Routine

Yesterday, we were going to bed after David's second day of work and he commented that full time work is exhausting. It's not that I'm done with work - I spent all day yesterday agonizing over drafts that I've been working on for like a year - but it's fundamentally different when you can do your own thing uninterrupted and eat pastries for every meal. Oh, graduate school.

It's made me think a lot about routines, though - I had dinner with a coworker of mine here in DC who asked what my routine for writing up my dissertation would be, and was telling me about how Maya Angelou has this whole routine where she checks into a hotel, has them remove all of the pictures from the walls, writes all day even if it's gibberish, has a light lunch and writes some more, leaves the hotel, goes grocery shopping at Zabar's or whatever, sips a little wine and leisurely cooks a delicious meal for herself, and then edits whatever she wrote that day, even if it is terrible nonsense. I was telling David this, and he mentioned how Jess Valenti said somewhere that she and Andrew have a strict policy of powering down all of their gadgets after 8pm, and how that is romantic. (I was like, "I hope you're not telling me we're not watching Glee at 9pm, because we definitely are.")

I was thinking about this, and how my routine involves waking up, eating breakfast and watching trashy television on Surf the Channel, going to the library in my pajamas and despairing about the journal articles I cannot humanly read in a year, giving up and making soup with Team Soup O'Clock, and then sitting in front of a computer and banging out my requisite 1000 words of terrible prose for the day. Sometimes, I give up and shop for slightly damaged groceries at Sainsbury's.

This is one of the many, many reasons why Maya Angelou is phenomenal and I have the work ethic of a magpie.