Unstructured

A friend recently forwarded an article (blog post) over to me that deals with the productivity transition from a 40-hour-a-week job to freelance (which in my case is unemployment). The author focuses on how having rituals and structure can lead to more creativity, but what I got out of the piece was the importance of structure in productivity and efficiency.

It's an issue that I've dealt with in the past and that I see happening both to myself and people around me. When you have an entire day to get a few things done, it's a lot easier to procrastinate or bum around the house, put it off and think, "I have time, I can do it later." I've noticed this tendency with myself on weekends where I have no plans or weeks where there's nothing going on. It feels a lot easier on Monday night to say, "oh, forgot to run to the store, that's okay, I can go after dinner," then change your mind after dinner and put it off til Tuesday when you also have free time. Compare that to the Monday night where you know that you are busy after dinner and have an urgent obligation on Tuesday. You'll be much more likely to remember to run to the store with that little bit of free time you have.

This is a huge issue to me during this period of unemployment--I always have a list of things that I need to do, but I kept putting things off and putting them off because hey, it's not like I'm in a hurry. I have no job pending, I can totally sit around and watch three hours of What Not To Wear while my room's a disaster, I haven't made any necessary phone calls, and my resume sits there unfinished. I let emails pile up, I forget to respond to voicemails...it all just gets really bad when I have too much time on my hands.

I know for a fact that i'm more productive when my days are structured. Since I don't have work or events or anything to structure it for me, it's time to start listening to my alarm and creating rituals and habits. (btw I sat down and cleaned my room and put things in the proper place and set up my pc. I feel so productive! hope I can keep it up!)

Family, Part 4

I just had a conversation with a friend about how completely crazy my family can be. There are lots of things that frustrate me about my family, and living closer/with my parents really does open the door for lots of crazy to happen. Holidays have always been complicated and I worry that I'll be more stressed out being closer to my parents and their multitude of issues. It's always complex to be wrapped up in someone else's life, which was why it felt nice being in California where I could be wrapped up in my own life. But is that what happiness is?

My friend is wonderfully blunt, which can be really helpful at times. She asked me why the hell I moved out here if I don't know if I can live near my parents. Fair question. What did I expect? It's not like these things were new to me, I'd just been removed from them for several years. And what kind of daughter would I be if I weren't willing to help my parents out with their issues (we've got a inevitable foreclosure pending here)? Sure, I didn't ask to be born and I'm not really obligated to do anything to help them out...except aren't I?

I've been struggling with the constant fear that I'm not doing what I want to do in life: don't know where I want to live, what I want to do, who I want to be. But one of the most important things in life is to help others. I do want to help others, so why not my own family? It doesn't have to kill me with stress and anxiety if I don't let it.

Family, Part 3

Tonight my aunt threw a huge going away party for me and invited all of her friends that I've gotten to know over the years as well as a couple relatives that I don't see often. It was great to see everyone but it was hard saying goodbye to a lot of them. Some I've seen on an almost weekly basis for the past couple years and it's surprisingly hard to comprehend that this period of my life is over and I won't be seeing these people except occasionally when I visit or check my social media.

I keep coming across the following phrase, "Blood of the covenant is thicker than water of the womb," which is often misinterpreted to say that, "Blood is thicker than water." In modern society the saying goes that family bonds are stronger than bonds between friends. But traditionally the line meant that bonds of friendship are stronger than the bonds of family. It's an interesting saying and it always reminds me that friends are a family that you choose. 

Maybe it's due to my imminent departure, but I've gotten a chance to see over the past couple weeks the bonds that I have with friends and people around me and how important those bonds are. When I left school, I felt a breaking of many bonds with people--friends who weren't that close, people with whom I had little in common besides the same major, classes, or dormitory. Everyone dispersed around the world and we were left with only those bonds that we cared enough to maintain, which (I am sorry to say) was fewer bonds than I expected to have. People grow apart and it's the natural order of things. It's to be expected, and I suppose that it can be relished, especially for those of us who sometimes have friends who are emotionally draining, unsupportive, or abusive. But it's just change, plain and simple, and it can be hard to accept.

It's going to hit me at the end of this week when I say goodbye to my aunt and her kids. I've spent three years close to them, and it'll be hard to go from seeing them a couple times a week to once a year. I'm grateful for the internet and smartphones, as it'll be easy for me to email videos and pictures on a regular basis, and I can email or call my aunt as often as I need to. But it's not the same as living out here. I'll be going back to counting down the days until I get to see them again, just like I did when I was a child and I counted down for my aunt to visit in NC.

Everyone wished me luck on my trip and my next "adventure". They know I'm flying blind, that I'm totally lost and unsure of where I'll end up. I really am ending a chapter in my life and embarking on a new one, one that I'll have to write as I go. 

And I'm so used to using outlines.

