Joining the Crowd at Writing Muscle Beach

I’m going to try something. For the last decade or so my friend Michael Bertrand has been blogging 1000 words per day and has said that it’s made him a better writer. Also, one of my comedy teachers recently advised us to try stream-of-consciousness “automatic writing” for 15 minutes a day to unblock creativity for comedy writing (although he says it has to be longhand, not typed, so I’ll be doing that separately from this blog).

They say the only way to get better at writing is to write, because “writers write.” They didn’t say it had to be good.

I probably should have done this a long time ago, and today is an arbitrary starting point, which is against my nature, but never mind. What made it happen today was when another recent piece of advice from a comedy classmate got combined with something similar I’d been trying to do for a long time—and whatever mysterious change that needed to happen to allow me to actually do it, finally happened yesterday.

The “something similar” I’m talking about is alternating between self-soothing, inherently pleasurable activities and things that I “should” be doing but tend to put off—instead spending all my time with the self-soothing activities until I finally get tired and lie down.

The catalyst was my classmate saying that to make herself do the things she should be doing, she was using the Pomodoro time management technique, invented by Francesco Cirillo and named after his tomato-shaped kitchen timer. (“Pomodoro” is Italian for “tomato.”) The word “Pomodoro” had been floating around in my head ever since and I’d been murmuring it to myself, presumably gathering psychic momentum.

Usually, the Pomodoro technique involves setting the timer and working for a specific number of minutes, but I’ve decided instead to just alternate actions without timing it. Also, I’ve decided that since the word “POMODORO” alternates between consonants and vowels and all the vowels are “O,” the vowels will be the part of the cycle where I do the “fun” thing, and the consonants will represent the “productive” things. Thus, the log I’m keeping looks like this:

POMODOROS FOR 2021/06/05

P = found and listened to Beethoven Sonata Op. 31 No. 3, first movement [work-related]

O = read Ebert review of The Super (1991)

M = brushed teeth; cleaned cat litter

O = read Ebert review of Lethal Weapon 3 (1992)

D = freshened cat’s water; fed cat wet cat food [STAIRS INVOLVED #1]

O = read Ebert review of Lethal Weapon (1987)

R = tidied under desk (garbage; recycling)

O = read Ebert review of Silver Bullet (1985)

S = took empty plastic box down to kitchen [STAIRS INVOLVED #2]; rounded up escaped 2L bottles and put in closet

The fact that, for now, all the “O” entries are the same (reading Roger Ebert movie reviews) also pleases me aesthetically. But there’s bound to be non-Ebert “O” things eventually, and that is OK too. (Deep breaths.)

I might have to change it from “POMODOROS” to “POMODORO” because when I get to the “S” I don’t have a letter for the next fun thing; it goes back to “P.” So in the meantime I’ve been adding an extra “O” by itself. “POMODOROS + O + POMODOROS,” etc.

I included “[STAIRS INVOLVED]” because I’ve noticed that within the last year stairs are more tiring for me than they used to be. I get really winded after going up one flight of stairs. Think of the guy from the Rekall commercial who can’t climb the mountains of Mars because he gets exhausted just taking the stairs. (Would it help if the gravity is ⅓ on Mars?)

So to rebuild my strength, I’m making anything that involves taking the stairs extra times count as part of my “productive” activities. I’m also deliberately not being efficient—not taking as many things as I can carry in one trip—so I’ll take the stairs more than I have to.

And the log is both to keep track of where I am in the cycle and to remind myself that I’ve accomplished things so that my depression can’t lie to me about it. Plus, think what this could mean if I can keep this up indefinitely. Ten years from now I could be thin and successful!

The title of this blog is “XL/TG,” which I re-used from my old LiveJournal. It’s Canadian wordplay: XL/TG can refer to the fact that I’m plus-sized and transgendered, but it’s also what it says on the size tag of a lot of my clothing—“Extra Large/Tres Grande.” If I ever get in shape the “XL” will have to stand for something else. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I hope I have that problem someday.

Another piece of Canadian wordplay I hope to use someday: if I ever need a name for a news anchorman, it will be “Earl Canneberge” (pronounced “can-a-berg”), both as an homage to the character “Earl Camembert” (pronounced “cannon-bear”) created by Second City’s Eugene Levy, but also because “Canneberge” is a word I see every day on the French side of the bottle of cranberry juice in the kitchen.

My friend Adam Charlesworth had a funny story about the time he was visiting France. He was in a convenience store and the cashier said “Hey, you’re Canadian, aren’t you?” and he said “How did you know?” and she said “Because you keep spinning the cans around looking for the English side!”

I still need more words, so here’s the oversoul.

Around twenty years ago there was a great used bookstore downtown called ABC Book & Comic Emporium. They used to have a barrel filled with used paperbacks that were 25 cents each. Occasionally I’d find an old book about a paranormal or paranormal-adjacent topic and buy it. The first one I found was The Ultimate Frontier (1963) by “Eklal Kueshana” (Richard Kieninger). All I can remember from that book is that it said Jesus Christ was actually an angel named Melchizedek who came from the centre of the galaxy. Another was The Education of Oversoul Seven (1973) by Jane Roberts. It’s the teachings of Seth, the multidimensional being she channels, but it’s in the form of a novel about a person who has lived seven lives so far and the progress of their soul through each life. As you might imagine, when we’re alive we don’t know we’re an oversoul with multiple incarnations. Only when we die and get to the astral plane do we become our oversoul and talk to our teachers/judges.

The novel rapidly loses momentum during the soul’s lives and I never finished reading it, but the oversoul concept was a useful takeaway. When I’m thinking about how much I suck at life, or wondering why I was created this way, I sometimes consider it in the context of the oversoul. Am I experiencing these things because that’s what my soul needed to learn from this incarnation? And what if I don’t learn, or learn the wrong lesson? My experiences in this life have made me more timid, and while it’s good to learn impulse control, that’s usually not the moral of the story in life. That’s definitely not what Albert Brooks was saying in Defending Your Life (1991). In that movie the purpose of life is to eliminate fear, because fear inhibits the full potential of the brain. And if you don’t, they get mad at you. Except for Rip Torn, who defends you. Rip Torn is cool. We like Rip Torn.

And we’re done! See you next time.