1000 Word Challenge, Day 8: A Writing Workspace

This is a big day. This is a big blog post. This is my first time writing from my newly decorated desk/office space in the basement of my house.

I learned a while ago that I have a tough time focusing on writing if I don't have a dedicated place to do that writing. It's fine to sit on the couch and write about a basketball game that I'm currently watching, but it's very hard to sit and write about something meaningful while relaxing on the couch. My brain is wired to use couch-time as leisure time, meaning I will browse Twitter or a thousand other sites instead of actually paying attention to what I'm "supposed to" be writing about.

Last week I got a desk from a friend of mine and plunked it in the corner of our basement. I sat down at the desk and I wrote. It went pretty well. The desk is small - about 40 inches across and 18 deep, according to my unbelievably bad spatial reasoning - and I truly just put it in the corner and sat down. But I wanted more of a desk area.

We (Jenna and I) fiddled around with all sorts of things and basically put ourselves into foul moods on Saturday, trying to figure out what would work best. I haven't had a real desk area in at least a decade, so I didn't really know what I wanted. Not knowing what I wanted made it hard to figure out what might work best for me.

We moved a shelving unit-thing because I knew I wanted a place to put photos and books that inspire me, but it seemed cumbersome. We tried different arrangements in the corner, allowing space for a lamp of some kind. We considered moving the desk to the 2nd floor into a well-lit room with shelves readily available. Nothing seemed right at all.

This morning, inspiration struck in a flash.

We'd been looking at things all wrong. By putting the shelving unit behind the desk on that wall (our plans had mainly looked at the shelving unit on the right-wall with the desk against the left wall here), the printer can still reach the outlet, the ceiling light still points into the area of the desk, the map is lit, and the shelving works out perfectly.

I can now sit at my desk (on a stability ball, obviously, because this is how I exercise now) and take note of the current stretch of books that inspire me. The current array of word-filled goodies is Shea Serrano's The Rap Yearbook, the 2004 Cleveland Indians Media Guide, The Big Book of One Direction, Letters of Note, Dead Wake, 1,000 Places to See Before you Die, A Short History of Nearly Everything, and Rick Steves' Italian Phrasebook.

As if that wasn't enough, I have a handful of photos that include several of my best friends, my brothers, my wife, and a Costa Rican sunset. The dry-erase map is there to remind me how much of the world I've yet to see and how I want to write about it.

The icing on the cake, of course, is that I can put a few trinkets on the desk itself. I'm proud to report that the gang on my desk is a Tim Couch starting lineup figure, a miniature Jeff McInnis bobblehead, and a full-size Grady Sizemore bobblehead. You can see all of them in the photo above, although Grady is obscured by a cup (which is not the first time Grady Sizemore has been obscured by a cup).

I love it. I'm so excited about this setup. It doesn't take up too much space, which means that we can still use leftover basement area as a workout space because it turns out Planet Fitness wants to take your bank account information in order to join and that just feels dirty.

Let's pivot to that for a minute: Why is it that canceling a gym membership is the 2nd hardest thing in the world to do? (The hardest thing to do, of course, is throw out a trash can.) I used to be a member at XSport Fitness in Chicago and they actually made you write a hand-written letter to their main office requesting that your membership be terminated. There wasn't a fee associated with it, but there was no confirmation whatsoever that your request was accepted. You simply write a letter and hope for the best.

I ended up walking into the gym one day and having them swipe my card to confirm that it was no longer active. It was awkward. The guy working there made me feel like a real asshole, but I promise it was actually his company that was the asshole.

I had a much more pleasant cancelation experience with Fitness 19, and my time at the Cleveland Heights Rec Center was also a delight - we moved and my yearlong membership simply expired. So why does a place like Planet Fitness do such weird things? Surely it's got something to do with offering $10/month membership, meaning they have to hold onto every extra $10 they can get. If 10% of members get screwed out of an extra month, those members feel like "oh well, just an extra $10." But if they have 250,000 members nationwide - which is probably too low of a guess, considering they have 1,500 locations - that's $250,000 to Planet Fitness's corporate machine, which helps them stay in business. 

Gyms are dirty. And not just because people don't like to wipe their sweat up.

That digression, I'm happy to report, was thanks to the newly conducive-to-writing desk-space that I've now taken up in my new home. 

I still don't know if I like living in this home - I don't hate it anymore, but I definitely don't love it - but having dedicated spaces to do different things makes it feel a little more useful. I look forward to typing millions of words from this space, and this first thousand will become just a drop in the bucket.

Writing can be cool sometimes.