Rich Mintz  

I’m afraid that my bike training regimen hit a speed bump. I had a good second week, but then an emotionally rough weekend due to circumstances beyond my control, and guess what? It turns out I’m not always in the mood to bike 25 miles, who knew?

So I spent week three putting another 60 miles or so on the electric bike and getting no exercise at all. Which is fine — the electric bike is lots of fun, for reasons totally unrelated to my physical health, and to be fair to myself, I brought my weight down about 6 pounds since I started this regimen and have held it there, so good stuff. But as my boyfriend reminded me today, I only have a couple of months before I have to bike a hundred miles in a day, which is a lot more miles than I’ve ever done before. So I’d better get cracking.

Today it rained off and on (nothing like Wednesday, now that sh*t was extreme) so I didn’t take the electric bike in the morning, which meant I found myself at work in the evening with only my trusty red folding bike, which I hopped on and rode home in a steady light rain, and I remembered why I enjoyed riding it so much (bounce bounce bounce! the Tigger of bikes) and something tells me I’ll do 15 or 20 miles this weekend and I’ll be back in the saddle.

I have to say that four days in a row on the electric bike (including a couple of trips all the way up to the West 70s and back) were a joy of their own. I’m up to almost 400 road miles and getting mighty comfortable on the thing, which is well-engineered for stability and fast enough to ride in ordinary Manhattan traffic without feeling outgunned — in fact, both drivers and cyclists tend to mistake it for a motorbike, which gives the former a useful paradigm for interacting with it, and occasionally pisses off the latter. I got a nasty lecture from a (lady!) cyclist yesterday that I didn’t quite understand, since I’d taken great care not to crowd her or ride up on her. But I’m mature enough (and, as importantly, have had enough time in New York, where everyone’s pissed off about something) not to pay too much mind to angry people getting up in my face for their own reasons, and I just waved and let her ride on.

I’m trying to resume a daily writing habit again, after reading Laura Vanderkam’s short book (really just a long article) about making more out of your mornings. I have a limited appetite for business books (and I have to be in the right mood, and the author has to be less oblivious of his/her own biases than they usually are, etc. etc.), but I liked this one, in part because she was making three main points that everyone basically already knows but most people are too lazy to do anything with:

1. If you want to incorporate a change into your life, don’t just dabble; instead, work systematically to make it a habit. That way, you won’t have to think about whether or not to do it. Your inner autopilot will take it over.
2. You have more time than you think; you’re just spending it watching Toddlers and Tiaras and screwing around on the Internet (or sitting around drinking, or whatever) rather than in pursuing the life change you say you don’t have time for.
3. For most people, early-morning time is both potentially high-productivity time, and relatively free of external obligations, so it’s a good point in the day to try inserting some life-changing habits.

That’s it. You don’t have to read the book now (although you can; it’s easy and there are a few nuggets I didn’t quote here).

I flirt periodically with a daily writing habit (see, for instance, this post); it’s hard to keep up. But I seem happier when I’m getting daily creative exercise, so I’m going to try again. In terms of the emotional benefits, it turns out I’m fairly ecumenical regarding what it is I’m working on. I have a couple of poems and longer essays going; there’s a short story or two; and then of course there’s this blog, with both the short pieces I dash off and the longer pieces that take some thought. And, of course, there’s the cartooning class that I’m starting next week, which may turn out to be a bust but that I’m still excited about.

The problem isn’t finding time to write, it’s finding time to write when I’m feeling energized and creative and loose. I do have a history of productive mornings, at least before the Internet came along and ruined everything — left to my own devices I fidget for a while but I do eventually settle down and work. I’m too smart for tricks like Freedom, and besides, it’s nice to have the Internet to look things up; not screwing around on it is a matter of good habits rather than enforcement. So I think I’m going to experiment with a regimen like this for a while:

