The days are getting longer in Montana. I’m staring at my window and can see the bright rays of the sun seep through the blinds. I’m amazed by how the seasons color my memories of Montana. When I lived in southern California, I never took stock of the weather because it fluctuated from rainy to warm to hot. I don’t even think about the weather when I recall the memories I made there. I moved to Montana three years ago with a few bags and absolutely no idea what was in store for me. I’m happy with how things turned out.

Sometimes I yearn for the bigger city because western Montana is very sparsely populated. I live in a town of 1,800 people. My college dorm room freshman year had more people than that. Missoula, Montana, with a population of 112,000 people, lies about 45 minutes south of where I live now, and I’ve considered moving there but haven’t. I don’t plan to move there now because I have a great job, but I know in the coming years I’m going to think about it. The other day I thought about moving to a city, something like Seattle or Portland. I don’t plan to move back to southern California for years, if ever. I don’t know when I made that decision, but it wasn’t recent. I somehow knew I wasn’t coming back the moment I stepped off that plane three years ago.

I don’t believe I’ve tried very hard to meet women while I’ve lived here. I didn’t when I lived in California. In all honesty, even though I yearn for a woman’s touch sometimes, it’s not as often as it used to be. I’m very focused on my work and on improving my craft, and more than one person has told me that a girl might “corrupt” me. I truly want to be excellent, and I don’t know how much time or energy I want to give toward dating women in pursuit of that. I’m only on day 212, giving me over 150 days before I consider stopping my daily entries. I will finish the first draft of my novel in the next few months, and I will start firefighting shortly after that. I have a busy schedule, and all I want to do is more.

I saw the young teenage girl I’ve had my eye on at school, and I didn’t talk to her like I planned to last week. I have to look elsewhere. I need to look for a girl much older, much more mature, and with some life experiences. I used to think the right girl was out there for me. I used to dream about her, but as I’ve gotten older, those dreams seemed to have disappeared. Now I don’t know if the right girl exists or if I should even be looking. I want to find someone I don’t even know I want, someone who fills the voids I don’t even know I have. I’m ready for the next chapter for my story in Montana. I hope I won’t be alone during it.

I almost didn’t workout today. There was a leak in my sink that had been dripping water for what looked like weeks. I had paper towels under it, and they had been soaking up all the water. The only reason I knew there was a leak was by the smell of the mold it cultivated. I texted my landlord, but he was about an hour north with his father at the hospital, so he wasn’t able to come over and fix it. Instead, he asked his sister’s husband to come over and check it out. He was in and out of my house for a few hours, and he fixed it. The landlord will have to tear down the wall behind the sink and replace it. I’m supposed to check underneath the sink for a few weeks until then to see if the mold returns. His repairs pushed my workout further and further into the night, and once he finished, I briefly debated whether I would workout or not.

I want to live a great life. As cliché as that sounds, I want to experience all that life has to offer me. To do that, I have to be better than better. I have to be strong, both physically and mentally, and I have to push myself to do the things I do not feel like doing. I made a commitment with myself today to workout, and I wasn’t going to let some unexpected event deter me from that. I really wanted to, though. I even knew how I was going to do it. I would have pushed all my workouts forward by a day, and instead of taking Sunday off, I wouldn’t have had a rest day until the following Sunday, almost two weeks from now.

I worked out as hard I could, and I felt great. There were times during the workout when I didn’t, and I wanted to rest, to take a breath, and I did sometimes but not without a fight. Especially when every ounce of my being wanted to stop because the pain hurt or because my lungs needed more air, I pushed myself harder because I know that’s the only way to get stronger. If it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t count. If that’s the case, I’m wasting my time and sweating for no reason.

Life is too short to live it in mediocrity. I have to have to best and strongest body I can. I have to read and learn as much as I can for hours every day. I have to write every day and learn and improve and master my craft. Anything less than this is mediocre and pointless. Excellence isn’t given to anyone. It has to be earned. An unearned life is not worth living.

I don’t always live up to my ideals. I want to be better, and I want to fight harder than I do, but the perfunctoriness of life can weigh me down. It’s during those times where I have to be more vigilant. It’s hard — really hard — especially when I’m tired, but if it’s not hard, it’s not worth doing.

