Interlude

Maybe it's not whether you are where you want to be so much as it's whether you are not where you do not want to be. Or is it?

Chicago, briefly

From this angle, Chicago looks a lot like Houston.

In which I experiment with mobile blogging

Greetings from Houston Hobby, the first of my unexpected stopovers.  I was suspicious when nothing was listed for a 5 hour flight.   Can I just say that there's a special kind of misery in setting one's alarm for 3:45am?  The best thing about getting up so early is that it can only get less early from then on.  On to the next: Chicago!

What I have been doing lately: Feeding myself better

Don't buy onions at HEB

No, I didn't eat this weird onion. I actually planted it. It's still growing on my balcony, and if you ask nicely, maybe I will update you with a current picture! What I HAVE been eating recently is better. At least, I hope so. It started in January when I decided I was going to wise up and quit sitting around eating nothing but potatoes and take out Indian. I quit eating carbs almost entirely for a couple of months. Ok, that's not entirely true. I quit eating gratutious carbs. Which is to say, I kept eating the occasional whole-grain tortilla and I didn't worry about fruit sugars. This went pretty well, but in the meantime, I started running (more on that in another post). I don't claim to know much about nutrition beyond the obvious (as sick and tired as I am of Michael Pollan, I AM trying to live by "Eat food, mostly plants, not too much") but when I suddenly started asking my body to run, I decided maybe I needed some carbs back in my life. Plus, to be perfectly frank, I'm not entirely sure that a life without tater tots is worth living. So I started on what I like to call the "will it make me happy" diet. I'm perfectly aware that this is ridiculous. But it seems to be working for me so far, though I still have to make a conscious effort to eat more veggies. Mostly what this does is ensure that, for instance, if I'm standing in the potato chip aisle, I'll think "will eating these make me happier than not eating these?" Sometimes, the answer is "shut up and put them in the basket." With tater tots, this is ALWAYS the answer. But sometimes the answer is, "No, I would feel totally gross and disappointed if I ate that entire bag of chips in two days." It's like checking in with My Inner Nagging Self. WWMINSD? Not subsist solely on tater tots, that's what. FYI, I retain exclusive veto power over MINS. So I eat lots of beans and lentils, I take "breadless sandwiches" for lunch most days, cook big batches of chili on the weekends, and don't feel deprived of all things delicious. It's been a challenge to try to eat healthy without a strict game plan, and I'm sure I'm doing it wrong. But I'm trying, and that's something, right?

What I have been doing lately: Burying my nose in books

Tigger and I would spend all day out here if we could

I have had a life-long love affair with public libraries. We go through our rough patches. I get busy and neglectful. The libraries can be of varying quality. But in the end, it seems, I am destined to come back again and again to how amazing it is that I can, for free, walk into a building full of books, pick one, remove it from the shelf, take it home, and lose myself for hours. My weekend productivity is way down. My practicing suffers. Perhaps it's not the healthiest of relationships. It's admittedly a little one sided, and, for my part, borders on obsessive. At long last, I recently joined Goodreads. I haven't gotten much into writing my own reviews, but I've gotten a lot of excellent recommendations from friends and strangers by looking at what other people are reading. Those people who do write reviews are more often than not thoughtful and engaging in their commentary. Such a refreshing change of pace from the internet at large. My library branch here isn't huge. For its size, it has a pretty impressive fiction section, but the real magic is that I haven't found a book yet that the Austin Public Library system won't send winging my way just because I requested it on a whim. Look, I know none of this is news. But in this day and age, I feel like it bears repeating that public libraries are fantastic. Do I still buy books sometimes? Of course. Do I support Amazon in doing so? Yes, sometimes. But I'm never going to plunk down the money represented by the number of books I read from the public library any more than I would buy every single show I watch on Netflix or Hulu. And the books have the benefit of being available to me for free, and free of advertising. Can I stress enough how cool this is?

Time, Loss and Gain of

I see this view a lot

When I moved here, I lost a few parts of my life. Largely, I lost a lot of ways to spend my time. This sounds like an odd thing to be concerned about, I will grant you. It is annoying to have to spend an hour getting anywhere in Boston, whether you are walking, driving, or T-ing. In some ways, of course I don't miss that at all. But when you walk somewhere, you also take your time. You look into store windows. You scope out the apartment listings on that realtor you pass every day just because they're there. You stop for italian ice at that sketchy looking pizza place where you've never actually eaten pizza. On the bus, you read a magazine. On the T, you people-watch and are never bored (cranky or bemused, but not bored). Here, where everything is expansive everyone drives a car, only the poor and the hipster take the bus, and I spend about an hour every day just driving myself to and from work. As daily commutes go, I realize this isn't that bad. Some people commute for hours each way. But frankly, I think those people are psycho. Anyway, the thing is that even spending an hour in the car on a given day I have, on average, halved the amount of time I spend getting to and fro. And in the process, I've lost the little delays and distractions that make the journey interesting. So in a way, I've simultaneously acquired more free time and a lot more boredom. This doesn't even take into consideration the free time produced by living alone, by not having a TV let alone a game console, and by the relative desert of gigs that has been Spring in Austin 2011. But fret not, gentle reader! For I have not been sitting idly by, watching my life zoom past! Wait, actually I HAVE been doing that. But I have also been doing some other things. So I'm going to write a few blog posts about those things. I figure this might also make up for the fact that I've been completely terrible about blogging lately, as Aphy has often mentioned.

A Shot in the Dark

It's cold here. Finally, legitimately, cold. When it got down to the 30s around Christmas, it was chilly. I got out my gloves and hat, and carried on. I went home to Cleveland, enjoyed seeing the snow, shivered, and came back down here to Texas where it was probably in the 40s. This morning, it was 21 when I went out to my car at 10:30am, and I would call that actually cold. Of course, I already knew that it was actually cold because my apartment has zero insulation and incredibly leaky sliding glass doors. Last night, I slept with long underwear on under my PJs, which I have never done before! To be fair, that's probably because somehow I never thought of it before. Anyway, apparently I am not alone in thinking that this is legitimately cold, because apparently Texas ran out of power. That's right, folks. With wind-chills in the teens, the Great State of Texas is enforcing rolling blackouts. As one radio show put it this morning, "Wouldn't it suck if you were homeless, and you finally decided that breaking and entering was better than freezing to death and you broke in somewhere only to find that the power was off?" I had power this morning in my apartment, and consequently heat, but who knows what the day will hold. Hopefully my cats and instruments will not have exploded due to the cold if the power's out for a while, because it surely won't stay warm in there on its own, what with the practically open to the outside situation of the sliding doors. At least one set of friends here were unlucky enough to have had their power shut off around the time they needed to get up. Not much worse than getting out of bed into a refrigerator. My only personal experience with the blackouts so far has been the darkness of the traffic light at 2222 and Lamar on the way to work. It's a big intersection, and it took forever to get through it. Some of you may have heard me explain that I have learned Texans are afflicted with a tragic disability that renders them unable to observe the rules of a four way stop. Luckily, I've found that they are at least by and large observant drivers, so if one just takes one's turn gingerly in such situations, oncoming traffic will yield. So, here I am at work, typing away, scanning documents, and hoping that the power doesn't go out. Less out of a desire to preserve the work I'm doing than out of a desire not to be plunged into total darkness here in my windowless office. Good luck to those of you who are actually suffering from winter weather rather than just poor civic planning! I'm off to download the flashlight app for my phone...