New Year's musings
Jan. 1st, 2007 01:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dendritejungleI can't decide if it's cute or just embarrassing that every entry I've ever made in this journal still fits on one LJ page... :P
I've had a post growing in my mind for the past couple of days, but a conversation from last night seems more topical, given that it's New Year's and all. (Happy New Year, everyone!)
I've had a post growing in my mind for the past couple of days, but a conversation from last night seems more topical, given that it's New Year's and all. (Happy New Year, everyone!)
I spent a lovely New Year's Eve at Mr. Mongolia's house, watching CBC and playing Super Mario Party with him and his wife as is our on-and-off New Year's tradition. Low-key, a lot of fun, and hey, it's always nice to hang out with friends! Particularly when it's friends and yummy food.
As I was leaving, Mrs. Mongolia (I need a better nickname for her. Suggestions?) offered me the kind wish for the New Year that - and I'm paraphrasing - this year I might meet a "special someone" who would make me happy.
While the wish was sweet, and I appreciated it, I was a little taken aback: I'm already happy, and of all the things I might wish for this year, meeting someone is actually pretty low on my list. Do I really seem discouraged at being single? Because I don't generally feel unhappy about it at all (the occasional blip notwithstanding, of course).
Lord knows when I was younger I felt a desperate, sucking VOID where I felt someone else was supposed to be, that EVERYONE was in a Relationship that was Completing Them and letting them Grow As People, while I was was just bitter and sad and slowly twisting up inside, but that was...wow, closer to a decade ago than I really like to think about. Damn, I feel old. Anyway, I ended up falling deeply in love, wonderful relationship blah blah, but my world fell apart when she dumped my ass. I compared it at the time to two plants that have grown together and their root systems intertwined, and when one is ripped out the root system of the other is damaged. It took a while for my mental equilibrium to reestablish itself. But it did, and over time I came to appreciate that I was a whole and complete person in and of myself - and capable of peace, happiness and joy that way without feeling I needed another person to help me achieve it. Don't get me wrong, I'm still a diehard romantic and believe that a good relationship can be one of the finest and most enriching experiences in human life. And you'd better believe that if love comes knocking, I'm not going to ignore the door. But I'm not pining away in the meantime. I feel, in fact, very lucky: so many people are so dissatisfied or downright unhappy being single, or don't want to get out of a bad relationship because the alternative - being along - seems so much worse. I might feel differently if I didn't have a wonderful group of friends, an awesome cat, a condo that's designed for one, etc. But I do, and I actually spend a decent percentage of every day being quietly grateful for a life that brings me so much joy. (When I'm not caught up in the minutia of day-to-day life, I mean. When I think PAST the arrgh-mistakes-at-work or dammit-I'm-going-to-be-late or must-remember-these-groceries or crap-I'm-cold foreground noise of my brain, and pull back and look at my life for a minute. Then everything pulls quietly into perspective. I do wish my brain would default to that state, rather than to its usual freakout-of-the-minute mode. Ah well. At least I'm much better at it than I used to be!)
I'm basically a quintessential quirkyalone.
I talked with Mr. Mongolia about his wife's wish as he drove me home. Apparently I do sometimes seem bitter with my "more action than I've seen in months!" comments, although I think it's more that it came across that way then how I meant it (as off-hand smart-aleck remarks). He pointed out that the wish most likely came from (a) their own happy marriage and (b) having seen another good friend recently fall in love and her current state of bliss.
Interestingly, I've also been pretty darn blissful for the last month or so as I wallow about happily in the Supernatural slash fandom, and my emotional responses I've self-consciously been comparing to the emotionally giddy highs of the early "honeymoon" stages of a relationship. Weird? I suppose. But it's happened to me for as long as I can remember, usually a couple of times a year: I get obsessed with something - last year it was the TV show House, it was the Lord of the Rings a couple of years before that, etc. - which makes me ludicrously happy, and then in a few weeks the obsession calms down and I move on. It's damn fun when it happens (although I do feel guilty for blathering incessantly about my current obsession to everyone, much as I try to restrain myself). And it's convenient, too: none of that pesky, complicated, time-consuming interpersonal interaction to deal with. Yes, I'm being facetious, but there is more of an element of truth to that than I would like to admit. Mr. Mongolia observed that this was exactly the attitude that has lead to stereotypical otaku antisocial behaviour: it's just so much easier to deal with idealized or fictionalized characters than with actual people. And so you end up with an entire subculture of people taking this to an extreme and living their lives in front of a computer.