I set my oven to 350˚F and waited a few minutes before sticking my blueberry bagels inside. I set my timer to ten minutes and began watching the newest season of House of Cards on Netflix. The ingredients for the bagels consist of “enriched unbleached wheat flour, high fructose corn syrup, and blueberry flavored bits.” Usually I don’t allow these ingredients into my body, but I made another exception to my diet because I’m trying to adhere to the more psychologically palatable 80/20 split: 80% healthy foods, 20% everything else. About half an hour before toasting the bagels, I toasted another set of bagels, which I slathered with cream cheese and quickly devoured. I tried to limit myself to one bagel, but my cravings were stronger than my willpower.

I read the Paris Review’s interview of Jonathan Franzen in which he said he reads four to five hours a night, sometimes more. I quickly felt inadequate after reading that because I don’t read anywhere near that much. I didn’t read a word of Don Quixote yesterday because I was too tired after writing, so I went to bed instead. The fact that I began watching the newest season of House of Cards is proof that I’m becoming weaker in the guide of conduct I’ve lived by for months: eating well, reading voraciously, and showing up every day. When my timer went off, I pulled the bagels from the oven and spread cream cheese all over them. I quickly took the plate with the bagels over to my bed, resumed watching House of Cards, and moaned in ecstasy at the delicious taste of my forbidden snack. I ignored the executive center of my brain and instead gave in to my lizard brain.

Deprivation had served me well throughout my journey, but I could see the cracks starting to show. I tell myself that life is too short for me not to write or read or live well, but then I live by denying myself many of the simpler pleasures that life offers. I stopped drinking because I hated who I became when I drank. Now that I’ve outgrown that original reason, though, I’m still disallowing myself from buying wine because I don’t want to break my streak. I’ve cut out wheat from my diet because it’s not Paleo, and I fear I would gain bad weight from this food. My friend once told me that I may have an eating disorder. I brushed her comment off because I didn’t believe her, but now I’m consuming bagels and eating burgers as a reaction to her comment. In reality, I’m eating these forbidden foods because I’m lonely.

Food makes me feel good. When I live my days habitually, I don’t think about what I’m eating because eating healthily was part of my habit. As I’ve been questioning my habits and yearning for a girl that in all respects should be forbidden, I’ve been giving in to what I’ve essentially banned from my life. I need to find a balance, something I’ve been craving for since day 31. For now, I’m going to experiment with adhering to my guide of conduct while also satisfying any unhealthy cravings. In return, I’m going to try to double my reading output. I won’t be near Franzen’s four to five hours a night, but I have to start somewhere.

My mind doesn’t need to think about what to do next since my life is built on habits and routines. Ever since I planned my days down to the minute, I’ve stopped thinking about what I needed to do with every day I lived. Some external system took care of all that thinking, and ever since then, I’ve been happy. It’s been easier for me to trust my systems because I created them. I devoted time in not only thinking and planning them, but also living through and tweaking them as I went further along. By removing the friction that an unplanned and disorganized day can bring, I’ve been able to accomplish so much. I really recommend anyone who feels ready to tackle their life with vigor and enthusiasm to spend all the necessary time — be it days to weeks to even months or years — in creating a system, experimenting with it, and sticking with it for the long term, even if it’s something as simple as writing everything down in a spiral notebook. As long as you have a system that you trust, you can accomplish anything.

I write everything down because I have a bad memory. My OmniFocus database contains tasks that most people find routine enough not to write down, but I do because I don’t want to think about them. All I want to remember is that I have to check my todo list to see what I want to get done today and focus on just those tasks. If more tasks come to me throughout the day, I add them into the database, process them, and let the system bring them up later. I write in my journals because I want to express the movings of my soul as honestly as possible to help me live life now and to aid my memory from reviving those emotions later. I write notes in Vesper and in my various pocket notebooks so that I can remember my thoughts now. I truly believe that by writing all of my various thoughts down and printing them on paper, I can devote my mind toward deeper reflection and meditation on diverse subjects like ideas, my life, and other things.

Here are a few things I’ve been thinking about:

• Writing a short story a week. I read that Ray Bradbury wrote a short story a week just to get something down on paper and to get used to writing stories. I’ve been thinking about doing something similar for years, but I’ve never gotten around to it. A thought I had today was to spend my already established habit of writing in the afternoon on writing a short story instead of my novel. But one thing that has stopped me is my next point.
• Writing novel first drafts as quickly as possible. As I’m close to finishing the first draft to my second novel, I’ve realized how important it is for me to finish my first draft as quickly as possible. First drafts are always shit, and the sooner I can get to the rewrite and revision phase, the better and happier I’ll be. I’m really excited about getting to my rewrite because of all the ideas I’ve written down on how I can make my novel better. I know I can produce one good thing in my life, and I want it to be this novel.
• I should leave young girls alone. The girl I have a crush on is only 18 years old, and I’m almost 29. No matter how attractive she is and how attracted she is to me, nothing will change her age and the fact that I work at her school. No matter how much I deserve a girl, I have to resume my search elsewhere. I’ll try to wait until she graduates, but I don’t want to hang my hopes on that.

