Keeping on keeping on…

“If” by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And - which is more - you’ll be a Man my son!

Special thanks to Syntactic Gymnastics, who (whom?) I’ve never met, but whose posts I connected to greatly. You have had a rough time of it, doing what you love but not being able to love what you are doing. So have I. And here we both are, two strangers, feeling a little lost and trying to figure out what to do with our idealism and, perhaps more urgently, our life directions. I wish luck for both of us.

So I know I’ve been away from here…

I think of blogging sometimes and don’t know where to begin. Much of the activities of my life have been more of the same– loving my job and hating how destructive it is to me. Wishing I had more in my life– or more OF a life but not having inertia to do what needs doing about it. And in some cases not knowing WHAT to do. I have been exploring the outer edges of this crossroads in my life and wondering how it will all come out on the other side.

My vacation starts today. I want to clean my apartment. Maybe that’s a bad way to spend a vacation but a clean apartment really would make me happy. I promise I’ll do fun things too. I’m dropping my keys and my laptop off at a friends’ house for the week. I may go into withdrawal but I’ll have to come up with something to do with myself… Clearly I need this break, hoping it helps.

Hey all

What should I do with my life?

Is this a light I see at the end of this tunnel?

What a week. I go on a cruise next week and by golly I’ve earned it. As my last post indicated, there was a major crisis at work this week involving some kids. It’s been one of those miracle weeks where emotions are high, and I have often felt that I am navigating through a maze, but not on my own power– I am doing things and watching myself doing them at the same time. There is a sense of right-ness, a sense of I’m doing what I’m called to be doing. A sense that I’m a passenger in my life but I know the way. And yet– it’s peculiar because it’s exactly how I shouldn’t feel. In a crisis like this I think I should be backpedaling and unsure– isn’t that how everyone is? But for all the moments of wringing my hands before summoning up my courage– I’ve felt sure this week about what is right and a… comfort with taking on the courage to do what needed doing. I wouldn’t want to go through this again, and I would do anything to take away some of the suffering here. But there are so many times in life when things are foggy and there’s something… clarifying… in coming to a crossroads where the choices come down to moral courage.

For all that I am afraid of, and there is much– one thing I am proud of, one thing I like about myself, is that I think I am a courageous person. More than once now I have faced hard choices and gone along a path that could have been easier– and I’ve always found I sleep better at night after. Even seemingly trivial choices like whether to give a toast at my sister’s wedding– I knew I needed to say what needed saying, and I was chicken for so long I couldn’t write it or guarantee it would happen for the longest time. But when I read the speech it was almost an auto-pilot thing– I think it’s that I feel free-est when my heart is open and sharing.

So. Miracles happen amidst madness. It is nice to be at the end of a lot of difficult decisions and have survived in one piece. It’s nice to actually now be thinking of my vacation. For a long time this week I didn’t think I could enjoy my vacation– I kept thinking of the many work items tabled in the name of crisis and stressing that it would be the center of my thoughts next week– and THEN all the worse to return. But something in me is shifting this past day or so. It’s not just the “I need a vacation” cliche’ of every week– it’s somehow I think I’m ready for it.

First Grade

Some randomness from my sixth year–

- We moved to Ohio. Hurrah!

- My dad taught me to play Solitaire.

- In first grade I fell off my bike and sprained my knee. It hurt a lot. I screamed so loud my parents came running from the house. I slept in their bed that night and it still hurt so my mom took me to the doctor and got an x-ray. On the x-ray you could see a little piece of my knee splintered up. So this got me out of school for a couple days and I was on crutches for awhile. I remember thinking crutches were pretty cool.

- This was about the age when I really started to resent my mother’s insistence on cutting my hair very short. I have pictures of myself at age 5 or 6 years old and friends have often asked if those are pictures of some unknown brother. I have a vivid memory of a public tantrum my sister threw in a restaurant once and the waitress went up to her and said “Calm down honey, look Brother’s behaving so can you.” I don’t think my mother understood how seriously it bothered my sister and I that we didn’t feel like we looked like girls and couldn’t do the things other girls did with their hair. My mother’s reasoning was that washing long hair was a hassle and why go through that at all. Thus the trip for hair cuts became an ongoing argument that lasted late into my teens.

- I remember we went as a family to the local health club all the time as a kid. I took swimming lessons from a pretty young age and we loved the water. I am really looking forward to when BestNieceEver learns to swim.

Processing…

I just got home after a long conversation with a good friend. He said that he had been worried about me because I had seemed really negative about things and he says that other people have felt that way too. I was kind of caught off guard at that statement. We started talking and the more we talked the more clear it became that it makes sense I come off as negative about things– I carry around an awful lot of pain with me. Pain and shame and frustration and fear, really, that quite honestly seem to conspire against me sometimes. At times I feel like I’m in a battle against these emotions, just trying to stay above them.

Some things that came out of the conversation–

1. I need to make a choice to present myself more positively, whether I feel like it or not. What I mean is, I need to get up in the morning, take a shower, blowdry my hair, put on nice clothes, and look in the mirror and approve of myself.

2. I’m struggling a lot with hopelessness in terms of potential relationships with men. I want to put less pressure on myself to make something happen quickly and more focus on just being happy with myself.

3. Looking at a list of my friends, it is clear that I attract really awesome people to my life. I should give myself more credit for that.

4. I tend to be embarrassed for others to know I’ve done something for myself (such as getting my hair blowdryed for no reason). I’ve always thought of these things as fundamentally the opposite of priorities. That’s wrong. Taking care of myself is one of the best priorities I can have.

It seems that this conversation in some ways was a recycle of conversations I’ve had a thousand times before. I don’t want to be in a rut, or live a life feeling unfulfilled. Can things change? Can I?

is snowing

I just got home after a treacherous drive averaging 15mph on 84. Glad to be home in my jammies.

Christmas Reminiscing

My strategy for tech week survival has been to take every stolen moment of free time and remember every detail of the good part of my holidays, very much in the obsessive style of having an eighth grade crush. So, in that vein I ask, however belatedly, how WERE your holidays anyhow? Get any good loot?

 I got a lot of good clothes, actually, something I hadn’t said anything about but was rather desperately in need of. A lot of the families of kids I work with got me gift cards, especially to book stores which was pretty cool. My cooking expert friend put together a lovely little cookbook for me that totally impressed me. People gave me a lot of photographs and cards this year which were also much appreciated. I also got 24 Season 5 and gave Seasons 1 and 2 of Six Feet Under, of which I fully intend on insisting on viewing rights. Other presents that I gave that I was especially proud of– a copy of 1984 for one great seventh grader, Barack O’Bama’s The Audacity of Hope for my mom, a video gameing magazine subscription to my brother-in-law in that hopes that he’ll actually read something, a handmade calendar for a special friend, What to Expect the First Year for my sister– in the hopes that my newest relative-to-be makes it through in one piece, the best baby book ever in the hopes that they’ll get read to when they finally do arrive, and a package of good ‘n’ plenties for my dad– our little tradition.

Bored? Need something to do in the New Year?

Get started solving some of these problems.

happy new year suckas

I wonder how long I’ll be accidentally writing 2006. Probably at least as long as I put off taking my Christmas tree down.