• Set a consistent wake-up time (let’s call it 7:00 during the week, 8:00 on weekends). Go to bed early enough that I can tolerate that. If I can, I’ll inch the weekday wake-up back toward 6:30 or even 6:00, but let’s take this one step at a time.
• Out of bed when the alarm sounds (and, based on my history, I’ll probably wake up at 6:58 without it). Shower, dress, and make coffee, and be seated in my “creativity spot” in the house by 7:20.
• Allow one hour (until 8:20) for unbroken creative activity. If I get fidgety, I can stop at 8:00 (40 minutes), but under no circumstances before. Fidgety is part of the point — I want to know what the awkward silence ends up producing.
• No restrictions on what: writing this blog, taking notes, doing research toward a creative project, drawing my cartoon series that will make me world-famous, finger-painting, deciding what recipes to include in my cookbook, etc. Creative work on the computer counts, or with pen and paper, or (theoretically) on a typewriter; writing in my journal counts; work for an audience or work for my secret self counts. No rules.
• Actively police my Internet screwing around during this time. Turn off notifiers. Directed Googling for links is okay, but no Internet rabbit-holes, no Twitter, and no email. Especially no work email. There are plenty of other times in the day for that.

One of the important points here is that I’m not predefining what “creativity” means. Really anything I do that is expressive or experiential, rather than about consuming the endless stream of low-signal-to-noise junk that’s around in the air, ought to count.

After that, we’ll see. But I’ll live with that for a while and see what happens. I’m excited!

I just wanted to acknowledge that my bike training regimen is going fine. While I’m not formally tallying miles, I am out on the bike every day, and trying to fit in a long ride (15 miles or more) every day that I have the time.

In the past week I’ve biked through Brooklyn and Jersey City; been to the Upper West Side three times; and, yesterday, rode a 25-mile loop from the Port Imperial ferry terminal in Weehawken north to the George Washington Bridge, across the bridge, and down Broadway (and the 9th Avenue bike lane) allll the way home.

My official scale is at the YMCA, not here, but I’m guessing I will have dropped at least three pounds in 10 days once I get myself over there for a weigh-in. So that’s good, too. And I’m feeling better all around. As I’ve noted previously, exercise makes me less hungry, in a virtuous cycle that makes healthy living easier, and on a day like yesterday, with lots of exercise and controlled (but not starvation-level) intake, I end up with something like a 1,500-calorie “credit.” Or, to put it another way, yesterday alone I lost half a pound. (Yay me!)

Based on my unscientific survey of the Lower East Side by bicycle this steamy evening, everyone on the street in New York City tonight is either (1) royally pissed off at someone present, (2) righteously indignant at someone absent, and/or (3) contemplating and/or threatening to commit some sort of mayhem. It’s hot again tonight; be safe, everyone.

The errand that I had to run in Jersey City tonight was to check on my storage unit, in an antiquated fireproof warehouse on the edge of the old downtown. When I moved from Jersey City to Brooklyn (from a 2nd-floor walkup to a 3rd-, 4th-, and 5th-floor walkup), there was a bunch of stuff I didn’t know what to do with and didn’t want to schlep all the way across state lines just because.

Because downtown Jersey City is kind of a pain in the ass to get to without a car (and because, even if I do take my car, the Holland Tunnel toll is, what, $40 now?), I haven’t been there in roughly two years, so I figured it was time to move the stuff out and into a storage unit closer to home. Fortunately there’s a lovely, more professionally run storage facility (call it the “Storage Palace”) a 6-minute bike ride from my apartment, the sort where you imagine a butler in a morning coat will collect your box of crap from your car on a ginormous silver tray and fly it up to your cubicle on angel’s wings. It is 50% more expensive than the one I’m giving up, for slightly less space, but I rationalize by saying (probably accurately) that I’ll be able to use it more intensively, moving things in and out of storage as often as weekly if need be. It doesn’t hurt that my new storage unit is immediately adjacent to the parking lot where my car lives — I can imagine some efficiencies arising from that.

So I have to move my stuff from one to the other this month. And I couldn’t remember what “stuff” I even had in there. So it was time for a reconnaissance mission.

Now, let me say right off that I’m not a hoarder. What I am, though, is a Projects Person. I am the sort of person who will vow to learn to play the bluegrass fiddle, or learn to speak Dutch, or become a cartoonist, or read everything ever written by Robert Sheckley. For each of those vows, there is a set of equipment and/or accoutrements, and I will typically acquire same, place them somewhere in the house, and then get distracted by a newer vow with its own accoutrements and forget about the previous set.