These are just a few thoughts I thought I’d share. There are more, but that’s why I have over 150 days left before I consider slowing down my pace. <HR> Thank you for reading, and if you have any thoughts you’d like to share, please comment below!

No matter how much I want to rest and goof off and neglect my duties, I must keep writing because my life is too short not to. I tried caring about making each one of my words count for something, but if each word took me minutes upon minutes to think about and debate and scrutinize, I wouldn’t get to do any living. I just have to write what’s in my heart because if I let my brain do all the work, I’ll never get any work done.

Writing every day is the best thing I do — once I get started. The moments before I start, those moments where I know I have to write but instead I pop open YouTube and watch a video about some Asian lady unboxing a Barbie cash register play set and buy stuff as Elsa and Anna from Frozen, are the worst. I try to stretch time, try to prepare myself from doing what I have to do by doing something I’m not supposed to do. I’ve been doing that a lot recently, doing things I’m not supposed to do.

It was the first day of Spring Break at school today, but since it’s not a holiday, I wouldn’t be given a paid day off. So I came into work today, and since there were no students or teachers, it was a quiet and slow day. At lunch, I ordered a jalapeño burger and sweet potato fries from a local bar, and when I went to pick it up, I stopped by the grocery store and bought a Sobe drink and one of those frosted blackberry pies that was like a dollar. I ate it all and it was good and I felt satisfied after but only for a short while. The sugar from the drink and pie went straight to my head, and the cheese from the burger made me feel bloated all day because I’m lactose intolerant. For months I prevented myself from straying from my diet, but today I allowed myself this luxury because I wanted it. I just have to be careful this doesn’t become a regular thing.

I came home and made my smoothie without my Primal Fuel because I ran out a few days ago, and I watched Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on Hulu before putting on my workout shorts and doing my Insanity workout. It was Off-Day Stretch day, which meant yoga and zero intensity. It was glorious. The saddest thing about today, and by saddest I mean the fact that the best thing that happened today was that OmniFocus for my iPad became OmniFocus for iOS, which meant all the features that made the iPad app better than the iPhone app became universal, making the iPhone app an even more amazing tool.

I stopped syndicating my entries to the social networks I belong to. I still have an RSS feed going, but the subscriber count has been going done for weeks now. I don’t want an audience, not really. This is my journal, and I want it public because of the Hawthorne Effect: the fact that I know it’s public means I try to act differently, and in this case it’s better. My life is so closed and private otherwise that this doesn’t make me feel so alone. I hope to change that soon, but there are no guarantees in life.

She didn’t come to school today.

One thing I hate to think about but think about anyway are my missed opportunities, be it with girls (like her) or things I shouldn’t have said or should have done. I think about all this anyways because it’s how I process them internally and how that helps me try to act or not act in the future. I’m always going to make mistakes; I’ve never even thought of not having them in my life. All I can do is work at being better.

One way I’m trying to do that is by reading more. I bought the new Getting Things Done book by David Allen and Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace¹ on Amazon, and they should be here by Monday. Yeah, I bought the physical versions of these books, and I’m so excited. I’m still going through Don Quixote, and at my current pace, I won’t finish it till the end of eternity. I’m still excited to start these new books, though. Even though I’m focusing on my debt, I budgeted a bit of my money toward new books every month, and I’m going to take advantage of it.

There’s this idea of the anti-library I’ve read from sites like Farnam Street and Brain Pickings. The concept is simple: the more books you read, the more books you buy and thus leave unread. These unread books is your anti-library. I have a ton of unread books in my library, but at the moment, I have more read books than unread ones, and that simple lopsided ratio bothers me. I have lists of books I want to read, but I’ve been preventing myself from buying them because of monetary reasons. But I’m going to change that now, and it’s going to be fun.

There’s one thing books can’t help me with, and that’s my own neuroticism. For months I fought with myself about talking to her or not. I work there; she’s 18 years old; I work there; she’s a senior; I work there; what if she’s not interested? Then I talked to her yesterday, and it was great. All those warm feelings permeated throughout my body, and she was smiling and talking to me and it was great. But I work there. I work there, and she’s a student. I resisted for so long from writing these thoughts down on my blog, but here they are. This is me. Unedited. Uncensored. Possibly unemployed soon.

