(a self-indulgent brain dump on paper planners, music I like, and feeling like everything is bad and nothing is good)

When you're "going to get your fucking life together", you get certain urges. You might, for example, buy a planner. In my case, I bought a Hobonichi Techo Weeks, despite the fact that several years ago I realized that I do not have the kind of life anymore that requires a weekly paper planner. My job is with computers and all of my work stuff goes on the Outlook calendar. My wife and I have a Google calendar; that's where we put scheduling things that are relevant to our lives and where I note when the bills are going to be paid. We live paycheck to paycheck, like a lot of people do these days, scraping together enough money every month to cover the bills and the mortgage, but not without occasional 24-to-48 hour periods of overdrafted accounts between paychecks. I really shouldn’t have spent money on a planner that I might not even really use. So now, the onus is on me to use it, so that I didn’t light $75 on fire for an aesthetic.

This year, the Hobonichi Weeks can be purchased alongside a perfect mustard yellow carrying sleeve, with a generous zipper pocket for writing implements and several interior pockets for things like appointment cards, stickers, and page flags. I knew I would probably buy it as soon as I saw it – mustard yellow is my favorite color, and, like I said, I'm getting my fucking life together, which is best accomplished with a talisman of some kind. The paper planner, at many stages of my life, has been that talisman. At some point in the last five years, I switched to a monthly planner layout and discovered my strong preference for spiral bindings that can be fully folded over or laid flat – I had a lot of success with those, until the one I bought last year fell into a pit of my own anxiety and depression and I didn't end up putting much in it. The Hobonichi Weeks has a standard binding in a flexible but sturdy cardboard cover – it can't be folded over, or laid flat. I can open it and press it down with my fist and it will stay open reasonably to the desired page. Because it is not yet December 1st, each of these pages, aside from the monthly overviews where I have penned in birthdays and anniversaries and major holidays, is mostly blank.

In this planner format, a seven-day overview on the left facing page (Monday through Sunday, with an equal block for each) gives way to a blank grid on the right. I do not know what I am going to put on these pages, and so I feel like "getting my life together" has already hit a pretty big snag. In high school and college, I would use these weekly facing pages to jot down my assignments ("thesis draft... lol" I might write circa 2012; "pages 72-80 AP US History" back in 2007) and to make to-do lists. I would also include my work schedule – Panera Bread until I moved to Boston, where my shifts were at the IT Help Desk. If I was ever in doubt about what I was doing or what my upcoming schedule was, I would look in the book. It was easy. As my life has become more complicated and increasingly oriented around online or hybrid activities, I look at Fantastical. (I love Fantastical, by the way; I'm a longtime user and I would be lost without her.)

But for many years, my paper planner buoyed happily alongside my online calendar — ostensibly, the paper planner was for my personal life, and the online calendar was "for work." Now, it takes massive amounts of concentration to even look at the paper planner. I love the aesthetic of my new 2026 Weeks and the sexy yellow cover feels like an object designed in a lab especially to please me. And I do not know what to put in it. I dread looking at it the same way I dread checking my email after a day off or the vegetable drawer in the fridge while my wife is out of town.

I can't figure it out. Have I become a workaholic without a personal life? I don't think so – I like my job enough to keep going to it and to take on new tasks. At least 80% of the time, I think, I affect a positive attitude in the workplace towards my colleagues and students. But I also generally minimize my time there outside of my regular working hours and I've been very intentional about this. At times, bereft of anything to do or the ability to concentrate, I spend at least a couple hours each day, in 10-to-15-minute increments, reading the news and staring aghast at the global horrors, unable to do anything about them except whatever is directly in front of me. I join committees at work (I'm on one about gender equity) and I volunteer my time to students (I'm currently the adult sponsor of a high school mock trial team). Away from the workplace, I started trying to do clinic escorting at least once a month. I wrote a 12,500-word fanfic for charity this year. I'm not without things to do, not without things to schedule. So why does every single thing, even the things I like, feel like shit?