Which is an excellent point. To be honest, I'm not really all that concerned about it happening to me. At least I'd like to think I'm more balanced than that! If these obsessions start lasting longer and longer I will be concerned (and y'all are welcome to whack me upside the head, or stage an intervention or something), but in the meantime, I'm treating it as good fun. :)
I offer all this as interesting food for thought, and also as a counterpoint to what I feel *I* desperately, overwhelmingly want for myself this year: to Get My Shit Together.
I am SICK AND TIRED of my propensity to put off interesting, rewarding projects (or basically ANYTHING that takes effort) because they require thought and concentration, invariably opting for TV or web-surfing or napping or some other form of instant gratification. I'm thirty-two. Why does my brain keep skidding around the simple, simple concept that things - dishes, tidying, studying, bill-paying, scrapbooks, websites, course materials - don't magically do themselves? I have years and years and years of unfinished projects, hobbies I could have been really good at if I'd actually practiced as I bloody well keep meaning to do, guilt over old pen pals whose correspondence languished unanswered...in short, I have the constant, nagging thorn in my side that I'm not only not living up to my potential, I'm not even close, and the guilt of opportunities passed and lost through laziness on my part. This is the one, overwhelming thing that casts a shadow on my day-to-day joy. I'm happy with my life, I'm just not satisfied with my performance in it.
I could blather on with specific examples of how I've screwed things up over the years, but that's neither useful nor, I imagine, terribly interesting to read about, so let's move on to The Plan, shall we? I'm hoping that by putting it out in the open, it will somehow give me momentum to get my act together.
audreyovisual introduced me to the fabulous Getting Things Done system a couple of months ago. I've been slowly, painstakingly integrating it into my life in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back fashion. With it, and with some excellent materials I've collected on overcoming procrastination, I hope to accomplish the following this year:
There's lots more detail, but those are the big ones. Wish me luck: I think I'll need it...
As I was leaving, Mrs. Mongolia (I need a better nickname for her. Suggestions?) offered me the kind wish for the New Year that - and I'm paraphrasing - this year I might meet a "special someone" who would make me happy.
While the wish was sweet, and I appreciated it, I was a little taken aback: I'm already happy, and of all the things I might wish for this year, meeting someone is actually pretty low on my list. Do I really seem discouraged at being single? Because I don't generally feel unhappy about it at all (the occasional blip notwithstanding, of course).
Lord knows when I was younger I felt a desperate, sucking VOID where I felt someone else was supposed to be, that EVERYONE was in a Relationship that was Completing Them and letting them Grow As People, while I was was just bitter and sad and slowly twisting up inside, but that was...wow, closer to a decade ago than I really like to think about. Damn, I feel old. Anyway, I ended up falling deeply in love, wonderful relationship blah blah, but my world fell apart when she dumped my ass. I compared it at the time to two plants that have grown together and their root systems intertwined, and when one is ripped out the root system of the other is damaged. It took a while for my mental equilibrium to reestablish itself. But it did, and over time I came to appreciate that I was a whole and complete person in and of myself - and capable of peace, happiness and joy that way without feeling I needed another person to help me achieve it. Don't get me wrong, I'm still a diehard romantic and believe that a good relationship can be one of the finest and most enriching experiences in human life. And you'd better believe that if love comes knocking, I'm not going to ignore the door. But I'm not pining away in the meantime. I feel, in fact, very lucky: so many people are so dissatisfied or downright unhappy being single, or don't want to get out of a bad relationship because the alternative - being along - seems so much worse. I might feel differently if I didn't have a wonderful group of friends, an awesome cat, a condo that's designed for one, etc. But I do, and I actually spend a decent percentage of every day being quietly grateful for a life that brings me so much joy. (When I'm not caught up in the minutia of day-to-day life, I mean. When I think PAST the arrgh-mistakes-at-work or dammit-I'm-going-to-be-late or must-remember-these-groceries or crap-I'm-cold foreground noise of my brain, and pull back and look at my life for a minute. Then everything pulls quietly into perspective. I do wish my brain would default to that state, rather than to its usual freakout-of-the-minute mode. Ah well. At least I'm much better at it than I used to be!)
