Hey, Diggy: Do you think we didn’t learn much in April, or do you think we were just lazy about writing?

That’s not just the standard boring “post about not posting much” motif.  I’m actually curious to know if this blyrg has run its course, or if it’s the idea of continual learning that’s gotten old.

Or maybe it’s the self-analysis that we’ve gotten sick of.  After all, sitting here at my new (well, acquired-this-month) dining table, with Rocket sitting next to me looking out the window at dogs playing in the heat, I can’t think of any lesson I learned this month more valuable than:

Even if all you have is Diet Pepsi MAX and shitty Safeway ice cream, you can make an ice cream float, because that’s actually all an ice cream float is, genius.

But you didn’t come here for that kind of insight.

This has been a pretty quiet weekend.  My usual crew has been dispersed around the country, and although I haven’t exactly been doing nothing, I’ve had a lot of time to sit and look out the window with the cat.

It’s strange to enjoy doing not much — as I’ve written before, I’m not good at downtime.

But the opening of tennis season led me to start going to bed at like 10 (so I could get up at 6 to play), which somehow screwed with my circadian rhythm, which somehow resulted in my body deciding it wants nine hours of sleep every night, no matter what.

Okay, all this to say: My daily routine involves a lot less stuff than it used to.  I get up, I go to work, I come home, I eat, I go to bed.  Maybe once in a while I’ll have dinner or drinks with friends, or maybe I’ll go to the gym or play tennis or something, but the days in April just kind of sped by.

I end the month in a weird kind of holding pattern — waiting for things to change in my professional life, trying to make sense of the things changing in my personal life, taking some time off from trying to advance my material life.

It doesn’t feel…good, exactly.  But it doesn’t feel wrong, either.

In other words, holy shit, is this what growing up is like?

I went to see the National in Richmond earlier this month.  And one of my friends (he plays music) had never heard them before.  I sent him their new album, and he wrote back: “I should just fucking quit. This band is everything I ever wanted my band to be. I feel both depressed and validated.”

And that, as I told my mom, made me realize that writing is what I want to do, because while I certainly agree about this band, I get that same wonderful/awful validated/depressed feeling when I read a really good piece of writing, like the David Foster Wallace commencement speech or a good Matt Taibbi essay or a great novel.

She said that’s how she felt when she saw the Mark Morris Dance Company.

And the more I thought about that wonderful/awful feeling, the more I recognized it.

I think it’s related to why we cry at really good movies, even the not-sad parts, or why it’s weird to look at yourself in the mirror for the first time in a long time and notice who you are and how you’ve changed.

As I told my mom, I’m willing to bet that’s what it’s like to watch your kids grow up, too.

And I guess it’s what it’s like to grow up.

So, the moral this month:

Growing pains are worth it.

-andy

It was not exactly a banner month for learning.

There were a few interesting items — the NASA movie posters, the Brigham Young University beard policy, some stuff about farts.

There was some stuff I liked, and some stuff I didn’t.

But, looking back at the few meaningful exercises in bluggery, it seemed like if February was about exploring the world around me, March involved a lot of exploration of the world within.

The other night (technically, this was in April, but it’s my blergh, so screw off), I ran into a fellow UPer who’s going to Europe for six weeks. 

I convinced her that blojjering was a worthwhile endeavor — but I found myself thinking about that conversation a lot afterwards.  She writes:

27 was to be THE year!!  The year that everything came together and my life would finally make sense. 

And then, of course, the opposite.

Hey, I thought.  I remember that!  And I remember how great it felt to have the realization that lack of direction is just another word for freedom.  And I remember why it’s important to explore within.

That conversation at Union Pub helped me realize that my friend’s epiphany about how to handle moments of transition is the same one that has guided my (considerably less continental) experiment here.  And while I now want to backpack Europe (or go back to Belize) more than ever, I’ve started to remember that the point of exploring the world is that it helps you learn about yourself.

I spent a lot of this month feeling like I’m in transition — personally, professionally, in whatever spiritual/physical dimension the changing of seasons gets you.  Maybe that’s where my mortality panic came from.

But as April begins, I’m feeling a lot better.  And I think it’s because I learned something after all.

I think I spend way too much time and energy looking outward for cues.  That’s probably why I’m terrible at making decisions.  I don’t just look to the people I’m close to.  I look to casual acquaintances, people I don’t even talk to anymore but who still live in my head, people I’ll never meet but whose reactions I imagine.

But in March, I learned:

The things I learn about myself are really, really important.

That’s where the real stuff is.  Not in the faces of the people I meet or the echo chamber of my mind.  And, while I learned in February that exploration makes me happy, this month I’ve come to realize that exploring within is important to staying happy.

Now, this all sounds like a lot of bullshit, even to me.  But I am applying this learning.  I’m making decisions — some actually big (like what to do with my career) and some only big in my head (like how to rearrange my living room) — based on what I find within myself.  And maybe that’s why I’m way more excited about these decisions — and about my life — than I’ve been in a long time.

Not bad for kind of a squishy moral.

-andy

February is always a weird month.  It’s only 2-3 days shorter than other months, but somehow it feels like it always flies by.  Maybe that’s because January and March are so different.  When the month began, my world was a snowy mess.  And now, it’s practically spring.  I’m already getting that fluttery, jittery feeling — that urge to go outside and run around even though it’s not really warm yet (the same urge that leads everyone in Minnesota to flaunt their pasty shoulders on the first above-freezing day).

