After experiencing a few highly tumultuous weeks that completely restructured my life and left me emotionally and physically exhausted, my sleeping schedule was royally distorted. I was finding myself unable to sleep for lengths of 24+ hours, which would be followed by four-hour crashes at odd times of day. After I’d laid sleepless in my bed for hours, feeling generally tortured and frustrated by thoughts I couldn’t stop, I’d get up in the early hours of the morning and ride the exercise bike until I was too tired to be distracted by everything else that was going on. For the rest of the day I would cling to this accomplishment: nothing else was right, but I had done One Good Thing by exercising.

Eventually, I’ve come to establish a new rhythm. My day still isn’t conventional: I sleep about 4 hours a night, get up between 4 and 5 am, have a two-hour nap in the afternoon, and repeat. But the most important part of this rhythm isn’t the sleeping; it’s my Daily One Good Thing. Everyday, no matter how crappy and fragile I’m feeling, I do One Good Thing that contributes to my sense of worth and well-being. Some days that’s been turning in a bunch of assignments for my online classes; other days it’s riding 11 miles on the bike. Yesterday, it was successfully baking French bread from scratch and making a baked potato, both for the first time ever. They’re not huge accomplishments by most people’s standards, but they add up to my having a more positive attitude and lifestyle.

So everyday, as best as I can, I intend on updating this blog with something positive I did during the course of my day. These things will be relative, and might be boring/standard behavior for others, but they will always be good for me. I’ll tag this feature as The Daily Good.

Here’s to wasting no time before rebuilding after things have fallen apart.

I have recently become obsessed with woodworking shows. Woodworking shows, you say? I knew not of such things. But yes, there are two (three, if you count home construction as woodworking) PBS shows on woodworking that I am completely enamored with. One is New Yankee Workshop, hosted by master carpenter Norm Abram, which focuses on furniture building, often on recreating antique furniture. The other is The Woodwright’s Shop, hosted by Roy Underhill, which focuses on all sorts of woodworking with exclusively pre-Industrial hand tools.

It may seems strange for a 20-something urban college student to be fascinated with woodworking, of all things. And it probably is. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gained more and more of an appreciation for handmade items. And despite remaining largely unconvinced about global warming (and therefore dangerously compromising my status as a bleeding-heart liberal, I know), I’ve also developed a desire and admiration for the self-sufficient lifestyle. Maybe it’s my bleak outlook on the international geopolitical landscape, maybe it’s the way I’m keeping my eye on 2012 thanks to the Mayans, or maybe it’s just because I’m dirty hippie with antiquarian leanings–but not a day has gone by in the last 8-10 months that I haven’t daydreamed about moving to rural farmland and spending my days tending a large garden, a small herd of livestock, and creating the things I need around my home, be it furniture or clothing, with my own two hands.

It’s one of those strange paradoxes people often find themselves in; though I embrace technology, utilize it constantly, and even lust after its most recent developments, I’m also resentful of its grasp on me, and how much it seems to control the rhythms of my daily life. I’m repulsed by how divorced I am from even the simplest knowledge of how to survive on my own, without the support of a service-based economy. It’s no wonder divorce rates are so high; how can we rely on each other when we can’t rely on ourselves?

Consider this too: I was 21 years old before fresh vegetables were incorporated into my daily diet (and unfortunately, I mean fresh in the fresh-from-the-store sense, not fresh-from-the-earth sense). Though my upbringing is partly to blame (home cooking? what home cooking?), I can’t help but accuse our society of being far too satisfied with its modes of homogeneity and mass production, so much so that the convenience of McDonald’s ultimately deprived me of the simple pleasure of sautéed broccoli and carrots.

I’m sure that I sound very preachy and holier-than-thou to anyone still reading this rant. Truly, I’m not; I think it’s up to every individual to decide how they want to live, and if some people love processed food, the constant buzzing of their cell phones, and think gardening is right up there with “stepping in dog shit” when it comes to having a good time, good for them. But for me, those things lack inspiration and meaning, and so I’ve started to map out the direction I want my lifestyle to head in. Now the only problem is getting there.

What was I saying again? Oh, yes, woodworking. I’d like to try it.

So I’m back in school. It looks like I’m taking 4 classes: Global Climate Change (booo), US History: Gender and Sexuality from 1630-1850 (yaaay), Spanish 3 (booo), and Intro to Russian Culture (yaaay).

I love my Russian professor. She actually taught my brother Russian, so it’s pretty cool to finally have a teacher in common with him. I am quickly falling in love with Russian culture, and here are two paraphrases from my professor that indicate why (please read with a heavy Russian accent for full enjoyment):

“Russians have very different sense of time. For them, history is very close to them still. They say, ‘Of course we’re behind all the other countries, we were under the Mongolian yoke for two centuries!’ That was in 1240, get over it already! Or do you know of any country that is still mad about Napoleon’s invasion? They see a man in the street with mismatched clothes who is very cold, and they say, ‘Ah, must be a Frenchman!’”

“In Russian Pravda [early set of Russian laws], the fine for severing a man’s arm is not that much more than it is for damaging his moustache. Russian men love their beards. Peter the Great wanted Russian men to look more like the French, so he demanded that they shaved their beards. Oh, the men wept. They were so sad, it was the worst thing for them. Afterward they would keep their beards with them so they could be buried with them. If they did not have their beards, they thought, how would they be recognized in Heaven?”

I consider myself to be a connoisseur of procrastination. It’s astounding how many ways I can find to distract myself from what I should be doing. There are obvious and easy distractions–video games, knitting, television, etc. After I can no longer justify doing those things, and the ticking clock starts to exert its pressure, my shifty mind tries to trick me out of doing work by leading me on quests that I’ll be 2o minutes into before I wonder why the hell I’m doing them. I’ll start re-organizing my computer’s folder hierarchy, or decide that making sure every song on my iTunes has artwork CANNOT wait. This can go on for hours.

But tonight I found a whole new way to procrastinate. My English instructor is a TA, who mentioned in passing (as if TAs ever mention their accomplishments entirely in passing) that he’d had an essay in a book that one of our other essays was from. Curious (and procrastinating), I Googled the book and his name together to see what it was about. I found not just the title of his essay, but his personal/professional site, a literary journal/podcast he used to do, and several media blogs that he contributed to. I haven’t read or listened to any of this yet, because it’s 2 am and I need to write, oh, 5 more pages and figure out how to properly use footnotes, but I’m still astounded when I find the digital footprints of someone I know. It’s voyeuristic and intriguing, and I’m not sure that I’ll ever get used to the fact that people are so easily trackable online just through Google alone. But anyway, had I known he was such an awesome web geek before, I probably would have paid more attention in class.

Except when he was lecturing on Freud. Don’t even get me started on why English academics have such a hard-on for Freud (and yes, I realize how that sentence lends itself to Freudian interpretation).