Seriously, I think that in turning 30 my body decided that we're done with alcohol. Two beers has me very toasty. Three beers, as I discovered Friday night, has me near-blackout drunk and hungover much of the next day. Seriously, what the hell? Two weeks ago, I handled three beers no problem. Last Friday night, at my 30th birthday party, I had 3 beers, ended up hiccupping most of the night and sort of hungover in the morning. Last night, 3 beers and BOOM. Liver, I am disappoint.
As an aftereffect of getting accidentally way more drunk than I meant to on Friday, Brownie and I had a talk yesterday about me/drinking. Getting drunk like I did was absolutely nothing I wanted to do on Friday night. I meant to just go out, have a couple of beers with Brownie, and then we were going to make fish and chips and watch the Olympics and have copious amounts of sexx0rs. This sounded like a fantastic idea. Anyway, so this all ended up not having because the beer made me way drunker than I would have guessed it would, and Brownie has taken from this the idea that I'm not being careful enough about drinking and that this lack of care is a) self-destructive and b) a sign of how stressed and unhappy I've been. His solution is that I should go talk to someone about it. I generally figure I should talk to someone anyway, but I don't know that I see the hangover yesterday as symptomatic of anything other than I need to institute new limits for myself, since the old limits apparently lead me to being non-functional. Non-functional after drinking was barely acceptable in college. At this point it's beyond unacceptable. And I really hate that pretty much all I did yesterday was stare in rapt horror at CNN while waiting to see what the tsunami would do to Hawaii.
Anyway, so I will go talk to someone in the therapy sense of things, because if nothing else my attempts at dealing with myself and exercising my way out of depression have done nothing whatsoever and I'd be glad to get a bit more help. Preferably of the non-drug kind, since my last encounter with antidepressants lead to an extreme and total loss of my sex drive. Now that Brownie's finally getting his back in the post-dissertation era of his life, I don't want to lose mine to some drug that locks it up in a straightjacket somewhere in the back of my mind.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Friday, February 26, 2010
Snowpocalypse 3: This is Getting OLD
It's snowing again. We're at 8 inches and counting. And dumping. And dumping, and whirling flying spinning pausing, dropping straight to the ground and piling up even more. The gusts don't seem to know what way they want to go anymore and so the poor snowflakes are getting blasted around everywhichway imaginable. I think. They were earlier, anyway, but at this point between the wind and the sheer amount of snow coming down, it's more or less impossible to see across the street. At this point, there's this awesomely mauve-ish radiant glow coming in from outside, as the reflections of all the streetlights in the area are bouncing around through all the snow - I can't see any of the streetlights individually anymore except for the one directly across the street, but they're having this cumulative effect of lighting everything up so that it's much brighter than I'd think it normally should be at 12:30am. Why this has decided to go mauve is beyond me.
I'm teaching Baudrillard tomorrow, which I haven't yet re-read. I have roughly 12 microthemes left to grade. I've spent the day pixel farming, watching the Olympics, foruming, playing around with my new MyPlate account in an attempt to get a vague idea as to what the hell I actually eat, and killing my arms with Jillian Michaels. Nothing productive on the teaching front other answering emails from my students wherein I promise to meet them tomorrow after class to discuss paper topics, the which class I am currently thinking may be cancelled because (due to aforementioned whiteout) I am not sure my car will make it all the way to campus. My beloved little car is not happy with the snow.