I'm basically a quintessential quirkyalone.
I talked with Mr. Mongolia about his wife's wish as he drove me home. Apparently I do sometimes seem bitter with my "more action than I've seen in months!" comments, although I think it's more that it came across that way then how I meant it (as off-hand smart-aleck remarks). He pointed out that the wish most likely came from (a) their own happy marriage and (b) having seen another good friend recently fall in love and her current state of bliss.
Interestingly, I've also been pretty darn blissful for the last month or so as I wallow about happily in the Supernatural slash fandom, and my emotional responses I've self-consciously been comparing to the emotionally giddy highs of the early "honeymoon" stages of a relationship. Weird? I suppose. But it's happened to me for as long as I can remember, usually a couple of times a year: I get obsessed with something - last year it was the TV show House, it was the Lord of the Rings a couple of years before that, etc. - which makes me ludicrously happy, and then in a few weeks the obsession calms down and I move on. It's damn fun when it happens (although I do feel guilty for blathering incessantly about my current obsession to everyone, much as I try to restrain myself). And it's convenient, too: none of that pesky, complicated, time-consuming interpersonal interaction to deal with. Yes, I'm being facetious, but there is more of an element of truth to that than I would like to admit. Mr. Mongolia observed that this was exactly the attitude that has lead to stereotypical otaku antisocial behaviour: it's just so much easier to deal with idealized or fictionalized characters than with actual people. And so you end up with an entire subculture of people taking this to an extreme and living their lives in front of a computer.
Which is an excellent point. To be honest, I'm not really all that concerned about it happening to me. At least I'd like to think I'm more balanced than that! If these obsessions start lasting longer and longer I will be concerned (and y'all are welcome to whack me upside the head, or stage an intervention or something), but in the meantime, I'm treating it as good fun. :)
I offer all this as interesting food for thought, and also as a counterpoint to what I feel *I* desperately, overwhelmingly want for myself this year: to Get My Shit Together.
I am SICK AND TIRED of my propensity to put off interesting, rewarding projects (or basically ANYTHING that takes effort) because they require thought and concentration, invariably opting for TV or web-surfing or napping or some other form of instant gratification. I'm thirty-two. Why does my brain keep skidding around the simple, simple concept that things - dishes, tidying, studying, bill-paying, scrapbooks, websites, course materials - don't magically do themselves? I have years and years and years of unfinished projects, hobbies I could have been really good at if I'd actually practiced as I bloody well keep meaning to do, guilt over old pen pals whose correspondence languished unanswered...in short, I have the constant, nagging thorn in my side that I'm not only not living up to my potential, I'm not even close, and the guilt of opportunities passed and lost through laziness on my part. This is the one, overwhelming thing that casts a shadow on my day-to-day joy. I'm happy with my life, I'm just not satisfied with my performance in it.
I could blather on with specific examples of how I've screwed things up over the years, but that's neither useful nor, I imagine, terribly interesting to read about, so let's move on to The Plan, shall we? I'm hoping that by putting it out in the open, it will somehow give me momentum to get my act together.
audreyovisual introduced me to the fabulous Getting Things Done system a couple of months ago. I've been slowly, painstakingly integrating it into my life in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back fashion. With it, and with some excellent materials I've collected on overcoming procrastination, I hope to accomplish the following this year:- By the end of April, I will have dealt with ALL of the stupid-ass outstanding "projects" (mostly trip scrapbooks) that I've been lugging around through the years. I will either FINISH them or GET RID of them.