I won’t see her again until Tuesday because it’s a hybrid Easter/Spring Break vacation time at school. That’s four full days to figure out what I want to do. I really don’t know what I’m going to end up doing, but I’m going to write about it because that’s what I do. I write things down so I can learn from them. That’s why I keep so many journals: writing is the only way I know how to think and reading helps me live well. But what can I read to help me here? Lolita?

I wanted to write about discipline today, and discipline is very important to ensure I show up every day, but I believe it takes a lot of confidence to do everything I’m doing to improve myself. My confidence has been one aspect of my personality that I didn’t expect to change during my journey, but in hindsight, it makes sense. Why am I writing about this? First of all, I need a lot of confidence to co-teach a class of high schoolers. I need to know what I’m talking about, and since I’ve lived and breathed storytelling for the last six months, and on and off for the past seven years, that hasn’t been much of a problem. Most importantly, though, the biggest change came when I had the confidence and the courage enough to talk to the cute girl I’ve had my eye on for months. We talked. It was a simple and nice conversation where I learned a bit more about her - she’s going out of state for college, for instance — and I caught us stealing glances at each other all day. I’m kind of infatuated with her. I’ve been smiling all day.

It’s time for me to show off all that I’ve built to someone. From my writing to my body to my home. There’s so much to share and experience with someone else, and even if this particular girl refuses me or if it doesn’t work out or something, I know I have that confidence that I can carry with me to the next girl, and the next girl, and the girl after that. I remember writing about how much I hated dating, and many of those feelings are still valid, but I want to take her out. I want to buy her food, get to know her, and have her get to know me. It’s strange.

Frankly, I didn’t want to write about this today. I meant to write this in my personal journal, but I really feel it’s important to write about confidence because of how much of a turning point it is in my life. I’ve never been the most confident guy in the world, and I’ve always hated myself for lacking that trait. Through sheer coincidence, I developed the discipline to cultivate my confidence, and that’s awesome.

And… for the past few days, once I finished dinner at around 7 PM, I’ve been too tired to do anything. These hybrid Insanity workouts have taken a toll on my body, even though I feel myself growing stronger and stronger every day. I don’t want to write this blog entry, I don’t want to write in my journals, and I don’t want to read. But I do it anyway, even if I’m more sloppy than I would like. Usually, I would try to edit this entry to make it seem more confident, but not today. Today I’m tired, and I just want to write a bit more, read, then go to sleep. I have to ask a girl out tomorrow.

I had a better day at teaching the high school kids today than yesterday. I misinterpreted their attitude yesterday as being nonchalant and apathetic because I asked them today what they thought of the assignment and most of them said they loved it. Their previous assignment was to write a soliloquy and recite it in front of the class, and they hated that. They said my assignment was better than that, and I’ll be honest, that felt good. I then asked them if they wanted to make movies this quarter, and they all said yes but that they already made movies earlier in the year. They sucked, they said. Except for this loud kid, who said his didn’t suck. Other people said it sucked. I told them they all sucked, and they laughed.

I came into the class with a few ideas, most of which I repurposed from college, and the drama teacher loved every idea I threw at her. At first this surprised me because she was a drama teacher, and I would’ve thought she would’ve known about a few of the ideas I threw at her, like acting out a scene from a movie. She didn’t know she could find screenplays online. Fair enough. Another one of my ideas was breaking up the students into groups and having them write, act, direct, and film a scene. This might be too much work for them, the drama teacher told me. What if they just get a scene from one of their favorite movies? Sure, I said. As long as they do some work, right? Of course, she said. I asked the students if the last drama teacher taught them anything about making a movie, since they went ahead and filmed one anyway, and they all said no. They were given a camera, a prompt, and told to have at it. This information excited me. It meant that I would be given the opportunity to teach them all about film production in the span of a few weeks. It won’t be much time, but there’s not much to the basics. I’ll see, right?

If you guys can’t tell, I’m excited about all this. I was told today that drama class might be cut next year because there aren’t any qualified drama teachers on staff, and that made me sad. I don’t have a teaching degree or any sort of qualifications to lead a drama class, but I would like to. It’s fun and enlightening. I’m learning a lot because I have to go back and re-learn many of these lessons so I can at least seem competent in front of these kids. Of course, I could be deeply disappointed by them later on in the quarter when I show them one clip from a movie and all they want to do for the rest of the quarter is watch movies. If that’s the case, I’ll pop in some Sergei Eisenstein or Andrei Tarkovsky. I love these guys, but you really have to be a cinema nerd to appreciate them. These kids aren’t nerds. They’re high schoolers.