The food tracking thing will probably last about a week. I'm just sort of curious to see what sorts of food I eat through the week. The tracker is counting calories (hate) and then breaking up my food intake into carbs, fat and protein. In two days, I've figured out that I apparently kick ass at getting enough fiber, but it (the tracker will from here out only be "it") doesn't think I'm eating enough carbs, which I find near-riotously funny because I often feel like carbs are 95% of my food intake (which I don't think is bad). I'm uncomfortable with the calorie-counting thing, however. The way it works, there's a baseline caloric intake that it thinks I should be eating every day: it starts with that total and then subtracts out everything I tell it I've eaten. If I work out, it adds a few calories back in for me so that it can subtract them back out later. I suppose this is probably the way to go about getting a general idea of what I eat, but I hate thinking about calorie levels. I've known too many people who have been calorie-obsessed, and I feel like having a calorie count in front of me is like trying to get myself to think of my food in terms of numbers rather than in terms of "red veggies are good for me, so I should have them." Like with a potato, for instance: when I see a potato, I think of how potatoes have shittons of potassium along with the carbs and are therefore good to eat before I'm planning a major workout (mashed potatoes at dinner tend to make for superawesomesauce running fuel the next morning). However, I know too many people who look at potatoes and think only of the carbs, that carbs are bad (RRRRRRRRR, South Beach Diet), and that the potato should therefore not be consumed (or, more unfortunately, that the potato is eaten guiltily). I'm oversimplifying this a lot, I know, and I know that the people for whom food=numbers rather than enjoyment tend to have that attitude toward food for numerous reasons, not all of which are bad, some of which are very good. At the moment I'm feeling guilty for a half-piece of cheesecake that I ate for dessert because it put me over my MyPlate caloric allotment for the day. I hate feeling that guilt, especially because I don't feel like I should be feeling it.
I guess my point here is that food for me isn't about numbers, and I don't want it to become that way, because for me that type of thinking tends to be unhealthy for me personally. If I think of food in terms of bright colors and nutrients within rather than calories, I eat much better and with much less guilt. So I'll track my food intake for a week or two to see roughly what I eat, and then I'm stopping it, because I can already sort of feel the numbers game running in my mind and I don't want it to get ingrained.
I'm teaching Baudrillard tomorrow, which I haven't yet re-read. I have roughly 12 microthemes left to grade. I've spent the day pixel farming, watching the Olympics, foruming, playing around with my new MyPlate account in an attempt to get a vague idea as to what the hell I actually eat, and killing my arms with Jillian Michaels. Nothing productive on the teaching front other answering emails from my students wherein I promise to meet them tomorrow after class to discuss paper topics, the which class I am currently thinking may be cancelled because (due to aforementioned whiteout) I am not sure my car will make it all the way to campus. My beloved little car is not happy with the snow.
The food tracking thing will probably last about a week. I'm just sort of curious to see what sorts of food I eat through the week. The tracker is counting calories (hate) and then breaking up my food intake into carbs, fat and protein. In two days, I've figured out that I apparently kick ass at getting enough fiber, but it (the tracker will from here out only be "it") doesn't think I'm eating enough carbs, which I find near-riotously funny because I often feel like carbs are 95% of my food intake (which I don't think is bad). I'm uncomfortable with the calorie-counting thing, however. The way it works, there's a baseline caloric intake that it thinks I should be eating every day: it starts with that total and then subtracts out everything I tell it I've eaten. If I work out, it adds a few calories back in for me so that it can subtract them back out later. I suppose this is probably the way to go about getting a general idea of what I eat, but I hate thinking about calorie levels. I've known too many people who have been calorie-obsessed, and I feel like having a calorie count in front of me is like trying to get myself to think of my food in terms of numbers rather than in terms of "red veggies are good for me, so I should have them." Like with a potato, for instance: when I see a potato, I think of how potatoes have shittons of potassium along with the carbs and are therefore good to eat before I'm planning a major workout (mashed potatoes at dinner tend to make for superawesomesauce running fuel the next morning). However, I know too many people who look at potatoes and think only of the carbs, that carbs are bad (RRRRRRRRR, South Beach Diet), and that the potato should therefore not be consumed (or, more unfortunately, that the potato is eaten guiltily). I'm oversimplifying this a lot, I know, and I know that the people for whom food=numbers rather than enjoyment tend to have that attitude toward food for numerous reasons, not all of which are bad, some of which are very good. At the moment I'm feeling guilty for a half-piece of cheesecake that I ate for dessert because it put me over my MyPlate caloric allotment for the day. I hate feeling that guilt, especially because I don't feel like I should be feeling it.
