The Sweet Taste of Solidity

I've finally got myself on some semblance of a daily routine.  I've got 3 alarms that get me up in the morning, and each has its own intention:

6:45 - "Turn me off immediately and go back to sleep.  I'm just here to let you know you're about to have to start waking up soon."

7:00 - "Stay awake long enough to check and make sure I am in fact the 7:00 alarm and not the 7:15 alarm.  Once you find that it's really and truly 7:00, go back to sleep."

7:15 - "You may have to actually get up now.  Wake up your wife and ask if she needs 5 more minutes of sleep.  If so, set the alarm for 7:20 and check your facebook on your phone.  If not, start making her coffee."

...Then I pretty much keep repeating that last step until 7:30, which is the latest we can possibly wake up and still get her off to work on time.

After she leaves for work at 7:45, I eat breakfast and do an hour of mental workout, then an hour of physical workout.

- Mental workouts consist of logic games, memorization techniques, creative outlets and learning new skills.
 - Physical workouts consist of 15 minutes of yoga, 30 minutes of weights, and 15 minutes of tai chi.

I usually finish all that around 10.  Then bible study and quiet meditation usually takes me to 11.  I spend the next hour doing various household tasks like laundry, emptying the litter box, etc.  Lately I've been spending this time packing boxes for Arlington.

I start making Glennda lunch at noon, because her lunch break is at 12:30.  We eat lunch together, and then she leaves around 1:15.  If I have anything to finish up, I'll do it here.  Otherwise, I start into all my unfinished semi-recreational tasks.

(Right now I'm tailoring a bunch of misfit and hand-me-down clothes to make them more awesome.  I'm taking in a pair of Glennda's pants so I can wear them.  Other times I'll take Bear for a walk, work on one of the stories I'm writing or just paint.  Or record myself painting and make a YouTube video out of it.)

I'll leave for work at 3:45 and when I come home at 9:45 Glennda and I will relax while watching our recorded shows.  Then she falls asleep and I read whatever book I'm going through until about 10:30 or 11.

So that's what my weekday looks like.  All this to say, I've finally been following this pattern long enough to call it a certifiable habit.  And it feels great.  I read somewhere that if you write down your routine and read it back to yourself, it helps to solidify it in your brain as fact.  So this journal entry is kind of just the last brick in the road to the routine-led day for which I've been striving for a couple years.

Ecclesiastes 10:18

-R.

Calvin and Hobbes rocks your face*

So if you haven't discovered the greatness that is Regina Spektor, you need to pick up her album far and listen to it until your ears bleed.

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I've always been fascinated with the secret arts of the far east...Tai Chi, QiGong, Fajin, Kundalini Hatha-Yoga, Feng Shui, that kind of thing.  Not only am I intrigued by the medicinal possibilities, but it's always a fun exercise in apologetics to compare things like Taoism and Buddhism to the ultimate source of Truth.  I was having a conversation with my dad about how much I admire the level of discipline found among Buddhists.  He responded by saying that the problem with the Buddhists is that they are too perfectly balanced.  Whaaat?  Is there such a thing as too perfectly balanced?  Then he said that things like love and passion require an imbalance.  An imbalance of priority, of importance, of desire.  And it makes total sense.  After all, the Buddhists are the ones who first realized that in order to do away with the negatives in life, one must abandon pursuit of the positives.

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I watch my wife's shows because I like spending time with her doing what she likes doing.  She watches Grey's Anatomy and Private Practice.  In one of these shows (it's still hard for me to tell them apart at times), one of the characters says that she's probably going to hell for trying to force her pregnant teenage daughter to have an abortion.  It got me thinking - there are really people out there who assume that the Christian doctrine teaches that committing sins condemn people to hell.  If you murder someone, you're going to hell for it.  We tell people that no amount of good works can get you into heaven, so why would we make people believe bad works will get you any closer to hell?  When thinking in terms of salvation, you must think of 'sin' not as a set of actions, but rather as a state of being.  Namely, being dirty.  We're all born dirty, and we stay dirty until we let God clean us off.  The bible calls this process sanctification.  If we die dirty, we go to hell.  If we die sanctified, we go to heaven.  It's as simple as that.*  In my humble opinion, there are just as many Christians who need to learn this as non-believers.

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They say you learn something new every day.  They're freaking liars, whoever they are.  However, I would say that most people probably learn something new every week.  This past week, I learned how to turn a standard household laser pointer into a candle-lighting, paper-burning, pocket-sized sci-fi torture weapon.  That's all I'm gonna say about that before I get myself in trouble.  Glennda, if you read this, the cat was already missing some fur from his tail before I learned this, and no lasers* were involved in the removal of said fur.

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So a guy I used to work with at the Y is taking an LSAT course where I work.  He once made a disrespectful joke about another one of our female co-workers (who is now my wife), and my first instinct was to break his nose.  The only reason I didn't was because I didn't want to lose my job (the fact that about 30 kids would've been witnesses didn't even factor into my equation until much later in a moment of guided retrospection).  Still, after all these years, the second he walked in our doors this afternoon, the first thing I thought to say was "Hey I remember you - I almost punched your face in.  How've you been?"  I'm not really the type of guy you'd normally find smacking people around,* but there are just some people you don't disrespect - and my wife is one of them.

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That's really all that's going on in my head at the moment.

Pieces,
-R.

















* (insert long, fine print disclosure here)