TKOG Who is all work and no play (but probably won’t end up chasing her family around an abandoned hotel so we’re still cool, right?)

NTKOG #219: The kind of virtuous schedule guru who wastes nary a second in her busy schedule of work, fun-work, more work and, y’know, generally making people feel bad about themselves.

I am: lazy by nature. Oh god am I lazy. My only complaint about escalators is that you can’t sit down on them.

I am not: going to achieve my dreams that way, eh?

The Scene: Back in Boston after a lovely weekend in New York a few weeks ago. The trip was the occasion of the infamous twelve-mimosa brunch – an afternoon that, delightful as it was, served as something of a wake-up call to me: in a few days, I’ll be twenty-four, and officially out of the realm of “young rising superstar.” Doubly sucky because, uh, “young” was the only part of that phrase that ever described me.

If I am more or less a third of the way done with my life (no complaints here), it might be time to invest more prudently in setting a solid foundation for the last long, hard haul. And the problem with long mimosa days, it seems to me, is that you lose yourself.

And maybe now it’s just for a few hours at a time afterwards, but if I have enough of those days? I may just find myself waking up twenty years from now in someone else’s life, a life I never wanted.

Lately I’ve been consumed with the idea of living in a secular monastery. A safe, rigorously structured place where I would be forced to constantly aspire to virtue and maintain an exacting schedule.

Then it hit me: I’m 23 years old. I have no significant other, no kids, no pets, not even very many friends. I have (barely) enough money to sustain me, and a perfectly serviceable little cloister of an apartment, just waiting for me to give it order.

So, for the past few weeks, I’ve been trying.

There’s nothing too amusing about trying to live a virtuous life, so allow me to bore and appall you with my weekday schedule of the past few weeks:

6:30am: Wake up
6:45am: Exercise or clean (alternating days)
7:15am: Enjoy oatmeal while reading theology or Wodehouse (same thing)
7:45am: Shower
8:15am: Leave for work
9:00am – 5:00pm: Actually work at my job (novel concept, for me)
5:15pm: Dinner, while writing
5:45-9:00pm: Boston Public Library, writing
9:30pm: Get home and clean or read until sleep
10:30pm: Sleep that I’ve actually earned, for once in my life.

Saturdays follow a similar schedule, with an hour or two of Hulu time thrown in. Because of necessary social obligations (well, necessary if you don’t want to die alone – a commitment I’m not ready to make just yet), I’ve left some wiggle room on my Fridays and Sundays. But honestly? I kind of look forward to the other days more.

The Verdict: Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think I’ll be able to keep this up forever, but oh man do I hope I try. It may not make me a more interesting person, and it certainly isn’t making me a more popular one, but I think it might be making me more worthwhile as a human being?

I think the monastery obsession comes from the pretty normal human fantasy of having discipline enforced on us by someone else, so we don’t have to dredge up the discipline to do it ourselves. But as I’ve always said in re: discipline, look, you don’t have to want to do it. You just have to do it. So here’s to many, many more years of doing precisely that.

Tagged as: all work and no play makes jack feel pretty good about himself, just another laura ingalls wilder day y'all, now do y'all forgive me for pouring gin in my eyeball yesterday?, sadly the things that make us better people are often the least fun to read about, secular monastery, who needs fun when you have the impending promise of grad school?, yesterday i ran for three minutes straight TWICE which may not sound like much to you but somewhere in nevada three middle-school PE teachers just dropped dead of undiagnosed cardiac issues