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Posts Tagged ‘personal’

::snarl::

Seven hours of travel delays is not how I wanted to close out my year.

But I made it home with three hours remaining. Now I try to get in a party mood, to end on a better note.

oof.

If the last two days of work have not precisely slain the Paper Monster, at least they have dealt it not one but several Mighty Blows.

See, the Paper Monster can’t actually be killed. I turn my back, and the next thing I know it’s sprouted more bills and class papers and critiqued drafts and scribbled-on bits and oh wow I never even opened that envelope. But it can be beaten into submission, at least temporarily.

My mistake was letting it grow so big this round. But it grew, and then I was moving, and then I was in England, and then I was noveling, and then I was getting married. The results were predictable, and entirely my fault.

On the other hand, I have a floor again. And maybe this time I can even keep up with my filing system.

Hah. Optimism.

fans

Not the sort who send you e-mail or ask for autographs; the sort you hold in your hand, for cooling yourself.

Does anyone have a recommendation for how to hang folding fans on a wall in a manner that won’t damage them? The one time I’ve done it, I’ve put in two small nails just inside the outermost sticks, below the fabric, but that warped the fabric where the weight was resting on the nails. I’m looking for a better solution. (All I can think of is nails on either side of the pivot pin, but they’d have to stick out awfully far, and I’d still probably need small nails at the top corners to keep it open and flat against the wall.)

hello, brain, my old friend

We’re up to 442 words on “How Heroes Fall” (its other possible title). Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but since this will consist of a bunch of vignettes around a theme, it’s a decent amount; it’s two vignettes out of some unknown total — maybe eight or ten.

This is, without a doubt, the most artsy-fartsy piece of crap I’ve ever written. My one hope is to make it good enough to remove “crap” from that equation. (Ain’t nothing gonna redeem it from artsy-fartsy-hood.)

I had all three of my e-mail accounts down to thirty e-mails or less when I went to bed last night; they’ve bounced up a bit since then, but not much. The fact that ninety unanswered e-mails counts as brag-worthy progress tells you what state they were in before.

I’m in a weird state right now. Not enough motivation to get anything done, but enough brain to want to get something done. Can’t figure out what to do with myself. Answer e-mails? Grade? Those would be useful. Write? Read? Watch something? Those would be entertaining. Clean up the house? I really ought to. But I can’t settle down to anything, it seems.

Meh. Stupid temperature dropping like a rock. We skipped right over the first two stages of fall, it looks like, and went straight to grey and dismal.

I’m back. (What’s left of me.)

So, I got married. And then I went to Vegas. (With a pause in there to teach two more days of class; I couldn’t just cancel a whole week.) Now I’m home.

Very, very glad to be home.

I’m trying to recover enough brain to deal with the backlog of e-mail that has built up over the last month or more. Most of the truly crucial stuff has been dealt with as it happened — I hope — but there’s a lot of non-crucial stuff owing. If any of that stuff involves you, Dear Readers, then please bear with me as I try to wade through it. Cerberus (my collection of three e-mail accounts) has grown a fine new set of teeth on all of its heads; dealing with those will take a little while.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying my return from the land of Flashing! Lights! and Brightly! Colored! Things! and did we mention the Obnoxious! Noises! The shows we saw (Penn & Teller, and Cirque du Soleil’s Kà and Mystere) were fabulous, but right about now, I’m taking deep pleasure in reading unmoving black text on a white page. And even writing a bit of my own; one of the flash vignettes that will make up the story “How They Fall” (if that ends up being its title) got scribbled down during my office hours today. I have hope this signals the return of my brain. It’s been missing for several weeks now; I’d love to see it again.

not too bad

After two rounds of questions on the career thingy, here’s what it recommends for me:

1. Anthropologist
2. Interpreter
3. Sign Language Interpreter
4. Historian
5. Actor
6. Comedian
7. Dancer
8. Translator
9. Writer
10. Musician

The one I don’t get is “comedian.” (For starters, it didn’t ask me a single question about my sense of humour.) But it told me “anthropologist” after the first round, and “writer” started out at #11. If I didn’t need to go to bed, I’d answer more questions and watch how it changes. But as career advice things go, this one isn’t half bad. My major interests do in fact include history, dance, music, and foreign languages.

zoom zoom

I’m really digging my schedule these last few weeks. I teach MWF, which means my Tuesdays and Thursdays are open, and lately that’s led to a pretty high degree of productivity. I go to the gym those days, so I always have to leave the house anyway; it’s pretty easy to talk myself into running errands along the way, especially since the gym is a bit of a drive, and it feels wasteful to go all the way to the other side of town just for that.

It reinforces what I’ve thought before: I’m at my best when I have some structure in my life. Give me nothing but free time and unscheduled tasks, and I end up floundering. Maybe it’s just perception, but I feel like I get more done in an average week now that teaching is taking up some of my time than I did this summer, when my schedule was completely open.

The best example of this rule might be the last two months of my senior year. Having finished my thesis, I was taking two classes, one of them pass/fail, and I had a grand total of five hours of class per week. I wrote a novel and six short stories, and had a great social life, too.

Which raises an interesting point. If I ever do end up writing full-time, I’ll probably need to find some regular volunteer job or the like — something that makes me leave the house on a regular basis. Otherwise the lack of structure might hamstring me.

Anyway, I’m almost done with lunch; time to put my money where my mouth is and do the productivity thing.

