Beating the Staycation

(This post was written 2 weekends ago and edited more recently)

I’m watching baseball from my bed while writing in my journal. After dinner, I’ll probably play some StarCraft against the computer, then get ready for bed around 11-ish to get plenty of rest before early morning of work. This is a solid evening

Incidentally, I’m also in Anaheim for a library conference, though I may as well be at home. Other than not having ESPN, what I described sounds like a perfectly achievable & relaxing evening after work. This evening, however, is very atypical. In a whole week, I might catch at most 1 baseball game while preparing dinner. I don’t play much StarCraft anymore and haven’t written in my journal for weeks, and even then, it was sporadic. Somehow, it takes almost 400 miles and a hard bed to get me to where I should normally be.

I have heard a lot about “staycations” as a cheap, travel-free vacation. We all have those local attractions that we never get around to because we could do it at any time (but never do). And travel always involves away-toilet situations and added exhaustion from moving around. The staycation seems like an ideal way to take time off and enjoy the world around you. I, however, can’t imagine that working out. With a day off, I would likely read more reddit, find something on netflix to watch, and maybe watch some StarCraft before going to sleep. In fact, that sounds exactly like my regular 2 day vacations: weekends.

I always imagined the way to beat the staycation funk would be to add constraints. Here are a few I’ve considered:

• eat out for every meal. As much as I love cooking, it actually can be a lot of work, and there’s a long list of recommendations I have yet to follow up on
• no internet allowed. That’s the world I need to get away from
• don’t look at the time for an entire week. Do things roughly by the sun and my own body clock, eating and sleeping as necessary
• try to do everything outdoors

It would be interesting to see how I would adapt to the different circumstances. The changes aren’t necessarily to discovery new experiences I couldn’t have imagined before, but more to force myself into something different. Without some change in my environment, I’m likely to fall back onto the same habits as usual, without the refreshing vacation feel.

But why stop there? A hallmark Kevin move I’ve mentioned is planning significantly ahead of time to trap myself into doing something that I would otherwise lose motivation for. Maybe I just need to plan to do more planning of things like trips to the city or zombie movie marathons. Although I’m attracted to the life of whimsy where I remain open-minded and stumble across an array of different experiences, the truth is that those are the moments where I am most likely to fall back on my old ways.

In the end, a vacation is a break, no facebook pictures required. A coworker mentioned that on a recent weekend cruise, she spent a significant time in her cabin watching TV. I thought that was odd, except that on a family vacation, the “kids” generation ended up playing cards a lot. Could we have done this at home? Absolutely. But we wouldn’t have.

So like usual, my blog is filled with more stories of life as usual. I played about 4 to 6 hours of StarCraft instead of galavanting around Disneyland with Mickey Mouse. My refreshing experience was crushing a Zealot-Immortal push I’ve been losing to for a long time by scouting and making Roaches instead of defending with only Queens and Zerglings. I might have gone on months without figuring that out without a break.