reading – Jason Toney

January 6, 2019 / 0 Comments

This is Where My Life is

“Things are just as they are.”

— Love and Equanimity Meditation

Today is the first day of 2019 that I remembered to write the correct year when dating my journal. Shall we call that progress? I don’t mean to suggest that it has been a rough re-entry into normal life. It hasn’t.

I’ve been reading Zadie Smith’s Feel Free, a book whose name I get wrong every time I write it down or speak about it. It’s sometimes Find Free and most often Live Free but always not the correct title. I haven’t decided if there is symbolism in this. Am I seeking to live more free in some way or to find out what it means to find freedom?

I do find constraint in this body. These hips don’t move the way I would like. My blood pressure is elevated. My upper back likes to stiffen when I sleep. This belly should be smaller if only so I might not fear to suffocate in child’s pose. During the first day of Yoga with Adriene‘s 2019 30-day program—Dedicate—she asked us to discern what brought us to the mat. To my surprise, what came to mind:

“I want the best version of my body whatever form that takes.”

I’m as committed to the idea of improving my flesh as I am to not defining what “the best version” means for me. What it has been in practice is over thirty days straight of some form of exercise, eating more of the right things, and believing that doing that which nourishes me is better than doing what’s convenient.

The actions may be difficult but the choice to do them every day hasn’t.

It hasn’t only been the physical. I’ve found discipline in limiting my screen time. I’m scheduling daily practice for improving my Spanish and treating it like class. I’m idling less in front of the television.

I’m reading Zadie Smith and feeling free.

Supplements and Counters

May 13, 2018 / 1 Comment

Little Fires Everywhere

“‘Cause I know you wanna see me come home proper.”

— YG

My love of books starts with my grandmother. She was a librarian and would subscribe me to book-of-the-month clubs (Sweet Pickles and Berenstein Bears when I was first learning words and then the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew Mysteries, Encyclopedia Brown, and Choose Your Own Adventure later). It was encouraged by my mother who would take me to the library on Saturdays and leave me alone to explore the stacks with little direction. Whatever books I fancied, I could check out. As I got older, my allowances were spent on books: comic books and Stephen King novels and The Babysitter’s Club. My weekends followed common patterns: chores, basketball, books. Once my parents had thought I was missing when, in fact, I had come home from a friend’s house early to read a book I was engrossed in and fell asleep in my room with those words and characters.

I thought about how parents might nudge us toward or away from reading with small choices yesterday. A young boy was in the books section of Target, impatiently waiting for his mother to see the book he wanted. It was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

“That’s a big book,” his mom said. He was discouraged. He pleaded. She suggested a far less exciting book. His reading skills were clearly beyond it. He tried to explain, but she was uninterested and moved to leave the books section with no books at all. As his dad arrived and distracted his mother, I watched him slide the blue covered book with the boy wizard into their cart.

The experience of reading Little Fires Everywhere reminded me of how I read as a child. I would lose all track of time. I nearly missed my bus stop two days in a row because my mind had departed to Shaker Heights. I took lunches further away from the office to not be interrupted while I hung out with Pearl and Mia and Izzy and Mrs. Richardson. It was that kind of read. You should find some time for it.

It’s a story about mothers and their choices. Today is Mother’s Day, and I’m thinking about my mothers and their choices. I would have never been discouraged in a store aisle about entering a world too grown with words too big, pages too long, and binding too thick. In fact, Phyllis or Pauline would’ve likely put it in my hands before I even knew to look.

The little fires they sparked still burn today.

Thank you.

March 26, 2018 / 0 Comments

Blow Your Mind (Mwah)

“You can’t tame me.”

— Dua Lipa

Like Arrival before it, Annihilation is creeping into my thoughts frequently. There’s some kind of through line between the serious science fiction of these two films and the humor and catharsis of watching Hidden Figures, a story about real people doing real science. I’m not sure what it is, exactly, but they are all connected in my head, lifting each other up.

