TV.

I made stuffed peppers for dinner, which I’ve never made before. I stuffed a dozen poblanos with black beans and cornmeal and onions and cheese and packed them into a pan full of spicy sauce. They’re in the oven right now.

That, friends, is the first thing that comes to mind on this quiet Monday evening.

Jacob and I don’t have a TV, mostly out of laziness and poverty. We lived in a furnished apartment for two years that had a big flat screen TV in it. We didn’t have cable, but we could hook my laptop up to the TV and watch Netflix or movies we rented on Amazon. When we moved in June, we gave up the furnished apartment and the TV along with it.

Don’t get me wrong - I still watch TV, only on a laptop hooked up to a speaker. We are not purists. Jacob has been working a lot of nights lately, and I’ve been on a raging bender watching every episode of The Mindy Project. Many Friday nights will find us on the couch watching old episodes of 30 Rock. But there is something freeing about not having a TV as a feature in our (very tiny) home.

A few months ago, Jacob brought home a nice little radio that sits out in the living room. It is usually tuned to our local NPR station or the local classical music station. I’ve always been a regular NPR listener, but in the months since the radio came, I'm off the hook. I turn the radio on when I get home, and unless I’m the mood for a podcast, I often find myself listening to the radio through the night and into the evening. I even find myself listening to Tom Ashbrook. I don’t know that having a radio in the background is any better than a TV, but I like it.

cardamom.

Like I said, I don’t usually write in the morning. But I woke up to the alarm clock blaring NPR and it felt like there was so much time and nothing to fill it with but writing.

Last night, I made a little dent on each of my end-of-year goals. I finished a book. I ran 4 miles. I wrote a blog post. I did 10 minutes of freewriting and made a list of creative projects and ideas. It felt amazing, like the night stretched on for days. Maybe that’s why I woke up itching to make more progress.

Habit-forming is such a trendy topic, and I’m especially guilty of falling down the deep dark hole of self-help articles and life-hacks and how-to-be-better books. I have some opinion on all of that, but I don’t know what it is exactly, other than feeling something weary of it.

It rained and rained yesterday, and now it’s cloudy and cool. The light is just coming up but not breaking through the clouds. Rat-cat is sleeping in the open window. Jacob is sleeping in the bedroom. I’m drinking a cup of coffee that is half Peet’s and half Turkish coffee I found in the back of the cupboard, because the bag of Peet’s was mostly empty. It tastes like cardamom.

This is really the first year of my life that I’ve been a morning person, and I can’t explain it. I can’t imagine going back. Mostly because I can’t imagine living in a world now where I don’t have time to cook and eat a giant breakfast. Eggs, peppers and bok choy yesterday. Steel cut oats with raisins, butternut squash and pecans this morning. It’s my favorite meal.

these are very common.

The rain has been coming down all afternoon, and its warm and muggy and October. I’m waiting and waiting for fall, but its slow in arriving this year. It isn’t that I need the pumpkin lattes (I hate Starbucks) or the buckets of apples or even the warm sweaters and tights and boots. I need the air of regeneration. I need the re-start. When the heat and light of summer drop away, my inner slate feels wiped clean and very hopeful. I’m always planning things, big and small, although small more often than big, and now is the time for planning. I’m making list after list.

Here’s a list:

-green cabbage
-Kennebec potatoes
-radishes
-celery
-scarlet turnips
-red beets
-baby eggplants
-mixed sweet peppers
-red bok choy

Those are the vegetables in my refrigerator right now.

dangerous.

I opened a new blank page on Sunday morning. I was going to start by writing, I never write early in the morning. But then I felt the need to make pancakes, and then coffee, and then I needed to shower and get ready for a wedding, and predictably, I never wrote.

It is so much about dulling the nerves, and I forget that. The nerves make me want more time, different time, later, after this and the other thing. They make me think instead of just doing.

On Saturday morning, when it was misty and rainy and cool, Jacob and I biked over to Jimmy T’s for breakfast, but the line was too long, so then we biked over to the library for the book sale, and Pound for coffee. We started talking about goals, and I told him that I’ve been thinking that I need to be better about setting goals for my personal life, or really my life as an artist. Because it’s very easy to fall in and then quickly back out of the writing habit when it feels like nothing is on the line.

I write at work on a calendar, with deadlines, with my paycheck figuratively hanging in the balance, because my job is to write things that make people want to give us money. At home I write from the gut, I most often write when I feel like it, and its rarely dangerous or urgent.

I petered out so quickly on this project. Why? What made it feel so terrible? What could I (should I) do differently? How do I fix it? How do I make it feel right for me? Is it supposed to feel right? This is a dark question hole that could go much deeper.

on a tired night.

The honest truth is that I had a cold last week, and I didn’t write. It’s Sunday evening, and I’m sitting cross legged on the couch, with one of my knees bumping one of Jacob’s (because our couch is small). It’s chilly, and the windows are all wide open, and I could close them, but I haven’t. Instead I’m drinking tea and a massive broccoli rice hotdish is baking in the oven.

On Friday night, Jacob and I started to watch Seven Samurai because he’s been talking about it and I made a resolution to watch more classic films. It’s three and a half hours long. We both fell asleep an hour in, not because it was boring, but we were tired, and I had a cold, and I was drinking a giant hot toddy (because of the cold). I wasn't sure I even wanted to watch it, but now I'm anxious to finish it. I’ll report back when we actually make it to the end. But on Friday night, sleep was more important. 

We went to Rose’s Luxury last night to celebrate Jacob’s birthday with a few friends from New York. We put our names on the list at 5pm and got a table at 10pm. I normally don’t go for that sort of thing, but...it’s really good.

And now here we are. My brain and body are tired and empty. The week and weekend were long and full. There doesn’t seem to be anything else to say. But writing is writing, even when it’s vacant and pointless and bad. Being present is worth something.