I guess my point here is that food for me isn't about numbers, and I don't want it to become that way, because for me that type of thinking tends to be unhealthy for me personally. If I think of food in terms of bright colors and nutrients within rather than calories, I eat much better and with much less guilt. So I'll track my food intake for a week or two to see roughly what I eat, and then I'm stopping it, because I can already sort of feel the numbers game running in my mind and I don't want it to get ingrained.
Monday, February 22, 2010
A Milestone Birthday
I turned 30 as of a few hours ago. I've yet to be struck by some great profundity of this event, although people keep assuring me it will happen. I can say that my twenties were by and large unrepeatable and that I am really quite happy to be past all that.
I thought of a bunch of different things I could do for a 30th birthday blog posting, but none of them seem all that worthwhile. There's the "accomplishments of my life so far," but beyond listing the grad school stuff which I don't want to list because I'm fairly frustrated with having done it, I don't really know what to list. I know a lot of people who would call getting married an accomplishment, but I think of it as a life choice rather than an accomplishment. As in, I'm happy in my relationship and I like having it cemented as a marriage, but I don't think that makes me somehow better off than someone who's single. That's just a different life choice or circumstance or something. Grad school, OTOH, was a product of being overly idealistic and of receiving a shitton of bad advice. So not entirely an accomplishment, even if I have (and may shortly-ish receive more) letters to shove after my name when I so choose. Meanwhile, do I have a house? No. Financial security? No. A career? No. Does this make me "behind" where I should be by now? Not really, because all of that is from a sort of arbitrary checklist of how to be a successful middle class person, and "successful middle class person" is a goal I'm only half-heartedly pursuing.
Alternatively, there's the "things I'd like to do by the time I turn 31/35/40" type list. However, I didn't have one of those "things I'd like to do by the time I turn 30" type list, and I'm glad for it because I'm not sitting here with the residual guilt or feelings of failure for having not accomplished something. Imposing some sort of structure on my life like that, when not strictly necessary, ends up causing me more stress than it really needs to: in other words, it becomes an imposition rather than a structuring mechanism. Things generally go relatively well when I work with whatever opportunities pop up anyway, so I will continue in that vein. I'm sure it seems aimless to some, but I've learned a lot with the aimlessness.
What I suppose is weird to me (and what is propelling the writing of this post) is that I, who can usually find the significance in anything (given that is ostensibly what studying literature teaches one to do), am lost trying to find the significance in a birthday that is typically seen as being some sort of milestone. I don't feel any older or any wiser than I did yesterday, or last week, or last month, and I suspect I will not feel any older or any wiser tomorrow, or next week, or next month. Life will continue to throw curveballs at me, and I will continue to respond (and occasionally to throw curve balls at it). At some point I will get a draft of my novel finished and decide what next to do with it. At some point I will finally get the dissertation done (or tell it to fuck off forever). At some point I will not feel so lost and confused, and at some other point I will feel just as lost and confused as I do now, or perhaps even moreso.
More quickly than all of that, however, and generally much more certain, is that Brownie will get home soon and we will go get me a birthday beer and then come home and make penne vodka for dinner. And tomorrow I will wake up and still be 30, and that will be okay.
I thought of a bunch of different things I could do for a 30th birthday blog posting, but none of them seem all that worthwhile. There's the "accomplishments of my life so far," but beyond listing the grad school stuff which I don't want to list because I'm fairly frustrated with having done it, I don't really know what to list. I know a lot of people who would call getting married an accomplishment, but I think of it as a life choice rather than an accomplishment. As in, I'm happy in my relationship and I like having it cemented as a marriage, but I don't think that makes me somehow better off than someone who's single. That's just a different life choice or circumstance or something. Grad school, OTOH, was a product of being overly idealistic and of receiving a shitton of bad advice. So not entirely an accomplishment, even if I have (and may shortly-ish receive more) letters to shove after my name when I so choose. Meanwhile, do I have a house? No. Financial security? No. A career? No. Does this make me "behind" where I should be by now? Not really, because all of that is from a sort of arbitrary checklist of how to be a successful middle class person, and "successful middle class person" is a goal I'm only half-heartedly pursuing.
