Of Rhythms and Ruts
Apr. 22nd, 2002 01:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tugrikHovering somewhere between the concepts of 'usual' and 'unique' lies the pacing to my daily life. A habit is just when something done for the first time sticks around, until eventually it's a usual thing. Sometimes it's hard to recognize when something's crossed that boundary. Usually the first time I notice is when the usual-action goes missing, and something just seems not right.
Wake up, check email: first personal, then work's. Quick responses to those that warrant, mentail filing for those I can get to later, and quick dismissal of the rest -- a necessity in these latter days of spam and information density. Having 6 active email accounts (and a handful more that very rarely get touched) gets a little thick some days. Take the morning acid-reflux meds. Find Yet Another T-shirt and one of the three pairs of jeans. The shoes slip on as the helmet is lifted, followed by gloves/jacket/gargs. Let gravity do its thing to roll the bike down the driveway. Shoulder-check, twist the wrist, and let the gentle morning flight between the lines of cages commence. It's a short 12 minutes to work.
I welcome the start of my workday, for the most part. I'm one of those 'self directed' types that just has to make sure everything keeps running, and that my to-do list is cleaned up at the end of the day/week/month as appropriate. As a result, I do my social 'waking up' at work. The secondary work and personal emails get answered, the page#mail on FM gets checked, and the general Heya/G'morning's take place with the usual online crowd. The day winds through, with me staying mostly (but not completely) idle online, interspersed with the few web-based boards I get into. A check of the ADV-Riders list, a glance-over of the GL1800 group; a peek at the Nice Forums for the comics group that lives behind the quiet whirring of fans in my garage, in that silly rack that lives behind the rebuilt soda-pop machine.
When the workday ends... amble on home. Grab some dinner, or maybe coordinate with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
revar (current roomie) or Farix (ex-roomie and now block-neighbor) to see if they're up for sharing a meal. Maybe hit the gym, maybe play some Tribes. The evenings vary on purpose: it's a very fine line between a Rhythm and a Rut, and I do my best to keep from toeing over the Rut line. The evening ends just as this one is: a final Email check leads into the opening of my nightly comics reading, followed by checks of my LJ friends, and once more through the web-boards.
This is the usual weekday cycle, or at least as far as my online use goes. Even with the large lumps of content I go through in a day, it's manageable: when I keep this schedule up each individual piece stays pretty bite-size and easy to deal with. Never get too far behind, never have to spend too much time at once online. It's like being just shy of low-earth-orbit, and skipping off the atmosphere for fun. Little slices of adventure, near-misses on all the pretty flames that rage on various forums, but still making plenty of good time through both the 'need' and 'enjoy' parts of online life.
And then, they go and send me to New Jersey for a week. Hrmph.
I had no idea just how much of all this had indeed become my routine. It was invisible, until I was pulled from it for a good week without warning. Sure, I take vacations, but I *plan* those... and much of my online involvement pauses nicely, with the proper warnings. This was more of a 'oh, here, get on a plane Monday, okay?' deal.
I come back... and just can't seem to get in gear properly. In some of my forums there's just too much that flies by in a week to even want to sift through it all. More often than not I just hit that 'mark all messages as read' button and hope to pick up the threads without too much hassle. Other lists that have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio, like LJ here, I will just burn a good chunk of time catching up on. Things like the umpteen comics I read just get Missed, save for maybe a handful that have consistant storylines I find a need to catch up on.
Eventually I'm back on an even keel, though it takes some info-attrition to get there. I leaves me with this vaguely uneasy feeling, like trying to get off of a bike that's still moving a little; a bit of unbalanced foot-down skidding is involved. One is stopped, but there's a few moments of unsureness, and a definately feeling that the situation could have been handled more gracefully.
I'm left in a bit of a debate, looking back on this weekend of playing data catch-up. How much of this Rythm is actually a useful, pleasureful pattern? A rhythm is there to provide a reinforcing beat, a timing line to the way things flow. When enacted properly, it regulates things to a speed that gets things accomplished. A rut, however, is when the same Rhythm is beat for so long that it wears into a hard track, that forces actions to follow even when it's far from the best path. Am I in a data-rut, and it took the serious sideways thwack! of a business trip to knock me out of it? How much of my time is wasted doing what I do with computers and the internet, vs. how much is my life enriched by it?
It gives me some thinking to do... the kind of thinking I like. The kind of thing that requires a ride to a nice serene overlook where one can dangle their legs over the ledge and just ponder a while about it. I'm looking forwards to that. Re-evaluation is something I always find refreshing, even if the conclusions turn out to be not all that new. Not everything requires change -- but we all owe it to ourselves to at least allow for the possibility of change.