I inherited this tendency, independently and reinforcingly, from both my parents, who were and are most emphatically Projects Persons in their own right, wide readers and dedicated (and ecumenical) hobbyists. Father: reads Chinese well enough to puzzle out restaurant signs, speaks it well enough to order lunch; can decipher Urdu inscriptions; former General-class amateur radio licensee; hobbyist cryptographer, 50-year amateur magician; mother: home darkroom, serial interior designer/real estate agent/home renovator; crocheter of afghans; writer of published cookbooks; provider of roomful of arts and crafts supplies and drafting tables for her young children; serial creator of her own garden in every home she’s occupied in my lifetime. Even my late grandmother influenced my habits; by the time she retired to Northern California, her little house in Tujunga was packed so full of stacks of paperback books she was going to get around to reading “someday” that it was hard to move.

In short, I grew up in a house full of books on every conceivable subject (with dozens or hundreds more coming in every year), full of crayons and butcher paper, full of a hundred cookbooks; the sort of house where it was most emphatically considered “normal” to dabble in any sort of recreational pursuit one felt the slightest urge to dabble in. In my early youth, I made meatloaf and chocolate cake and collected stamps and drew fanciful maps; in my teens, I earned myself an amateur radio license; in my thirties, I learned to code passably well in Perl. I bought that bluegrass fiddle in my thirties. And I have carried those habits right through to middle age. (If you know me, you may be aware how many bicycles, fedoras, and/or bottles of gin are in this apartment at the moment.)

Unfortunately, I live in a large zero-bedroom loft apartment in a century-old commercial building. My walls, ceiling, and floor are all white, which means that all my crap is in plain view for everyone to see. So I can’t bring all those plastic tubs in here — in fact, we spent much of the last two weeks just hauling clutter out in a sustained and systematic spring cleaning. (Hard rule #1: if you haven’t touched it in two years and it has no sentimental value, IT GOES. Hard rule #2: “What if I need this someday” is not “sentimental value.”)

Hence the storage unit. When I unlocked the metal doors this afternoon, I was greeted with this:

Nothing wrong with any of that stuff. Some of it is useful, at least theoretically, and there are indeed items of sentimental value in there (including every high school and college paper I ever wrote, and the last 50 copies of the catalog I produced for my bookstore in 2002) — but more than half of it will end up in the trash after (or before) it gets moved into the Storage Palace.

I’m glad I’m the sort of person that tries things he’s curious about. But I’m also learning to be the sort of person who (with difficulty) is learning to say “no thank you, I’ve got enough projects going on at the moment.”

I had an errand to run in Jersey City this evening. The PATH train doesn’t allow bikes during rush hour — I’ve never seen anyone enforcing that, but why risk it? — and I like being on the water, so I left work and biked up to the 39th Street Hudson ferry terminal in midtown Manhattan.

I’d never been to that terminal before, and I was surprised how bustling it was — not exactly crowded in the way the Lackawanna Ferry terminal in Hoboken must have been once upon a time, but still busier than I expected. It reminded me of a small airport (Lansing maybe, or the Marine Air Terminal at La Guardia). It had 8 or 9 slips, and boats being announced and coming and going more or less continuously during the evening rush, to half a dozen destinations.

So I bought a one-way ticket to Newport (and a bike ticket) and rode the ferry across to the Jersey City waterfront. The Newport terminal is deserted — just a rush-hour stop, basically just a dock bolted to a patch of asphalt, but I rode around the boardwalk and through the Newport business district into downtown Jersey City, and across to take care of my business in the crook of the expressway that approaches the Holland Tunnel.

Afterwards, I rode around Harsimus Cove, Hamilton Park, and downtown for a while. Five years ago or so I lived in downtown Jersey City (near 5th and Brunswick, if you’re keeping track), on the second floor of a tumbledown triple-decker near a vacant-lot-turned-community-garden. It was cheap, and the owner was friendly and respectful, and the neighbors were civil, so I pretended not to mind that if you set an egg down on one end of the kitchen floor it would roll to the other end.

In 2007 the neighborhood was “in transition.” It’s still a mixed neighborhood, in transition culturally, racially, economically — but it feels safer and more settled. There are new businesses on Newark Avenue, a couple of new restaurants around the park, a very nice ice cream parlor on 1st Street two blocks from the PATH. (There’s also a spiffy-looking Key Food that replaced the filthy C-Town supermarket I used to avoid.) Tiresome-looking gay couples of a certain age (i.e., mine), always a reliable indicator of neighborhood investment, were about. I stopped for an excellent burger and a couple of cocktails at the tavern at 9th and Coles right near Hamilton Park (what used to be on this corner? I can’t even remember), swung by the ice-cream parlor (which I knew of only as a result of jealously reading Linda Yang’s Foursquare checkins), and made my way south to Paulus Hook for the return ferry to Wall Street.