Alternatively, there's the "things I'd like to do by the time I turn 31/35/40" type list. However, I didn't have one of those "things I'd like to do by the time I turn 30" type list, and I'm glad for it because I'm not sitting here with the residual guilt or feelings of failure for having not accomplished something. Imposing some sort of structure on my life like that, when not strictly necessary, ends up causing me more stress than it really needs to: in other words, it becomes an imposition rather than a structuring mechanism. Things generally go relatively well when I work with whatever opportunities pop up anyway, so I will continue in that vein. I'm sure it seems aimless to some, but I've learned a lot with the aimlessness.
What I suppose is weird to me (and what is propelling the writing of this post) is that I, who can usually find the significance in anything (given that is ostensibly what studying literature teaches one to do), am lost trying to find the significance in a birthday that is typically seen as being some sort of milestone. I don't feel any older or any wiser than I did yesterday, or last week, or last month, and I suspect I will not feel any older or any wiser tomorrow, or next week, or next month. Life will continue to throw curveballs at me, and I will continue to respond (and occasionally to throw curve balls at it). At some point I will get a draft of my novel finished and decide what next to do with it. At some point I will finally get the dissertation done (or tell it to fuck off forever). At some point I will not feel so lost and confused, and at some other point I will feel just as lost and confused as I do now, or perhaps even moreso.
More quickly than all of that, however, and generally much more certain, is that Brownie will get home soon and we will go get me a birthday beer and then come home and make penne vodka for dinner. And tomorrow I will wake up and still be 30, and that will be okay.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Probably time to hit the career counselor
Had a long talk with Brownie about everything I was posting about last night - i.e., can I trust that we'll move someplace and be there for more than a year if he's planning on continuing the academic job search - to which his reaction is that he'll only do the job search if we're unhappy where we end up. I'm not fully satisfied with this since I think it takes more than a couple of months (which is all we'd have before the job search starts) to decide if one really likes an area. I honestly think it takes a full year to really get to the point of beginning to understand the rhythms and patterns of a place.
Anyway. So the outcome of the conversation is that I (well, both of us, but this blog is about ME, dammit! :) ) should start putting together a resume and applying to jobs (at this point in either city we've been discussing). This is all good and fine. So I hop on monster.com out of curiousity to see what's out there...
... and haven't the foggiest idea how to figure out what I might be qualified or good at or anything at all. Like, not the foggiest. I'm not unintelligent here. But this job searching thing is leaving me feeling very, well, "buh?"
So I figure I need to go hit the career counselor at University on a Mountain and ask them how the hell I go about figuring this out - this is emphatically not the type of training I'll ever get in my department (especially since I still sort of have to keep up something of a charade that I'm still considering academics, since disclosing otherwise to all but a few people is a recipe for social/political disaster). This should be interesting:
Counselor: "What can I help you with today?"
Me: "Well, I'd like to find a job."
Counselor: "What sort of job are you interested in looking for?"
Me: "Anything but this (i.e., academics)." Because that's about how far I've come in narrowing it down.
So, um, yeah. Should be interesting. If I end up taking some sort of "what kind of job should you be trying to find" type survey, I'm going to laugh my ass off. Those things always tell me I should be a teacher or a professor or a counselor or a priest or a writer. The same variety of options typically appears in my Myers-Briggs type as well (I'm an INFP with a vengeance, if that weren't pretty obvious by now for anyone reading who knows that typing system well enough to guess).
Really, all I'm looking for is a job in "adventures in earning a paycheck" for a time so I can figure out what sorts of strengths and weaknesses I bring to a non-academic environment and can figure out where I'd work best with said strengths and weaknesses. Really.
At least until I get a bestselling novel published. :P
Anyway. So the outcome of the conversation is that I (well, both of us, but this blog is about ME, dammit! :) ) should start putting together a resume and applying to jobs (at this point in either city we've been discussing). This is all good and fine. So I hop on monster.com out of curiousity to see what's out there...
... and haven't the foggiest idea how to figure out what I might be qualified or good at or anything at all. Like, not the foggiest. I'm not unintelligent here. But this job searching thing is leaving me feeling very, well, "buh?"
