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I find it interesting to look around from time-to-time for oil. Not black crude-oil oozing out of the ground, but things made out of oil. Take the outfit I am wearing today, for example. I have on fast drying travel pants—made mostly of nylon, a nylon shirt, and shoes made from of plastic mesh and synthetic rubber. Each of these is primarily made out of oil. In fact, the computer I am writing this on right now (a MacBook) has a plastic case. Even the keys I am pressing are plastic. I cannot even escape plastic away from my computer. Writing by hand in my notebook, the pen I use is also plastic. The notebook itself is leather bound with paper pages, but when I look closely I can see nylon threads stitching the pages together and an elastic band to hold the book closed when it is not in use. I look around my apartment: the carpet on the floor, the drapes on the windows, the window frames, and the light switches—all oil.

Oil is an amazing material—it can be cheaply made into many forms and nearly any shape. It is unsettling to look at an ordinary object that I use everyday and realize that it was oil, under the ground, for millions of years. At some point, it was pumped out of an oilfield half-way around the world, put in a barrel, and shipped (probably) to China. In China, the oil was transformed through complicated manufacturing processes into nylon or polyester and then woven into fabric. Then the fabric, in the first remotely human process, was sewn into the pair of pants that I am wearing right now. Before they reached me, they were packed into containers, shipped across the Pacific Ocean (the largest ocean in the world, which literally spans 1/3 of the earth), loaded onto trucks, delivered to distribution centers, put in other trucks, and then finally brought to the store in which I bought them. Despite coming from the far side of the earth, somehow, they are still a fraction of the price of pants made locally out of natural materials. It boggles the mind.

We live in a world, where almost everything we interact with every day was made by a machine. Unless you make it a point to have things made by hand, it is unlikely that you will have any at all. Before the industrial revolution, the manufacturing process that we take for granted didn’t exist; everything was made by hand. Plastic was invented in 1907 and nylon in 1935; there are people who have been around longer than that. But these products are now everywhere in our lives—absolutely unavoidable. I read a blog a couple years ago, about a couple who tried to not touch any plastic for an entire month (there are many such blogs now, but I can no longer find the original). Oil products are so prevalent in day-to-day life that this couple needed to do things like walk stairs instead of ride elevators because elevator call buttons are plastic and buy specialty tooth brushes, because the only ones available at drug stores are—you guessed it—plastic.

Most people agree that oil is a nonrenewable resource; it is not going to be around forever. At some point we have to return to natural materials. Oil is unlikely to completely run out in my lifetime, but one unavoidable truth is that the price of oil is continually increasing. Will I live to see oil so expensive that it becomes cheaper to make wooden window frames and metal pens again? A part of me hopes so.

I originally thought this blog was going to be about finding meaning. It was to be about my experiences and experiments in finding a more purposeful life; about what I have going through my head and what I am doing with my time and energy. It turns out, although I am spending some time with introspection—figuring out what life means to me—the real focus of my time has been writing.

Originally the main purpose of writing this blog was to create an online business—a location independent way of supporting my life. But here’s the thing, I don’t want to be a “blogger”—it is not a goal of mine; it is at best an end to a means. I have slowly begun to realize I do not want to be the blogger “slash” online entrepreneur. It is the writing that interests me. If I can find a way to support myself with written words, then I’ll be happy. I don’t want to use the sleazy marketing strategies so common among successful bloggers: they make outlandish claims of what their product will provide and then deliver a shallow ebook with more pretty formatting than actual content. Recently I received a come-on from a blogger that used all of the following terms in a single email: “crush it”, “legendary”, “grow like crazy”, “become amazing”, “never be the same”, “skyrocket”, and “ninja art”. Sadly, this is not uncommon. It is hard for me to find my place in such a market.

For now, instead of trying to build a business, I am working on becoming the best writer that I can be. Here’s what I do with my time to improve my writing:

