thoughts

Hello! I am still a person under all of these tens of thousands of words of Marvel Comics content.

Or, at least, I think I am. It’s hard to tell, because my personhood is different than it was a few months ago.

We’re now in the eighth week of my stay-at-home parentage and life is definitely upside down from what I’m used to. I’ve done a lot of things that are totally uncharacteristic of me. I bake with EV regularly. (I hate baking.) We go grocery shopping multiple times a week (I prefer to order online.) We’ve visit the zoo every other week (I really hate zoos.)  I go out for long walks and hangouts at the playground. (I wither in weather above 80) We tend to the violets in our front yard. (I think gardening is pointless.)

There’s even a rumor I might spend a day next week at the shore. (I despise beaches. And people. And that pesky heat, again.)

I’m not hating those things as we do them. Well, maybe the parts that are hot. My point is, all of those things would be miserable wastes of time to me if I wasn’t spending them with EV, but they all make her deliriously happy. So I do them.

I hope EV is having fun. I can’t tell. That’s the thing about toddlers – they’re very opinionated and they crave freedom, but they’re not really good at describing the state of their world subjectively. Last week EV took a big spill out of our rocking chair on the same day she did a ton of pull-ups on the monkey bars at the playground, and she seemed to be pretty sore all over the next day. We asked her, “Are you sore?” We got blank stares in return. EV doesn’t know what “sore” actually describes, and there’s no way to show her. We have to wait until she’s sore and squawks like a chicken about soreness, and then tell her, “That’s what it feels like to be sore.”

Despite that, usually when I ask her, “How’s it going?” she replies, “Good,” and keeps on fussing whatever she’s fussing at the moment while I explain the different between “good” and “well.”

I’m not sure how it’s going. Last month was more unbridled fun, but that was at least in part due to the weirdness of not going to work every day. Spending every day hanging out with a toddler is a pretty big shift after years of interacting with whip-smart coworkers daily and being under constant deadline pressure.

This month I’m a little more intent on getting some writing and planning done (love those deadlines) while EV is becoming more independent every day. Today was the first time I’ve been met with a chorus of “I can do that myself.” It’s thrilling, but also a little sad. I was just getting good at doing a lot of these things for her.

We won’t find a balance because she’ll keep changing. I get that. The best thing I can do is keeping challenging myself in different ways to keep my promise that staying at home doesn’t become a routine. That’s why I’m so happy to have shipped over 60,000 words of CK so far this month It was a massive undertaking, but I’m so happy I did it. I like to do big projects here at CK, whether that’s a song a day for a month (OMG, that was ten years ago), writing a book in one month, or intensely recapping and ranking a season of Ru Paul’s Drag Race.

The fun of it is that they’re always different. I don’t tend to enjoy doing the same challenge the same way a second time.

Luckily, being a full-time parent to a toddler is pretty similar in scope. It’s also like being a toddler. I’m not sure if I’m sore or worn out. I don’t know if it’s going well, and by the time I do “well” could be something totally different.

All I know is that I should probably start figuring out what I’m going to write tomorrow.

My life of eight years ago was much simpler, but not in the way you think. I’m not grumbling about working at a start-up, having a child, or owning a house. Those all complicate life, but that’s not what was so different about my life of eight years ago.

I’m talking about consumption.

Eight years ago this is what my consumption looked like: I listened to tons of new music on my iPod on my commutes. We had a three-at-a-time movie plan from Netflix. We had just started watching DVDs of Supernatural. I read an occasional book and subscribed to Rolling Stone and The Atlantic. 

That resulted from a conscious decision to give up TV, watching football, playing internet games, and going to all but the most major of movies.. Even with the Netflix, when I got home from work, I usually had vast gulphs of time to fill with writing and arranging music. I could create just as frequently as I consumed. If I had money to spare, I spent it on gear so I could create even better and more interesting things.

Now, I feel beholden to all the media I consume – not just by consuming it, but keeping it all straight. I listen to more new music than ever and keep careful track of release calendars and critics scores to know what to buy. We have streaming content from Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, constantly checking for new things to watch along with my handful of ongoing TV shows and a few YouTube channels, so I need to know when there are new episodes. I read more than 70 ongoing comics, and it takes almost as much time to order and organize them as read them. I play one internet game that can eat a few hours each weekend if it introduces new content. And, in an attempt to be less beholden to screens, I’m suddenly reading more actual books and playing board games (plus, again, devoting time to learning about and rating and organizing those, too).

Predictably, my creative output has fallen to close to nill, aside from the awesome month of blogging I just did. Frankly, the effort of keeping up every day exhausted me, and I went into an even more consuming-heavy month as a result.

Recently, a comic from The Oatmeal about “Fear of Missing Out” circulated in my social media circles. Basically, when the author was younger he never wanted to miss a social event. (I’m not linking to it because I don’t actually like The Oatmeal. Oooo, blog drama!) That’s not what I thought it would be about! What is there to miss about social events? They’re just filled with people you can enjoy elsewhere in less stressful settings.

Clearly, I am that person who answers, “I prefer books to people” on the Myers-Briggs.

What I’m afraid to miss out on is all that other stuff. Missing shows means you can’t be in the dialog about them. Missing albums means you can’t chat about critic’s best-of lists each year. Missing comics means you might have to pay hugely for them once their collections are out of print.

In that way, weirdly, I am at my happiest right now. I’m not missing anything I don’t want to miss! I have every LP, movie, and comic I’ve ever wanted and I realize how privileged that makes me. I love being a recommendation agent for my friends and being able to jump into any conversation on media with a well-formed opinion. It makes me feel incredibly content. Yet, I’m actually missing something really important. No, not people – again, major self-centered introvert here, this is so not about people other than me.

That’s what I’m missing out on. Me. The thoughts and feelings I have that might be worth documenting or exploring, writing or singing about. Books written, albums recorded – missing out on all of that. And the more I consume, the more my creative output becomes just an echo of what’s going in – it’s all critique and response, and little genesis.

That leaves me paralyzed. I want to consume all this stuff and get that dopamine shot of contentedness every time I reel in incrementally more of it. I don’t want to stop now and get behind! Then I wouldn’t have the completeness in my possession, even though with every new cohort of music or comics that arrives the chance that I’d have the time to re-read an old one grows less and less.

I’m not sure how to balance this. Maybe it’s months on and months off, so I add a programmatic ebb and flow to my consuming and creating. All I know is that for as drained as I felt after a solid month of blogging, I also felt really awesome.

I’d like to find a way to do the contentedness and the awesomeness at the same time, and maybe also do some exercise that isn’t carrying gear and lifting longboxes full of comics.