So I figure I need to go hit the career counselor at University on a Mountain and ask them how the hell I go about figuring this out - this is emphatically not the type of training I'll ever get in my department (especially since I still sort of have to keep up something of a charade that I'm still considering academics, since disclosing otherwise to all but a few people is a recipe for social/political disaster). This should be interesting:
Counselor: "What can I help you with today?"
Me: "Well, I'd like to find a job."
Counselor: "What sort of job are you interested in looking for?"
Me: "Anything but this (i.e., academics)." Because that's about how far I've come in narrowing it down.
So, um, yeah. Should be interesting. If I end up taking some sort of "what kind of job should you be trying to find" type survey, I'm going to laugh my ass off. Those things always tell me I should be a teacher or a professor or a counselor or a priest or a writer. The same variety of options typically appears in my Myers-Briggs type as well (I'm an INFP with a vengeance, if that weren't pretty obvious by now for anyone reading who knows that typing system well enough to guess).
Really, all I'm looking for is a job in "adventures in earning a paycheck" for a time so I can figure out what sorts of strengths and weaknesses I bring to a non-academic environment and can figure out where I'd work best with said strengths and weaknesses. Really.
At least until I get a bestselling novel published. :P
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Apparently I wasn't feeling so ambitious
So much for the "I'll try and post every day between now and turning 30" if this is only my second post of the month - whoops. No guilt, though, because I refuse to allow myself to feel guilty about a blog right now. If I have a blog that becomes important for some strange reason, I'll feel guilty about it (er, I'll probably update more, since that would seem to be important). Anyway.
So let's see. A bio prof in Alabama was denied tenure and shot and killed some of her colleagues. I feel horrible for the families of everyone involved in the tragedy, and I hope that they're able to mourn and to work toward healing in whatever manner they need to and without prying media bullshit surrounding them. I hate that I'm not surprised that it happened, however. What I'm surprised (and thankful) about is that it doesn't happen more often.
Brownie got a signature for his dissertation on Monday, which is bloodyfuckingfantastic in that he's finally relaxed enough that he's been able to talk about things other than his dissertation or the job search for the first time since roughly July. So we topped Monday off by getting into one hell of a "discussion" about acceptable levels of stress, the job market, academics and so on, and somewhere in there Brownie announced that he doesn't think he wants to do the academic thing because he hates what it's been doing to our relationship. I hate it too, and have for a long time, and view the problems academic careers can cause in a relationship as one of my major reasons for getting the hell out, but I've also always figured that him staying in or also getting the hell out is something that he needs to decide for himself. He's always seemed to lean toward staying in, and I've dealt with that as best I can by figuring that we are really happy together and that a lot of that happiness comes from being together at home - all the cooking we do together and so on - so that maybe it doesn't really matter where we live, etc., as his going into academics means that we get no say in where we're living.
So then Monday he announces he thinks he wants out, that it just isn't worth it.
Cue me bursting into eleventy hundred tears, because it's the first time in months (maybe longer) that I've started to feel like maybe I'd get some kind of say about where we'd be living. And all of these realizations I've been struggling desperately not to have - that the whole job search thing has been entirely about him and his career, that I'm shoving my career off to the back burner for him, that I'm having a lot of anger towards myself for doing that, that I've been feeling by and large unimportant for a long time because of all of this - all this comes tumbling down all around me. Suffice it to say it's probably good that I've been sick and snowed in all week. Not that I ever lack for introspection, just that the sick has kept me from wanting to cry as much as I probably would otherwise, and the snowed in has meant that the sick hasn't been as in the way as it usually is.
Anyway, we've pretty much narrowed it down to a move to either KC or to Portland, OR. KC is where I grew up - Brownie loves it out there, I have a ton of friends and most of my family out there, and it would generally be (relatively, anyway) an easy move. Plus: thunderstorms. YAY! Oregon, however, is this place that we've both always kind of wanted to live, despite the fact that neither of us has ever even visited - just from the sheer aspects of food, beer, wine, and love of exercise, we both want to live out there. Plus it's fucking beautiful. So as much as I'd love to be around my family again, there's a part of me that wants to move to Portland too, I guess because I have a sort of feeling that if we don't do it now, we never will.
