Importance of Sleep

Z surprised me with a weekend in San Fran for my birthday. We emerged from the plane in Oakland and all the Oregonians let out a gasp at the 65 degrees and sunshine. Z and I actually had to buy sunscreen day II so that we wouldn't come back lobster style.

Part of his unofficial itinerary was a Planning Morning where I would hang out in the hotel room journal in hand and Figure Shit Out. (While he got champagne and bread for brunch.) I no longer do New Years resolutions. Not really. Any major resolutioning I do happens mid to late Februaries. This gets me out of the New Years malaise but throws me double into the birthday malaise. And this one could be a lot of malaise. This year it's 30.

Sitting down with a journal and 30 years to come to terms with wasn't a historical re-visitation. It was more of a lesson in perspective. Every day we are breathing we are learning more about ourselves. Whether or not we recognize it and log it is a totally separate issue but every day we bump into good and we bump into bad and we react emotionally to those experiences.


I've learned quite a bit from bumping. I don't like onions unless they're cooked. It has nothing to do with flavor. They make me feel a little sick. I need to be creative. If I don't have some creative project going on (even a teeny tiny one) I get antsy. Television causes me anxiety (although it was just last night that a friend put the actual word "anxiety" on the emotion and it was like a light bulb went off.) It's hard not to watch it during the week, but for the two weeks I've been keeping it off, I feel so much better.

Some of these smaller gems turn into patterns, and it's the patterns I'm most interested in finding. I want to find the structure of these patterns and make a decision as to which are good and which aren't. And this is why I love doing the birthday resolutions: amid the chaos of the every day, once a year I give myself permission to actually think, spend time and deeply think, about who I am and how I exist in the world around me. It's selfish and it's delicious. And occasionally I come out on the other side with more self awareness than the day before. And with that, like the most delicate and strongest of armour, I enter into a new year, ready to see what there is to learn.