the difference between

I have been thinking about 

the difference between

thinking you are the puzzle

and 

thinking you are a piece, 

thinking you are the tapestry

and 

thinking you are a thread, 

thinking you are the body

and 

thinking you are a member of it.

the song of the temporary car

My temporary car sings me soothing songs of welcome when I get into it and when I turn it off, it caresses me with a few chords of farewell.  It is huge, with a cavernous trunk and four doors.  The rear-view mirror is magically treated to prevent glare from sun or high beam behind one.  It has digital readouts of the temperature inside and outside.  There are lots of numbers displayed.  The radio is touch screen activated.  It has power everything; I am careful not to accidentally hit any buttons or knobs or levers because I have no idea what they will do.  (One of them is probably a seat ejection button.)  The temporary car is quiet and smooth.  It accelerates and breaks with no stomping required.  It does not even have keys.  It has no rust of dings from impolite other people's doors.  Did I mention that the trunk could comfortably sleep at least 3?  They give you these courtesy cars at the dealership to tempt you with luxury.  Don't you want a better car than the broken one you are bringing in to be fixed? they ask with soothing siren songs.  Don't you want this car?  And I say No.  I can't even figure out how to work the air.  I don't care about or need all the fancy knobs and levers and numbers.  And if I got knocked off a bridge into the water, and the electrical system shorted out, I would die trapped in this fancy temporary car tomb.  No, I don't really want this car.  I thank god for my low-tech car.  Yes, my cheap little car has two spots of rust on it (curse you, hail storm), and driving it is a small wrestling match, and it hurts to roll down the windows, and it has been mercilessly dinged by other cars in parking lot battles, but the 6-year-old I took to see Peter Pan said the seat-belt buckling chime sounded like Tinkerbell, and this car is mine until death do us part, and luxury has never tempted me away from practicality.  (Also, I know that my little car has no eject button and that if I end up in the water, I can crank and open my way out to safety.)  My car is my own, and I will not be tempted away by another.

Let it Go: college magazines from 2004-2014 edition

Why is this still so hard?  I have about a decade's worth of my undergraduate college's magazines that it's difficult to throw away.  This reluctance makes no sense.  It's not as if I am going to read them.  It's not as if someone else needs them.  Recycling them so they can be something useful like toilet paper seems obviously preferable to having them lie around gathering dust.   

It's just that it feels so final, like another acknowledgement that I have given up my dream of teaching there.  As if, if I were to apply again, they would get up to the contract stage and then say, "Do you have all your alumni magazines?  Did you read them all cover to cover" and then when I said, "No," they would have to regretfully inform me that since I didn't keep the  magazines and now couldn't read them all cover to cover, they couldn't hire me.  As if my problems with them theologically and otherwise would even let me get to that point.   

Time to let go.  Maybe a symbolic, purposeful burning ceremony would be better, but I'm pretty sure my condo association has a rule against that.  To the recycling bin with ye!  May you be made into bicycles for the poor in other countries or toilet paper or printer paper or something else people will use.  Seriously.

Wrestling the Sandman and other distractions

Slowly, oh so slowly, I have been edging back my getting in to bed time and getting out of bed time.  Now that I am not responding to student emails for three hours every night, I can once again try to tackle the sleep dilemma.  I don't sleep well (years of chronic pain mess with all aspects of your life), and I've been told that we've done all we can messing with all the sleep-related side of things.  The only way for it to get better is if we address the pain/neurological side of things.  Since that's not going well, I'm trying to find a balance between ruthless adherence to keeping the time in bed short (6 hours) to encourage my body to be efficient with its time in bed and just giving in to my body's exhausted demand for more time not doing anything (sometimes 12 hours).

If I only allow myself 6-7 hours of time in bed, I am a bit more clear-headed, but I am also very short-tempered.  If I let myself stay in bed as long as my body appears to want (10-12 hours), I am much more mellow but also much more muddled.  I'm shooting for somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 1/2-9 hours in bed since then I won't feel like I'm wasting all sorts of extra time trying to recharge batteries that won't charge, but I also won't feel like I'm demanding silly things from my already overworked body.

It's not easy, but I have been making progress the past week, at the expense of everything else.  I think I've spent too much time trying to do everything at once with a brain that shorts out when it only has one thing to do.  I'm going to try to tackle things one at a time and really put my foot down about that one thing.  Other things will suffer, and that will be okay.  Really.  My to do list does not contain anything that will cause world-wide problems if I fail to do it this week.  Priorities.

Willpower, go!

Priorities: rearranging a life

I just got offered a class to teach at a local university, and I find myself suddenly faced with a priority crunch. 

I was going to audition for a singing group that rehearses Monday nights.  Tuesday nights, I have a writing group.  Wednesday nights I lead a small group from church.  Thursday night is when the anime club I belong to meets.  Friday night through Saturday night, I clean and collapse.  Sunday is two flavors of church and  sometimes a writing group and spending time with a friend.  There is no way I can do all that, handle a new full time job, and juggle a part-time job on top of that.

I am inclined to just scrap it all and focus on the jobs this semester. 

