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I write these things on Saturday morning as a creative warm up. Mornings are rough for me as that is when I am at my most decaffeinated.

It has been a mild winter. I suppose I should be grateful for that. Meanwhile, Alaska and Seattle have been buried in snow, and it all somehow has something to do with climate change. I'm tired of that shit. They just don't fucking know, and they can't come out and say it. The irony is that the same people who harp the most about global warming are utterly oblivious to the coming financial calamity and the debt crisis.

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That was as far as I got on Saturday morning with that post. I was running late for Fight School, so I did the RTOVS and hauled ass. After that, my life became a blur of work and sleep for two days. I missed the Super Bowl working late. No big deal as I find working weekends way more tolerable since giving up the sports habit. You can either watch people doing things, or you can do them yourself.

I just got done writing an email to Malnic. Malnic is very stimulating. I drop everything online to respond to a Malnic email. Malnic has that same creative urge that I have. Most people I correspond with have interests in politics, philosophy, or economics. Malnic is the only one who creates. I think people are afraid to create because you are taking something from inside of yourself and putting it out there to be praised or damned. In that respect, we are comrades.

Talk to me long enough, and you will hear me whine about TME--Time, Money, and Energy. TME are the resources we all use to accomplish our objectives. If we fail to accomplish an objective, it is usually as a result of a lack of one or more of those resources. For instance, I believe that I can cure cancer if I put my mind to it. The problem is that I will probably die of cancer before I ever get to the cure because there is that whole medical school thing you have to do before tackling that cancer thing. Plus, I don't have the money for that sort of thing either as I would need a great deal of funding to do the research involved. So, we temper our ambitions to what we think we can reasonably achieve given the time, money, and energy that we have.

People think their failures are due to some lack of virtue on their part, but I don't see it that way. I think it all goes back to the TME issue. I remember my brother lamenting the loss of fitness and chalking it up to some degree of laziness on his part. The reality is that he spends numerous hours working on engineering plans and his few leisure hours with his family. This isn't laziness. Ultimately, there are only so many hours in a day, and he devotes most of his time to being an engineer, businessman, husband, and a father. Since that time, he has cut back a bit on work and got back to working out. I am sure when something doesn't get done on the job he laments his laziness there.

The reality is that our ambitions exceed our resources. In my study of achievements, I can't help but notice how so much achievement is the product of neglect in other areas. What you don't do is often as important as what you do. That nugget of wisdom forms the kernel of the minimalist lifestyle strategy. This is why less is more.

Minimalism is nothing more than being deliberate in what you are going to shun and neglect and eliminate. Most people are not deliberate, and they let the failures dictate what happens to them. The result is a messy frustrating life. I know all about messes and frustration. The only antidote I have found is the creation of a "Not To Do" list. You need to make deliberate decisions on things you are not going to do. This will help you concentrate your time, money, and energy on the things you really care about. That is Leo Babauta's wisdom in a nutshell.

I am someone with a large appetite for new interests. If I actually indulged all of my interests, I would achieve nothing. I am not talking about climbing Everest or painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I am talking about the most mundane of things like taking out the trash or cleaning my bathroom. In fact, most of the bad habits people report are mostly neglect of important but mundane things in pursuit of the things that really thrill them and make them happy. This would be things like eating right, getting some exercise, and flossing. Watching TV, partying, working, blogging, painting, and many other things consume our interest so much that we end up neglecting other things in the process. I have literally lost hours and been late to things because I started a blog post that consequently consumed my being. I have to have a "go to sleep" alarm on my Timex to remind me to go to bed, or I will forget to sleep.

My "Not To Do" List or N-List is the following:

1. Do not watch televised sporting events.

I am tempted all the time to watch NASCAR, the NFL, and UFC. I keep putting the sports talk station on my car radio preset and removing it at least once a month. It gets uncomfortable having a convo with one of my buds, and sports comes up and I go silent. I didn't know the Patriots and the Giants were playing in the Super Bowl until a week before the game. The reason I don't know this stuff is because I have to put my mental energy and time into things that matter more to me than watching these competitions and keeping up with them. The most blatant example is that I can watch mixed martial arts, or I can learn mixed martial arts. I choose the latter. The same thing goes for fitness. I can watch football, or I can go work out.

