This Joyful Noise

Wireless at last, my desk overflowing with scribbled notes on tiny scraps of paper, I’m setting out to make this pursuit work. Today all I’ve done is change colors again, though I’m still not happy with them, and add a snazzy picture, which I’m more happy with although I assume by the time this is all over it’ll be gone as well. No matter. I’m looking at websites that offer business cards and reading Apple’s instructions on listing a podcast in iTunes. I’m comparing myself to everyone else again and getting impatient with my findings. Some day soon I will own several magazines and a cable channel, and I’ll finance spinoff television programs featuring my favorite people, the ones I listened to and read for inspiration on my way to the top.

It will undoubtedly be a source of humor and some considerable embarassment years from now to reflect on the great efforts I made branding myself before I had actually produced anything of value. I will tell the story gracefully, fully aware of the absurdity of this period in my life. I’ll recount how late one night, dissatisfied with my progress towards my goal of becoming a world traveler, a well known and widely respected public intellectual, and a brilliant and acclaimed storyteller, I jumped into action and changed the name of my rarely updated web log from A Joyful Noise to This Joyful Noise!

Lest you scoff, this was not the extent of my activity this evening. Oh no. I also set up a gmail account (thisjoyfulnoise@gmail.com), and asked politely for someone named Sharon to give up the blogspot address she’s holding (thisjoyfulnoise.blogspot.com), and then gleefully explored what font I would choose I were to order hundreds of business cards bearing my new brand.

This Joyful Noise, unlike clunky old A Joyful Noise, sports a snappy subtitle, which I have very cleverly (if I do say so myslef) included on the reverse side of my imaginary business cards. My brand’s message – light, heat, sound – is simultaneously too precious to stand and too weighty to bear. If I do what I hope to and all goes very, very well, it will likely be a decade or more before I produce something that lives up to such a portentious and epic signature. Still, I have nothing better. It comes earnestly out of an attempt to explain what it is I want to do. Listening to Astronomy Cast, a weekly facts based journey through the cosmos, has me keenly aware of the unimaginable emptiness, darkness, quiet and cold of the vast majority of the universe. Doing yoga at Yoga To The People, a donation based studio in the East Village, has made me keenly aware of life’s incredible capacity for producing heat. Standing in my lake of sweat, watching the windows fog, my chest feels like a coal fueled furnace and my mind turns to the chemistry of energy storage and use in the human body, the wonder of willed work, and, always, the unfathomable context of our efforts. Vast distances, lengths of time, silences. I name the sources of heat in our universe, few and far between, all of them wondrous: nuclear reactions in our stars, gravity’s pressure inside our planet, and in our cells, bonds breaking, decisions being made, life out of lifelessness.

I say we’re a noisy, hot, curious and hard working species, never satisfied, never finished: a stunningly beautiful thing in a still and empty universe. My feelings on the subject of humans are precious and weighty, and I see no way around that. I won’t be transcribing all my dribbling wonder at the world here; those who have encountered one of my rants on this topic will tell you, I’m very enthusiastic but rarely coherent or disciplined enough to be interesting. The blog and the podcast will, however, take as their official subject humans, the human project, the human experience, if only to provide cover for absolutely any story I feel like reproducing. In that sense, I’m aiming at capturing a little of the light, heat and noise made by my fellow wise apes, and it’s such an innocent and gradiose intention that my cuteness feels appropriate.

It makes sense. I have, after all, never been a very cool person. I’m too excited, too earnest and too invested to be cool. I dance at parties. I think economists say more interesting things than any other kind of person. I try to write a blog. I declare this rebranding officially underway. May we soon have some content to fill the empty vessel of This Joyful Noise.

He Becomes A Nudnik

Mr. Singer’s admonition has me paralyzed about writing here, which is no good, seeing as how I’ve decided to try to write every day. Yesterday I let myself off the hook because I ended up working 14 hours straight. Today it was quite simply too hot to think. Proposal for a work of conceptual art in the form of a blog: every day, I will post an excuse as to why I cannot post on that day.

Tonight I did headstand. I was so proud, looking in the mirror during the class, of my broad shoulders, my collar bone, my heart. My ego was basking, rejoicing, as everyone in class watched me balance on my head, move my legs through a series of postures, and breathe loudly.

In both writing and yoga, I have to both utilize and get past this huge ego of mine. It won’t let me admit fault. It also won’t let me reveal faults to others. It doesn’t react kindly to criticism. Sometimes it seems to be holding me back – in fear of failure and embarrassment, or in certainly that I don’t have to change, don’t need to be challenged, don’t deserve to be disagreed with – more than any other part of me. But there’s something about that flood of love for myself, prideful and arrogant though it may be, that I need to listen to. It wants great things for me. It makes big plans and trusts that I can follow through. It takes great pride in hard work, rewarding me for my effort with a renewed certainly in my awesomeness.

Yoga is great at putting you right in your work, your challenges, as you simultaneously hold and release, strive for more and accept where you are, surrender and strengthen. There probably hasn’t been a class I’ve taken that I haven’t come face to face with this ego of mine, listened to it, mindfully ignored it, and gotten to know it better. So I want to spend a lot more time on the mat, and also writing here, where my work – about when and how to include the first person in my writing, what tone to set, what words to chose – will be uncomfortably and productively with me at all times.