This February was particularly weird because it pretty much defeated any hope of routine.  I spent a week indoors and another on vacation (more on this in a moment).  Of course, there were still opportunities for too much thinking and the usual silly stuff, but I sort of felt like I spent the whole month on the go.

So, as I look back on February in search of a moral (read the primer), it’s hard to identify a theme.

I never wrote my “What I learned in Cancun” post because, well, Cancun doesn’t lend itself to a whole lot of learning.  We had thought we would beat the rush by going the week before American spring break — but instead, we encountered Canadian spring break.  And although Cancun is technically in Mexico, let’s be honest: it’s Vegas with more sand and less class.  It’s a theme park for college kids.  Six Flags Jager.

There was a lot of weird:

• One night, we went to a club to see Lil’ Jon…perform?  Perform isn’t right.  Appear?  He doesn’t sing, he doesn’t rap, he doesn’t even DJ (some white kid with an iPod was playing the songs).  He…demands that people drink?  He sexually harasses women?  He…I really don’t know how he makes money.  Someone told me he’s a producer.  Maybe that makes sense.  But then paying to see him is like buying tickets to watch Peter Gammons watch a baseball game.  I’m rambling.
• You can’t get good Mexican food in Cancun.  I didn’t have even passable ceviche the whole time I was there.  In fact, it was a culinary disaster (Pat O’Brien’s, I’m looking at you) until we found the little taco stand up the other end of the highway.  Ate a lot of tacos.
• We went snorkeling one day, which, if I’d been in a snarky mood and in reach of my computer, would have produced a post with the sentence: “Today I learned that Americans are terrified of fish and unaware that they live in the ocean.”  Seriously, a whole crew of people “eeeeek”-ing out because a school of grouper swam past their legs.
• The hotel had a guy named Javier who was supposed to be the sort of concierge.  He had a desk, and on it were all these pamphlets for things you could go and do.  Unfortunately, also on the desk was a sign that, in the morning, said “JAVIER WILL BE BACK AT 4:30,” and, in the evening, said “JAVIER WILL BE BACK TOMORROW AT 9:30.”  I saw him once, in the bathroom, carefully fluffing his simply amazing perm.  It was like seeing bigfoot.

I could go on.  And it would sound like Alvy Singer’s Vacation Diary.  You would think I had a shitty time in Cancun.

But I didn’t!  I had a great time.  I drank Dos Equis, I ate tacos, I saw parrotfish, I let my heels dig in the sand and stared out at the ocean, I watched sunsets, I laughed at my friends’ sad attempts to get laid, I saw fucking LIL’ JON.  If I’d hated it, I would have done the old Andy thing I used to do when I’d try something I didn’t like — come home and angrily insist I would never do something like that again.

Instead, the whole thing made me want to go on vacation again as soon as possible — although, maybe somewhere a little less Americanized.

My favorite post this month was this one.  The exuberance reflected therein was the result of being in a new place with people I liked.  And when I got home from Baltimore, I realized what the lesson was, and it’s going to be February’s moral.  In January, I learned not to be afraid of happiness.  In February, I learned a bit about how to make it happen.  February’s moral:

Exploration makes me happy.

Obviously, if “exploration” only meant “vacation,” I’d be sort of screwed.  But isn’t the whole point of this Internet project that exploration is easy?  It’s all around us!  I get the same kick out of Marlo’s rim shop as I do out of a tropical “paradise.”  In fact, I get some version of that endorphin hit out of nailing a new Korean taco recipe or seeing a new bird.

I can’t believe this stupid blog is working so well.

-andy

Originally, the point of this blog was to keep track of all the fascinating little things I learned about the world, the things that make it worthwhile to keep one’s eyes open and sense of wonder sharp: my cat’s heritage, cooking tips, random facts about graphic design and home repair, etc.

The idea was that, by the end of the year, I’d have a huge basket of reminders that the world is an interesting place.  This blog is, in short, an anti-ennui device.

Of course, being an emo kid at heart, and having invited another one to join the show, it was probably inevitable that the blog would start to feature as much internal discovery as it would actual learning.

In terms of this blog, I think the best posts have been the ones where a piece of new information served as a jumping-off point — where internal discovery and actual learning weren’t so much component parts of a while as they were melded together.

So, your humble co-authors decided that these monthly posts should feature a review of the learning done that month, capped with a moral.

What did I learn in January?

I learned that, in fact, my original suspicion was right — it’s easier to enjoy life when you have some kind of formal system for writing down the little things that make your day that you’d otherwise forget about as the days drag by.

I learned, somewhat unexpectedly, that it was a lucky thing that I had started a project of internal discovery, because actual events caused quite a bit of introspection.

A few days ago, I wrote:

And I guess I’ve been feeling out of sorts lately because I’ve somehow landed at one of those moments where I am zooming out rapidly, constantly amazed at how much there is, eating up as many miles of track as I can.

And that leads me nicely into January’s moral:

Don’t be afraid to be happy.

It has been a scary month — trying new things, questioning old tenets, taking chances, and other things I’m usually pretty bad at.  But I am so much happier than I was in 2009 (which, itself, ended pretty well), and I’ve come to realize that the more I scare myself by shaking up the Way I Usually Do Things, the better off I am.

Figuring out what will make me happy — and going after it — has been, and will continue to be, neither easy nor foolproof.  It requires of me things I’m not good at.  But this month, I learned that it’s worth it.

-andy