Dear FOQ
As any of you will know if you follow me on more
traditional, personal social media platforms (notably Farcebook and once upon a
keypad, Twitter) little sends me into a Nerd Rage more effervescently than
TRAIN FAILS.
It’s a historical thing.
Oi. Not that historical; how old do you think I
am?!
Back when I was commuting into the darkest crevice of
civilisation (that’ll be London then), the service would sometimes be so dire
I’d fire off a rant on the Face Book equivalent to emitting a screaming puff of
steam from both ears.
I left the Capital City (aka the Stinkhole of Society) in
the vain (and, as it transpires, laughable) hope that a daily shuttle down a
sedate little branch line would be a wild and welcome departure (and not from a
platform it took a mildly asthmatic sprint to reach).
Oh, my sweet summer child…
That was not to be either.
Union disputes.
Sinkholes.
Scruffy little schoolchildren with their stoopid little scooters.
Pandemic.
All of these little things have, over six years, conspired
to make the commute as much of a bane of my life as any journey through Clapham
Junction aka Crapham MalFunction might have been.
And after let’s say fifteen years of this
omnishambles, I think I’ve finally pinpointed why a Rail Fail irks me so.
Well, there is that…
Fundamentally, though, it’s because any Rail Fail just
messes with my Routine.
And a girl’s gotta have a Routine.
…OK, this girl does.
Anecdotal insert here: sometimes I can be a bit too… me at work. And by that I mean:
I get excited by the oddest things – systems, calendar set-ups, schedules in Excel… And when that happens, when I geek out, there’s a good chance my workmate will shake her head and say, “You’re such a weirdo!”
(Well, duh.)
But Routines, and Habits, have become how I get through the
week/month/day.
And never has this need for structure been as pronounced as
during, and since, Ye Olde Pandemicke; it’s also never been as crucial as when
I took it upon myself to give my health the ol’ glow-up, and managed to apply
two previous years of barely-applied research into habit-building to getting
myself less sedentary, and eating less processed tosh.
As I've mentioned in previous posts, the earliest, uncertain
days of lockdown in spring 2020 had me trying to make my home as liveable as I
could, and my days as structured as I could, given that that was where I was
spending exorbitant amounts of time.
As such, it's when I started to subscribe to all manner of
productivity/organisation channels on YouTube as motivation, if you can call it
that.
Disclaimer: I’m fully aware that taking advice from
randoms on the internet should always be accompanied by a hefty pinch of salt.
I’ve taken the advice I can get my teeth into, and discarded the rest, like
rind.
Two or so years later, and several pandemic permutations later, I'm only now starting to weed out the ones that, as the precocious brats of the Choobs say, no longer serve me. Like a redundant butler.
Why, just the other day I found myself watching one of the tribe of ‘Bright Young Productive Things’ describing the process of decluttering her junk drawer with the cloyingly earnest self-assurance and borderline arrogance of a surgeon describing their dissection of an artery – right before a hastily-made nick causes a geyser of house red to splatter the masks of the assembled team. (Yes, I’ve watched too many medical dramas. No, I’m not sorry.)
She's the Cristina Yang of the productivity-choob. I bet she was intolerable at school.
Anyhoo, at one point, she described finding a pile of "Legos" (srsly, aren’t they just “Lego”, collective plural, like sheep, or fish...?) and after vocal consternation over how these could have wound up in her junk drawer, she proclaimed that, "[My husband] and I don't play with Legos, because we're adults." (They're both 25 if a day.)
Well, excuuuuuuuuuse me, Miss Judgy Pants.
That's tantamount to an unfollow/unsubscribe from me.
Nobody needs that negativity in their lives.
I'm off to play with my felt pigs in protest.
But that's not quite the point I'm trying to make here.
What even was the point?
Did I have a point?
Oh yes.
Back in the room.
Routine might have been what I turned to most dramatically during ‘Rona times as a coping mechanism, but a lot of my routines and habits are still a work in progress (and are, to be fair, probably due a reset).
And some are honed.
Those are the ones I probably should worry about most as
they’re the ones to which I have stuck with alarming rigidity, with limited
provision made for flexibility and variables.
They’re the favours that Today QB does to Tomorrow QB – to
elaborate, Tomorrow QB knows she’s got a photoshoot at work, so will have limited,
depleted energy to make lunch and dinner, so Today QB makes them for her. How
nice of her.
Tomorrow QB is getting up at stupid o’clock to go to the gym
before work (to appropriate pretentious YT parlance... to ‘go work out’. Ew,
just stop). Today QB puts out her clothes in readiness, right down to lining up
sports vest, leggings, then top and jeans to go over the top in that order
so there’s no faffing around in drawers and wardrobes at the crack of dawn.
All of these little habits have evolved over time through (perceived)
necessity.
Habit-building and routine construction does take time. This
is both a good thing and a not so good thing.
The good thing is that you have to be patient to see the results; you can’t give it just a few hours or a few days and decide that, nope, it’s not working out for you. Which is, as I think I mentioned before as well, why I still fail to understand the culture of constant, all-too-frequent ‘resetting’.