2. Do not begin new hobbies.

I have a friend who is a drummer, and I have gone to see some of his gigs. We talk a lot about the drums and favorite drummers. I am not a drummer. He gives me music catalogs for drum equipment because he thinks I am going to break down and buy myself a kit. I never do. I also get hunting/fishing invites almost weekly from other friends, and I always turn them down. I can barely do the things I have on my plate now, so adding new things will be money wasted. I take a keen interest in these things but only to the extent that I like to write about them. I even attend offbeat church services even though I am an atheist merely to indulge my curiosity. The bottom line is that I am a journalist except jobs in that field pay so poorly that it is simply a hobby for me. Good journalists and writers are merely explorers of worlds who report back to their respective audiences.

Except for writing, my only other leisurely pursuits are getting in shape and learning self-defense. I can't even call them hobbies because I see them both as being vital to living well in much the same way you wash your car and change the oil. Both have as the aim the preservation of one's bodily functions. The workouts are more chore than pleasure, but the ironic thing is that you will get your chores done. It is more a "have to" than a "want to."

3. Do not buy the unnecessary.

This is the tools/toy thing I have mentioned on the blog before. I wanted a smartphone, but I disciplined myself to buy a durable dumbphone. Similarly, I want to buy a hulking 4WD pickup truck with mudgrip tires, a wench, a roll bar, and a set of chrome truck nuts hanging on the back. What I will get will be a small pickup that is good on gas and won't cost me a month's pay to put tires on. The irony is that I find the tools more delightful than the toys. This is because I use the tools while toys end up unused and neglected.

4. Do not get another girlfriend.

This is the latest item on the list. Nothing eats a man's resources more than a woman. There was a time when a good woman was an asset. Now, they are mostly nagging liabilities. This struck me when I saw that the guys do most of the cooking on Jersey Shore. Women are a waste now. Over the last year of unattachment, I have more TME than before. TME beats TLC especially when TLC doesn't exist.

5. Do not listen to anything other than country or rock.

I spent a decade (the 90's!) exploring different musical genres from classical to jazz to hip hop to soul to electronica to ambient to what have you. I had a library of CDs. In the end, I still like to listen to rock and country. 90% of that library of music went unplayed in favor of whatever was on the radio. Since then, those CDs have disappeared in favor of digital files that remain unplayed on my computer. I mostly listen to the radio. The reality is that my musical explorations only revealed to me that what I really like is what I have listened to since I was a kid. Country and rock are to me like Coca-Cola and Levi's jeans. You really don't need to fuck with those things. They are fine just as they are. The lesson is that the familiar doesn't always have to lead to contempt.

6. Do not indulge wanderlust.

Living somewhere else is appealing because it offers new sights and new experiences. Travel is also pretty cool. But if you do enough of it, you start to notice the same things instead of the new things. This would be seeing a kid in New Delhi wearing a pair of Levi's and drinking a Coke. This cures whatever notions you might have that you are missing something by not traveling more. The reality is that the world is smaller than you realize. The experience of the new pretty much ended with the advent of the glossy magazine, the television, and the internet. As a friend who spent a honeymoon in the Cayman Islands told me, "Save your money. All the good parts you see in the brochures. Going there only lets you see the ugly parts."

All of this stuff on the N-list would suggest a boring monochromatic existence for me, but it isn't like that at all. What I have found are the ironies of life. The supposedly good things in life are oversold. The really good things are the familiar things and those without the glam and the advertising. It is the difference between reading a thick novel like The Count of Monte Cristo and watching Transformers. I have done both, and I can tell you that book is unforgettable. I am still trying to forget Transformers.

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