All posts in: quarterlife crisis

books
09 Mar 2013

time is on your side

If I had to make a list of the things I have spent the most hours of my life worrying, stressing, and fretting over, I think time would be the hands down, number-one, top of the list. I worry about being late. I worry about being early. I worry about not having enough time to finish assignments and work tasks before they are due. I worry about not having enough time to accomplish what I want to accomplish in my tiny, insignificant life. I actually expend time thinking about how I don’t have enough time. This makes zero sense.

This is all part of the perfectionist Cycle of Self-Hatred, where you set very high standards for the way you conduct your life and then beat yourself up when you aren’t “on” 100% of the time. Even though the reason you might not be “on” 100% of the time is because you are full of anxiety because of said high standards.

The cycle. I’ve been mired in it for a few weeks now. I’m still mired in it, I guess, maybe for life, but it’s been bad these last weeks of winter where I am feeling cooped up and carbed up and it’s too cold to clean my apartment much think complex, coherent thoughts. I am spending my time worrying and soothing my worry-brain with mindless Internet and then feeling crummy about wasting so much time.

Yesterday I picked up Laura Vanderkam’s 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think (on a recommendation from the reliably awesome Janssen of Everyday Reading. I’m only a few chapters in, but man, but as much as I hate the axiom “Right Book At The Right Time yadda yadda yadda,” well, shit, here I am.

In case you couldn’t tell, I am a huge sucker for nonfiction that captures conventional wisdom in a straightforward manner. Blame Michael Pollan – I read In Defense of Food in 2010 was taken to my knees. Nonfiction that takes an everyday concept – food, time, whatever –  and reminds you of what you know about it, in your bones, as a human. That you shouldn’t eat food that has ingredients in it that you don’t know what they are. That you shouldn’t spend time on activities that don’t give you pleasure or reward. Then, they reveal some secrets you probably didn’t know – that skim milk is full of additives to make it taste more milky, that the average American chronically underestimates the amount of free time they have in any given day.

And then, the good stuff –  little mind/life tweaks to help get you back on track to feeling normal. Some simple ideas to get your body and brain back on the right track, out of the cycle. Not feeling like a manic perfectionist or a yo-yo dieter or a worried lump of indecision who is surely going to die before she ever gets the chance to do X, Y, or Z. Just normal.

Here are some Time Tips from the few pages I’ve read of 168 Hours. I suspect that at least 50% of you who read this will say “yeah, duh, everyone knows that,” but the other half of you are probably high strung nutsos like myself who tend to forget the obvious under duress. So this is for you.

And for me, in five days, when I forget everything useful I’ve learned in life and succumb to the cycle.

  • You have 168 hours to kill in a week. Even if you sleep 8 hours a week and work 40 hours a week, that is more than enough time to do some stuff. Whatever that stuff is that you decide you want to do. If you don’t believe me, schedule out your next week, fifteen minutes at a time, and see how hard it is to fill the slots. Or, take Vanderkam’s advice and do the reverse: chart out your hours for a week – jot down when you do what – and then take a good hard look at your data.
  • I repeat: You have enough time. (See also: Daring Greatly)
  • Okay, so you have enough time, but you don’t know what to do with that time. I mean, you have some ideas of what you should be doing, what you want to accomplish, but that doesn’t lead to anything you are going to do instead of surfing the internet. Vanderkam’s suggestion to list 100 Things You Want to Do In Your Life is a good place to start, especially because you don’t frame it as a series of goals. This isn’t a Life List or a 101 in 1001 days or a 30 before 30; it’s just you and a piece of notebook paper and 100 Things You Might Like. You might hate them all, but that’s okay, and it’s a good place to start.
  • If you’re still feeling stymied, think about what you like to do and what you are good at. Do those things, even if those things are “sorting the sock drawer” and “reblogging pictures of cats for your friends.” Start your dreams from where you are and where you’ve been.
  • Did I tell you that you have enough time?
  • You meaning me.

 

 

 

