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Back to work
I have been on vacation for the past ten days. They weren’t structured in a way ideal for me to feel rested, but it was still time off. Three mini events broke it up: a Ravinia weekend, a trip to Springfield, and a Fourth of July barbeque at home. Ravinia was fun and less stressful than I imagined because the alcohol was kept in check. The weather wasn’t cooperative, being rainy and quite cool. The music made up for it and being able to talk with friends. Springfield would take an entry of it’s own. There was enough to see in the two days that we were there. I walked…
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The edge of comparison
I find myself frustrated. I am becoming dissatisfied with my life again. I was calm and a little more centered after reading Cameron, but that has faded. I have identified it a little earlier than usual this time. Because I am tired, comparison becomes easier than work. I want to have an amazing life, full of quirks and opportunity. From the inside it looks like work and drudgery. But it looks that way because I have compared it to other lives. I have not focused on the things that I have done. Nor have I been gentle with myself. I have bought into the culture of scarcity that says because…
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Monday morning
I’m thinking I’m stressed this morning. My jaw keeps clenching even though there was nothing this morning to set me off. I slept reasonable well with strange dreams that I don’t remember. To add to that, the train is 15 minutes late and rapidly becoming crowded. And there is a group of people on the upper deck that won’t stop talking in the quiet car. It’s just irritating and other than putting in head phones, there’s nothing to be done until the conductor comes by assuming he does. They usually skip it on days it’s this crowded. Overall, it isn’t just irritation. There is also an underlying current of emotion…
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Day in review June 16, 2015
Wednesday has become my day of sleep. I get to the middle of the week and my energy flags, productivity goes down, and basic tasks can take all day. On top of that, today my stomach didn’t like the rice noodles I tried to feed it for a snack. I haven’t felt ill, but something isn’t right. Today work wrapped up a couple of projects I had been working on. Each was different aspects of the same proposal. The first part landed in mine and a colleague’s lap five weeks ago. We were tasked with updating a previous document on information seeking behaviors of clinician’s of all types. We then…
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Gentleness
One of the things that I have gained by reading a book on creativity is the idea of being gentle. Yesterday I wrote of the larger picture of creativity. Inevitably, there comes a period where creativity is absent. I like that she puts these periods as droughts rather than blocks. She goes on to explain that crativity exists in cycles and with gentle action, the cycle will progress and work can begin again. I had a hard time identifying with this at first because I don’t consider myself a working artist. Even as a hobbist, another label I don’t quite attach to, I am not producing art and I have…
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Building creativity
I’m always amazed at how restorative reading is to me. I have a few writers that I turn to regularly or stories that I go back to. Each of these times, I’m looking for their work to recreate a feeling I had the first time I read it. That is easy enough to do for fiction–just get carried away in the story. But there is a selection of non-fiction that I have slowly accumulated that also does this for me. For those works, the experience is more intimate. These works are not self help, but revolve around living an authentic self. Roughly psychological, I identify with aspects and use these…
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Summer
I walked out of work today at five and into a downpour. Four hours earlier, less by other accounts, the sky was clear. I knew the rain was coming, my weather app had told me so earlier in the week. There is always the question of how much I believe it though. The rain was good. The water was warm. Every other rain we have had so far has been cold; the change in pressures have a cold front usually pushing from behind. I was out of my office for most of the day today and I think I needed that. I’ve been trying to get more outdoor time on…
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Day in review June 9, 2015
The beginning of the day went well. Research was tedious because it was data gathering. I had a hard time paying attention and will have to do some coding and cleaning of the data before I can use it. I truly had no idea how many different types of degrees and certificates can be offered. Evaluating each of these programs takes a certain amount of discernment that I hadn’t anticipated, but it is slowing me down. There will be a lot of data to play with when I’m done. I hope that it will yield some meaningful connections to the library. I fear I may need to learn some scripting/coding…
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Monday problems
Today I got back to the meta-analysis that I was working on. I reviewed my notes and my original search structure. Next was adapting it to the vocabulary of the next database. The run produced similar results in terms of numbers. Unfortunately, I was stumped by the inability to save or export the list in an RIS format. I left it hanging while I went to a faculty meeting. When I got back, I had a sympathetic, but overall unhelpful customer service agent at Elsevier. She couldn’t do anything for me. The only explanation I got was a “system-wide” outage that hadn’t been resolved. The recommended that clear the cache,…
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Day in review June 5, 2015
Friday, today, ended in a meeting. The day started with a meeting too. Everything in between was a mash of email maintenance and opportunity. By the end of today, I realized that I will be working on four papers, if not five. It really makes me wish I was on the tenure clocka bit, becuae there is the possibility that these won’t count for me. I doesn’t matter. I am taking the opportunities that are in front of me. Right now I feel as if I am saying “yes” to everything. Not sustainable in the long term, but good for now in the sense that I have little to lose.…