Catching Up

I just thought I'd get caught up on my blog after a few months of silence. For the most part life has been going well.

Working: I've stayed true to my resolution to not work as many overtime hours as I have in the past. At most I've taken home maybe one project to work on so far this year. Based on my past track record, this is outstanding and, as any sensible person could have told me, I feel much better and less exhausted.

Reading: I've been getting a lot of reading-for-fun in lately. In fact I've done so much that I can't quite list everything here. I did take a break over this late spring and early summer to take care of other things.

New Home: I've recently moved into a new apartment this month. As much as I absolutely loved my old apartment, I just couldn't really afford to live there anymore. They would have raised the rent by $100, and that put it in a price range that was falling out of my comfort level. Either the rent is too damn high or my paycheck is too damn low! So I frantically searched for a new place and found one that's priced at about $200 less than what I was paying. It's nothing fancy, there aren't brand-spanking new appliances, there aren't 9 foot ceilings with crown molding, but it is still nice and in a very good location. I moved in about three weeks ago and I'm still getting settled and adding my personal touches, but it will be charming and cozy in no time. I really miss my neighbor Kitty friend from my old place, but I'm trying to make friends with the cats in my new area.

Deeper Thoughts: This past spring and early summer has been a bit of a struggle emotionally at times. It was the one year anniversary of my dad's passing. The pain of losing someone as close as a parent never truly goes away and it doesn't necessarily get any easier with time. As they say, there are really good days and really bad days. The biggest struggle is when something happens in my life that my dad would have been especially interested in or happy about, and I think, I can't wait to tell him about this, and then realize that I can't.

I realize I'm not alone in my loss, and I think about that a lot too. I've had friends and family members experience losses of their own and I feel for them and share in their pain. A dear friend lost her mother about a month before I lost my dad, and she was going through the same painful one year anniversary that I was going through. Last month, one of my cousins lost his partner after a long battle with Alzheimer's, and another dear friend recently lost her father also to Alzheimer's. And more sad news touched my family after a beautiful cousin passed away on July 4 from pancreatic cancer. All this loss, both the loss that I'm feeling and the loss that loved ones are feeling, has left me a bit sad and shaken over the past few weeks, but the wonderful thing about family and close friends is that we can all find support and strength in one another and that helps all of us get through these difficult times.

Resolution Update

Here is how I've been doing on my New Year's resolutions:

Number of Overtime Hours Worked: Zero

Number of Books Read: Four. Fahrenheit 451, Venus in Furs, Fanny Hill (or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, and The Lightning Thief.

Numbers of Meals Cooked: Several, but so far the most creative was a red lentil and chickpea stew over rice.

So far I think I'm doing pretty well.

New Year's Resolution, Education Confessions, and My Strange Brain

As I mentioned in a previous post, I decided to make a set of New Year’s resolutions this year, and I tried to keep them to manageable goals that I could actually achieve. One of my resolutions was to read more. As I said, I don’t read that much anymore because I spend almost all of my day reading, and lately when I get home the last thing I want to do is read. I also said that I always used to love reading. Well, that isn’t actually true. If you talk to anyone who has majored in English or anyone who works in publishing, they will probably tell you that they always loved to read. They will probably say that they devoured books or that they were a voracious reader. Yes devoured and voracious are pretty much the same word, but big, proud readers like those two words in particular. My big confession that shocks most people is that when I was young, I hated to read and I honestly don’t remember reading that much. Throughout school I read because I was forced to read, but I never read on the side as a hobby or as a pleasure. I didn’t fully enjoy reading until I hit college.

To stay true to one of my resolutions, I managed to read a book this weekend. In fact I read the whole book on Sunday. Granted, it was only about 145 pages, but still it’s an accomplishment. This weekend I read Fahrenheit 451. It is such a popular and important work of literature, it’s on so many high school reading lists and it’s even on some junior high reading lists, that I’m honestly surprised that I haven’t read it already. Or maybe I did read it but just can’t remember reading it. Or maybe I was supposed to read it and just blew it off.

People who know me today and people who know my most recent history probably think that I was an outstanding and exceptional student my whole life. That is far from the case. I was an average student in elementary school, if it’s even worth going back that far. I was a great student in junior high. I was an average student again in high school. And I was an outstanding student through community college and college. I don’t really know why I had these ups and downs in how I performed as a student. I had moments when I was incredibly dedicated and focused, like in junior high where I first discovered my love of history and mythology. When I got to high school I suppose I lost some dedication and focus, and can’t really remember why. It’s not like I was always out at parties or always hanging out with my friends. I was always more of a recluse and antisocial. In high school, most of my friends were in honors or advance placement classes and already starting to study for the SATs in their sophomore year. Meanwhile I was getting B averages (with an occasional C in math classes) in the “regular” level classes. For some reason I was just less focused and less dedicated and not invested in my classes. I’m sure I must have studied through high school, but I honestly don’t remember actually doing it. Maybe I have ADD and just don’t know it…

At any rate, things turned around for me when I started community college and made my way through two additional colleges and graduate school. And it was a complete 180 turn. I went from being lazy and unfocused to incredibly dedicated and focused. It was like I couldn’t learn enough and maybe the difference was that I had the opportunity to choose what I wanted to study. I wasn’t limited by the subjects we were required to take in high school. Sure, in college I was required to take a science class, but I could decide what kind of science class I wanted to take. While I generally have a hard time understanding basic science, chemistry, or biology, somehow I managed to do really well in physical anthropology or geology. I’m generally bad at most forms of math, but did pretty well in geometry. I went from hating reading to loving reading. And somehow I managed to study Greek and Latin at the same time, something most departments discourage because it is often too difficult to do at once. And I managed to excel at both. I suppose once I was in college, I managed to figure out how my strange brain works and what it’s good at. And maybe I was lucky enough to find the right professors who gave me the inspiration and encouragement that I needed. And fortunately I had the family to support my odd and extended educational choices.

