to Raw Oats, a blog where you will find poorly constructed insights on literature, music, workouts, travel, and everything else that a typical 20-something guy decides to be interested in!
Here’s a cliché to kick off my first post: life moves fast. Raw Oats is an attempt at capturing important thoughts and events that would otherwise be forgotten. All in pursuit of quality, pursuit of a life worth living. Generally, this would make me a lifestyle blogger, something people who know me (and I’m assuming that’s most people reading this) will get a laugh out of. But putting down thoughts and impressions here will reach a larger audience than my usual, very infrequent scribbling in a Moleskine notebook. So why not?
To give you a better picture of what I am about and what to expect here, I will give you a quick snapshot of my living room, where I sit typing this out. I am drinking German coffee, brewed in my Chemex not long ago. I typically follow a regimen of intermittent fasting, but made myself blueberry protein pancakes earlier because it is Sunday (my cheat day). I have fairy lights strung up on the wall facing me that are reminiscent of a University of Michigan sorority house. On that note, perched on a corner table, I have a Crosley record player that, like so many sorority members, I bought at an Urban Outfitters and most recently listened to Halsey’s first album on. I have a stack of back issues of The New Yorker which I enjoy reading almost as much as I enjoy telling people that I am subscribed to The New Yorker.
The wall between the two windows that look down on the street has been covered with blackboard-style wallpaper where recent guests have written inside jokes and drawn on. Paterson, the long poem by William Carlos Williams, sits on the dining table that I have underneath the sorority wall. I have not yet started to read it. Alongside the book, there is a bottle of Frank’s Red Hot that I forgot to move to the kitchen after having dinner last night (chicken breast and broccoli tots, eclectic but it fits my macros). I have three plants in this room, two large ferns and a lone jade plant who has his own name. Dried flowers are in a makeshift vase on the coffee table that sits at the center of the L-shaped couch on which I sit. The couch is gray. It is 9am on a Sunday morning, potentially my favorite time of the entire week. A perfect time to start this blog.
Sundays for me are synonymous with football, but I currently live in Germany so I will need to wait until tonight to watch the games. Actually, daylight savings time kicked in last night, so this day has an extra hour in it. Another reason why I have no excuse not to start this blog today. That and I need the extra hour to tidy my place up a bit and meal prep for the week, though I am not pressed for time. The only thing I have on schedule for the day is a yoga class in two hours. It has become a weekly ritual to walk across the town square to the studio, get a good workout in that aligns with my “active rest day,” relax, and try to fight off the Sunday Scaries.
So there you have it. A short but hopefully telling introduction. Here’s to attempting the upkeep of this site!