Apparently, I’m Dehydrated

I write at the same wooden desk I used as a child. It now sits in a peculiar little alcove tucked into our bedroom, an out-of-the-way space almost exactly the right size for the desk and an old Queen Anne-style chair that once sat in my parents’ living room. I’ve piled throws onto the chair and turned the alcove into the place where I write, edit books, dream up cover concepts and spend far too much time wondering whether anyone has bought one of my books on Amazon since the last time I checked three minutes ago.

The setup would probably not photograph particularly well for one of those articles about beautiful writing spaces. A 24-inch television sits on top of the desk, and The Tudors plays on a nearly continuous loop while I work. I have watched the entire series approximately twelve times, so at any given moment Henry VIII is marrying, divorcing or executing somebody in the background while I move commas around or decide whether a title needs to be half an inch lower on a book cover. Poor Catherine Howard. She was so young that by the twelfth viewing I have begun feeling personally protective of her, although there is obviously very little I can do about the outcome at this point.

The rest of the desk is an equally accurate representation of my life. There is a vanilla-neroli candle from TJ Maxx because I refuse to participate in pumpkin-spice season. I like pumpkin perfectly well, but pumpkin spice does not smell like pumpkin, and I don’t want it in my coffee, my candles or anything else people decide needs to smell like October.

There is also a very large bottle of Tylenol that originally contained 500 caplets and has apparently become permanent desk equipment. A bookcase sits to my left, there is currently a fork on the desk that I apparently failed to return to the kitchen yesterday, and usually about six dogs are asleep at my feet.

In the corner of all this sits my planner. It is German, which may explain why it has absolutely no interest in getting to know me, and this is one of the things I appreciate most about it. German planners don’t mess around. Mine provides dates, sensible spaces for appointments and enough room for notes. It lets me get to the business of business without asking how I feel about any of it. It has never once inquired about my hydration, demanded that I identify my three priorities for the day or asked me to record something I’m grateful for before proceeding to tomorrow.

I had not realized quite how much I appreciated this arrangement until I went back to TJ Maxx yesterday. I had seen something there about a week earlier that I thought would look good in my writing nook, and after thinking about it for several days, I decided to see whether it was still there. I’ve been wanting some Halloween pillows and a few decorations for the desk, and I found what I had gone back for. Apparently one of the benefits of writing at your childhood desk is that you eventually reach an age when you can decorate it however you please.

The checkout line was another matter. Only a couple of registers were open, and the line wrapped all the way back toward the candy. Every so often the computerized voice would announce that another register was available, and we would all inch forward before settling into another long stretch of waiting. I should mention that I did not buy any candy. Considering how long I was forced to stand beside it, I believe that deserves at least a modest amount of recognition.

Eventually I reached the section where TJ Maxx had placed journals and planners beside the checkout line, which is dangerous territory for me. I love them, and I have shelves filled with half-used journals and planners to prove it. I will buy one, use it faithfully for a while and then encounter another one that is prettier and become convinced that this is the planner that will finally organize my entire life. I apparently remain optimistic despite years of evidence to the contrary.

I picked up one that was particularly beautiful and opened it. There they were: eight little water droplets waiting for me to fill them in as I drank my eight glasses of water for the day. I suppose I’m supposed to color each one in much like filling in the little bubbles on the ACT or SAT, except I already knew I would fail miserably. If someone designed a planner with eight little coffee cups, I could fill those in and probably ask whether there were additional spaces available. Plain water is another matter. I already know I don’t drink enough of it, and I don’t need a beautiful bound volume preserving the evidence.

I picked up another planner and found more water droplets, and then another offered essentially the same arrangement. Apparently the stationery industry has reached a consensus that my hydration requires supervision. Readers of I Pee When I Sneeze and Other Midlife Observations may recognize that this is not my first encounter with a planner that wants to know how much water I’ve had. I wrote about it in the book, and I had hoped perhaps the stationery industry and I might eventually reach some mutually agreeable boundaries. We have not.