I hesitate to make a sweeping generalization, but I think it feels like shit because the world we live in is shit and the society I live in is, in many ways, also shit. Sean Bonnette wrote about this in the AJJ song "Normalization Blues", back in 2019, which feels like a lifetime ago:

I can feel my brain a-changing
Acclimating to the madness
I can feel my outrage shift into a dull, despondent sadness
I can feel a crust growing over my eyes
Like a falcon hood

I've got the normalization blues
This isn't normal, this isn't good

I'm detached and I'm distracted, all keyed up but unproductive
Vacillating between being all excited and disgusted
And then dozing lackadaisically In this bubble where I've made my mental home

The fact that the song has seemed to only grow in relevance for the last six years doesn't really bode well, does it?

My commitment to doing at least something on paper is, of course, precious, but also grounded in cognitive comfort and a desire for stability – I remember things better when I write them down with my own hand, and I discovered that it can be a better way to produce a distraction-free first draft of a fictional story, letter to a friend, or essay. (For this, since I have been unable to find a duplicate of the light brown paper dot grid notebook I bought at Muji in JFK airport in 2011, I recommend the Romeo notebook.) But what can I do when the paper fails me, when I have nothing to put on it? It feels, immediately, like a surrender. I quit writing about women's sports last year and it brought immense relief to my life to lay down that self-appointed duty – which was thankless to me and morally absurd. I got back into my photography. I started writing fiction and essays again, with support and encouragement from my wife and the Romeo notebook. She and I recreationally analyze fiction together (right now, we are working our way through the entirety of NBC's ER, which is much, much better than it has any right to be). When something feels good, it's easy to take the time to put it to paper, something that to me, feels good. When something doesn't feel good, the effort and the accoutrements (the notebooks, the pens, the Mustard Yellow Case) feel grim and false like bad props in a hasty theater production.

My life is going well and I am happy, honestly, or at least as happy as can be expected under the current conditions. I have a roof over my head, incredible friendships, an amazing and supportive spouse, and six cats who run my life. I suspect many of us feel this way: that there is a significant and irreconcilable disconnect between what we do every day and the urgent and necessary work that is required to address the rank corruption, naked fascism, ongoing genocides, and other, general abuses of power that are occurring worldwide but perhaps especially and uniquely in the United States and by its government. The impotence is by design, and has been perpetuated intentionally. Pulling yourself up and out of the hole that has been dug for you is potentially lifelong labor in and of itself. Sometimes, it feels like resting on your elbows at the edge of it.

The disadvantage is as much material as it is psychic. We need jobs to survive, especially in the US, where high quality health insurance is dependent on having a job that offers it. I have multiple sclerosis. My wife has asthma and post-COVID cardiac issues. I keep going to work. I dread the planner. I dread holes in my clothes; I'm re-learning how to sew and am experimenting with sashiko techniques for mending. I dread "AI" discourse because as soon as I say "I think it should be illegal to make a chatbot that tells kids to kill themselves and I also think the mass non-consensual creation of LLMs and insertion of them into products was morally wrong and the data centers should be incinerated" people at work think I'm being "extreme." I write, but it's never enough. Everything always feels like a precipice.

I wrote this after sitting down with my planner this morning and realizing I still don't have anything to put in it. After December 1st, I won't have an excuse anymore. Maybe the lesson here is that I ought to continue to do things that feel important even when they don't feel good, because it doesn't look like "feeling good" is going to be on the upswing anytime soon. But, as Self Esteem wrote on her fuck-you-I'm-great 2021 album Prioritise Pleasure, on the title track:

I got a feeling
The timе is now to start accepting
Everything I messed up
All the fucked up shit I did thinking it would make me happy
Very little of it did, really
And it happened lately
As I willed a sunset to go quickly
Always thinking what next
Never have I just enjoyed the moment happening right now
I've never known how

This album (really, all of Self Esteem's output) came into my 30s with me and helped me give myself permission to enjoy them despite the fact that they've been almost entirely characterized by global and domestic disaster and unrest and a not-insignificant amount of personal or emotional strife. But I do prioritize pleasure now, including in the sense that we can and should derive pleasure from service and kindness to others. Pleasure and happiness are sometimes the product of work and intentionality. Sometimes, if you want something to feel good, you have to make it that way. In terms of finding things to write in my planner – I have to do this on purpose. And maybe I should continue to find more things to do that do please me. I cannot stress enough that right now, pleasure is a radical act, especially pleasure in service to others. Do something. Write it in your planner. It's not much, but at least it's honest work.