Perhaps evaluating your routines and habits on a quarterly, or six-monthly
basis might, as the Youth say, serve you better, and perhaps after that time
you’ll be able to see with more clarity that your habits, of leaving out the
day’s clothes the night before, perhaps, or making the week’s lunches on a
Sunday afternoon are, or aren’t, ‘serving’ you because you’ll have a good few
months of evidence to substantiate that perhaps it wasn’t one of your better
ideas.
And sure, making five salmon salads and seeing them neatly lined up in glorious cliplock boxes on the bottom shelf of one’s fridge is pleasing in a Home-Edit sort of way, and it sure alleviates that daily decision fatigue but honestly, by Thursday, if you’re already growing bored of salmon salads, you’re bvggered, really. Believe me, I know.
The not-so-good thing is that if you have been
patient, and cultivated routines over a certain period of time, and you’re in
your groove, then an external influence intervenes – say, the train times
change again; grr, damn you all the way to Hades, Southern... – and throws your
mechanical, pristine weekday routines out the window, it’s up to you to
readjust, yes, and reset (with painful inevitability) and start again.
Which is markedly easier for some folk than for others.
There is of course always the option to say, ‘ha, phooey’ to
routine and habit altogether, and live a bit more spontaneously... (Gah, that
word makes me shudder, reminding me of a peculiar university acquaintance of
mine whose answer to almost everything was ‘be spontaneous, yeah?’ He didn’t
wash his hair for nigh on a good few months so I’ve never been hasty to take
his advice.)
But therein lies the temptation to fall back into old ways. I built so many of my current routines to get out of bad habits.
Planning and making a week’s lunches so I didn’t feel tempted just to say, ‘s0d it, I’ll get a sandwich from M&S’.
Going to the gym first thing before work so I didn’t get tempted to think, ‘nah, I’ll just go home after work; I’m too tired’.
Setting aside a
‘power hour’ of cleaning and sorting at the weekends and a fifteen-minute tidy
daily, because otherwise I’d be living in a den of filth and slack that would
be prime fodder for Kim and Aggie.
All that said, while, with the best will in the world I’ve not cultivated a habit of drying up all my washing-up and putting it away before bed, at least I’m not leaving last night’s cutlery and crockery to wash up the morning after. I literally and physically cannot.
No fuss, no muss.
 |
| Actual footage of me on a morning...(!) |
Perhaps wanting to retain one’s painstakingly-cultivated self-discipline may be a little (or a lot) weird. And exercising a little flexibility from time to time is OK (as long as I... er, I mean, one knows about it with sufficient notice to be able to prepare oneself for a change to the routine...).
Yeah, there’s a lot more to unpack here than I’ve got time
or space to write about at this point. And I’ve not even used the c-word
(control)...
But I like to think that on the whole, this culture of
routine- and habit-building has been more of a benefit than a hindrance. It’s also a
way of parenting oneself, or rather being one’s own partner, in the absence of a
tangible real one.
And perhaps if I’m feeling particularly open to being, well,
open I’ll share with you a few of my little quirky habits.
Because, who knows? They might work for you, or for someone
else. They’re all appropriated from the interwebs anyway. 😏
Right, that’s quite enough Beffling.
You’ve been a wonderful audience.
---
This fortnight, I have been mostly...
Reading 📚
Toast of Tinseltown
...I'll admit the surrealism lost me at some points!
Rewatching
The September Issue
followed almost immediately by
The Devil Wears Prada
and chased up some days later by
27 Dresses
I am unapologetic in my love for all of these films.
The latter two are unspoken advocates of the Filofax Life, and I am all on board with that.
(Of course, it's taken me probably 27 views of the fillum, and also having binged The Office US and The Bold Type to spot the marvellous Melora "Jan Levinson/Jacqueline Carlyle" Hardin as James Marsden's boss, Maureen, in 27 Dresses... Too distracted by how brilliant Katherine Heigl in this film, is despite all the bad press she's had in the past.)
Also, been watching a lorra-lorra YouTube videos, mostly on decluttering, but this one was arguably the one with the most useful takeaways:
Kallie's adorable. She doesn't over-egg the "I'm such a busy mom (sic)" ethos (well, not too much) and her video editing and inserts are often very quick, clever and entertaining.
And she's not about to diss Lego, that's a given.
Plus, who doesn't love a gal whose channel is But First, Coffee? Speaking my language there, kid.
Link Love 🔗💗
► Boomer mathematics: why older generations can’t understand the millennial struggle to buy a house (and not just millennials: try single Gen Xennials...)| The New Statesman | with thanks to Reg for sharing
► How to Get a Friend to Put Away Their Phone Without Being a Jerk | Nir Eyal, nirandfar.com | ...because I've been that jerk
► 5 Unexpected Ways Music Improves Your Workout | via the Fitbit blog | a little old now but never less relevant
► HarperCollins Children's Books to publish newly discovered Paddington story | The Bookseller (so might not link correctly!)
Because everything is better with g👀gly eyes...(!)
And finally...
A friend shared this on her FB feed this week and it definitely deserves a post. Patti Smith in 1978 (a vintage year), performing Because the Night on the Old Grey Whistle Test.
And now I want a brown bowler hat.
(Thanks, Toni!)
Jusqu'a la prochaine...*
qb xx
* Do you ever get random French phrases present themselves to you out of nowhere...? Non? Pretentious, moi?!
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