Teaching is challenging, and I think that’s why I’m going to love it so much. Before I co-taught my first class, I met with the drama teacher in the morning, and we went over the few ideas I had. One of them was having the students break off into pairs and read the first scene of the Social Network. It’s a great scene, and what I loved about it was that it had both a simple setup — two people sitting by a table in a coffee shop — and very complex dialogue. There’s so much going on in this scene, and like typical Sorkin, it’s written very entertainingly. I wanted the students to read the scene a few times and start writing notes beside their lines with action verbs. Each line, I told them, isn’t always delivered straight on. There’s subtext behind the words. A character’s tired or timid or angry. Each emotion will result in a differently delivered line, and I wanted the students to start thinking about that. That was my first project with these kids, and I thought it would be fun and that the students would jump up on their seats and yell with joy and happiness and sprinkle confetti all over me and say how awesome this was going to be, but they didn’t. They sat there with blank looks on their faces and a jaded demeanor that I wanted to slap away.

These are just high school students from a very small town in Montana. They’re not college students. College was so dominant in my head that I don’t remember anything before it. I graduated from high school over ten years ago, and I don’t remember what it was like in my classes. Maybe I would have acted exactly the same way as these students if someone like me came into my class and the first thing he did is tell me to read a ten page scene from a movie and expect to act it in front of the class within a week. I wanted them to memorize the scene, but the drama teacher told me that would be too much for them. Last week, I told her I wanted them to write a five page scene, but she nixed that idea, too. Hell, along with this project, they’re also practicing reading a children’s book to the kindergarten class. I’m not sure what they’re supposed to be learning from this, but it’s something they’re doing and will be graded on. I’m going to have to rethink my game plan going forward with this class, but I’m okay with that.

This is my first ever class. I’ve never taught anything before, and I never thought I’d teach anyone ever. Surprisingly, I’m enjoying it. Like I wrote a few days ago, the best way to know something is to teach it. As I’m on this journey toward becoming a better writer, I know how important I have to treat this class. I’m not only teaching a group of students what I love, but I’m also learning a lot about myself the craft I love so dearly. I just hope I can evolve from wanting to slap them to wanting to hug them. A man can dream, right?

One thing I love about writing this blog is the fact that the seeds to today were planted days ago. As a writer, especially a very introspective and personal writer, I try not to let anything go. If I’m feeling tired and burnt out, I have to investigate why, and this blog has been a great medium for me to do that. I don’t know if I would be where I am today if it weren’t for my blog. It’s given me the opportunity to examine myself as openly and as honestly as possible, and that self-interrogation has helped me grow faster and more fully than I would’ve otherwise. Even when I don’t want to write — especially when I don’t want to write — I sit down and do it anyway because it’s the only way I know how to think.

I’ve been too focused on working during this six month journey that I’ve neglected to reward myself. In the Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg describes something he called the Habit Loop. In short, the habit loop consists of a cue, a routine, and a reward. For a while, I treated my progress and growth as a person, a writer, and an athlete as my reward. In a sense, they are very rewarding, but that reward is so gradual and subtle that I could go days without feeling the beneficial effects of all my hard work. What I needed was a more direct reward: a new toy to play with, a night out with friends, or a tasty dinner at a restaurant. Without these hard-earned and tangible bonuses, I would become more irritable, tired, and burnt out. Fortunately, I made the conscious decision to let myself have fun today, and I’m very glad I did.

I felt rejuvenated today because I let myself have fun and heal. Part of my healing process was going to Starbucks and buying myself a coffee and a muffin. The muffin was delicious and really hit the spot. I ate it much too quickly, though, but it made me smile and that smile hasn’t left my face since. It’s funny because, on the face of it, today doesn’t look that different than any other day. I did all my work, and I checked off all my tasks in OmniFocus, and yet, I feel like I let myself relax and have fun today. I played video games, watched music videos on YouTube, and bought the new Modest Mouse album on iTunes. These activities, although tame and simple, gave me the necessary break from the go-go-go lifestyle I’m used to living, and in the end, that’s all I needed to feel good.

I don’t know what the future holds for me. I don’t know if today is a sign of things to come or a blip on my timeline. All I know for sure is that I have a smile on my face, and I feel good. I’ve written it all down for me to read later and remember that all I have to do whenever I’m feeling tired or burnt out is to relax, have fun, and reward myself with something nice. Because in the end, life is too short not to have some fun.