I’ve been thinking about how radical it is that we have major mainstream pop culture that doesn’t center the male gaze. That maybe doesn’t even consider it. I haven’t seen Wrinkle in Time yet, but I have noticed that women have seemed to enjoy the flick far more than male critics. When something isn’t made for you, perhaps explicitly ignores you, after everything before it was made for you, is your adverse reaction visceral even if you don’t recognize that is the root?

I haven’t seen it yet, but I wonder.

I finished reading The Tipping Point. It only took me nearly twenty years to get to it. We talk about virality so much these days, and in our digital culture, it is easy to identify the salespeople, and with a little more thought, we could tell who the connectors are (we’ve got the data), but who are the mavens? Have we given that role up to services that aggregate everyone’s thoughts? Is that better than trusting an individual who we know has done the proper legwork, whose opinion we respect, who delights in the knowing?

I wonder.

LA Public Library rules for new releases is that you’ve got seven days to read it, no renewals. I’ve taken the bait on a Walter Mosley novel that I didn’t even know was out. Can I win the battle with my devices and idle TV time to focus and finish a book in a week? Challenge accepted.

Maybe I’ll use it as an excuse to implement candle hour, act like a futurist, slow jam the news, or even break up with my phone.

Doubtful, but I wonder.

September 29, 2015 / 0 Comments

On Living Wisely: Finding Meaning in the In-Between Time

“Offer me something inside. A place to go. A place to hide.” – Jessie Ware, Something Inside

What does it mean to live a good life? What about a productive life? How about a happy life? How might I think about these ideas if the answers conflict with one another? – Richard J. Light, How to Live Wisely (New York Times)

Yesterday, I tried to reconcile how I want to be spending my time with how I spend my time. I was unsure, so I spent time SnapChatting my day to see what was going on. I don’t think I did enough talking about what actually happened so tomorrow I’m going to do more explaining. More storytelling.

Today’s exercise, though, asks about how I spend my spare time.

Well, right now, I’m writing. It’s 8:51 P.M. and I’ve watched the premiere of The Daily Show with Trevor Noah (Good job, kid!) and what I’d rather be doing than anything else is typing words into the white screen that Ulysses provides. I don’t do this enough.

I wrote on the first night of XOXO:

I’m most human when I’m writing.

That’s true. I also feel most human when I’m reading other people’s words. I do that often. When I take a break from work and grab an iced skinny hazelnut latte at the nearby Starbucks or take lunch by myself, I’m usually spending my time with the writing of others.

I talk a lot and watch a lot of basketball. When I was a kid, Hell, up until my late twenties, I played a lot of basketball. These days, I’m particularly passionate about women’s pro ball. We are season ticket holders for the Los Angeles Sparks. I’ve seen more women’s basketball live than I’ve seen any other sport, by far.

I love television and consume it in large quantities.

So how do I spend my spare time? Writing. Reading. TV. Ball is life.

Now, the way the question is presented in the Times article, the question is meant to help a person focus their college studies. I extrapolate that to presume this is supposed to be a good way to make decisions professionally, but I’m not so sure. What I know is that when I’ve had to write as the primary work product of a job, it’s dimmed my love for writing.

Having worked in/around television for the bulk of my professional career, my love for it only grows when immersed in the process. I like how those donuts get made. I imagine, at some point, I will get back to that.

I do a lot of reading as part of my gig now. Reading. Editing. Massaging copy. I should do more of it. It’s painful but making someone else’s words better whether through soft nudges or complicated surgery is satisfying.

If a professional basketball team came calling for my services in some way, I’d have to consider it but I worry it would tarnish my love of the game. I’m a fan first. Could I still be with a paycheck on the line?

What I didn’t mention to this point is that I also enjoy doing things in service of the greater good. I didn’t include it because I don’t do enough of it.

I’m making time for writing and reading and basketball and my eyes glued to the endless hours of great tv, but I haven’t been creating space for making the world a better place.

Huh.

There it is.

A moment of clarity.