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life maintenance
07 Mar 2013

high school high

High school is on my mind lately. Maybe because I was actually *in* my high school just a few weeks ago. Maybe because I read a lot of YA so I have high school on the brain more than most. Maybe because yes, my ten year high school reunion is this year. I will not be able to attend, but don’t worry: last night I dreamed the entire thing, start to finish. It was in the school cafeteria, girls were wearing prom dresses, and my parents were there singing in some kind of a cappella group.
See that little red sign on the right-hand wall? My locker was just past that for three years. After the first year, I noticed that it didn’t actually lock, so I yanked it open every day without doing the combination. A few lockers down was my friend Kevin. His locker had a large hole in the bottom through which you could spy on a classroom. One afternoon Kevin stuck his leg down there and we locked him inside, because he was over six foot and about 120 pounds and he wanted to see if he could do it.
There was a day that I went to my locker after school was out and there was a boy there waiting for me. This was a boy with whom I exchanged smiles and waves in the hallway for months – he was a Senior, the drum major, and way too cute for me. And there he was, waiting for me at my locker.
He’d seen me dancing with another guy at the Winter Snowball. He wanted to know if we were dating. If he’d been waiting at my locker the day before the dance, the answer would have been no. Afterwards, the answer was “kind of.” I was with the other guy, the guy I danced with, for the rest of my days at that high school. My life went in one direction, not the other. In fact, my life went in plenty of directions that you couldn’t have predicted if you were reading about High School Jessica in her own YA novel, her own really boring Teen movie. High School Jessica skipped AP English took extra science classes and math, all the way through Calculus. Slightly Older High School Jessica thought she would get a journalism degree.
But then again, I also make a living dealing with the same books that inspired debates with my English teacher. I marched toward my persistent high school passion as a full-grown adult, and I still read books set in high school. I still think about my high school boyfriends (and almost boyfriends) more than is probably necessary.
Things change, things stay the same, etc.
(That does not mean I am sad about not being able to attend my high school reunion. No, no, no, the horrors. I can’t even manage to spend an hour in the auditorium watching my sister play the oboe without making posts like this no THANK YOU.)

 

quarterlife crisis
13 Jan 2013

an ode to a kitchen table

For some folks, living as a grown up is something that just happens. I am of a certain age therefore I will no longer use the bath towels I stole from my parent’s basement in 2009 that they were probably keeping in the basement to rip up later for rags. I am of a certain age therefore I will no longer drink light beer. I am of a certain age therefore I will no longer let my parents pay for my cell phone.

Others, not so much. And by others, I mean me, and also this guy I live with. Unless prompted or required, we both tend toward a kind of perpetual adolescence, neither of us stepping toward responsibility or adult-like life progress.

What I’m trying to say is this: we are pretty messy and we play a lot of video games and live in ill-suited apartments and we don’t buy furniture.

Our current apartment is definitely ill-suited, in that A) it is disrepair B) it is in a shady neighborhood C) it is impossible and expensive to heat D) there are probably mice and E) it has no dishwasher or laundry However, despite all of it’s flaws, it is large. Huge, actually, compared to our previous living arrangements. We have room to do Wii Fit and sleep guests. We have separate closets and bookshelves. We have a poorly designed eat-in kitchen.

Somewhere in the whirlwind of getting a job and moving and such, it hit me that this is it. This is the life that I will lead from now on, give or take a few thousand dollars a year. As long as I am in this city, this is what I have to work with. No more waiting for a shoe to drop. All shoes are on the ground. Now what?

I decided that if this is the rest of my life, and I have this eat-in kitchen, then I would like a kitchen table to put in it.

Off to Goodwill we went and came back with a scratched up 35 dollar beauty and two chairs that belong in a formal dining room. No matter. A table is a table, a chair is a chair, and I like my kitchen table, I really do. It makes a life different.

Most nights of the week, we sit down and eat dinner together like civilized folks. After work, one person can make dinner while the other sits at the table and have your after-work chats. You have somewhere to put your cookbook, your groceries. If you are feeling lazy slumped on the couch between the hours of 6 p.m. and 9 p.m., you can take yourself over to the table, sit upright, pour a cup of tea and your mood changes. If you have something to work on, but you are afraid to do it, sitting at the kitchen table is nicer than holing yourself up in a bedroom because even if you have your headphones on, you are still part of the flow, not sequestered away, alone. You can grab a snack or a glass of water. You can spread out your papers and books.

It’s a good place to be.

On a similar note, I have also decided that if this is the rest of my life, I would like an iPhone. A 35-dollar table wasn’t much of a fight, but we’ll see how this goes…

 

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goals
28 Dec 2012

to share or not to share?

Listen guys. You know I enjoy telling y’all about the minutiae of my life, despite the fact that this habit may some day get me murdered or fired, and has more than once led to uncomfortable encounters with colleagues and family members alike. This doesn’t stop me. My big mouth is unstoppable. And you also know that I enjoy revealing my deepest desires and life’s grandest wishes. Someday I will indeed change the world/run a marathon/write the Next Great American Novel/actually floss my teeth, and I will be happy to share my ups and downs along the way and then write self-righteous advice once I achieve my myriad of goals.

It is December 28th, which means I am thinking about my New Year’s Resolutions. As per usual, I would like to make about 50 and I would like to tell you all about them and then update you as the year rolls on. Accountability is good for goal-making. Also, I am a raging narcissist, so any excuse to talk about myself.