• M: I haven't auditioned yet, but even if I do, I might not make it, so maybe I should table this one for now.  Or maybe I should go for it and pray that if it's a bad idea, I won't get in.  Will I be in any shape to audition next year?  Probably not after a whole year off, but there's no way I can fit the a cappella choir I've sung with for the past six years into the new job schedule in the first six months. 
• T: I've been having trouble getting people to show up to the writing group, and I was only really doing it to force myself to do research on publishing, which I don't really care about, because if I don't have teaching experience, I need some pieces published to potentially get hired, which I already am, so this is something I don't need to torture myself with anymore. 
• W: My small group wants to meet on another night, so this could be a good time to disengage from that commitment. 
• Th: I don't NEED the anime club, and they don't need me since I really don't contribute much of anything (hooray for passive entertainment), but I do enjoy watching things on a big screen and not being required to be in charge. 

On the other hand, in college I learned that you should start out with way more than you can handle, and you can whittle down as you go, deciding what's important.  Of course, I don't have that youthful energy anymore to keep it up for a whole quarter before disengaging . . .

How do you prioritize?  Do you have any advice on what I should sacrifice and what I might want to consider keeping?

Not to be a lawyer

There was a time in sixth grade when I thought I might want to be a lawyer.  It made sense at the time.  I liked to argue, and I liked to win (by having the best argument).  I also ran headlong into some injustice issues with my child-hating teacher and school princi"pal" who was apparently not my pal but my secret arch-nemesis, only I never knew. 

Anyway, I stopped considering law as a profession when I realized that sometimes you have to defend scumbags or people who are guilty but saying they're innocent, but you have to do it to the best of your abilities because it's your job.  No thanks.  Also, truth and justice don't always prevail.  If I couldn't clearly be on the side of truth and justice, I didn't want to play the game.

I don't really know what got me remembering that, but I think it had something to do with my lawyer for my OWCP case not emailing me back like he said he would.  He doesn't usually get back to me clearly and directly because he's a lawyer, and he knows the import of words as proof committed to paper.  He'd rather leave me hanging.  I can't really hold it against him.  We know my case has no chance, truth be d----d, so I guess I forgive him for giving up. 

Some games you can't win, no matter how well you play, so why play?   What a thoroughly reprehensible, practical, adult thing to say.  "Give me back my youth!"


So, do you remember a certain thing you wanted to be when you grew up and when you decided to cross it off the list and why?  (Sometimes it's really weird things that seem unrelated, but those make great stories.  :)

Layering a Life: Adjusting to a New Schedule

Did you ever go to the city pool in the summer?  Someone would drop you off, you would go change and then go out to the pool and be faced with the biggest dilemma of the day: how to get in the water.  There were two ways. 

1. Go over toward the deep end and fling yourself into the pool, instantly getting wet and experiencing an excruciating moment of freezing cold.  
2. Start at the shallowest part and ease your way into the pool, then walk slowly deeper, letting your body adjust slowly.

In college, I definitely went with option 1.  It exhausts me just thinking about it . . . 

After college, I got hurt.  Suddenly, I was losing energy.  The things I had to do (graduate school, work) took up more energy than I had.  I was losing concentration and mental capacity and memory.  I couldn't trust myself to commit to a whole lot outside of what was necessary.  I was treading water. 

Now that I have my graduate degree, I have that time and some of that energy available.  I'm using it for job hunting, writing, submitting writing for publication, conducting research, church involvement, alumni organizations, blogging, and other things.

To avoid overwhelming myself, I'm doing it in layers.  I try one thing; once I get that into my schedule, I try adding something else.  Eventually, I will run out of energy to spend, and then I will have to stop at that my level of involvement and maybe back off a bit.  (In fact, I think this little bout of the flu may be telling me I've already reached my limit.  Boo.)

However, there's one more layer I'm going to add: replying to comments on my blogs.  Once I show that I can maintain this post-a-day (or a-week) pace without exhausting myself, my time, and my ideas too much, I'm going to start figuring out how to improve the blog designs and quickly respond to comments. 

But first, more orange juice.  And maybe some chicken soup.  (Not because of health value, per se, but because liquid is good for sick singers.)


How did you get into the pool back in the day?  How do you approach new situations now?  (And how would you get into the pool now? :)

Wanting to lose

Like many people, I am pretty desperately looking for a job. I'd like to get into teaching full time this year--though it's unlikely for a newly-minted MFA with no formal teaching experience (since it's hard to get the teaching experience without the master's)--so I've been living this last year thinking of experiences here as my last.

My last winter here with all the moronic drivers. My last months with the view out the store's huge picture windows. My last spring concert with the choir. My last near-death icy driving experience(s) on Highway XX. My last year in retail hell.

Now that it's looking increasingly unlikely that I'll get my desired job, I'm letting myself think about the other side.

Some things I wouldn't mind being here for:

• another state fair free admission and a free meal for volunteering at my old church's booth!
• another autumn leaves turning and falling and leaving skeletons behind
• another year with the friends and mentors from my graduate program we've got work to do on the alumni group
• another Christmas concert how I love that little cathedral

Maybe it's okay to think like that, to ignore the whole poverty issue and the looming personal financial crisis and think about nature and people and beauty and how I will lose them.

Meanwhile, I'm working as hard as I can to make sure I don't see these any of these things again, and that makes me a bit sad. I would leave it all in a heartbeat in exchange for a new job. Practicality can be heartless.