Waking up at Noon and Watching Reality TV All Day

Guys, it’ been a rough day. Last night Matt and I went out to the bar to watch some basketball game or something. (I’m a really big sports fan). I mostly concentrated on drinking beer and wondering how many French fries it is polite to take from a friend who said, “you can have some of my French fries if you want.” (That means I can just have all of them? Because that's how many I want.) I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to do a thing for today. I have been getting up early every day because it just feels like I should and because I’m used to it, but I realized taking a break means that I am totally allowed to sleep as late as I want and then watch TV all day and that can be my thing. So that’s what I did. I slept until noon and now I am watching reality TV. I chose the reunion show of The Real Housewives of New Jersey, which is a little confusing for me because I’ve never actually seen The Real Housewives of New Jersey, but it’s alright. I made a pickle and cheese sandwich on sourdough, I’m wearing pajamas shorts. Normally in a situation like this, I would feel incredibly guilty, like I should be writing or reading or looking for jobs or sitting upright, but today I am letting the power of the break be my spirit guide and embracing it. And let me tell you, it’s pretty great. Once I let myself just enjoy relaxing without feeling like I had to be doing anything else I felt calmer, less worried. As I stared at Theresa’s strange proceeding hairline (it seems to get closer to her eyes with every shot) I wasn’t frantically trying to plan my entire life in my head like I usually do during every waking moment. Maybe The Real Housewives of New Jersey and sandwiches are my yoga?

Watching the Entire Season of Arrested Development in Two Days

Despite what creator Mitch Hurwitz suggested when the entire new season of Arrested Development appeared on Netflix all at once last Sunday, Matt and I decided to just watch the entire thing in two days. I was happy with our decision, it was pretty great. It was rainy, there was beer, there was pizza, there was a giant bowl of popcorn, there were cookies, there were elastic waistbands all around.  It was at times a little tiring and my brain felt like it was going to explode. The season is set up so that the same story is told from all the characters’ perspectives, which meant that ten or so episodes deep you started to forget if something happening onscreen was something you already knew from previous episodes and had forgotten or something you were going to find out in later episodes.  But in general, I’m glad we defied Mitch Hurwitz because that’s how we have learned to digest good television: by the box set or clicking through lists on Netflix. I like watching an entire season of something all at once: like reading a book cover to cover in one sitting. Netflix and box sets have made watching television such a different experience from the way it used to be. Waiting eagerly for an episode week to week is good, too. It gives you something to look forward to after school or work, it builds suspense, but I prefer the all at once method. I don’t regret spending entire days in the world of blue meth dealing, or vampire slaying, Texas high school football, or, let’s be honest, creekside teenage melodrama. I want to spend an entire weekend thinking about if it’s really possible to dissolve an entire body in a bathtub full of acid. I want to contemplate for a few days if I could pull off Buffy’s floral dress and combat boot combo. I like watching as Matt slowly morphs into Larry David mode after a few hours of Curb Your Enthusiasm, monologuing when someone parks incorrectly and insisting I use a coaster, challenging my respect for wood. It satisfies the same need for complete immersion into a different world that I crave from books.  I’ve never been a chapter a night reader, either.

I’ve always heard people describe why they love characters and plot lines on weekly TV shows as “because we invite them into our home once a week,” but with the option to now watch television episodes as many at a time that we want, the relationship has become even more intimate than a friend or neighbor who drops by every once and awhile for a quick story and a cup of coffee. Now my relationship with television shows is like that good friend from summer camp who you only get to see for a few weeks a year, but in those weeks you do everything together, you stay up all night telling each other every single thing about yourselves. Different people may be partial to each relationship, but for me it’s the camp friend, which is a metaphor but also probably why I always really loved summer camp.

That is to say that I really loved the way Arrested Development came out and wouldn’t be opposed to more TV shows doing this in the future. As long as we don’t run out of popcorn and nobody makes me wear real pants.

I Love Goats

One thing you should know about me is how much I love goats. I’m really partial to all farm animals: horses, chickens, pigs, cows are alright I guess, ducks, border collies, sheep, llamas if you’re on a really exotic farm. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a city and the only time I ever really got to get close to an animal that wasn’t a dog, cat, or gerbil was in farm-like situations: petting zoos, horse stables, what my mother told me was a petting zoo that later turned out to be a pond of ducks behind an Italian restaurant. Anyway, I love goats the most. I don’t know if you’ve interacted with a goat, but it’s like interacting with a dog. They are playful, affectionate, and really want you to pet them behind their horns. Also, they make the best, creamiest cheese, really good caramel, and in 800 AD roaming goats discovered coffee beans so really goats are just the best and pretty much invented Frappachinos. 

