So, last time I blogged about Courtesan School, and how it started. A couple of days later I was faffing about on Twitter and somehow this led to a discussion of exercise, which led to a comparison of what exercises we variously do, which led to what I'm coming to think of by now as the inevitable "how do you courtesan?"
I'm coming to think of this as inevitable because at this point, any discussion of my daily routine ever seems to end up coming around to "how do you do all that??" Me and my fellows in Courtesan School. The short, one-sentence (but possibly not 140 characters) answer is that we are incredibly organized and four years plus practiced at rearranging our schedules in a game of activity tetris to figure out what it is we can do in a day, and what we can drop and pick up the easiest if we don't have time or energy to do it all. Because sickness happens, sleepless nights happen, and with everything we do or try to do in a day we do need all of our energy. For me, I can most easily drop languages or music practice, and pick it up again. Dropping a day of a language won't hurt me, even dropping a week or two when I have a deadline breathing down my neck, or every Yuletide as archive open day draws near. For Adsartha, it's one out of her several music practices. (I do multiple languages at once, she does multiple music practices. That's also a part of Courtesan School, learning what your specialty is, your particular talent, how to be who you are, and then being yourself as brilliantly and as much as you possibly can.) So, over the past four years, we have learned by trial and error, lots of error, how we can pack all of the things we want to do in a day, and do it without hurting ourselves.
Several sub-lessons of this were hard. Learning that downtime, rest time, is something we need to schedule in because we can't always do everything at once. Learning how to take downtime at all. I scheduled a rest day the other day and then it took me about two hours to actually rest because I kept thinking of things I could be working on. Learning which activities are fulfilling enough to spend time on, and which aren't. Learning which can be dropped without hurting our overall process. Learning that life is a marathon, not a sprint. That it's okay to drop or change something that isn't working for you, that failure isn't a dirty word. For the first two years we had two quotes we kept coming back to: Samuel Beckett, "Try again, fail again. Fail better." and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. "If you can't run, walk, if you can't walk, crawl. But by all means, keep moving."
We made mistakes. A lot of mistakes. Let us never again discuss the great Lead ALL the Baby Courtesans incident of 2008? 2009? whatever it was. We were too new at it to lead anyone else by anything other than maybe our good example, or possibly as an object lesson. We didn't even know where we were going ourselves, at the time. (See those Four Important Questions.) We discussed our goals and our methods, figured out the best way to check in; at first we checked in two and three times a week, now we're down to about once a week, and that seems good for both accountability and us taking stock of where we are. We swapped recipes, some of which were a definite "never make this again" and some of which worked so well we're still doing it. Let us never again discuss the Great Lemon Bars Experiment of 2012. Right now, we've probably been in our daily routines for maybe a year, couple of years. I've been in mine for at least a couple of years, so I'll lay that one out for you right now.
I get up, and then I shower. I have no idea why showering works better to wake me up than almost anything, but it does. In the winters I get up and stagger into the shower, in the summers I can get up and stagger to pull my sweats and shoes on, and then go walking or running. Usually it's walking, because my asthmatic weakass lung capacity rarely permits running and often I lose half the progress I've made from summer to summer. Slowly but surely; part of CS is learning where your limitations are and how to get to or modify the ultimate goals to fit. So, I get up, shower or run, and do fifteen to thirty minutes of vocabulary exercises for my various languages to wake my mind up. Since it's just vocabulary, it's less strain on my sleepy mind than full on reading or grammar study would be, but switching back and forth between languages is still work. For this, I use Memrise, which is a nice easy-to-use online tool for learning vocabulary in other languages -- a set of flash cards, basically. Then I go out into the living room and do my exercises, which for me consist of ballet exercises and other forms of dance, and some yoga. I started taking ballet when I was maybe six years old, and continued till I was eighteen. Exercises on machines and with weights quickly become more of a chore for me than anything else, and if you're miserable at your exercises, it makes it that much harder to do them. So why bother? I go through dance exercises, finish with a stretch and a reverence as much for the mental as the physical, and then go grab breakfast and sit down with my computer and my Irish book. Depending on how long it takes me to do my lesson for the day, sometimes I tidy up the house after. And I post my lessons online for public accountability. I also do a statement of intent for the day for writing work and blog work; I call it a statement of intent because it's easier for me to intend to do something than it is to not meet a goal. Again, the little things that make it easier or more enjoyable? They help. A lot. In little ways that add up to big ways.
So by now I've finished my morning language (it used to be Russian, which is why it's 'my morning lanugage' in the overall) and tidied up where I can, so as not to have to do a great big tidying later on in the week. Little things into bigger things. And I've gotten ready for work, and then my aunt picks me up because we carpool in to work and she's only a little further out of downtown than I am, on the same route. At work, depending on how busy it is, either I spend the day dealing with my day jobligations or I spend the day keeping ready for some day jobligations and working on blog writing or personal to-be-published writing. I'm very lucky at this point in that I have a job that allows me to do this. I suppose if I didn't I'd have to find some other way to manage, and probably have to cut back my writing schedule and blogging by a lot. Still, since I can, I do. At lunch I do some more language practice; until recently this involved studying German, but since I've completed my German textbook right now it involves translating things from English to Russian and German in order to keep myself in practice. I finish out the day at work, get home, and either do Japanese or guitar practice depending on the day. It used to be both, but then I discovered that this took up the same amount of time while not advancing either skill in the slightest, so, greater blocks of time for each and more spread out over the week. Then I cook dinner, because I do love to cook, and because now that I have a large kitchen it's much more enjoyable and sometimes I can keep my Japanese book and notebook in one corner while I keep an eye on something simmering, so I can start dinner sooner. After dinner it's finishing up whatever bits of blogwork for Unspooling Fiction are left, line edits, web coding, miscellaneous other things until a last round of tidying and checking doors and windows and brushing teeth and taking my tired ass to bed.
And yes, it seems like a lot when you read it like that. But after two years it seems less like "a lot" and more like "my normal day" to me. It did seem like a lot when I started. I ended every day wondering how the hell I had juggled all of that and how the hell I could find the energy to do it all again tomorrow. My failures knocked everything out of whack, not just the area they were specific to. But the check-ins helped. Doing it with other people helped, they talked me down from my tree when I needed it, offered suggestions, other perspectives. We all did that for each other. And, again, it took me a couple of years to figure out what even the broad strokes of my routines could be, that were best for me. And now it's mostly fine-tuning. Changing as things in my life change, like buying this house. Adapting. Learning, growing. The best thing I think CS did for me was get me into the habit of finding the goal, finding what shape best fits the goal to make it likeliest to happen, and picking a likely looking path to get there. And not giving up if that path turns out to have boojums instead of snarks.
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