Personal Thoughts
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Day in review July 17, 2015
It’s hot today. I stink on the my final train along with everyone else. Good thing it is a rush hour and I have plenty of room to myself. The week has been full. It took me a bit to get my feet underneath me. Overall, I wasn’t happy about my productivity. However, in the effort to not be hard on myself, that is all I will say. Next week is clean, waiting. I have continued my goal to keep planning a self care or creative activity for each weekend. This weekend is gong meditation. I haven’t thought about it much. There was a time when I would have hoped…
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Start to the week
It’s storming. Thunder, lightening, and lots of rain are everywhere. For me, the weather makes this a fabulous morning despite that I have to be out in it. I’m on the train, facing backward because too many people don’t flip the seats and take up more seats than they should. The conductor flips his booklet to new tickets. He flips the dollars paid to all face the same way, sorts them according to value, and pockets the wad again. The train is busy with random little activity. The woman across from me is moisturizing her face and inspecting it in a mirror. Three rows back, a man in a peach…
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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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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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Emotional wish list
I’m feeling better today. In addition to the moodiness I was working on a headache for the latter half of the day. I went to bed, slept poorly, and went to gym this morning anyway. But I started to change during the gym session. It started with me giving myself permission to not do anything strenuous. I still had the headache. I wasn’t my best. The point was not to worry about whether or not I was getting my money’s worth or putting in a gold star performance. Because of this little change in attitude, I was able to see that I’ve been hard on myself and I need to…
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Moodiness and self care
I wish I had an explanation for my mood today. General moodiness started to creep in last night and has settled in for a bit. The feeling is a combination of ennui and dissatisfaction. I look at my life and I find it lacking. There is no joy, only a grouchiness at the world around me stemming from a vague sense of unfairness and inequality. My personal demons are rampaging as well. I’m getting fatter. I’m not a patient parent. I am losing the ability to be nice to children and small animals. Not good. I used to be a more optomistic person. I didn’t suffer from these bouts of…
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An earful
Today was an earful. I tried to speak to my son this morning about his beligerant and direspectful attitude. What he told me was that he wasn’t accountable to me. I went to work and heard our new chancellor speak about how we need to keep student focused and that our success will depend on new ideas and focused direction. What he told us was that there are going to be budget cuts and they are going to hurt. I called my sister to discuss travel arrangements for our uncles funeral next week. What I heard was the story of my grandmother in the final phases of her life, and…
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New Year Coming
It seems hard to believe, but the new year is almost upon us once again. This is not something unusual. Most of us think similar thoughts at this time of year. I always consider each year coming as a surprise. Whe I was a child I counted forward the years and discovered that the turn of the millenium would come in my lifetime. With a little more math, I realized that I would be twenty-seven. That little knowledge tidbit set me on my course and I don’t think that I ever recalculated. Year 2000 came and went. None of the appliances I had suffered any programming problems, and life went…