend to his immediate needs, plaster the holes in the boat. I’ve grown attached to some of them, probably all of them, which is bad news in this economic climate, where people are loathe to change their hairdresser but not their employer. I worry that when I leave it will be evidence of some sort of negligence on my part, a failure to see it through to the end. I understand better why so many choose to remain aloof.

I try, when I have the time, to give time to creative projects and read when I can. I still have to attend to the quotidian mess of living, laundry needs folding and dishes scrubbed. My hands are perpetually dry; this week I plunged them into a bowl of hot sauce and chicken breasts while preparing meals and my fingers sung all night with the humiliation of my carelessness. Lord knows I’m not short on gloves.

I can’t imagine I’ll do this work forever. Already I’m getting tired of its rhythms and routines. For now it is steady work, all I want, and I’m making it to the gym at night for sweat therapy. When I’m driving I’ve been listening to show tunes — I’m tired of the motivational podcasts I subscribe to and their insistence that there’s a golden tipping point within my grasp that let will loose the true abundance and meaning of my life.

I’ll leave you with Jerry Orbach singing “Try to Remember” from The Fantasticks. It is my latest obsession.