Last month I was in the middle of the English countryside making lentils and dodging sheep poop. This month, I'm back in London, still making lentils, but dodging fumes instead.
I'm working a contract job in Parson's Green, cycling two hours a day, and trying to keep up with my "get hard" gym routine. During the week, it feels like there's only enough time left in the day to cook up some lentils, read a chapter of Catch-22, and fall into a sleep that would be much sounder if it weren't for the crazies who visit the drug dealer across the street in the middle of the night.
Ah, London!
A day in the life...
05:45 - Wake up, pee, start kettle
05:50 - Drink a glass of water and a cup of coffee
06:00 - Put on some gym clothes, pack a change of clothes and my lunch
06:15 - Cycle to the gym
06:30 - Work out (weights on MWF, cardio on TuTh)
07:30 - Shower, change
07:55 - Eat some Bircher Muesli, read a bit of the paper and have a coffee in the gym's lounge
08:10 - Cycle to work
08:55 - Work (grrrrrind)
17:30 - Cycle home from work
18:30 - Get home and head straight for the kitchen
19:00 - Have a yummy dinner and catch up with Tim
20:00 - Get the next day's stuff ready: clothes, lunch, etc
20:30 - Think about writing something or doing something productive but end up surfing the internet instead
21:00 - Give up on productivity and read a book for a while
22:00 - Fall asleep
At first, the day's events exhausted me. But I'm adjusting, physically and mentally. The evening spurts of energy have returned, and joyfully I'm driven to create something. Anything. A photo. A paragraph. A delicious dal.
Still, I feel like I'm living for the weekend, which frustrates me. I want every day to be meaningful, not just every 2 of seven. This means I need a job I love. I had a taste of this in Austin. It was delicious.
In November I start a new job with a big company doing cool math stuff. I'm very excited; it's an opportunity to learn lots of useful math in a very profitable domain. It's not the end all be all, but for the time being, I hope it invigorates me the way my last job did.
In the end, I need to be independent, have my own company, work for myself. How else can I take months off at a time to go on long hikes across the country? Or work from anywhere in the world I damn well please?
My ideal job: writer, of anything that isn't technical documentation. So I should work on that, shouldn't I?
In theory, this is good practice... that is when I'm not prattling on about my life issues that are not at all complicated but seem to stress me out anyway. In fact, with my optimism hat on, my world is pure bliss: I get to cycle across scenic London every day to work a job that's not very hard and get paid rather well to do it. And there are lentils when I get home. Or omelets when I so please.
There's also a strange dirt/grime build-up in my ears which I can't really explain, and I don't even want to think about what's in my lungs.
Ah, London!
It's 21:30... I'm late for my reading.
Speaking of surfing the internet, an article on "social neuroscience" in today's NYTimes relays this interesting tidbit from a recent study:
The most significant finding was the discovery of “mirror neurons,” a widely dispersed class of brain cells that operate like neural WiFi. Mirror neurons track the emotional flow, movement and even intentions of the person we are with, and replicate this sensed state in our own brain by stirring in our brain the same areas active in the other person.
Mirror neurons offer a neural mechanism that explains emotional contagion, the tendency of one person to catch the feelings of another, particularly if strongly expressed. This brain-to-brain link may also account for feelings of rapport, which research finds depend in part on extremely rapid synchronization of people’s posture, vocal pacing and movements as they interact. In short, these brain cells seem to allow the interpersonal orchestration of shifts in physiology.
