On Habits, or, More of My Profound Wisdom

What with all the new year's resolutions that have been buzzing around, I've been thinking about habits, and how to form them. I am, of course, embarking on my own (previously unannounced) Program of Reform: namely, I am striving--for the eighth or ninth time--to start practicing yoga at home, regularly. There are too few yoga studios around here, offering too few classes and located too far away, for me to count on classes to get my yoga in (anyway, a year and a half of living here has proven that that is not feasible in this location). In the past, I've sort of half-thought that, since I figured I wouldn't be at Field for all that much longer, there was no real point in developing sustainable habits adapted to this location. Well, it's been a year and a half, and that kind of thinking isn't doing much for me. So the plan is this: 20 minutes of yoga--whatever I want to do--per day, unless I engage in some other fitness activity (swimming or soccer). So far, so good; in fact, I've been having a hard time sticking to only 20 minutes. But we'll see what happens when classes start next week.

Anyway, the point is that this has me thinking--not for the first time--about how to form habits. Unsurprisingly, I'm far from perfect on this score, but I'm a fairly willful person and I've had some success in getting myself to do new, potentially unpleasant things on a regular basis. My two major categories of examples on this score are yoga (going to classes, anyway) and fiction writing. I've written two novels, one when I was 23 and the other when I was 30; they're both quite likely bad and will probably never be published, but having written them makes me happy, and I'm proud of the accomplishment, as they really did require some pretty serious discipline and general unpleasantness. I also went, in my 20s, from a fairly lackadaisical exercise schedule to serious vinyasa yoga classes 3x/week, despite all the usual reluctance and malingering, and stuck to that schedule for several years (until I moved to Field. I still miss my studio so terribly!) Doing these things has led me to develop a pretty reliable set of rules for getting myself into gear when it comes to forming new habits. And so, while these may not be useful to anyone else, I offer my reflections--some of which are, I'm sure, obvious and hackneyed.

But what else is a blog for, other than to offer hackneyed and narcissistic reflections on topics of general interest?

Anyway. Here goes.

1. Make your goal reasonable. This is probably the most obvious and hackneyed of them all, but it's the one that I break the most. I seriously convince myself that I will make such changes to my life as, for example, starting to get up at 4:00 am for an hour of yoga followed by 45 minutes of meditation. Um. Yeah, I haven't done that once. So planning to spend two hours a day at the gym or write ten pages every morning before class are pretty much dooming yourself to failure. We all know this.

2. Focus on form, not content. It is better to do something lame than to do nothing at all. So, for example, when I wrote my second novel, I committed to writing 1000 words a day, but the words themselves could be totally stupid and it wouldn't matter. Knowing this was a help when I felt "uninspired," because I would tell myself that I could just describe a room for half a page or write a purely functional action sequence (this happened, then this happened, etc.). In practice, I usually got into the swing of things pretty quickly, but sometimes I did have to resort to a kind of "summary" paragraph. The point, though, isn't for every single day to be brilliant, but to get into the habit. If the habit is what matters, then the details of what you're producing don't. And the habit really is what matters, typically.

Similarly, when I committed to going to a particular yoga class every week, there were certainly days when I was "tired" or "out of sorts" (or just whiny). So I would tell myself that I would go, but I didn't have to try very hard or do much and I could sit out in child's pose for half the class if I wanted to. Invariably, once I was there, I worked as hard as I ever did, so all the whininess was just that--whininess.

The point, I think, is to get out of your own way. There are a billion content-related reasons for not doing something (I don't have any ideas, my leg hurts, I'm distracted and can't put my all into it today). But form-wise, there isn't much. Just show up and see what happens. If nothing happens, at least you showed up--and that's all you've asked of yourself, so good for you!

3. Make it non-negotiable. This is, for me, the most important thing.

When I started my first novel, I was 23, living in a new city. I was unemployed, running out of money, and plagued with great pretensions of being A Writer. (Someday. Not yet.) And one day I got thoroughly fed up with myself and said, OK, I'm unemployed, I have only one friend in this city and nothing to do all day, and I never write a goddamn thing. So here's the deal: four pages per day for 100 days, or I never get to pretend that I'm going to be A Writer again.

I was very stern with myself. It was quite intimidating.

So, I started. And then I got a (very boring) 9-5 job.

But I'd written about 20 pages, and I wasn't about to give this up; the idea I'd had for the novel interested me (although I was a bit embarrassed about it--it was genre fiction! So not what I wanted to be known for!). And I did the only thing I could: I started getting up at 6 am to write as much as I could of my 4 pages before work.

