The Side Effects of No Routine - a podcast by Jai//Em

Quick Notes:

Graham & Brown Wallpaper
Jarvis Standing Desk

Full(ish) Show Notes:

All right, so today we are recording in a new room in a new way. Long story short, Covid-19 has changed our routine, and in changing our routine we have come up with some creative ways to... I don't know...LIVE, right? 

I think this is so interesting, and I never really thought about it until this 30 plus day shelter-in-place. When your routine goes out the window, when everything changes and ‘normal’ is just a word you can't hold close to your chest. That is when it's easier to do things you wouldn't normally do! It's easier to do things you kind of thought about doing, or thought maybe were too risky, or you were even too bored to do, you know what I mean? Too busy to do, too in your head about. There's something about all of my routine having gone out the window that has opened up my life to do things that I wouldn't normally do. 

What we ended up doing here in our house is rearranging the whole motherfucking thing! So let's see, how do I set this up? Our apartment is not very big. I would guess 900 square feet, maybe a thousand probably nine hundred and there are two bedrooms and a living room in a kitchen so when we moved in we put our bed in the smaaallest bedroom. The smaaallest bedroom! The room was big enough for a queen bed with a foot and a half maybe so basically in the middle of the night, you’re getting up to pee, sort of doing the basketball guarding shuffle drill around the bed….

And the room that should technically be the master bedroom, we will make that a big office.

That's where we're gonna be spinning a lot of time. We'll set up our desks--everything that we need for Kate's work, for my work, for our hobbies, in that room and then there's a walk-in-closet which is awesome, so we'll just put all of the clothes in there….

But with Covid-19 we were both needing to work (and do serious work) at the same time…. Okay, I'll do my call in here. You can do your call on the couch? You're good for that just for this call? Okay, and then we'll switch. And it wasn't bad but it wasn't fun. So we were like what if we change this around? What if we take the walk-in closet, which is small but definitely could be an office. And the bedroom which is a much better office than a bedroom. And make ourselves separate offices. Pull the bed into the room that it was meant for but also make sure our dressers are in that room too and just have clothes and bed in this giant room and prioritize separate offices instead of one big giant office?

It's awesome. It's awesome! I'm happy, I know Kate's happy. She had that room set up in like 20 minutes. When we started moving stuff around she had a vision she knew what was happening in her office and it is set up beautifully. I really love my space as well, but I did the very Janet thing which is... I can't just move in there and figure it out later. I need to kind of move in there how I'm gonna move in there. I don't like big projects or tasks sort of looming over my head. I like to see the landscape, see the gameplan, right? And then execute that. That makes me feel better.  Otherwise, I just obsess about things I shouldn't obsess about.  We talked about me obsessing about things I want to obsess about, but there are things I need not obsess about. So if I can just see it all in front of me, make the plan, make some choices...  When I built my computer I was like, I'm gonna do this, but I needed to focus and get it done.  I can't be like, oh I'm gonna build a computer and then do it three months later. I’d drive myself insane. 

So, this time I was like… I wanna wallpaper the room before I move in there. So I went online and ordered some wallpaper. Then I was like, well, I always said that when we did move out of this apartment that the next apartment I would dump my IKEA desk and get a sit & stand desk.  Why don't I just do it now?...

I wallpapered the shit out of this wall. And it looks so good and I’m really, really excited about it. 

I watched a couple of YouTube videos. I got super excited and inspired and I did the thing! 

Kate had to help me get the first one up because... So the first strip of wallpaper, they want you to go across the corner. So even though your wallpaper is straight, your walls aren't straight and certainly these walls aren't straight. So you have to put the first with an overlap in the corner of about I don't know 10 centimeters. Just a little bit of a flap and then that way when you cut down the corner line, your wallpaper matches whatever the actual “straight” line of your wall is. I will leave a link in the show notes so that you can see it. It's a dark gray or dark silver, wood/bark pattern. And it's really cool….I wallpapered this bad boy in 4 hours and it was great!...

Building the desk almost killed me. I will never build a desk again. I won't…. One-- it was so heavy! All of the pieces are so freaking heavy. The leg, the arm, the moving mechanism, the top piece. All of it was so so heavy. 

The first day with the wallpaper I got my arm above my head exercises. You know, the shoulders, the neck, the upper back. The next day it was like squats and what is it called? Dead weight lifting? And getting down on the floor because you have to build a giant desk on the floor, you can't build a desk on a desk, which is really what you need. You need a desk to build a desk!  It’s a lot of getting down on the floor and up and down and up. At one point I was just sitting on the floor and  was like, I don't care. I don’t care about the money. Just take it away and we'll pretend this never happened. But I got through it. I have this amazing sit & stand desk by Fully….not by fully, it's a Jarvis desk. So I think it's by the Jarvis people, but I bought it on the Fully website….Look, Jarvis, Fully. I've said both words-- one of them is correct. It's really cool….

 It’s amazing to me that this happened now because I have been talking about this standing desk for I don't know, three years. I'll get one when we move, I need to get one, I should get one. But I didn't make it happen until everything was thrown into chaos, all of my routine was gone….

Wallpapering is the least messy situation I've ever experienced with a wall and I have painted walls. I have put holes in walls. I have spackled walls. I have hung things from walls. The wallpaper paste was clear, so it didn’t show up on my walls when I got it on the adjacent walls,  it didn't show up on the top-side of the wallpaper when I got it on there. I got it on my hands, it got on my clothes. I think some got my eye. I'm fine…. It was messy and yet not messy at all, so I highly recommend it. 

I'm gonna try to do this more and I hope that you do too. If you're itching for your routine you want to get back to normal, that's great and totally expected, but maybe also we could lean into what the non-routine brings us because my regular routine is not working. 

I'm not recording the way I usually record, I'm not writing the way I usually write. I'm not even eating like normal! We are going to bed at like 11 every night and that is not normal for either of us, we're usually in bed at nine. But I’m leaning into the non-routine and I encourage you to do the same. You won't end up wallpapering probably, but you might end up doing something else, that's good for you, that you are gonna look at when you're done and be like, Oh my god. I'm so glad that I sort of was in the situation to be able to pull the trigger on that. Maybe it'll be creative but maybe it'll just be something you need to do personally for your well-being. 

So yeah that is why I am recording in a new way. I might sound a little different and it's because my usual setup is on the floor and not plugged in. Now that have gotten into this room and got the desk built in my pretty wallpaper up, I need to plug everything back in and set up the mic and all of that stuff. But I hope this sounds good. I think it sounds fine, the playback sounds fine in my ear right now. Who knows, I might have also discovered a much easier way to record just plug into the laptop and not worry that it's a digital connection and just go for it. 

I tell you what I do like recording while I stand up this is the first time I'm recording from a standing position where I can kind of move around. I'm digging it!  It's pushing blood through my body, you can't see me right now, but I'm I'm cagey like a tiger, ready to pounce.

So, there you have it! Maybe you want to embrace not being in your routine because it will lead you to doing something that you've kind of been wanting to do, kind of been nervous about doing, kind of been too busy to do. 

You can find us on Twitter or Instagram: @Creative4evr. Don't forget to be creative this week, even when you have no choice but to just think about it. Later.

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