The July Project: Day 9A few days ago, I mentioned the rules of the exercise game that I’ve been playing:
Rule #1: Do something every day.
Rule #2: Everything counts. On Wednesday, someone who’s been reading this blog lately said to me, “I just can’t exercise every day.†I replied, “I’m not saying that you should …[MORE] In some of her workshops, my friend and sometime coach Mattison Grey has offered a theory that everyone is about either fame, money, or winning, and that making this distinction can help you figure out how to help people get what they want. I don’t know whether that idea holds water for everybody. I can’t speak for people who are about money or fame, and it seems to me that there might be all kinds of other things to be about—love, pleasure, or security, for instance. But as Mattison explained it to me, since my orientation is toward winning, the way for me to reach any goal I’ve set is to turn it into a game I can win …[MORE] We met for lunch at Café Red Onion. She ordered the spinach and goat cheese enchiladas. I ate the usual pupusas revueltas—fat cornmeal pancakes stuffed with shredded pork and other good things. We talked about writing. Since that topic encompasses everything else that we both live and breathe, the conversation covered a lot of ground.
The July Project: Day 19I’ve written elsewhere about my exercise rules and about the idea of making a game out of achieving goals.  I play a lot of games in my exercise routine. I make up arbitrary rules and give myself extra points on an imaginary scoreboard for achievements above and beyond the normal daily routine. I’m not always sure whether these tricks help keep me motivated, or just give my idle mind something to do. Here’s a rule I made up tonight:
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She talked about inspiration and the nocturnal activities of her particular muse. There was a voice that came to her one night to dictate notes for years’ worth of writing projects. I speculated about the creative unconscious, the unknown workings of the mute machinery of our brains that collects, organizes, catalogs, and stores images, sounds, smells, emotions, and abstract ideas and then assembles them into dreams, long-term memories, and all the wonders of fantasy. I wondered why she was so eager to give the credit for her brilliance to something outside herself