Brownie tells me today while we're out getting drinks that he's not sure he's ready to give up on academics yet. That he might do the job search again next year. And that he really wants to focus in on moving to KC rather than Portland because of all the pro-KC reasons I just mentioned and because for him, it's an adventure either way, which he then acknowledges (albeit jokingly) as being selfish. I'm objecting to the idea of getting rid of Oregon yet simply because this whole "I get some level of say in this" idea is brand fucking new, and I'm not about to close off options any earlier than I have to.
This is probably not a line of thinking I should continue on, because I'm writing myself into more anger than I felt initially about it, and I probably don't need to do that. It's making me think that I do need to reopen the whole "how I've been compromising v. what I've been getting in return and vice versa" conversation, since I'm apparently still pissed. I'm pissed for two reasons. One, that I had allowed myself to hope that we might end up living someplace I'd actually like to live - really, that I'd allowed myself to hope when hoping in this whole mess has done nothing but make me more disappointed than I'm already typically feeling. Two, that he could change his mind and say sure, maybe we could move halfway (or all the way!) across the country come May (or June or July), but don't consider it to be an assurance that we could actually stay there since he may very well decide to do the academic job search again, meaning we'd just end up moving again in another year.
I think I'm starting to reach the end of my ability to push myself and my career off any more than I already have. I need to figure out exactly where my limit is and draw the line, because I am tired of feeling more excited about nail polish than my future career prospects.
So let's see. A bio prof in Alabama was denied tenure and shot and killed some of her colleagues. I feel horrible for the families of everyone involved in the tragedy, and I hope that they're able to mourn and to work toward healing in whatever manner they need to and without prying media bullshit surrounding them. I hate that I'm not surprised that it happened, however. What I'm surprised (and thankful) about is that it doesn't happen more often.
Brownie got a signature for his dissertation on Monday, which is bloodyfuckingfantastic in that he's finally relaxed enough that he's been able to talk about things other than his dissertation or the job search for the first time since roughly July. So we topped Monday off by getting into one hell of a "discussion" about acceptable levels of stress, the job market, academics and so on, and somewhere in there Brownie announced that he doesn't think he wants to do the academic thing because he hates what it's been doing to our relationship. I hate it too, and have for a long time, and view the problems academic careers can cause in a relationship as one of my major reasons for getting the hell out, but I've also always figured that him staying in or also getting the hell out is something that he needs to decide for himself. He's always seemed to lean toward staying in, and I've dealt with that as best I can by figuring that we are really happy together and that a lot of that happiness comes from being together at home - all the cooking we do together and so on - so that maybe it doesn't really matter where we live, etc., as his going into academics means that we get no say in where we're living.
So then Monday he announces he thinks he wants out, that it just isn't worth it.
Cue me bursting into eleventy hundred tears, because it's the first time in months (maybe longer) that I've started to feel like maybe I'd get some kind of say about where we'd be living. And all of these realizations I've been struggling desperately not to have - that the whole job search thing has been entirely about him and his career, that I'm shoving my career off to the back burner for him, that I'm having a lot of anger towards myself for doing that, that I've been feeling by and large unimportant for a long time because of all of this - all this comes tumbling down all around me. Suffice it to say it's probably good that I've been sick and snowed in all week. Not that I ever lack for introspection, just that the sick has kept me from wanting to cry as much as I probably would otherwise, and the snowed in has meant that the sick hasn't been as in the way as it usually is.
Anyway, we've pretty much narrowed it down to a move to either KC or to Portland, OR. KC is where I grew up - Brownie loves it out there, I have a ton of friends and most of my family out there, and it would generally be (relatively, anyway) an easy move. Plus: thunderstorms. YAY! Oregon, however, is this place that we've both always kind of wanted to live, despite the fact that neither of us has ever even visited - just from the sheer aspects of food, beer, wine, and love of exercise, we both want to live out there. Plus it's fucking beautiful. So as much as I'd love to be around my family again, there's a part of me that wants to move to Portland too, I guess because I have a sort of feeling that if we don't do it now, we never will.