- Before next Christmas, I will have come to an active, conscious decision about what I want to be doing in my life. I'm thinking specifically career-wise, but more generally as well. If I choose to stay at my job, that's fine. But it will be because I have carefully considered the alternatives, not just because of inertia.
- I will remember people's birthdays. This is not rocket science. I should be able to do this.
- Before the end of the summer, I will go skydiving.
- I will start actually exercising.
- I will get out of bed when my alarm clock goes off. Not when I feel like it.
- So help me, I will train myself to clean up as I go along.
There's lots more detail, but those are the big ones. Wish me luck: I think I'll need it...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-01 09:04 pm (UTC)(Which is pretty funny, as I haven't seen you since Pride and then I see you and you post within a couple days of each other).
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-01 10:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-01 11:06 pm (UTC)I don't think you need worry about the otaku syndrome; you seem to be pretty good at functioning as a human being around other functional human beings.
And maybe I'll Get My Shit Together this year, too. We'll see how that goes.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-01 11:30 pm (UTC)And thank you for the endorsement. Yay! I pass as functional! :)
If you suffer from too-much-stuff-in-your-head, I do recommend the GTD method to Getting Your Shit Together. Besides, there's fun software (http://shared.snapgrid.com/index.html)! And awesome analog "hardware" (http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/03/introducing-the-hipster-pda/)!
I am SUCH a geek.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-02 03:22 am (UTC)Of course, what happens at home might be a different story, as you say.
The Subgeniuses have a concept that seems to apply here - Rewardian vs. Emergentile:
"Basically, a Rewardian rewards itself first and THEN might or might not
get around to whatever it was rewarding itself for. Emergentiles
postpone the "reward" and often never get to it, because for them the
"work" (or whatnot) IS the actual reward. "
Food for thought.
BTW, the GTD is pretty A-OK, isn't it?
Happy New Year!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-06 05:04 pm (UTC)As for what happens at home: it amuses/frustrates me no end that since I posted this, I finally received the Supernatural Season 1 DVDs in the mail, and so have reached WHOLE NEW LEVELS of non-productivity this week as I glut myself on all the episodes I've missed. It's just kind of scary. Thank god there's a limited number, so I can rest assured I will get my life back. And at least I have something to tide me over until the new episodes start up again, THANK GOD, after they blue-balled the entire viewing audience with the fall season cliffhanger. Bastards.
I like the concepts. I am so a Rewardian, I think I might just go off the end of their scale. "Delayed gratification? What's that?"
And yes, thank you so much for the GTD introduction! Of course, now that I'm all organized in what I'm supposed to be doing, I still have to work on actually doing it...
Happy New Year to you too! I love the drink reviews (http://audreyovisual.livejournal.com/17614.html).
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-03 04:24 am (UTC)p.s. I still have more of your books! I was cleaning and I found the Satanic Bible in my room and I'm sure it's not mine. Also a Charles de Lint book that may or may not be yours. I'll drop them off at some point :)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-06 06:01 pm (UTC)Aw, Jumila, you just made my day. And possibly my life. I am SO touched - thank you!
Also, I can't tell you how hard I laughed when I read that you still have my Satanic Bible. It's like a Fundamentalist's worst nightmare: see, this is what happens when you invite non-Christians as youth group leaders. They end up slipping SATANIC BIBLES to the innocent, impressionable youth! (Never mind that you're, um, in your twenties now. And also not Christian. And it was to amuse you, not convert you. Details, details!) Things that those police background checks just don't cover.
Mrs. Mongolia
Date: 2007-01-09 12:45 am (UTC)For all you ex-youth groupies, feel free to check out my flickr account (http://www.flickr.com/photos/54964342@N00/) to see some of my recent and some of my older pics.
And Den- you know I love you!