Content

I went to dinner with two of my roommates tonight at my favorite sushi place. We ordered a ton of food and chatted about things. It's something I really wish we'd done more often in the year we lived together. It'll be sad to leave these guys. I'm really starting to feel this imminent move.

Quitting

I've been doing a countdown to my last day at work. I'm feeling particularly unproductive at home (with regards to packing and getting ready to leave) but work has been busier than ever. Four days left now, and I'm counting down the hours. It'll be sad to leave the people I've spent tons of time with for the past three years, but what's really strange is how quickly everyone will forget me....and I will likely forget them.

Of course there are good friends that I'll still write and see when I visit LA, but the majority of the salespeople and account managers that I greet on a regular basis now, I'll see only on my LinkedIn page after the 8th. It's unusual.

I can see why people who are fired after decades with a company can be truly devastated by the change, even if it was semi-welcome.

It's been such a strange experience, spending so much time at a company and then leaving abruptly with no interest in continuing to work within the industry. It's just....odd.

Family, Part 2

I went to see my family last Sunday. It was a nice visit and conversation centered around getting to see everyone more than discussion of what I've been doing, which was nice. My cousin's son played with a set of Fisher-Price golfballs and clubs and asked politely for iced tea and a second cookie. We played Santa animals while the grown-ups talked a bit and he quite enjoyed it.

It was like being in another dimension, walking into the same living room, same kitchen, same den, and same bathroom that I remember from my childhood. What's weird is that I'm pretty sure things haven't changed since my dad was a boy too--the wastepaper baskets in rooms are emptied hourly, dishes don't pile up, and Papa sits in his armchair watching TV on maximum volume. It's like stepping back in time entering their house, and the only change I recognize is that the old tree in the backyard was removed a couple years back.

Then there's my grandparents. 84 and 94 years old, they're getting on in their years, and during my visit I kept it in the back of my head that I might not get to see them again when I visit next year. It was disconcerting, but the strangest thing was seeing how much they've changed since I last saw them. My grandmother has always been a harsh, bitter woman, and she would often take out her anger on her husband, who sits back and takes the abuse, keeping his hearing aids turned down so he can't hear any of it. Due to his poor hearing, Papa would always sit in his armchair and watch family reunions and visits, sometimes asking loudly how someone is doing or question who a specific person was (his grandchildren have all grown up and now we're onto great-grandchildren). But this visit was entirely different. Perhaps because everyone was at the house, or perhaps because she's getting older, Grandma was far more subdued than I've ever seen her. There was very little snark, and when she spoke to me about her health and stress surrounding caring for Papa, she sounded tired and beaten. It's almost scary to see such a change in a person, even a somewhat welcome one. Papa, on the other hand, hardly spoke at all during the visit. His hair is almost gone, and he looks older than he ever has before. For the first time, when I hugged him goodbye, he did not squeeze back when I took his hand.

Everyone else is aging too, and my cousin mentioned that her 40th birthday is looming out there on the horizon. Walking through the house and looking at all the pictures, those of my siblings and me have been largely overshadowed by pictures of the great-grandchildren, my second-cousins, one of whom I've not yet met.

My father moved to Colorado from Los Angeles in the late 80's, then eventually to North Carolina after I was born. I've always believed that part of his reason for leaving home was his overbearing mother. He lived at home through college, and has told me many stories surrounding his mother's inability to accept things that are new to her, like eating fish. Even her children's significant others were subject to scrutiny--it's like that old philosophy that everything should stay in the family and outsiders are not to be trusted. My dad told me that he didn't want to see his kids treated like his sister's children, who learned to manipulate Grandma in order to get what they want and visited her frequently despite her harsh disposition. The decision may have cost him his relationship with his mother, who now holds a grudge over the fact that he doesn't call or send letters often enough (she hangs up if he calls and has sent back letters and cards). It's quite a dysfunctional situation.

When my maternal grandparents passed away, I felt sad that I'd never forged a relationship with either of them. I spent the next couple years that I lived in LA hearing about how wonderful a person my Grandma was, but I feel so young--I don't remember much at all, besides the basics that a grandchild remembers. I remember her generosity at Christmas and how much she loved Santa Fe and southwestern jewelry, I remember her difficult relationship with her husband and how sad it was to see her fade away in the years after she was diagnosed with cancer. I remember that I never got to know her as a person. She passed away the first semester that I was in school in Los Angeles, and had been very sick leading up to it. I didn't know her, and as a stupid kid, I had never seen the importance of trying to get to know her. I regret that immensely now. I hear so much from my mother, my aunt, and other relatives about how giving and wonderful a person she was, how she coped with her husband and how she raised five children as a navy wife, moving every couple years. I learned that she'd wanted a white Persian cat, and my aunt had wanted nothing more than for her mother to be able to have what she wanted. But Grandpa outlived her, and I did get to see him decline. We were never close, but he visited me at school occasionally, and I would go to San Bernadino a couple times to see him. He was a talker, couldn't take a drive without him explaining the history of the area and what used to be in a certain location. We went to an art gallery once in my college town and he spent thirty minutes chatting with a salesman while I stood staring at a boring piece of art. He struggled to take care of himself, buying all his food and produce at the 99 cent store, which sells items close to their expiration dates. We would find food in the fridge that had expired years ago and have to throw it out when he wasn't around.

