Deconstructing days

I had a good day yesterday, so I wanted to deconstruct it. Today is much less good, maybe for the same reasons yesterday was good.

What was good yesterday:

eating fruits
social interaction - made a few phone calls
writing for a full hour in the morning
walking in the sun
working

I got a bit of sun today (a few minutes, without walking), and some social interaction - too much, which made me cranky and irritable.

There's no conclusion here. Only an observation that a combination of good deeds seems quite likely to make you happy and creates a postive cycle where you're encouraged to do more good things.

An hour a day...

will make you a better writer.

I'm rereading Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, which I honestly cannot recommend highly enough. Her advice is simple but essential. Like most writing advice its core is, ' just write,' but she also offers a lot of encouragement and good ways to view writing. She advises that we write for sanity and as a way to penetrate our lives. And she reminds us that the writing is the important thing, not the finished work. That we are not the finished piece, that we are already good and deserving of love without having to be good writers.

In fact my friend gave me a very good piece of writing advice along these lines just now: "enjoy the process and you'll love the outcome even more."

So we'll see how long this an hour a day thing lasts. I'm always very reluctant to set goals for myself then fail to meet them, preferring to 'wait and see how it goes.'

Weekend off

I decided to take the weekend off. Not that I've been busting a gut working or anything, but I just think some breathing room, time to do something else and not feel guilty for 'not working' when as I've mentioned before 'working' so often translates into a rotation between Facebook and the blogs I check everyday, is a pretty good idea.

I actually did some proper writing today - pages and pages. Not necessarily brilliant, actually quite straightforward, basic writing along the lines of 'the dog jumps over the fence,' but definitely a breakthrough given that I haven't hit that stride which brings forth pages and pages for a long long time.

**

Link: Cary Tennis' advice column yesterday was on writing, and it contains some solid tips relating to Virginia Woolf's mandate of a writer needing money and a room of one's own.

Marx in the morning

A Marxian quote for you:

"The worker only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home."

Karl Marx, Collected Works, Vol. 3, p. 274, quoted in the journal of International Socialism in an article entitled "Reality TV: The Big Brother Phenomenon."

The article itself is very worthwhile. It's basically a Marxian analysis of reality TV with a strong focus on the show Big Brother. I came across it while doing research for an article I'm working on about reality TV via Google scholar.

The link takes you directly to the quote. Computer magic (I definitely didn't do that).

Feel free to agree or disagree with Marx in the comments.