I’ve been trying to talk myself down to 5 or 6 goals, but the ones that I feel really strongly about, the ones that really move me? Well, I just don’t want to tell you about them.

Maybe because I am learning the difference between public and private (haha). Maybe because I am afraid I might fail and would prefer to keep the option of a graceful bow out available without having to confess to you guys that I just suck.

But also, I have reason to believe that now that I have reached an extremely advanced age, I feel comfortable enough in my own skin to believe, deep down, that I can live my life the way I want to live it without making public proclamations. Without turning over a new leaf. I honestly spent many, many years of my life feeling miserable most days of the week because I wasn’t living up to my own standards. I felt lazy, ate the wrong foods, was messy, watched too much TV, didn’t do enough work. I’d write up a little schedule of “my ideal day” at nighttime, and then fail myself in the morning. The self-help solution to this problem would be to practice being kinder to oneself, forgiving of ones own humanness, etc. I did some of that, and I could do some more, but really, I just started living on my own and some time later, I was able to wake up and just DO all the things I wanted to do and be done with it.

I don’t feel that way any more. I rarely have “ideal days,” but most of the time I go to bed exhausted and feeling like I just had a day reasonably well-lived. I don’t need a New Year’s Resolution to help me turn over a new leaf. I’m here, on the other side of the leaf, living.

Some of the things I want to do this year are big and scary. Some of them aren’t “good” resolutions – easy to measure, to work toward. Some I will probably fail at. I think the heart of me is telling me to keep these goals close to my chest this year, to practice intrinsic motivation, to keep on living on the other side of the leaf.

I just read Nova Ren Sum’s post about her 2012 resolutions – she wrote down 7 writing goals in January but didn’t share them on her blog, and just this week revealed her successes and failures. This I love, because her goals were big and burly and there were too many of them, just like my own goals are wont to be. And because she missed the mark on so many, but still admits to a good 2012.

Maybe I’ll do a big reveal in  2014, let you know how things worked out. Or maybe I’ll break down and tell you about every last detail. Maybe I’ve changed a lot, maybe I’ve changed a little. Maybe I’ve got a long way to go, or maybe I’m already there.

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libraries
03 Dec 2012

2012: week forty-seven

November 28 – December 3

One of the reasons I decided to go into librarianship was the huge variety of tasks and skills most library positions require. I like to do different things every day. I like a good shake up, and this week, I got it.

You see, we are getting a new Integrated Library System. This is a huge, extended, heartbreaking process. Side effects include suspended filling of holds (ouch), various tasks for librarians to complete in order to prepare for the switchover, and oh yeah, we aren’t allowed to buy new books.

So while we wait out the “computer upgrades,” we’ve been dispatched to help other librarians complete their extra tasks, which means last week I spent four days out of the office doing what I truly enjoy – playing with piles of books. I also enjoyed different wake-up times, different commutes, getting to know my fellow branch librarian coworkers, and lunches out.

This week, I am back to the office to catch up on tasks and emails. Back to the routine. Hoping my I-Am-Freezing related depression will lift a little bit, now that I have made some progress in Project Cold Apartment: I found this puffy vest to wear over everything, we saran-wrapped a few of our windows, and The Boy taught me how to take a hot shower that lasts for more than 8 minutes. Positive developments! Life is not a meaningless misery!

 

Reading:

  • Nonnnnfiction
  • A book to review that had the protagonist lose her virginity on page 3 and she got pregnant on page 10 and got on a bus to San Francisco on page 12 and what is going on here?
  • I decided one evening that I was too grumpy and cold to stay awake, but it was like, 9:15, so I took to my bed and cracked open Gone Girl. I made it through about 15 pages and then had an hour of half-awake, half-asleep, wordily-narrated literary dreams.

Listening To:

  • I am listening to a lot of music lately, which is nice. I am mostly getting my ideas from the Staff and Host best of 2012 lists from WXPN. I also listened to some Fleet Foxes, some First Aid Kit. Listening to a CD while reading on the couch is something that I truly like that I haven’t done in years, so now I am making up for lost time.

Watching:

  • My Saturday afternoon was greatly improved when I discovered that Clueless was on Netflix Instant.
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life maintenance
26 Nov 2012

2012: week forty-six

November 18 – November 24

In the ongoing saga that is Jessica’s Mood, I have identified the following areas as areas for mood improvement:

Procrastination Regarding Nagging, Annoying Tasks

See: making phone calls, submitting forms, sending emails. Of course, I attempted to take care of some of these tasks two weeks ago in the heights of my emotional unrest, and ended up crying over unhelpful customer service representatives. Not the best idea. However, the nagging tasks, they continue to nag.