I’d taken this ferry before, when I lived in Jersey City. It’s obviously a heavier-traffic route — bigger boats, and apparently seven-day service. The Midtown-to-Newport ferry is a short ride downriver, but Paulus-Hook-to-Pier-11 is a sweeping ride across the top of Upper New York Bay, past Liberty Island and the Staten Island ferry terminal, with the lower Manhattan skyline in full view ahead of you. It’s probably the best $7 boat ride in New York — plus $1 for my bike, which you can see threatening to tumble into New York Harbor in the photo above. It didn’t tumble, though, and I rode home the few blocks from Pier 11 feeling like I’d had an adventure at sea in the middle of the afternoon.

From today’s Times, a story about group houses for transitory technology nerds in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

Obviously group houses aren’t a new thing (Berkeley, Adams Morgan, Ditmas Park, etc., etc.), but I have to say that these group houses, with their bunk beds and drywall and cinderblock, their people coming and going, the fundamental selfishness of everyone working separately on their own projects, seem especially bleak.

At my last startup I lived on an inflatable mattress in the back of our office for more than a year, and many days I felt part of something big and energetic and communal, and on my most hopeful days I was proud of myself for the choices I’d made. But most of the time I just felt sad and trapped and poor and tapped-out, with all my hopes pinned on the possibility of a big score that I didn’t understand how to engineer or guarantee (and that ultimately didn’t come). And I was in New York City, a 2-minute walk from a panoramic East River view, 5 minutes from America’s most vibrant Chinatown, a 10-minute bus ride from the East Village! If I’d been on a random suburban street in smoggy Mountain View, on my very worst days I would have been suicidal.

Maybe it’s just the way the Times spun it, but the idea of these people as “aspiring tech entrepreneurs on the bottom rung of the Silicon Valley ladder, those who haven’t yet achieved Facebook-level riches” — as though the normal course of events were to achieve Facebook-level riches, as though most of these people would naturally achieve Facebook-level riches, as though “achieving Facebook-level riches” were a sensible goal to build one’s life around — leaves me feeling more than a little sad for them, like the down-and-out characters in a dystopian-near-future science fiction story. It’s not a patronizing sadness, it’s an empathetic sadness — I’ve been there or somewhere like it, it didn’t work for me, and it probably won’t work for you, either.

I’m as concerned about Amazon’s consolidation of its position in the book marketplace as the next guy (or more so, considering that I personally lost an astonishing amount of money operating an independent bookstore a decade ago, probably more money than everyone reading this, taken together, has spent in their entire lives of book-buying). But I’m also a heavy user of Amazon Prime, because I am, you know, rational and I buy a lot of books and assorted crap that Amazon sells. Okay.

But I do periodically spend money in independent bookstores, both in person and online. And tonight I wanted to order all the books by a particular graphic novelist, and so I went to the website of a bookstore I happen to know in another city that has a great selection of graphic novels, a bookstore I have patronized in the past both in person and online, thinking they would have what I wanted in stock and I would be able to help out a small business, and…

…JESUS what a crappy website! Slow, impossible to navigate, impossible to search. So I went to Amazon and bought the guy’s latest book, for 40% off with free shipping. And another nail in the coffin of etc. etc. (I’m only human!)

I’m not currently getting the Times (it’s stolen out of my building’s vestibule so often that I recently cancelled it), but fortunately Tim Kreider’s essay “The Busy Trap” appeared online as a blog post, and everyone and his brother tweeted it to me last week.

Since I read it I’ve been chewing on it, and I just read it again, and … hmm. And that’s a “hmm” of recognition. The following three things are true of me, of every member of my family, and of virtually everyone I know (there’s a short list of exceptions I can count on my fingers):

1. They’re too busy — they have too much “stuff” going on to take care of or even keep track of.
2. They see this as a problem.
3. They think there’s nothing they can do about it.

Being too busy to let life happen is, of course, a problem, and during the 25 years of my adult life, it’s certainly gotten worse. I’m certainly not immune to this — and I’ve been fortunate enough (for many reasons) to have been able to fashion a career and a life that’s structured largely according to my specifications. I don’t have kids, am senior enough at work that I am generally cut slack whenever I ask for it, and still I feel like I’ll never, ever “catch up.”