Matt meets a kid.

Goat cart

        One of the fun things about not having a job and living somewhere new is that I never know what’s going to happen to me in a given day and I’m learning to just go with it. For instance, the adult softball league that Matt sometimes subs for needed a girl player so I played catcher in a softball game last week, even though I’m generally terrified of playing organized sports mostly because I don’t fully understand the rules to any sport besides bocce ball and like, capture the flag. (I don’t want to brag or anything but I hit a pitch and made it to first base.)So on Saturday Matt and I went to visit one of my professors from grad school at White Lotus Farm. She told me there were goats there, but I didn’t realize the sheer amount of goats or that half of them would be kids or that they would wear little dog collars or that their hooves would be so tiny. In general, I wish all my days of taking a break involved playing with baby goats and even though I’m not supposed to be actively looking for a job I’m not going to pretend like I didn’t Google “goat shepherd” to see if this job still exists. Maybe one day Teacake and I will take to the Italian hillsides to shepherd our herd from villa to villa as the goats prepare us artisan coffee drinks, but for now I will have to make do with just visiting. 

Goat watch 2013

Goat stampede

Natural goat herder?

        

Day One: Placemats!

                When I was in first grade, my mom sewed me an elf Halloween costume. The costume worked like this: my legs were hidden inside the trunk of a toadstool and around my waist was the toadstool’s cap, on top of that were two fake legs constructed from pantyhose stuffed with cotton filling. From the waist up I was dressed in a green vest and a pointy green cap, giving the impression that I was sitting on the toadstool. My mom sewed the entire thing from a Martha Stewart Halloween costume book, that if I remember correctly was full of clever children’s costumes like the sitting elf and adult costumes that were mostly literal interpretations of common phrases. The “jailbird” costume featured a woman wearing a feathered headdress and fake chains around her ankles, the “serial killer” costume was a guy dressed all in black stabbing a box of Wheaties, a “stool pigeon” had a beak attached to his forehead and was sitting on a three legged stool (perfect if you plan on staying stationary for an entire Halloween party). My mom spent hours making the elf costume with her sewing machine, but when I wore it to school, every single other first grader in the Halloween parade was wearing a pink Power Rangers costume from CVS, even the boys. It was a parade of 45 Kimberlys and one pair of stuffed pantyhose sitting on a fungus. Every time I turned around I knocked over a pink-masked six year old with the girth of my mushroom cap.  I was super embarrassed. Nobody elses' legs were encased inside a toadstool trunk. Nobody elses' mom had made their costume. That night, I refused to trick-or-treat in the elf costume (because seriously kids are the worst) and my mom quickly whipped up some cat ears and black leggings and I went as a cat instead.

                I always took for granted that my mom was so good at sewing. In fact, throughout elementary school and into middle school it always seemed a little embarrassing. Sewing was so domestic, and women were supposed to be liberated from all that household stuff when they set their bras on fire in the seventies, right?  But I didn’t argue during ninth grade crew when she sewed up the flared leggings she bought me to run in when everyone else had bought straight-legged leggings. And I didn’t argue when she altered my prom dress when I realized it didn’t fit twenty minutes before my date arrived.

                I thought that sewing would be a good project for my first day of taking a break because it’s how I used to take a break when I actually had real things to do. I asked my mom for a sewing machine two years ago when I really wanted to make my own pillows for my couch, and it didn’t take long to realize why my mom had spent so much time sewing when I was a kid. It’s relaxing and mentally challenging at the same time (you even have to do math sometimes!) and producing something that you can hold and use is incredibly satisfying. Another great thing about sewing is it’s an excuse to watch TV and feel productive at the same time. Today I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and then accidentally, Mean Girls 2. (It’s just as bad as you think it is and unironically involves a lot of girls walking in pyramid formation with an unidentified wind source blowing their hair dramatically and the line “Maybe we can talk about it over some non-fat soy raspberry lattes!”)

 I’m not a super accomplished sewer yet, and today I went for something easy: placemats.

Not super accomplished or organized:this is how I fold and store my pattern pieces.

Right before I realized I should have measured before I cut.

I got the fabric at the Ann Arbor Sewing Center, an independent sewing store. Not because I only shop at independent stores (although it's great to support independent stores! I'm just poor!), but mostly because the Joanne's Fabrics in Ann Arbor pretty much only stocks weird colorful fleece.Welcome to Michigan, I guess its cold here.

