Entries categorized as ‘work’
Lil Wayne’s Daily Prison Routine
July 14, 2010 · 7 Comments
Dave Itzkoff calls attention to a blog post by Lil Wayne wherein he describes his daily prison routine:
Wake up around 11AM. Have some coffee. Call my kids, and my wonderful mother. I then shower up. Read fan mail. Have lunch. Back on the phone. Read a book or write some thoughts down. Have dinner. Phone. Pushups. Then I listen to ESPN on the radio. Read the bible, then sleep. That’s my day.
Wayne (née Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr.) is currently serving a one-year prison sentence at Rikers Island for attempted possession of a weapon after a gun was found on his tour bus in 2007.
Last month, he literally phoned in a verse he wanted appended to Drake’s “Light Up.” Best lyric: “Behind bars, but the bars don’t stop / Recording over the phone / I hope the call don’t drop.” Indeed.
(Via.)
Related posts: “100-Year-Old Master,” “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Daily Routine,” “Donald Trump’s Daily Routine,” and “John Waters’s Daily Routine.”
Be a Tortoise
June 16, 2010 · Leave a Comment
Not only in the “slow and steady wins the race” sense, but in the “help others when they’re (upside) down” sense as well.
(Via.)
Categories: endorsements · video · work
John Waters’s Daily Routine
May 26, 2010 · 2 Comments
The lunch he prepared for us was perfect: homemade vegetable soup, tuna-salad sandwiches on chunks of suspiciously healthy-looking bread, and a dessert of berries, followed by coffee. He doesn’t drink, except on Friday nights, when he tends to have fun in biker bars. Mr. Waters’s life is otherwise disciplined. He gets up at 6 a.m. and is usually in bed by 10 p.m. or so: “I’m a Swiss person trapped in an American’s body. I like a very orderly life.”
He’s a meticulous man, too. His library of some 8,000 books is carefully catalogued. He’s a bookworm. “Nothing is more important than an unread library,” he says. Formerly a heavy smoker, he showed me the record he carries of the number of days since he quit. He was on to Day 2,634.
—John Heilpern, “Uncharted Waters,” Vanity Fair, June 2010.
Categories: books · quotes · smoking · work
Tagged: John Waters
Don’t Go Looking for Office Jobs
May 3, 2010 · Leave a Comment
Maybe the most important piece of advice I can give to those of you heading into the world of film is that as long as you are able-bodied, as long as you can make money yourself, do not go looking for office jobs to pay the rent. I would also be very wary of excruciatingly useless bottom-rung secretarial jobs in film-production companies. Go out to where the real world is, go work as a bouncer in a sex-club, a warden in a lunatic asylum or in a slaughterhouse. Walk on foot, learn languages, learn a craft or trade that has nothing to do with cinema. Filmmaking must have experience of life at its foundation.
—Werner Herzog, Herzog on Herzog
Categories: movies · quotes · work
Tagged: Werner Herzog
I Will Go the Library and Play With the Books
April 26, 2010 · Leave a Comment
Serendipity, browsing, screwing around: one of the most fruitful methodologies I know! I’ve always wanted to write a grant proposal with this description in the “methodology” section: “I will go the library and play with the books.”
Hear, hear.
Related post: “Collect Everything.”
Labor Has Its Own Schedule
April 9, 2010 · 1 Comment
Work is what we do by the hour. It begins and ends at a specific time and, if possible, we do it for money. Welding car bodies on an assembly line is work; washing dishes, computing taxes, walking the rounds in a psychiatric ward, picking asparagus – these are work. Labor, on the other hand, sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it’s harder to quantify … Writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms – these are labors.
Work is an intended activity that is accomplished through the will. A labor can be intended but only to the extent of doing the groundwork, or of not doing things that would clearly prevent the labor. Beyond that, labor has its own schedule. Things get done, but we often have the odd sense we didn’t do them. Paul Goodman worte in a journal once, “I have recently written a few good poems. But I have no feeling that I wrote them.” That is the declaration of a laborer. Like the shoemaker, we wake up to discover the fruits of labor. And labor, because it sets its own pace, is usually accompianed by idelness, leisure, even sleep.
—Lewis Hyde, The Gift
Donald Trump’s Daily Routine
April 1, 2010 · 2 Comments
I play it very loose. I don’t carry a briefcase. I try not to schedule too many meetings. I leave my door open. You can’t be imaginative or entrepreneurial if you’ve got too much structure. I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops. There is no typical week in my life. I wake up most mornings very early, around six, and spend the first hour or so of each day reading the morning newspapers. I usually arrive at my office by nine, and I get on the phone. There’s rarely a day with fewer than fifty calls, and often it runs to over a hundred. In between, I have at least a dozen meetings. The majority occur on the spur of the moment, and few of them last longer than fifteen minutes. I rarely stop for lunch. I leave my office by six-thiry, but I frequently make calls from home until midnight, and all weekend long.
—Donald Trump, Trump: The Art of the Deal
Related reading: “How to Unschedule Your Work and Enjoy Guilt-Free Play”