Consider (and this is journalistic evidence, not me bitching, so hush): on an average day I get about hundred and twenty emails, or approaching a thousand a week. Each of them requires some action; about a third of them require ten minutes or more of attention; 20 or so would require half an hour or more of attention to deal with properly (so I put them off and put them off and, if I’m lucky, their moment passes). You do the math; I’m not going to do it, it’s too depressing.

If I may point out the obvious: although much of the team collaboration and “networking” that I’m involved in happen in email, answering email is not the most important part of my job. But email is quantifiable, and it keeps coming, so I keep answering.

The rise of social media, which everyone loves and everyone complains about, is more of a symptom of our busyness than a cause of it. (To be fair to the Internet, I was feeling overwhelmed even 15 years ago, and a lot of the tasks that the Internet makes it possible to take care of easily in a few minutes now used to take hours or days of worrying and working.)

Everyone (including Kreider, who describes his in the essay) has a couple of friends who have “opted out.” I don’t mean the hopeless schlimazels who can’t get their lives together; I mean grownups who are living fully realized lives, lives they’re proud of in the long view and are enjoying in the short view; but who have time to relax and take stock and to breathe; who don’t constantly feel like they’ve forgotten to do something and forgotten what it is.

I’ve spent a lot of my private time (yes, I do have it) over the past two years or so trying to figure out how to get out of the “busy trap.” In the short term, that will require two things: (a) better control over what’s on my “list,” and (b) better boundaries (e.g., between work time and non-work time; between work activities and non-work activities; between things I have agreed to do, even implicitly, and things I have not agreed to do). I’m working on all those.

In the long term, though, getting out and staying out of the “busy trap” may require some more radical change. I’m not foolish enough to think that a change of scenery is what’s required (on the contrary, New York City is emphatically one of the most lovely places on earth to enjoy being unbusy), but I may reach a point at which a change in the structure of my work life is needed. Who knows. Life is long.

In the meantime, intermittently as I find the energy and focus to do so, I’m trying to do things like these:

• Be alone every day. Carve out time to be by myself in a quiet place, doing nothing in particular. Note that being alone doing nothing in particular is not the same as being in the same room with someone else doing nothing in particular; so when you don’t live alone, even if you have no children, this is harder than it sounds. But it’s important — it’s in silence and in solitude that epiphanies come knocking.
• Find writing time every day (like right now), and try to do it in conditions that induce reflection and self-analysis. (I find that cafes with a low hum of activity work well, as does sitting on my couch with Kathy Griffin nattering on in the background. On the other hand, sitting at a desk in a dead-quiet room is THE WORST, JERRY.)
• Make physical activity a mandatory part of every day. I can’t stress enough what a lift a little bit of strenuous exercise — even when done alone — brings to my sense of connectedness with others. It reminds me that I live inside a body, which is as much “me” as my mind, and which is part of a physical world in which other people (and animals, and rocks, etc.) exist. For me, the activity I tend toward is bicycling in the city (because it has the secondary effect of circulating me through parts of the city I wouldn’t otherwise see), but even when all I do is get on a treadmill in an empty YMCA at 4 in the afternoon, I feel better.
• Cook and eat real food. New York’s a great city to eat delicious, creatively prepared junk food in, and I’m fortunate enough to be able to afford to buy basically whatever I want to eat whenever I feel like it. But artisanal donuts and Shake Shack burgers, as delicious as they are, in the long run are more delicious in moderation. What contributes to a sense of wholeness and peace is baking bread, making soup, roasting a chicken, putting together a fresh salad. Laugh if you like, but these things are true.
• Cut myself some slack. There’s no prize for Inbox Zero! Do your best, and then set it aside and live your life.

Side note: Thanks to the NYC Department of Transportation for clearly posting an “alternate route” for bicyclists around Times Square (left on 48th, right on 7th Avenue, left on 42nd back to Broadway). It keeps us out of the worst of the pedestrian congestion (which is good for everyone), and it moves us through Times Square a minute or so faster.

In fact, I’d like to see something similar near Greeley Square, because it’s almost as congested as Times Square, but the way the blocks come together doesn’t allow the same sort of tidy bypass. Perhaps the DOT could signpost a diversion on southbound Broadway just above 36th Street as a left turn, with the caption “Alt Route Southbound – Use 5th Ave”