NoteBook 1 : Title 1

My six months of standing upright. 

It started, like most things, with an article I read. It was about how Ernest Hemingway, Winston Churchill, Carol Lewis and many other writers, like myself I would like to think, didn't sit down when working, but stood. The whole day. 

This made sense to me, and is something that I always suspected is the way the Lord wanted things. Writing is possibly one of the most disturbingly dangerous activities for your health known to man. Because you lose yourself spectacularly, focusing mostly on keeping your fingers moving, and your brain - and not much else. 

And unless you're a smoker, you never get up. You just keep on going. Until the cows come home, or your alarm goes off. Off course right from the start you make sure you don't need to get up. You surround yourself with various unhealthy snacks, salty things to counteract the chocolaty things. Drinking things in ice buckets and flasks of hot coffee. Hot to counteract the cold, and vice versa. But not too much, because the one thing you cannot bare, is to get up to go to the toilet. So you develop bladder muscels that would put Charles Atlas' resistance training to shame. I can clench for hours on end. 

Because an idea doesn't wait for pee. And the rhythm of writing is a cruel master. 

So I read this article about how when you don't spend your day standing, you are going to die - in the next three days. The writer of the article got so scared he immediately forked out $400 to buy himself a standing desk thingy. I don't have $400 to waste, so I bought three boxes of books for R250 at the Charity Shop. Some nice books. An entire Children's Encyclopedia, some lovely red leather Uncle Arthur Bedtime Stories and a crapload of Reader's Digest abridged volumes. And then I built myself a stand-up work station, on top of my normal desk at work.

This was yesterday. Today my calves regret it. And I have been ridiculed by co-workers more than I would have liked, but I am not going to die within the next three days. In fact, I am going to report on my progress made right here, for the next 6 months. Until December, when I go on holiday. 

What I can report: 

My calves ache. My hamstrings, I believe they are called, also aches. My mind is however much better. Because strangely enough, when you stand, your mind thinks that you have to do something. Also, you can't stand in front of your desk doing nothing. That would just be loitering. So you're kind of forced to work, or do something. Or actively read something. It's a whole other ballgame when you sit. You don't have to do something. You can just sit. But if you do nothing standing, it defeats the purpose, and you feel useless. 

So here I am, standing, and writing this blog. Something I thought I would never do. The question is, what am I going to do once I've posted this? 

I'll keep you posted.