Reversible placemats!

 I was going to say that I wasn’t going to go step by step through how to make these placemats because anyone should be able to figure out how to cut out rectangles and sew them together, but then I immediately mis-measured and didn’t have enough fabric. (Like I said, sometimes sewing involves math).But luckily I had some extra fabric that sort of matched, so I made two of the four placemats reversible, which ended up being a happy accident because I actually really like the way they turned out.

So, there it is: my first day of taking a break. I didn’t even feel guilty. Well, now I sort of do because I’m still watching Mean Girls 2.

Twenty Eight Days of Taking a Break

I just graduated from an MFA program where everyone’s mantra was the same: work. Work every day, for hours a day, work when you don’t feel like it, when you aren’t inspired, work on Christmas, work instead of sleeping if you have to, work instead of eating (Psh. Whatever). In general, the people in my MFA program were some of the hardest workers I have ever met in my entire life. And the work worked, all my friends are slowly but surely making names for themselves. They are appearing in journals and on websites, winning awards and receiving fellowships. And this is isn’t just true of writing, I read everywhere in every field that the people who are the most successful are never the people who just happened to have a particular talent, but they are the people who worked hard for something they really wanted. There are all the famous examples of extremely successful people who pushed through failure and kept working: Stephen King’s first novel Carrie was rejected 30 times before it was published, Van Gogh never sold a painting in his entire career, Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Even people who seem to be instant successes at an early age often still worked incredibly hard to get there, Mindy Kailing writes in her memoir about how after she graduated college she moved to New York and would spend days in Borders reading books about screenwriting she couldn’t afford to buy, then she wrote, produced, put up, and starred in a play with her best friend that got her noticed. (She also writes about how her best friend and her wrote that play while watching reality TV and eating snacks, which sounds like my kind of work.) I listened to an interview with Nick Offerman the other day, who talked about how it took him a really long time and a lot of work until he finally had some real success. He said “When I got the job of Parks and Rec I was 38. I had learned to be incredibly happy with my life as it was, I was working as an actor, I was unknown, but I had an incredible household, I had my wife, I had a woodworking shop. I was happy as a clam…and then I got my dream job. I was grateful I was able to become pretty solid before I had some success.” The point being, if you work hard enough at something you want eventually you will see results, even if it takes a long time. Unless you are Van Gogh in which case you will never see success and die alone with one ear.

 I’m all for hard work. But the problem for me is that even though I am willing to work hard, I'm not sure what work is the most important. For the last three years in graduate school and the last two in college before that, I’ve worked really hard as a writer and then as a teacher, but I don’t necessarily know if that is what I want to do forever. And now I've graduated, I'm unemployed and I'm not sure what exactly I'm supposed to be doing. I like a lot of things. How can I know which one is the most important? Which is the one I’m supposed to be putting all this hard work into? Writing nonfiction? Writing screenplays? Food writing? Or is it something entirely different? Teaching? Sewing? Working with animals? Cooking? Running? Everyone is always saying to work hard at the thing you are passionate about, but I think the trouble for me is trying to distinguish my passion from my hobbies. I listened to a radio story yesterday about a 23 year old guy who walked across the entire country asking people what advice they would give themselves at 23. In the end, he decided the most common advice was that "you already know what you want to do, do it." At firs this sounded nice, kind of mystical and important, as if I could just sit down and think really hard about my dreams and suddenly be guided in the right direction like a pointer on a Ouija Board. But then I thought "Bullshit." If everyone knew exactly what they wanted to do at 23 and worked towards it, there would be a lot more rockstars and like three mailmen. So for the next month, I’m going to do the opposite of what everyone has been telling me to do for the last three years: I’m going to take a break. Every day I’m going to do something I like to do, but that doesn’t contribute to a larger goal. And here’s the big thing: I’m not going to feel guilty about it. I’m going to stop feeling guilty for not writing enough, or not cooking enough, or not running enough. In fact, I’m going to do away with guilt altogether, because the guilt of not knowing what work I should be doing often paralyzes me to the point of doing nothing (Also known as watching Netflix while reading celebrity gossip/eating Greek yogurt). So starting on Friday I will be posting three times a week (On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays) about the things I did during my 28 days of a guilt-free break from attempting to be successful. I will not expect any of these things to provide me with a road map to a life-long fulfilling career and I will not feel guilty for doing one of these things when I could be doing another thing. Because hard work is great, but I’ve been in school since I was 2 and maybe breaks are underrated. Hopefully.

Zora: expert break-taker.