This was not in tune with my natural rhythms. But I reminded myself that it was just for a few months, and if I didn't get up early I'd have to write when I got home and was tired, so I got my ass up every frigging day, and I wrote the damn thing. In fact, I exceeded my limit and wrote more than 500 pages of melodramatic, self-indulgent, dearly beloved prose. (I really do love this novel. I do not think that it is particularly good, and I don't really like showing it to others. But I love it.)

And when I started going to yoga every Monday at 5:45 pm and Thursday at 6 and Saturday at 3, I did something similar. It was non-negotiable. I wasn't allowed to talk myself out of it. So I'd walk to class with a whole monologue about how I was tired and so forth and shouldn't I just stay home?, but my body had already left, and my mind could chatter away as much as it wanted--it wasn't running the show. I scheduled things around classes. It was a priority--an immovable fixture in my week. There was no "I'll go on Tuesday's class instead"; Tuesday's class was dead to me. It was Monday, period.

The thing is, once you introduce exceptions, every day becomes an exception. Be stern. No exceptions. (Unless, of course, something truly extraordinary happens. It's a little like your late-paper policy....)

4. Spend a lot of time thinking about how awesome you are. This is extremely important for me. Positive reinforcement is terrific. Again, focus on form, not content; if you're just developing the habit, it doesn't matter that you ran slowly and only for half a mile. You ran; therefore, you rock. It also helps me to have someone to whom I can brag routinely. Boyfriends are good for this; parents can work well, too. Or just a friend who has a high tolerance for your absurdities.

5. It might take a few tries for the habit to "take." As I said above, this is not the first time that I've tried to establish a regular home practice. But that's okay. As my old yoga teacher used to say, it's all practice--and the more you practice making a positive change in your life, the more likely you are to succeed down the line. If you can't stick to something, think about what didn't work and then try again. My problem with the home yoga practice in the past may have been trying to practice a certain way or for a certain length of time every day; an hour is too much, and a particular DVD gets boring after a while. Make it fluid. Find what works for you.


That's it for me, I think. I did a pretty soft yoga practice today--Womanly Issues and all that--but hey, I did it, and now I'm finishing up this post and a little glass of scotch because hell y'all, I spent all friggin' day on my comp syllabus. Damn.

A little too quiet.

So the wiki has not been updated since January 3rd.

My bloglines this morning reported one new post (thanks, undine!).

What the hell am I supposed to do instead of working, eh?

Pause

I'm here in my warm, tiny kitchen, sitting at the table next to the heat vent. The little pink-shaded light is glowing on the wide windowsill, next to the pepper plant, the small jade, and a couple of Christmas cards. Bottles of scotch are lined up at the end of the sill, awaiting more strenuous days. Behind me, on the stove, the milk is cooling for this week's yogurt. It's snowing.

My comp textbook is beside me, closed.

I'll work on my syllabus soon, I promise.

But right now, I think I'll just enjoy this.

I didn't even know that I was in suspense

I just checked the medieval wiki for the first time since MLA. I've already been rejected by Big Scary (which was fine and unsurprising; I am not of that league, just yet), but I was pleased to see that none of the other schools with which I interviewed have scheduled campus visits yet. I'm surprised to feel a bit of relief, a sense that I'm no longer avoiding something dreadful.

My feelings about being on the market are ambivalent. On the one hand, it would be awesome to get a reasonably well paying 2-2 or 2-3 job in a cool(er) place. On the other.... Well, yesterday I found some pictures I took of my yard this summer [see fig. 1] and that got me thinking about how it would feel to be moving away from here. It would be exciting, sure, but sad, too.

[fig. 1: yard]

I don't have deep roots here. But I do have a great boyfriend, nice colleagues--a few of whom I see socially--and some students whom I'd love to continue to know. I have a sweet little house with a garden; there are farmers' markets all around (if you don't mind driving 20-30 minutes); the harvested cornfields are sad and gray and beautiful in the winter. There's a yoga studio a half-hour away--a little far for frequent trips, but at least it's there (and I did go this morning).

No, I would not want to live here forever. I would not want this job forever: it asks an awful lot and gives so little back, either financially or in time for research and writing. But I'm a long way beyond the terrible dissatisfaction I felt at this time last year (at that point I was staring down three 20-student sections of comp, for one thing; this semester I'll only have one!).

So, yeah. Job market = a thing about which to feel ambivalent. And then a part of me thinks that my very ambivalence will score me a job--kind of like how you're supposed to fall in love when you're not looking for it, as that wearisome advice-nugget goes.

I'm also meaning to blog about other things--the MLA and its meet-up (I'll probably not get to this one, but it was great to catch up with Sisyphus, What Now, Medieval Woman, Flavia, the Rebel Lettriste, Dr. Virago, and SEK) and new year's stuff--but that'll wait. Or, in the case of the MLA, be skipped altogether. Right now I think I'd like to take a shower.