Keeping Busy

A bored Jessica is an unhappy Jessica.

Taking Your Vitamins

Who CARES if the crazy bearded guy at Vitamin World was right and your Walgreens vitamins don’t actually do anything and are just a placebo. Take that placebo and RUN with it, child! Take your fish oil, your C, your B complex. Maybe add a Vitamin D to the mix to make 4 p.m. sunsets seem a little less tragic.

Moving Your Body

The season of 4 p.m. sunsets marks the end of after-work runs. But there are such things as weekend runs, you know, and also sit ups and push ups and Wii Fit and Netflix Pilates videos and it’s just cold out, you haven’t died, you know. You can get off the couch for four second.

Staying Warm

Except for the fact that it is still 2 degrees in your apartment, and it will likely remain 2 degrees in your apartment for the rest of the season. It is very hard to get off the couch. Heck, it is hard to stay on the couch and read a book because your hands get cold. Wear layers. Find your fingerless gloves. Hold hot cups of water. Buy long underwear, thick socks. Turn the heat up, you stingy fool.

Being Single-Minded

And finally it is okay not to want to tackle 50 tasks at once, to just Do One Thing pretty much all day long every day and letting other life things (eating, cleaning, working, sleeping) sift in as needed. Right now, that One Thing is ready a shit-ton of nonfiction books. Just go with it. Read and read a lot.

Light a Freaking Candle, Turn on the Twinkling Lights, and cue up some Sufjan

It’s the holiday season, dammit!

Play a computer game from 1988

I don’t know why. Just do it.

Reading:

Listening To:

  • This Lullaby on audio… I’ve read it a million times, but never listened, which makes it kind of fun.

Watching:

  • Had a mini-Shameless marathon on Saturday
boston
19 Nov 2012

2012: week forty-five

November 11 – November 17

I am about done with this mood. The only thing I ever want to do is read pop-psychology and write in my orange notebook and feel feeeeelings. I am annoying myself.

Can we talk about how there are only six weeks left in 2012? What a year, guys. Some days I think back to January, February, March etc and I feel triumphant. Some days I feel chewed up and spit out.

One thing that doesn’t suck – Thanksgiving! I appreciate this holiday more and more as I grow older, probably because I have also become a better cook. A holiday devoted to food is one thing… a holiday devoted to cooking? Divine.

This is my second Thanksgiving away from family, sadly, since I am currently lacking these things called “vacation days,” and if the library is open the day after Thanksgiving then you better believe that I need to be there! We are heading out to East Boston to dine with friends and their family, which is really a good way to do Thanksgiving – to be the culinary “guest star.” You can devote your attention to a single dish, putting in the flourishes the host wouldn’t have time for and buying those weird ingredients. Also, you take the train home and your kitchen is waiting for you, clean.

My household will be providing a pumpkin pie, some brussels sprouts, and some kind of corn bread casserole as concocted by The Boy himself. I think the chosen recipe calls for green chiles and at least two types of cheese. I made my pie crust today.

Maybe Thanksgiving will perk me up, and if it doesn’t, I will have another chance – the following Thursday I have been invited to an event called “Thanksgiving 2!” Maybe I can squeeze in an extra Christmas before actual Christmas? Just shove a major holiday into every week, keeping your spirits buoyed with delicious food, drinks, and general cheer all year long?

2013?

 

Reading:

  • So much nonfiction.
  • I am also reading a book about a boy who survives a tornado and finds out he is a sylph. I rarely subject myself to such “paranormal romance,” and I’m trying not to roll my eyes too much. Also, I can’t spell sylph. Also, I am 150 pages in and am not quite sure what a slyph is.

Watching:

  • A little Breaking Bad.
  • A little How I Met Your Mother.

Listening To:

  • Shovels & Rope – O’ Be Joyful
  • Anya Marina – Slow and Steady Seduction
  • Tom Waits – Small Change
  • Oh, and podcasts. It has been a very long time, but I am now almost caught up with You Had To Be There, and SO EXCITED that Sara and Nikki are going to have an MTV show!!!!
life maintenance
15 Nov 2012

life as a normal human: hobbies

The things that you do when you are not working are called “hobbies.”

I have probably blogged about this already, but sometime last semester I had a conversation with an undergraduate student about my ridiculous schedule, and she looked at me funny and asked, “Uh, what do you do for fun?”

Blushing. An extended, “Ummm…” Then I settled on the following responses:

  • I read on the bus
  • I listen to podcasts while I run

This was not an adequate answer.

