Habits Stuck in Time
A benefit of being an inflexible curmudgeon is the occasional aspirational habit sticks. I have not missed a monthly blog post in 12 years. I don’t recall when I started exercising before every workday, but we’re talking thousands upon thousands of workouts and possibly as few as single digits in workouts missed.
OK maybe only two habits stuck. I would like to add two more. They have a fighting chance because they continue to hover in my mind without prompting, and initial adoption has been promising.
The first one I call the Eminem rule. After one too many views of the rapper’s “8 Mile” battles, the Youtube algorithm served me a clip of Akon talking about Eminem’s regimented work schedule. He showed up at 9 a.m., took a lunch break at 1, and left the studio at 5 sharp. He could be in the middle of writing a verse — once 5 o’clock hit, he was out.
My Eminem rule is go to bed at 10. That means brushed, flossed, retainer snug and ready to drop whatever I’m doing. If intercourse is legitimately planned and not fickle innuendo, ideally it starts before (yes with the retainer, limiting oral activity to avoid contamination). Otherwise the first move must be promptly at 10 and we can engage only in what my wife and I call “transactional,” which means I drop any pretenses of trying to dazzle anyone and basically try to come as fast as possible like she’s a pricey pay-by-the-minute trick in the Red Light District. Truthfully that lurid thought and the efficiency of it all turn me on in ways romanticism never could.
The second habit is harder to describe and follow, but it’s been working for me. Parents lament how fast the years go by as their kids grow up. To me a year still feels like a year. There’s just not that many years. It’s a short time when they are small and cute.
I am still milking my 4-year-old pronouncing “Obi-Wan Ke-nobody” without a hint of irony. This has gone on for at least a year, but some of the phases last only days. Last week he was fixated on announcing the time from his brother’s Spiderman watch. And then he stopped.
This is the root of the new habit, roughly named the First Response rule. Whenever I have a decision or reaction regarding my kids, my first thought without even thinking should be to remember how short this time is. The cheesy but true two-second framing sets up my high-strung mind better. It doesn’t mean I never get pissed off or have to give in every time. But I am less pissed off and give in more.
I stopped writing this like nine times to hang with my clingy little one. He will be this obsessed with me for about 5 percent of our lives. When I give in or simmer down after applying the First Response rule, I find myself taking a few seconds to just watch them and soak in their rapidly changing faces.
Often I sneak into their bedroom to see what creative sleeping position they’re in. The other night I was deciding whether to walk the extra 20 steps for a quick look, remembered the rule, and was rewarded by this gem capturing the height of his time-telling phase.
Tangentially I wanted to share another time-heavy experience difficult to appreciate in the moment. My best childhood friend, a stand-up comedian, performed in front of a full house at Radio City Music Hall in New York City this month. You can look up the names who’ve headlined there over 93 years. In industry parlance, he “sold that b out” despite competing with the Knicks playoff opener a mile down 7th Avenue.
It was surreal to process in real time, a fantastical dream of many realized by an Indian kid from Plano, Texas. The whole thing felt like a dream… “AKAASH SINGH SOLD OUT” on an old-style marquee that looked the same as it probably did when it said “SINATRA SOLD OUT”… the mahogany-paneled halls and rooms backstage… faceless people spilling in and out of every entrance and aisle in the building… wandering around Times Square at 1 a.m. in a maze of trippy lighting, scouring a map like any other Asian tourist, and then my other buddy saying “Oh there he is,” the same corner real estate that was rotating Netflix and Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ads.
I’ve seen him perform just a handful of times over 20 years, kind of like the inverse of incessant parenting over a short period. These time-lapse memories added to the dreamlike state, not to mention the shrooms at the after-party. There was him performing in front of an empty restaurant in Ventura County, Calif., haggling over stage time at a random dive bar, the packed comedy club in suburban Irvine, Calif., five sold-out shows in Denver almost exactly three years ago, filming the special in Houston, and now here we were at Radio Effing City.
I was almost desperate trying to take it all in. After he crushed the show and the exits were overflowing, I insisted to my buddy we stay in our seats and be in the moment. I don’t know if I was expecting some kind of epiphany, but it took all of a few minutes for the crew to start dismantling the stage and the ushers to kick us out.
The rule of all rules, the one all habits including these two must observe: Time runs independently of how you feel.