Brownie tells me today while we're out getting drinks that he's not sure he's ready to give up on academics yet. That he might do the job search again next year. And that he really wants to focus in on moving to KC rather than Portland because of all the pro-KC reasons I just mentioned and because for him, it's an adventure either way, which he then acknowledges (albeit jokingly) as being selfish. I'm objecting to the idea of getting rid of Oregon yet simply because this whole "I get some level of say in this" idea is brand fucking new, and I'm not about to close off options any earlier than I have to.
This is probably not a line of thinking I should continue on, because I'm writing myself into more anger than I felt initially about it, and I probably don't need to do that. It's making me think that I do need to reopen the whole "how I've been compromising v. what I've been getting in return and vice versa" conversation, since I'm apparently still pissed. I'm pissed for two reasons. One, that I had allowed myself to hope that we might end up living someplace I'd actually like to live - really, that I'd allowed myself to hope when hoping in this whole mess has done nothing but make me more disappointed than I'm already typically feeling. Two, that he could change his mind and say sure, maybe we could move halfway (or all the way!) across the country come May (or June or July), but don't consider it to be an assurance that we could actually stay there since he may very well decide to do the academic job search again, meaning we'd just end up moving again in another year.
I think I'm starting to reach the end of my ability to push myself and my career off any more than I already have. I need to figure out exactly where my limit is and draw the line, because I am tired of feeling more excited about nail polish than my future career prospects.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
In which I emo some
So the dissertation is still frozen in time, although this is not the fault of playing Farmville of facebook. It's just me and my performance anxiety/self-fulfilling-prophecy-fear-of-failure type thing. I probably can do this damn thing. So I should get on that so that it's done. So that I can stop grinding my teeth at night - my jaw hurts all the damn time. So does my back.
The novel is fairly well frozen in time at the moment as well, but not quite for the same reason as the dissertation. I've spent a fair bit of time with the novel docs open on my computer. I've mentally rehashed a particular character, and need to do the rewrites on that. Mostly I'm just stuck, however: like I've gotten it to a certain place and I know the other really major event that needs to be worked through, and then it needs to end... but I'm not entirely sure exactly how it ends and so have spent a lot of time mulling it over. A LOT of time mulling it over. Often while playing endless games of 4 suite Spider Solitaire (w00t 8% won!) and listening to whatever music seems helpful for whatever chunk of writing I'm trying to think about. There are so many ways this whole novel fits together in my head, but they feel blocked right now. We're supposed to get a Snowpocalypse this weekend, so mayhaps I'll spend probably-snowed-in-Caturday slathered in BPAL Block Buster and see if that has any discernable effect.
I'm having a hard time believing it's February already - I know I spent half of January out in KS but it still feels to me like it should be January. Or really, last October maybe. I know that I'm in mid-SAD for the year and that this is probably contributing to my general sense of nothing (nothing in the sense that nothing really affects me anymore, in that I'm already feeling just down and blank and whatever). I don't feel like I can think at all right now, like my brain knows it has a job (several, really) to do but isn't up to the task(s). This round of SAD is less self-involved and introspective than usual. I assume this is due to Brownie's ongoing job/dissertation stress, which has so overtaken his life that I feel mostly unable to live my own; keeping him even half-functional lately has been above and beyond my emotional capabilities. I don't blame him for this, really - I do think it's 99% how obnoxious and awful the whole academic job search thing is. I'm hoping he hears something soon so that we can even attempt to make some sort of near-future life plans. He did finally say (and seemed truly to mean it) that if the job stuff doesn't work out this year, we can pick a city, move there, and see what happens. I kind of adore this idea, but I'm not holding my breath.