•    I write everyday. In the last 30 days, I have written about 69,000 words. That is a lot of reps—to steal terminology from weight lifting. The best way to get better at writing is to write.
•    I publish everyday. Similar to writing everyday, but not exactly the same. When I write in my journal, for example, I never have to make sure that it is readable. I can just throw words onto a page to get the ideas out as fast as possible. If I want to publish, then—at the bare minimum—I must hold myself to grammatical standards. I also need make sure that everything makes sense and that my ideas flow logically from one to the next. This is not a simple writing process for me; to get a complicated thought into an intelligible form takes iterations of reworking it. Although I can write something that is fairly readable on the first try if I’ve been mulling it over, it always needs an intensive editing and rewriting process. Good English does not happen by accident—it takes a lot of work.
•    I write as clearly as I am able. If I can think of two ways to write something, I try to pick the more simple. It isn’t that I am dumbing it down, it is that I want to make my writing as understandable as possible. Picking big words or complicated phrasing might make me seem smart to casual observers, but careful readers will appreciate unambiguous wording instead of flowery prose.
•    I read about writing. I have tried to learn lessons on writing from books like: “Bird by Bird”, “On Writing Well”, and “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”. I think that I have improved at punctuation in the last month. Take a look back at one of my earlier articles and tell me what you think.
•    I read authors who write well. Practice by itself is not enough. I need to know what good writing is in order to know how to improve my writing as I progress. I need examples of good writing to pattern my own after. I don’t want to steal a single author’s style, but instead I want to discover the common threads which make good writing. I immerse myself in works by authors whose style I wish to emulate—classic authors universally considered skilled writers: Twain, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald; and contemporary writers with the same distinction like Haruki Murakami or Roberto Bolaño. By reading books by such writers, I believe my own writing will surely improve.

I sleep on the floor—I know, it’s a little bit odd. In this day and age, everyone has a bed. Some people have not ever slept on the ground a single time in their lives. But for me, it is normal. When I starting backpacking in 2006, sleeping on the ground was uncomfortable—my arm would fall asleep quickly, my hips would hurt, and I would toss-and-turn all night. However, I now find the ground more comfortable than most beds; I sleep soundly through the night, with no pain, and do not need to roll around like I used to. I believe it is simply a matter of toughening the body and learning to sleep in slightly different positions.

I am, and have always been, a side-sleeper. I believe that this is the most natural position to sleep, and have been unable to regularly sleep any other way. I lay on my back for a while when I want to think about things, maybe mulling a problem over. To me, this position indicates that it is time to work on a problem, not time to sleep. When it is time for me to sleep, I roll to my side, sandwich my ears between two pillows, and—on most nights—fall asleep quite quickly.

I have heard people complain about the ground being uncomfortable (while backpacking older men are the most vocal about this), but I don’t think they’ve ever taken the time to learn how to sleep on a hard surface. In some ways, a bed is like training wheels: it makes sleeping comfortably easier at first, but I don’t think that it is any better in the long run. I believe that mattresses are often too soft for ideal sleeping. My girlfriend had chronic back pain for years that went away when we started backpacking. Carrying weight on her back helped strengthen her muscles, but that was not the only thing that helped. She started sleeping on the ground full time—at home and on the trail—and her back has been more healthy than it had been in years. But, when we’ve stayed with friends or in hotels, and it was not appropriate to sleep on the floor, we’d sleep in a bed and the next morning her back would be sore.

My girlfriend and I have a huge “bed”. It is the entire floor of our bedroom. In reality, the area that we use is about six-and-a-half feet wide by six-and-a-half feet long—about the size of a king-sized bed. But, if we wanted to spread out further, the walls are the limits. Even though I am accustomed to sleeping in a single spot all night—a habit forged in the backcountry; when sleeping on hard, cold ground with a 20-inch-wide sleep-pad it is a good idea to not roll around much—it is nice to have as much room as I want to stretch out.

We always have the option to buy a mattress and put it on the floor or we could buy a bed with a frame and a box spring. But despite the substantial investment that would take, I don’t think either of us would sleep any more comfortably than we do now.

What would I do without spell check. My guardian angel. She corrects me—without her, I wouldn’t be able to spell at all. She allows me to be lazy. She lets me get by not knowing how to spell some of the simplest words. When I’m wrong she’s there for me.

But it is not always a healthy relationship. When I have to write things by hand she is nowhere to be found. All of a sudden I go from being an intelligent literate college educated writer, to someone who cannot spell “intellegent”. It’s embarrassing. When I’m typing, I know that I have misspelled a word when I see that little dotted red line under the word. Most of the time, I command-click (right-click for those of you using Windows) and select the word I know to be correct, but I often won’t spend the time to see how I’ve misspelled it.

Recently I’ve been taking the time to see if I can correct the words myself. More times than not, my misspellings are typos. It can take a few seconds to figure out which letters are out-of-order, or which one I left out. Sometimes, I’ve gotten lazy and typed a word with a spelling that I know to be wrong on closer inspection. But there are times when I have no idea at all what the right spelling could be. I furrow my brow in concentration and try to figure out what it could be. Does the word have a French origin? Is the problem a nasty string of vowels that I can’t put in order? Or is it a tricky suffix: I’ve never been able to remember when to use “able”, “eble”, or “ible”. But as an aspiring writer, these are things that I need to know.