Anyway, I started this post to congratulate myself for reading an awesome book, and then went into a retrospective on the history of my education and how my strange little brain works. I take a year off of blogging, and this is what you get. Take what you will of it.

New Year's Resolutions

For a long time I would make New Year's Resolutions every year. In recent years, I would be horrible about keeping them. Then eventually I got to the point of not making any at all. What's in a resolution, after all. In a sense, most resolutions for most people are a declaration of what they don't like or hate about themselves. Some of the most common resolutions are to eat better, lose weight, manage money better, quit a vice like smoking or drinking. I suppose it is noble to admit your faults and to recognize where you can improve your life. But it a way it's also somewhat depressing, because your essentially listing all the things you're doing wrong in your life. Oh well. I suppose the best way to start a new year is with a positive attitude that you can fix whatever is bothering you or holding you back in life.

I'm giving resolutions another shot this year and my goal is to try to make them positive and hopefully these are things that will make my life this year better than what it was last year.

Resolution 1: Work Less. My name is "Tenth Muse" and I'm a workaholic. I don't need to explain why this is my number one resolution. My pathetic posts of the past are explanation enough. I declared this on New Year's Day. Since getting back to work, I have worked my 8-hour day and I haven't taken work home with me at night or over the weekends. I also haven't checked work e-mail while I'm "off the clock." So far, so good. And it has felt great. Do I feel like I should be catching up on or getting ahead on projects? Do I feel guilty? Not one damn bit.

Resolution 2: Cook More. I cook all the time. I suppose this resolution really means cook better, cook healthier, cook more interesting. When things get busy (see blog history and what's behind Resolution Number 1), I often feel too tired to cook when I get home from work. So I make an easy dinner or microwave some frozen dinner. It's not the healthiest thing to do every night. I really enjoy cooking and I love experimenting and trying new recipes. It has often been like a hobby for me. So one of my resolutions is to force myself to cook actual meals, real meals, that are good for me and that I enjoy preparing and eating.

Resolution 3: Read More. This one might be hard to pull off. Now that I'm in my ninth year working in publishing, a job where you're looking at text and reading for a living, I can't stand reading. I used to love reading. It was always such a joy to pick up a new book—or, as is the case for me, an old book—and lie on the couch or in the bed and just read it for an afternoon or evening. Being a book person, I should probably read them more often.

Resolution 4: Learn More. I could probably tie this into Resolution 3. I have an associate's degree, two bachelor's degrees, and a master's degree. Education and learning is in my blood. When I'm not learning something new, I feel like a lazy, ignorant slob. I don't like feeling like a lazy, ignorant slob. So my goal is to "study." So this "studying" might mean reading some books or watching some documentaries. Whatever the form, I just want to learn something. Maybe I'll pick up my Greek and Latin textbooks and get back to reading Greek and Latin. I've gotten so rusty in those languages over the years.

So those are my resolutions for the year. I've limited myself to four goals, and these seem like goals that I might actually be able to accomplish.

A Return to the Blog

It has been a very long time since I've last posted something here. It's been well over a year, I think. So, why did I stop writing? Why did I disappear? I suppose a big part of me just got tired of myself. I was tired of what I was writing day after day, then week after week, then month after month. Somehow I found myself stuck in a rut and in what seemed like an endless cycle of doing the same exact thing day after day. Work got incredibly busy and unfortunately it managed to take over my life. I would work long hours, take work home with me, and work over the weekend. In the free time I had, I really felt no motivation to do anything. I posted on my blog because I, for some reason, felt compelled to, but at a point I was getting depressed about what I was writing. How exciting and interesting is it to constantly write about how tired I was because work was always busy? At the time absolutely nothing inspired me and I didn't feel moved or motivated to write anything interesting or clever or creative. So I just stopped. I doubt the world felt a great loss by my disappearance, but for whatever reason I feel compelled to write here.

So, what has happened in the past year? Well, things with work haven't changed. It's still busy and there were a few months ago where I was working about 50 or 60 hours a week. Because I don't get paid overtime, because we only get a 2 percent cost-of-living raise every year, and because we don't exactly get recognized for working long hours, my New Year's resolution was to NOT work so much. I'm going to try to force myself to keep my work-life balance, and ideally I'd like the scales tipped more toward the "life" end. But I don't really want to talk about work, because I've done enough of that over the years.

The real life-changing event happened last year when my father passed away. His health had been failing for the past few years, and he would have periods when he was ill, but then he would "bounce back" and get better. Toward the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013, his health really started to decline. He was in and out of hospitals, spent time in emergency rooms and ICUs, and even spent time in a nursing home, before my mom and brother decided to bring him home in May 2013 for hospice care. Selfishly speaking, living so far from home was incredibly painful because there was nothing I could do to help him or to help my mom and brother who were taking care of him. I went home on May 29, and he passed away the next day. My mom, brother, sister and her family, and I were all with him when he passed. My other brothers and a nephew came a few days later, and we were all together for his memorial service. As difficult and as painful as the time was, we were all fortunate to be together. We could laugh and cry together as we remembered him. Some day I will write more about him and about the man he was, but I'm crying a little too much to do that right now.

Thus begins my return to my blog. We'll see what I can manage to pull together for 2014...