I find many things in my life to have a rhythm. I actually like it, even if it means sometimes having things bust the groove.
Wake up, check email: first personal, then work's. Quick responses to those that warrant, mentail filing for those I can get to later, and quick dismissal of the rest -- a necessity in these latter days of spam and information density. Having 6 active email accounts (and a handful more that very rarely get touched) gets a little thick some days. Take the morning acid-reflux meds. Find Yet Another T-shirt and one of the three pairs of jeans. The shoes slip on as the helmet is lifted, followed by gloves/jacket/gargs. Let gravity do its thing to roll the bike down the driveway. Shoulder-check, twist the wrist, and let the gentle morning flight between the lines of cages commence. It's a short 12 minutes to work.
I welcome the start of my workday, for the most part. I'm one of those 'self directed' types that just has to make sure everything keeps running, and that my to-do list is cleaned up at the end of the day/week/month as appropriate. As a result, I do my social 'waking up' at work. The secondary work and personal emails get answered, the page#mail on FM gets checked, and the general Heya/G'morning's take place with the usual online crowd. The day winds through, with me staying mostly (but not completely) idle online, interspersed with the few web-based boards I get into. A check of the ADV-Riders list, a glance-over of the GL1800 group; a peek at the Nice Forums for the comics group that lives behind the quiet whirring of fans in my garage, in that silly rack that lives behind the rebuilt soda-pop machine.
When the workday ends... amble on home. Grab some dinner, or maybe coordinate with
revar (current roomie) or Farix (ex-roomie and now block-neighbor) to see if they're up for sharing a meal. Maybe hit the gym, maybe play some Tribes. The evenings vary on purpose: it's a very fine line between a Rhythm and a Rut, and I do my best to keep from toeing over the Rut line. The evening ends just as this one is: a final Email check leads into the opening of my nightly comics reading, followed by checks of my LJ friends, and once more through the web-boards. This is the usual weekday cycle, or at least as far as my online use goes. Even with the large lumps of content I go through in a day, it's manageable: when I keep this schedule up each individual piece stays pretty bite-size and easy to deal with. Never get too far behind, never have to spend too much time at once online. It's like being just shy of low-earth-orbit, and skipping off the atmosphere for fun. Little slices of adventure, near-misses on all the pretty flames that rage on various forums, but still making plenty of good time through both the 'need' and 'enjoy' parts of online life.
And then, they go and send me to New Jersey for a week. Hrmph.
I had no idea just how much of all this had indeed become my routine. It was invisible, until I was pulled from it for a good week without warning. Sure, I take vacations, but I *plan* those... and much of my online involvement pauses nicely, with the proper warnings. This was more of a 'oh, here, get on a plane Monday, okay?' deal.
I come back... and just can't seem to get in gear properly. In some of my forums there's just too much that flies by in a week to even want to sift through it all. More often than not I just hit that 'mark all messages as read' button and hope to pick up the threads without too much hassle. Other lists that have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio, like LJ here, I will just burn a good chunk of time catching up on. Things like the umpteen comics I read just get Missed, save for maybe a handful that have consistant storylines I find a need to catch up on.
Eventually I'm back on an even keel, though it takes some info-attrition to get there. I leaves me with this vaguely uneasy feeling, like trying to get off of a bike that's still moving a little; a bit of unbalanced foot-down skidding is involved. One is stopped, but there's a few moments of unsureness, and a definately feeling that the situation could have been handled more gracefully.
I'm left in a bit of a debate, looking back on this weekend of playing data catch-up. How much of this Rythm is actually a useful, pleasureful pattern? A rhythm is there to provide a reinforcing beat, a timing line to the way things flow. When enacted properly, it regulates things to a speed that gets things accomplished. A rut, however, is when the same Rhythm is beat for so long that it wears into a hard track, that forces actions to follow even when it's far from the best path. Am I in a data-rut, and it took the serious sideways thwack! of a business trip to knock me out of it? How much of my time is wasted doing what I do with computers and the internet, vs. how much is my life enriched by it?
It gives me some thinking to do... the kind of thinking I like. The kind of thing that requires a ride to a nice serene overlook where one can dangle their legs over the ledge and just ponder a while about it. I'm looking forwards to that. Re-evaluation is something I always find refreshing, even if the conclusions turn out to be not all that new. Not everything requires change -- but we all owe it to ourselves to at least allow for the possibility of change.
I find many things in my life to have a rhythm. I actually like it, even if it means sometimes having things bust the groove.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
It used to be we begged for a boring week
Date: 2002-04-22 07:33 am (UTC)Of course, the downside is that a largish break (like, say, a business trip to New Jersey) can knock things askew for a while... But notice how quickly you recovered, yas?