Mental Maintenance
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Visible lines
My favorite art movement is impressionism and Paul Cezanne is often associated with it. While I did enjoy the exhibits, my take away from it was more personal then I expected. Cezannes work is full of inconsistencies, illogical constructions, and things that generally “don’t make sense” to us now and to his contemporaries then. Examples include differing visual perspectives, object lines that don’t meet, and incomplete sections. And yet, he was a master — a master because of these not despite them. What I choose to take from this is that, while I may never claim to be a master, I can reject the “rules” that culture, art, society, and…
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Voice
I started this site when I was in grad school as a semester-long project in learning to code HTML. I kept it, initially, because I was job searching and needed somewhere to showcase project work and also to create a separation between my future career and my current job and social media. I also wanted a little piece of the internet to myself. It’s been been ten years now and I still haven’t done much with it. I’ve had plans for board game review pages, data management annotated bibliographies, creative projects, all of which languish as random pages mostly unpublished. Some of this is because I feel that I’ve lost…
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Looking
I made a small realization earlier this week: I don’t actually look at what I’m doing. For the longest time I have been struggling, trying to figure out why I can’t seem to get on track with productivity and maintaining focus. Part of the trouble has been determining priorities and adjusting to faculty expectations. But the other part has been strictly intrinsic motivation and personal habits. In this second part, I have read seemingly all the literature and posts on identifying habits, creating structures, managing calendars and email. Despite this, I have not had a consistent track record of being able to maintain focus. I identified mindfulness as a means…
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Tired
Today I am tired. This is mostly due to a dog that decided to get sick in the middle of the night (he did this last week to in the midst of orientation week). It must have caught me just wrong because despite going back to bed, I don’t feel that I’ve slept enough. I managed to not caffeinate at all today, a good thing because all the caffiene choices I have are not good for me. But, I can hardly wait to get home. The work list at home doesn’t allow me to sleep right away. I’ll have to figure out what can get crossed off the list. The…
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Adjectives
I’ve been working on values and what exactly they are and what they mean to me. The guiding definition is a state of being that I am continuously working toward. Goals, by contrast, are achievements along the way. This definition is startling because it flips aspects of personal growth. I have read countless articles and media click-bait about how to achieve goals. What I’m learning is that the goals aren’t really the point. This concept made sense once I was challenged by “what happens when the goal is achieved?” The goals becomes a checkmark; that’s all. There’s no other interaction with them. I can achieve them, then what? Values are…
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Values
It is an interesting coincidence that in therapy we are just started to work on values. Without going into the necessity of therapy, the values study is a piece of acceptance and committment therapy. The idea of this therapy is to base our actions on our values in order to live fully. What I am discovering is that values are more simple and more complicated than I expect. The simple view is that values are what we desire and want most in our life. The complicated view is how do we distinguish a “want” as a somthing fundamental and important versus a “want” that is superficial and unimportant. And by…
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Badass life
I realized on my first train home today, that it’s time to acknowledge that I have a pretty badass life. A few examples: I regularly get on a train home and have stimulating conversations about feminism, sci-fi/fantasy book discussions, current events, and a myriad of other topics I get to spend my day doing what I like: educating people about resources and teaching them about data management I get to spend other parts of my day trying to answer questions that are interesting to me and that I think are valuable to the science and library science community I get to come home to family and three (!) dogs. I…
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Clarity
I’ve been sick for almost a week. Last week started with a sore throat late Friday and becoming a lingering annoyance Saturday. By Sunday I was feeling the full effects, aches and raw, painful swallowing. It’s now Thursday and I have been drugging myself for days to be functional. Chloraceptic in the beginning, moving to ibuprofen for the aches. These last two days have ended with sinus-induced, blistering headaches, incompletely managed through hot compresses and the serious drugs. Between the pain and the side effects of drugs, I haven’t slept well in days. Being overstimulated is generally bad for my anxiety. Over the years I have learned to recognize that…
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Headaches
Blistering headache to end the workday. The bitter chill of the bike ride to the train station did it. I was optomistic that the sun and building body heat would keep it from happening, but no. There is a steady breeze directly into my ears and I’m done for. I’ve been doing strange stretches on the train to ease my neck. I’ve taken off my glasses because they have been pushing on my right ear and creating some pain. They are sitting on the seat next to me and I’m hoping that a sudden stop doesn’t fling them somewhere. I’m cautious about looking too far down in order to see…
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It’s not as simple as “Stop Whining”
I think I have gotten away from writing lately because all I seem to be doing is either whining, or listing out my day. Even as I write this, I feel the urge to start the litany. To list all the injustices in the system I am working in and the volume of what needs to get done. Instead I’m tring to force my thought processes into a new direction and see if I can examine the source of this behavior. With some introspection behind it (no real epiphany though), I can sum these processes up with “garbage in, garbage out.” My of the whining comes from listening to coworkers…