(I’ll admit, though, that I’m looking forward to when the wedding is done, and I can officially declare Screw Productivity Week, when I will do jack-all that Tuesday and Thursday.)

Birthday Egotism

Every year I feel obliged to explain this post, because it’s a little bit odd.

Some time ago — four years, I think — I was having a crappy birthday. Nothing big and dramatic; just the kind of day that makes one slouch angstily in a chair and think, “I’m twenty-three years old, and what do I have to show for it?”

This was a stupid question, and so I set out to prove that to myself. You see, I’m veryverygood at being self-critical. Not so good at patting myself on the back. Ergo, I made a post about the Awesomeness of Me: all my accomplishments, all the things I had learned, all the things I could do, everything I might be proud of in my life to date. I made myself do so publicly, because the point was to toot my own horn for once. And I didn’t let myself put in any qualifications or disclaimers — which was damn hard for me. Nothing but the positives, all in one place so I could go back and re-read it if I ever sank back into that Slough of Despond.

And this has become a tradition.

Mind you, this year’s birthday has been fantabulous so far. Lunch with friends, then a road trip out to the Exotic Feline Rescue Center — in five years of living here, I’d never managed to go. It’s sunny and the perfect temperature (as far as I’m concerned), I had ice cream, I’m relaxed and happy. But this is tradition. So here is this year’s update of Birthday Egotism: everything from the last year that I’m proud of.

So. I’m twenty-seven years old. What have I got to show for it?

WARNING: Rampant Self-Aggrandizement Within

huh.

I’ve been silent lately, haven’t I? The only two posts I’ve made in the last eleven days have been Lymond book-blogging, hence not public.

I promise, I’ll surface again soon. With all kinds of fascinating updates about teaching and wedding prep and all that good stuff. No, really I will.

But before that happens, I will Finish This Revision.

No, really I will. (Because it’s due in to Madame Editor real soon now.)

Back to the grind. I have some thoughts about revision, and what I have learned about it in the last eight years, but those can wait. Like just about everything else.

But hey — I have a new monitor stand. Remains to be seen whether I like it — god, my monitor seems high — but it’s worth trying out, at least. And it provides me with small shelves beneath said monitor, which is nice.

I said “back to the grind” a paragraph or two ago, didn’t I? <sigh> Here we go.

Did I loan somebody my copy of The Unstrung Harp? You know, the little Edward Gorey book about the writing of novels, and the aftermath thereof.

I’ve been promising myself for a while now that I would get to read it when I finished Midnight Never Come. But now I’m finished, and I can’t find it.

<sad swan>

an update on the labors of Hercules

The inbox for my personal e-mail account is down to 11 messages.

The inbox for my writing e-mail is down to 10.

We’ll continue, for the moment, to pretend my academic e-mail account doesn’t exist.

It’s progress. But I think I’ve made as much progress as I can stomach for today. Having done the work of the virtuous, now I’m going to go let my brain die for a while.

e-mail

I can’t decide which Herculean labor is the right metaphor for the battle I’ve been waging for several days now, against the backlog in all of my major e-mail accounts.

Candidate A: Cerberus. There are three accounts, after all, so it’s kind of like dealing with a three-headed monster.

Candidate B: the Hydra. Because every time I think I’ve made progress toward defeating one of the accounts, it sprouts new heads/new e-mails to attack me again.

Candidate C: the Augean Stables. Shoveling endless mounds of shit, and feeling like I’ll never be done.

This post brought to you by the forty or so e-mails I dealt with yesterday, and the fact that today’s schedule has prevented me from dealing with any more, which just ensures that tomorrow’s battle will be harder.

yay water!

Yesterday I went swimming for the first time this summer. I was in London when the pool here at my complex opened, and then I was busy, and then it was closed, and then I was busy, and then it was closed . . . but we went and swam for about half an hour or so last night, and it was glorious.

A few observations, in no particular order:

1) If you need goggles, get thee to a specialty store or look online and get yourself some Barracudas. To quote the jargon from the website I turned up, they’re a positive-pressure seal instead of a negative-pressure one, i.e. they don’t operate by glomming onto your face with suction, which makes them much more comfortable than Speedo’s product. The frame is molded to fit the eye orbit more closely, and the foam on mine has held up for over a decade; only now are they starting to leak a bit, leading me to decide that it’s time to get some new ones.

2) My form on various strokes has undoubtedly degenerated, but a lot of it came back very quickly. (Though it did take me most of that half-hour to remember I was doing the wrong breast-stroke kick. Oh well; now that I’m not competing, I’ll go back to the one that doesn’t make my hips and knees hurt.) I think I can still justifiably call myself a strong swimmer.

3) I can still do fly!!! In fact, despite the loss of form, I probably swim butterfly better now than I did when I was fourteen, on account of having some actual upper body muscle. I may consider adding a once-weekly swim session to my exercise routine, because if you want gorgeous shoulders and back, ain’t nothin’ like swimming fly to give it to you. And I like swimming a lot better than running, even on an elliptical.

4) Did I mention I love the water?

5) I think I made almost this exact post (minus the commentary on Barracudas) a couple of years ago, after another long hiatus of not swimming. But most of you weren’t reading this journal then, so I can pretend it counts as new content, right?

Swimming good. I just wish I didn’t have to go to so much work to keep my hair from becoming chlorine-damaged. Otherwise I’d be in the water every day, like I was when I was nine.