The planners weren’t satisfied with knowing what I drank. They also wanted my three priorities for the day. If I had filled in those spaces honestly yesterday, my first would have been to write an essay somebody might actually want to read. My second would have been checking my Amazon KDP dashboard approximately 78 times. KDP is the behind-the-scenes platform where Amazon authors can see their book sales and Kindle Unlimited pages read update throughout the day. I apparently believe that someone may have bought one of my books or read another few pages in the three minutes since I last checked. Occasionally someone actually has, which is unfortunate because that only reinforces the behavior.

My third priority would have been making it through another day without acquiring another dog. This is more important than it may sound because the balance of power in our household has already shifted, and it is not in favor of the humans. So there were my three honest priorities: write something worth reading, find out whether anybody is reading what I’ve already written, and don’t bring home another dog. None of the planners seemed designed with those particular goals in mind.

The irony of writing a book about slowing down while checking a sales dashboard 78 times a day is not lost on me, but maybe that contradiction is part of what bothers me about these planners. They aren’t content to help us remember where we need to be. They seem to want to help us become better at being alive.

A good portion of the pages I looked at was devoted to tracking water, priorities, habits, goals and gratitude, leaving comparatively little room for the appointments and notes I actually want a planner to hold. I remember when a planner’s job was to remind me that I had a dentist appointment Thursday at two. Now Thursday apparently also requires hydration goals, three major accomplishments and an end-of-day assessment of whether I appreciated it sufficiently. My German planner would consider all of this outside the scope of the contract.

I was prepared to dismiss the gratitude question along with everything else until I looked at the woman directly in front of me. She was using a mobility chair and had laid the clothes she was buying across her lap, using it as a shopping basket. I knew nothing about her circumstances, but seeing her made me suddenly conscious of something I had spent the previous half hour taking completely for granted: I could walk.

I had been irritated about standing in that line for so long, yet I could shift my weight when my feet got tired, walk over to inspect the planners, carry my own purchases and eventually walk to the register and out to my car. The woman ahead of me was navigating the store differently, using a mobility chair, and the contrast changed the way I saw my own complaint. If somebody had handed me one of those planners at that moment and asked what I was grateful for, I would not have needed much time to think about it. I was grateful that I could stand, and I was grateful that I could walk.

That didn’t suddenly convince me that every day needs a gratitude box. It reminded me that gratitude sometimes arrives without being assigned. I had gone into TJ Maxx for Halloween decorations, not to contemplate my health, but for a few minutes in that ridiculously long checkout line I became aware of something my body does for me every day without receiving much acknowledgment from me at all.

Maybe that’s what bothers me about all the tracking. Water matters, priorities matter and gratitude certainly matters. What I question is the idea that every worthwhile part of an ordinary day needs to be measured, recorded and evaluated before we can consider the day properly lived. We already count steps, calories, hours of sleep, glasses of water, tasks completed, goals reached and habits maintained. We can reach the end of an otherwise perfectly decent Tuesday and discover that, according to the available data, we have underperformed. I don’t particularly want my planner joining the committee.

I genuinely wonder whether people fill all of these things in. Perhaps there are women whose planners remain beautifully completed from January through December, every water droplet colored, every priority identified and every gratitude box thoughtfully filled. My own history suggests that January will begin in beautiful handwriting, March will become sporadic, and by May I will have written a telephone number sideways across a Tuesday with absolutely no recollection of whose number it is. Eventually I will see another beautiful planner and decide the problem was obviously the old planner.

There is another consideration: I lose things, and I’m not entirely certain I want a portable record of my hydration, priorities and private thoughts floating around in the world. Imagine one of these planners falling into the hands of my enemies. I say that jokingly, but after paging through all that supposedly revealing personal information, about the most damaging thing they could learn is that I don’t drink nearly enough water. I can live with that.

I came home from TJ Maxx without a new planner and returned to my little alcove, where Henry VIII was still making catastrophic marital decisions and the dogs had reclaimed the floor around my chair. The fork was still on the desk, my enormous bottle of Tylenol remained within reach, and my German planner was sitting quietly in the corner exactly where I had left it. It had no questions for me and seemed perfectly content to let me get back to work.

I think the Germans have this one right. I’ll tell my planner where I need to be and when I need to be there, and it can remember those things for me. Everything else is outside the scope of the contract, especially what I’m drinking. That is none of its damn business.