I suppose blogging could be considered a hobby, as well as enjoying fine wines with friends. But I didn’t want to reveal that to my undergraduate acquaintances.

By the way, did I mention that these undergraduate acquaintances who were so baffled with my lifestyle were honors students?

Also, by “enjoying fine wines with my friends” I mean “drinking Two Buck Chuck in my apartment, regardless of who else decided to join me.”

Anywaaaaaaaay. I finally have time to, you know, do some things in my free time. Things “for fun!”

I wish I could say I am doing much more than reading on the bus and listening to podcasts, but frankly, I am afraid that I am having trouble squelching my Type A tendencies. My free time is mostly spent blogging, drinking cheap red wine in my apartment, and micromanaging my life by the way of lists, charts, and cleaning and rearranging my apartment.

I am spending more time, guilt-free, with my friends, including occasional evenings cavorting around Boston without any homework taunting me at home.

I am watching occasional recreational television, and reading occasional recreational books.

I am cooking dinner every night.

I am mostly reading and writing, which is what I like anyway.

I have not begun working for charity, running long distance races, knitting, doing calligraphy, or writing The Next Great American Novel…

but thanks to my dear friend who moved to Seattle who loaned me her sewing machine in her absence… I have one crooked, red curtain in my kitchen.

 Give it another three months, maybe I’ll sew up the other one.

books
24 Oct 2012

nice girls manifesto

“I realized that at this particular time in my life, I was friends with everybody. I’ll admit that seventh grade was only one day old, but suddenly I had this new goal: to go the whole year with everyone liking me.  I don’t mean be “most popular girl” or anything; I just wanted teachers to smile when they said ‘Alice McKinley’ and the other kids to say, ‘Alice? Yeah, she’s okay. She’s neat.'”

In pursuit of a bit of preteen-Jessica lingering around in my psyche, I recently re-read a preteen-y book from my preteen days – Reluctantly Alice by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.

Seventh-grade Alice has decided that all she wants out of middle school is to be likeable. Of course, Naylor obeys the first Law of a Decent Plot and immediately denies Alice her dearest want via a lumbering schoolyard named Denise Whitlock, but other than that Alice succeeds in making friends. Playing nice.

I don’t remember when I stopped playing that game, when it stopped seeming like an asset to play nice. I was thick in it in seventh grade, maybe all the way through high school, into college. My deepest pain was criticism because I was always always striving to please – all I wanted was to be liked, so why won’t you just like me already?

At some point after college, maybe in grad school, I read an article about how women send emails – that women are more likely to apologize in emails than men. That the apologies are usually needless – a pleasantry, a formality, a filler – that revealed a bit of that common need-to-please, that maybe made you look weak, unreliable, wishy-washy. I realized that I said “sorry” in almost every email I sent – sorry I didn’t have a chance to respond, sorry if you are too busy for this email, sorry for the trouble but I need xxx from you.

I stopped, because it seemed suddenly very clear that at any given time, there is likely something more important to me than feeling liked, being nice, having people say “Oh, Jessica? She’s okay. She’s neat.” That I should be looking out for my goals, my interests, and not apologizing so damn much.

But I still want to be nice. That doesn’t go away, and neither does the pain of criticism.  And that’s part of why I love Alice, why I love YA and children’s lit; those identity struggles never truly go away, and for children and teens, the struggles are that much more raw and on the surface. Reading about that rawness reminds me that I am still raw, that I am grown up, but still in that struggle.

Maybe that’s not me anymore, but Seventh-Grade Jessica will always be a nice girl.

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goals
17 Sep 2012

weekly: week thirty-seven

September 9 – September 15

This week, The Boy bought his first power tool – a 30 dollar drill. He has now drilled holes in a number of pieces of furniture and in many walls happily, and offered to make me a bookshelf.

I had a similarly adult transformation: I bought my first wine glasses. Those of you who have known my longstanding proclivity to drink wine from cups – plastic, if you have it – realize what a monumental five dollar purchase this was!

However, I decided that tomorrow will be my first day of the Whole30 challenge, and my wine glasses will remain unfilled for the next thirty days. This nutritional mind-body transformation better be good… now excuse me, I need to go hard-boil some eggs.

Reading:

Listening To:

  • Tom Waits – The Mule Variations
  • The Last Five Years
  • The sound of holes being drilled

Watching:

  • Still auditioning Up All Night
  • Daily episodes of “Liberal Propaganda” – The Boy’s choice of The Daily Show, Bill Maher, Colbert Report, or the Rachel Maddow Show.
  • It stands to note that I voluntarily watched a football game this week. In a bar.
  • An episode of Breaking Bad. We are also auditioning LOST replacement shows…
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