So I do think that most of the lack of introspection during my current depressive funk is due to everything I just mentioned, but I also wonder if part of it is just that I've basically figured most of my shit out for the moment, but lack the energy or motivation to actually DO anything about any of those issues (i.e., classic depressive problem). I just wish I could get excited about something again, anything really, because I don't remember the last time I actually was excited. My basic range of emotions is this: genuine concern/care for family/friends, and blah. Like I'm turning 30 in 2.5 weeks. My thoughts on this are not OMGFREAKOUT, nor are they YAY (which is actually what I was expecting - my 20's are something I'm glad to leave behind me), nor are they anything at all other than "oh, I have to teach that day." Brownie has something big planned, but I haven't been able to get excited about that either. I've told him I am, and I very much want to mean it. It's just that finding the energy to be excited seems beyond me right now.
I think the depression is bigger than seasonal affective, because it's been going on way too long (erm, for at least the last two years). I've never had any luck with antidepressants, so I'm really resistant to going on them again. I hope to Ceiling Cat that leaving grad school behind will help - I've pinned my hopes for my sanity on that event.
I'll sign off for now. If I get really ambitious, I'll try and post every day until I turn 30 so as to chronicle the last few weeks of my 20's.
The novel is fairly well frozen in time at the moment as well, but not quite for the same reason as the dissertation. I've spent a fair bit of time with the novel docs open on my computer. I've mentally rehashed a particular character, and need to do the rewrites on that. Mostly I'm just stuck, however: like I've gotten it to a certain place and I know the other really major event that needs to be worked through, and then it needs to end... but I'm not entirely sure exactly how it ends and so have spent a lot of time mulling it over. A LOT of time mulling it over. Often while playing endless games of 4 suite Spider Solitaire (w00t 8% won!) and listening to whatever music seems helpful for whatever chunk of writing I'm trying to think about. There are so many ways this whole novel fits together in my head, but they feel blocked right now. We're supposed to get a Snowpocalypse this weekend, so mayhaps I'll spend probably-snowed-in-Caturday slathered in BPAL Block Buster and see if that has any discernable effect.
I'm having a hard time believing it's February already - I know I spent half of January out in KS but it still feels to me like it should be January. Or really, last October maybe. I know that I'm in mid-SAD for the year and that this is probably contributing to my general sense of nothing (nothing in the sense that nothing really affects me anymore, in that I'm already feeling just down and blank and whatever). I don't feel like I can think at all right now, like my brain knows it has a job (several, really) to do but isn't up to the task(s). This round of SAD is less self-involved and introspective than usual. I assume this is due to Brownie's ongoing job/dissertation stress, which has so overtaken his life that I feel mostly unable to live my own; keeping him even half-functional lately has been above and beyond my emotional capabilities. I don't blame him for this, really - I do think it's 99% how obnoxious and awful the whole academic job search thing is. I'm hoping he hears something soon so that we can even attempt to make some sort of near-future life plans. He did finally say (and seemed truly to mean it) that if the job stuff doesn't work out this year, we can pick a city, move there, and see what happens. I kind of adore this idea, but I'm not holding my breath.
So I do think that most of the lack of introspection during my current depressive funk is due to everything I just mentioned, but I also wonder if part of it is just that I've basically figured most of my shit out for the moment, but lack the energy or motivation to actually DO anything about any of those issues (i.e., classic depressive problem). I just wish I could get excited about something again, anything really, because I don't remember the last time I actually was excited. My basic range of emotions is this: genuine concern/care for family/friends, and blah. Like I'm turning 30 in 2.5 weeks. My thoughts on this are not OMGFREAKOUT, nor are they YAY (which is actually what I was expecting - my 20's are something I'm glad to leave behind me), nor are they anything at all other than "oh, I have to teach that day." Brownie has something big planned, but I haven't been able to get excited about that either. I've told him I am, and I very much want to mean it. It's just that finding the energy to be excited seems beyond me right now.
I think the depression is bigger than seasonal affective, because it's been going on way too long (erm, for at least the last two years). I've never had any luck with antidepressants, so I'm really resistant to going on them again. I hope to Ceiling Cat that leaving grad school behind will help - I've pinned my hopes for my sanity on that event.
I'll sign off for now. If I get really ambitious, I'll try and post every day until I turn 30 so as to chronicle the last few weeks of my 20's.
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