I feel like I've been rambling and not going anywhere with this.

My aunt likes to say that it's strange to think that you only know your grandparents when they're old. As you grow older, so do they, and so for the self-centered child (as most of us were), it can be difficult to ever see grandparents as different than they currently are. It's true, I only ever knew my grandparents (or remembered knowing them) when they had started to age. I don't recall Papa without hearing aids and participating in everyday conversation just as I don't remember my (maternal) grandmother being able to keep up easily on our trips to amusement parks and zoos. My (maternal) grandfather and (paternal) grandmother have always been angry people in my memory, but they mellowed with age.

Sometimes I really wish that I'd lived closer and could have known both sets of grandparents better than I did. But when I look back at who I was at 15/16, when I would most likely have had the forethought to try to get to know them as people...I know that I wouldn't have done it. Hell, most teenagers don't even get to know their parents as people.

I'm glad at least that I'll have a chance next month to get to know my parents as people, no matter where I end up afterwards.

Bliss

I've been baking for a couple years now, not really seriously, but enough that I've invested in a ton of equipment: dedicated pans, a cookie dough scoop, two flour sifters, several ramekins, a massive bag of active dry yeast. I bake often enough and have such a small sweet tooth that I find fault in every recipe that I make. Cookies are always too dry, too crumbly, too soft, too hard, too floury, too sweet. Cakes taste off, frosting gets overly sweet, icing doesn't set....the list goes on. I'm my own harshest critic, and I rarely stumble upon recipes that seem worthy enough to add to my personal recipe box.

But today I came across a fudgy brownie recipe that baked up so wonderful that I have to reconsider my life. I always thought I preferred cakey brownies, so the recipes I would make usually ended up having three or four eggs, lots of flour, and a small amount of butter or oil. But I gambled and this recipe paid off.

This isn't a baking blog, so I won't get in depth about the experience, but producing such an excellent product is invigorating, and I feel suddenly supremely confident about my baking abilities (my last batch of cookies had a bad brown-granulated sugar ratio and turned out too dry and crumbly). If one recipe can turn out this good, think of what else is out there just waiting to be made!

Now if only I can replicate this kind of success in my writing...

Mixed Feelings

I feel very good about what I am about to do. But I am incredibly sad that I will no longer live near my aunt.

Fear

My aunt gave me the book The Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker, and so far it's fascinating. I was a little worried in the beginning that the book would attempt to justify irrational fear on the basis that fear is a good survival instinct. However, it's much more nuanced than that, and includes a lot of scary stories about people being victimized and how the victim was able to read their intuition after the fact--the author laments that if only people could learn to trust their intuition in the moment rather than attempting to rationalize away sudden fears or concerns, they may be more likely to come to correct predictions about a person or a behavior that unnerves them.

There's a lot about understanding your body and your actions in context of things: my favorite example was one of a man who avoided getting into bed with his wife while she was still awake. He asked his wife if he was unconsciously avoiding sex with her. His therapist responded, "What is unconscious about that?" Looking at the man's actions in the context of the situation, it was clear what he was doing, but it was much harder for him to recognize it.

I've always been of the opinion that logic and rationality are far superior than emotion and gut feelings. This book is starting to make me wonder, and I'm thinking back to all those times I spent around people who made me feel slightly uncomfortable, and I'm suddenly able to understand why I acted in ways I did, due to feeling threatened or fearful or just plain uncomfortable.

I don't know why I never trusted my gut. It's sad really. I had lunch a couple weeks back with a good friend and she listened quietly to my rationalizations and arguments about whether or not I should leave everything behind and go to North Carolina on a whim, then informed me that sometimes it really is best to follow your gut. Looking back, I see that I was speaking from a place of pain, where a lot of things in my life were changing and I'd just realized how unhappy I and how much I felt that I needed a blank slate and a new start. I have no question that my gut feeling was right and that I eventually made the right decision to leave. But it's scary how much I haven't listened to my gut in the past several years. Terrifying, really. It's like going through the world attempting to be a computer, weighing pros and cons of everything and making the decision that is expected, the decision that is logical, not the decision that will make me happy.

Making an emotional decision is often considered wrong. Only logic should prevail. But why is that?

I don't really know. I'll probably be exploring that for the next few days.