A quick aside—why does writer have one “t” and written have two? I couldn’t tell you, but it trips me up more often than I’d like to admit.

The English language is a mess. There are no simple phonetic rules like Spanish—which if you know how a word sounds, you can, without fail, figure out the spelling. This is not the case in English. Perhaps the most articulate speakers will create a distinction between which and witch, but determining the difference between it’s and its requires context and memorization of rules. Not memorization of broad rules, mind you, rules that are surprisingly specific. Why is Phone spelt with a “ph” and fax spelled with a “f”. The “f” sound in phone comes from the Greek word phōnē which means sound or voice; meanwhile, fax comes from facsimile—“fac” and “simile” are two latin roots meaning “make” and “like”—but the abbreviation is so common that it has replaced the original word in everyday speech—have you ever heard anyone ask to “facsimile over that document”?

There are countless oddities in the English language, primarily because it is made up of many pieces. It is made up of unequal parts of ancient Celtic, Latin, French, and Norse (Danish and Swedish). It is not a language that naturally evolved, but instead changed rapidly with each successive conquest of the English Isles. Given its rocky history, we can try to forgive English for being so eccentric. But we need to pay attention to get it right. Without spending time to learn the rules, and the specifics in each case, there is little chance of writing it well, which is my ultimate goal.

Every type of information you could want is now at your finger tips, in a single spot: the internet. Want to know if it’s your friend’s birthday or how many moons Saturn has, you’re only one google search away from the answer. It is terribly convenient—the internet is always on and always available. There are blogs, wikipedia, newspapers, sports pages, Facebook, and more. It has replaced information sources in all areas of life: social—the water cooler discussion, phone directories, the personal letter, phone calls; news—the daily paper, the 5-o-clock news report; and general sources of information—encyclopedias, dictionaries, and even knowledgable people.

I had a good friend growing up who could remember a tremendous amount of information about every movie he watched. He could remember the titles, the plot lines, the actors, and could even answer questions like: “who was in that ninja movie from the 80’s where the guy has to go through the village of crazy people to win the girl?” That was all it took: a weird vague description, and he would tell me what I was trying to figure out. I don’t need that information from him anymore—it is available online. He has been replaced by IMDB. This is more convenient, but at the same time is depressing. It gives me one less reason to give him a call—it’s one less reason to stay in touch with a friend.

I have recently experienced drastically limited internet access for months at a time. On each of my thru-hikes the last four summers, I would be at a computer for only an hour or two every week. The rest of the time, the internet might as well have not existed. While on trail, my fellow hikers and I would often wonder about things that would be easy to look up online. We’d ask questions like who sang that song “are you going to go my way” or try to remember the name of that guy who won all of those episodes of Jeopardy. Obviously this sort of random trivia is unimportant to life in general, but can nag at you if you can’t remember the answer. Before the internet, we would not be able to answer some questions at all. We might be able to look them up later, assuming we could remember the question. To find the answer to the question about a song, we might have taken a trip to the music store or called a friend who was interested in 80s music. Even then, finding the answer was not guaranteed. But now, with google, that information is always available on-demand. Not only is in possible to find out who sang that song—Lenny Kravitz—it is a simple task to find a youtube video of it, determine that it’s really called “Are You Gonna Go My Way”, and see on wikipedia that is was released in 1993 and is not an 80s song at all. All of my questions (and more), answered in less than a minute of web surfing.

Having to wait for an answer can sometimes be a good thing. I could use a little more daily practice denying myself the instant gratification of the internet. I have started habits, like running, that require long waits to see results. I’d like to reinforce the notion that waiting isn’t always a bad thing. Somehow, I made it through the first fifteen years of my life without any internet and it was another five years before I had access to it at home. I want to try a new challenge: stop using the internet in all forms for the afternoons—from 12:00 to 5:00. Although this may not seem like much of a challenge to light internet users, it is a major cutback for someone like me who has a smart phone which allows unlimited access. I will need to turn the wifi connection off of my laptop and put my phone in airplane mode. Depending on how this experiment goes, I would like to see how I can get by without internet for even longer periods of time, while still writing daily for my blog. In my estimation, I don’t need continuous access to the internet, and think that my time will be better spent in its absence.