i can do anything (sometimes sorta) aka routines are weird

I've never felt more human than at this moment, walking out of Walmart with two pool noodles I have absolutely no use for. 

People give me strange looks. But let them. I'm free. Free of the cage of "sanity", that the world has built around itself. I can do anything. And that includes buying as many relatively-inexpensive instruments of whimsy as I want. Look at them! They're so colorful. And swingable. And make a nice sound when you hit things. And unlike when I was a child, NOBODY can stop me.

Ahem.

When considering "what makes us human", I think a big part is our ability to make decisions—or to "exercise free will", if you want to get fancy. 

This is the case with anything we create: it's all about the series of tiny decisions we make. The choice to put that particular chord there, to use that specific shade of purple, to have this structure of 3-item list all over the place—creation is channeling our experience into a series of inimitable choices, leading to a unique, irreplaceable result that we can take pride in.

And "serious" things aside, the freedom to do stupid things—things that don't abide by any structure of rules or reason—are just as irreplaceable. Cogito ergo sum? Sure, but we've built robots that can think—and more efficiently than us, at that. The niche that's left for us is <thoroughly irrational, highly volatile creatures ruled by spontaneity and emotion>.

That's kind of why I've always hated routines—ethereal beings that drown our very capacity to decide beneath an endless onslaught of GCal events and phone alarms. 

The thought of living the same day every day might be one of my greatest fears. The horror of realizing a full week has passed, each day bleeding into each other like one of my attempts at watercolor—until nothing distinguishable is left. It's living on autopilot, also known as the evil time vortex. 

What happened yesterday? What did I do again? It's gone. Evil time vortex. Time is not my friend. The moment I look away, oops—there goes another day. And it'll keep going. Months, years—decades of my life if I let it.

Routines resist memory and meaning. The moments I remember and cherish are the ones where I broke the cycle, in however small a way. Late night trips. Stupid impulse purchases (within reason. foam swords. cool-looking cheese. pool noodles). Conversations in classrooms until the sun came up, long after the voices of sense and reason had gone to bed. A day spent going through the motions is a day I'll never look back on.

So after graduating college and starting a remote job with "flexible hours" (the hours are flexible—I'm just not the one deciding which way they bend), I was so excited to finally be free. Time is in my hands now. I can finally ascend into the productivity god I've always believed I could be (more than a little wishfully) . I can do anything! I can make everything!

But... here I am. Waking up consistently at 1pm. My sleep schedule is garbage, which in turn obliterates my food-eating schedule, which in turn obliterates everything. I've escaped the evil time vortex, only to build an evil time vortex of my own. I'm getting some stuff done I guess. But still—not quite the liberation I had pictured. 

The realization I've come to, which in retrospect is kind of obvious, is that time isn't the only resource. Free will is draining sometimes—as nice as it is to make decisions, they take mental energy. And mental energy (or the more-accurate-but-slightly-awkward "capacity to care") is precious, not to mention weird and inconsistent. Weirdness and inconsistency can be great! But not so much when it comes to sleeping well. Turns out having some structure to cut down on the waste goes a long way.

So I need to put in the work, I guess, on figuring out which routines work. Which one serve me, and which ones serve our capitalistic overlords at my expense. Brushing my teeth? Work emails? The evil time vortex can take those, once I get the routine in place to make that happen (admittedly a challenge in itself). And maybe if someday I end up in a horrible soul-sucking 9-5, it can have those hours too. So long as it stays the hell away from everything else. So long as it leaves me enough energy to make the things I care about, and enough pool noodles to keep my stupid little brain happy.

oh, here's the obligatory silly image. it's jevil. from deltarune. a game you should play.