Curate Your Day
To begin with let me say up front that this is something I am quite often pure and utter proper rubbish at. I set out to curate my day almost every day. I have a list on my home desk going at all times arranging my day. I call this list, hope. I work half time at the library, and am writing two books, and you all know about my photography obsession which has come to be part of my writing process, or so I tell myself. This sounds like rather a lot. Which is why I also have decided to get in shape and learn Italian. So when I’m hit with insomnia, as I am prone, this is really quite hilarious.
And meanwhile I fall in love with new things all the time. I am so utterly in love with so many amazing works of art and things! I never want to not be curious and enthusiastic and generally swooning over the great things there are in this messed up world. I will die swooning! For example, new (to me) writers (OMG Renata Adler…more in a future post), new (also to me) TV shows, hello Lucifer, hello Tom Ellis, hi Miranda (my true hero), and you know I need my daily Bruce, and of course other music. Hozier! Oh, Hozier! Pure soul. And I need to listen to Max Richter every day. Every. Day. I need to read a few lines of Clarice also, and Cixous. I could go on.
But okay, how to fit all this in? My attempt goes like this. Write my novel early mornings, and my essays in the afternoons (on the days I’m not working at the day job). Work-out post novel writing with treadmill and free weights, listening to Bruce or lately watching Miranda which is the funniest show that I’ve ever watched. Sometimes lately it’s the Stones Emotional Rescue which sends me back to when I worked out at Mr. C’s Gym in a crumby basement in a seedy part of town in my early 20s. (I know just when you think you know someone). Okay, so then it’s shower and get back to the desk. Work on some photos, the blog, shower, lunch, on to the essays, or off to work depending on the day. Evenings it’s sitting outside with a good book, weather permitting, which it hardly ever is, or lately bingeing on Lucifer. Somewhere in there, I’m trying to get in 30 minutes of Italian practice on Rosetta Stone which happens intermittently.
This sounds like a lot but honestly it’s never even close to enough. My weird secret though, is the desk schedule. Libraries live and die by the desk schedule and though when I first worked in a library, the science library at the Uni while I was doing my undergrad degree, I found it stifling and strange to fit myself into all these pre-programmed boxes, I have adapted this kind of scheduling in my home life. Ugh it sounds so uncreative, right? Sure. But it works, even if I bust out of it quite a bit. I look at each hour of the day and do what I can in the time allotted. And so in this way, I curate my day, making sure there is music, some good laughs, some beauty, a few angels, a few devils. The rest finds its way into it regardless.