Live from SF: Inarticulate musings at the mid-point

Yesterday on the plane I got to play the fun game: Who's going to MLA? Woman across the aisle from me reading Michel Houellebecq in French? Check. Guy in front of me in Ray-Bans with a word-find puzzle book? No. Tall guy from in skinny jeans and carrying a black bag? Could go either way...but when I saw him walk right past the ticket machines at the BART station, I concluded that he was a local.

It's Sunday, and I had my first two interviews this morning (the next two are tomorrow, also in the morning. I like this whole afternoons-free thing). The first one was The Big Scary; I was really glad to get it out of the way early, but given how much more together I felt in the second interview, I'm not sure that that was the most rational sequence. Essentially, though, I feel as if I've spent the morning re-defending my dissertation, only to much less sympathetic audiences than my actual committee. It's funny--the first year that I was on the market, every question was about teaching. Because, you know, I hadn't like taught anything. Now, when I have plenty to say about teaching, nobody wants to hear about it. Go figure.

I'm not going to say anything about how I think that the interviews went, because I know that that's futile. (Besides, in my pre-academia days, it seemed like every interview that went well went nowhere, while the ones I thought I'd bombed turned into jobs, so I'm not sure how valuable post-mortems are.) It was kind of nice to have people ask me tough questions about my work, however--even though I'm not sure how well I answered all of them. I miss feeling institutionally supported as a scholar, I think.

Another thing that's striking me about this round is how much better I am in the interviews than I was in my first year. I thought that I did well in my interviews my first time out, but looking back, I was vague and spoke in abstractions and didn't get very many follow-up questions. Last year, which is for some reason really hazy in my memory, was definitely better--but I hadn't taught a medieval lit course yet and my "future research" project was totally inchoate (and virtually indistinguishable from my diss). This year, I think that I'm being a lot more specific and concrete in my answers to questions, and I also feel relatively composed. None of this might mean a damn thing if I slip up and say something unreflected and stupid (which I think that I did in Big Scary--OK! No post-mortems!), but at least I have a better sense of what it means to be faculty than I did in the first year. Or the second, even.

Nonetheless, I am not loving the MLA, as I never have loved the MLA. I'm insecure about my lame-ass institution; I can't find anyone I know (nor did I do a remotely good job of setting up fun reunions, other than joining in on tomorrow's meet-up--my roommate, who was my social link to my grad school, bailed at the last minute); and, while I just had a nice lunch with a friend I hadn't seen in years, I'm likely to be eating most meals alone. Much as I love conferences--and I do!--they always make me feel kind of lonely and unsure of myself. And unpopular! Most of all unpopular. Maybe if I had some hipster glasses...?

Been a while, hasn't it?

So here I am, at the House of Mom, sort of half-assedly preparing for my MLA interviews. I am so ready to not spend every Christmas doing that. But I'm also not very stressed, because I've had a lot of interviews that haven't gone anywhere over the last few years, and this somehow makes me not particularly anxious about them. Also, I do have a job, and I fully recognize how fortunate I am in that respect.

Anyway, my grades went in last week, and lord! I have become a Very Hard Grader! I have never seen such a parade of Cs, at least in the one comp section and the survey. Yikes. I am compensating, clearly, for having been too soft last year. Well. Here are two amusing errors that I found in the course of my grading (the only two, oddly; apparently my students were more savvy about spellcheck this semester):

1. "Not eating protein can result in a loss of concatenation."

2. "Sometimes racist jokes can cause people to take a fence."

Never mind that these statements make it look like I was assigning my students the most banal paper topics ever; I have simplified and modified them for the purposes of reproduction, but the errors are entirely their own. And they weren't banal, really--these were both from the "life experiment" project that I assigned in my composition courses, which produced some interesting results. Of course, a couple of my evaluations said things like, "I didn't like the l.e. project because I had to do XXX", even though each student chose his or her project and so blaming me for his or her decision is a little bizarre. But whatever. I don't know that I'll do it again--we're completely revamping comp next year, a revamping that is well overdue--but it was, at least, interesting.

Perhaps I'll have more to say about this at a later date.

For now, though, happy holidays! Good travel! And good luck, interviewees--I hope to see some of you at the MLA meet-up in a few days!

I am not a history teacher. Obviously.

So far, I have had two students declare in their papers that Beowulf is among the oldest works of literature in existence. According to one of them, it may in fact be the first epic poem!

I can assure you that I did not give them this idea.


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About seven to go and then I'm done with everything but the stragglers....