An open thread for personal stuff.
As usual for these threads: no trolls, no MRAs, no I’m-not-really-an-MRA-buts, no being jerky.
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Open Thread for Personal Stuff: February 2015 Cat Wearing Box in a Sink Edition
What a lovely kitty! Where’s it from, katz?
That’s Lying Cat from the excellent graphic novel Saga. Pretty self-explanatory: She says when people are lying.
We’ve had a mild winter in Minnesota without much snow. It hadn’t been that cold until this week. It’s been the kind of cold that makes your skin hurt 🙁
I prefer extreme cold to lots of snow though.
http://www.stonekettle.com/2015/02/the-telltale-heart-of-history-beats-for.html
Watching the Tom Hiddleston Henry IV Part1. He is beautiful *sigh*
Ugh. Agent replied to my revision with another round of revisions. All of which I have to do before she will even decide whether she wants to work with me or not.
I’m feeling kinda guilty cos I haven’t crashed yet :/
I still think I’m heading there.
On good food front, today’s lunch was freshbaked mixed grain bread+cold roast beef+roasted onion hummous.
@Arctic Ape… You’re Finnish, if I remember correctly, right? I live outside of Stockholm, Sweden, and our winter has lasted about six weeks. Six weeks of winter is not normal. And 2014 was the warmest year in Sweden ever.
But oh no, the fact that sometimes some places still has really cold weather totes prove that global warming isn’t real…
Finished watching Tom Hiddleston in Henry IV 1&2 and Henry V. Now watching Neverwhere.
Marquis de Carrabas is gorgeous. Hunter is gorgeous. Hmm…I seem to find both men and women gorgeous. But I am wholly hetero….Hmmm.
Last Henry V I watched was Branagh’s.
No, wait, there was an ep of Next Generation where Data is playing Hal on the Holodeck.
I watched the Branagh Henry V after taking a whooole bunch of Dramamine. They lost me at the tennis balls.
@Dvärghundspossen
Here in Gothenburg I’ve barely seen snow since I moved out here in 2013. I think there was one day of snow last winter, and then a handful more this winter. Today it snowed though!
On personal stuff, I got a cortisone injection to reduce swelling in my achilles tendon. It’s THE worst pain I’ve ever experienced. Finally walking again after almost 3 days.
@dhag85
That sounds aweful! Glad you’re walking again.
I was recently introduced to the Imperfectionist Manifesto, by Melissa Dinwiddie. It’s a beautifully calligraphed poster encouraging would-be creative people to ease away from the perfectionist mindset. Her position is that, regardless of how you may feel about your writing/drawing/painting/applehead dolls, it’s always better than what you would have accomplished by doing nothing. Sort of like that “I’m lapping everyone on the couch” poster.
I have been having a LOT of trouble with it. Most particularly, one line about ‘you don’t have to be good to have fun’. What?! It’s not enough to make art, you’re supposed to have fun doing it? Maybe I’m just not looking at this the right way. The last thing I did that I would unequivocally say was ‘fun’ as I understand it was public speaking. I *enjoy* doing a number of things; could that be what she’s talking about?
Exhortations like this from professional Creative People make me suspicious about who, exactly, they’re addressing. Mostly I suspect it’s not me.
(Sorry about not linking; I don’t know how to do that with my phone).
@Spindrift
Thank you. Oh, and a disclaimer: I really haven’t experienced much physical pain in life. Obviously there are things that hurt much worse than this. 🙂
Branagh’s Henry V was eh…positive ? vainglorious ? Hiddleston’s was more low key. Both have positive points and are enjoyable.
Hey, guys, can I ask for some life advice?
I’m just starting to get to the point of “but there are too many things” and starting to stress about it and when I start stressing too much I go into ‘only do one thing at a time’ mode and let all the other things crash and burn.
Situation is like so:
I have three months until my seasonal job as math support at the uni ends until August (if the college’s current budget crisis doesn’t make my summer hiatus permanent).
So, I need to find a job, or actually finish applying to grad schools, or something. But, all of those varied applications and hunts are starting to look daunting as heck, because most of them involve moving.
That’s a given, because I don’t want to live in this place my whole life, but I’m not sure if I’m ready to move, but I kind of want to move.
Things holding me in this town:
Fire-1 Class is almost done and will end at about the same time as my current job ends. At the end of Fire 1, they’ll be issuing new gear (which is supper snazzy, by the way: It’s half the weight of my current bunkers, and isn’t expired, and a lovely shade of black). For the volunteer side, the department only has funds to buy 25 new sets of bunkers, and I’m on the list, even though I’m a bit of an unusual size. So, when I leave, they’re going to have this set of really super nice bunker gear that won’t actually fit anyone. I’d also miss everyone in the department, because it’s been awesome working with them.
There is a seasonal BLS ambulance crew application that’s due in 4 days, and I feel like I should apply, so I can give more back to the department, because they’ve been freaking amazing to this short little bio-math nerd-lady.
Also, BLS (EMT-1 Level) is something I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with, and I enjoy it. I don’t think I want to be a paramedic, ever, but it’s been awesome to be an EMT. Since it would be paid, I have no idea how it would affect my volunteer status.
My university job wants me back in the fall, assuming my position will still exist.
Grad school applications are terrifying. I don’t have a clue what I want to do for my thesis. Or my project. I barely even know what segment of the field I want to go into, much less any of these details they keep asking for.
I’m music directoring for the University’s unofficial choir, and I don’t have anyone in the wings this semester who’d be able to take over my role, yet. The best candidate is actually the person who resigned from the position last year specifically so she could be just a choir member, and I don’t want to foist it immediately back on her.
Things pulling me away:
I absolutely cannot have the stability to have my own place and my own dog in this town. Housing is ridiculously priced, especially with pets. I desperately want to have a pooch some day. I love being a live in at the volunteer station, but I don’t want to be a live in forever. I want to some day legitimately have my own place.
Also, the longer I stay here the more people expect me to stay here, and it makes me feel a little trapped. Okay, not a little trapped. A lot trapped. Like, people are making plans around what they think I’m going to do, and if I don’t do what they think I’m going to do than it will be a let down and I like these people and I don’t want to let them down. Hence the trapped feeling.
I really want to get moving more into my field, and the longer I wait the less likely my former professors will be able to give me solid letters of recommendation and the more likely the grad school will want me to repeat half of my undergrad work because saying “Yeah, I took calc/physics/inorganic chemistry 8 years ago” just isn’t enough for some campuses.
So… it boils down to there are too many options and I’m overwhelmed and I also have that lurking suspicion that I’m not actually good enough to do things, even though I know I’m good enough to do things. I also really, really, really don’t want to do another summer of being unemployed. The lack of a structure made it super stressful. I like having a plan. I really, really like having a plan.
But there’s too many variables and I can’t change the parameters or do any sneaky things to reduce them and ‘eek!’
Which means I’m having a hard time coming up with my plan.
Sorry for the teel deer, and I know a lot of you have gone through way worse, and this is a ridiculously small “quarter-life crisis” but it’s kind of freaking me out…
Any words of wisdom from any of you folks with more than 22 years of life experience? Or anyone with 22 or less who’ve actually done things with their lives or figured out how to be okay and not panic when they’re not doing things with their life? Anyone know how to harness the zen of not being busy while simultaneously being way too busy?
Is quarter-life crisis a thing that anyone else has?
Sorry for the teel deer, but eeps!?
Contrapangloss: I think a quarter-life crisis is a totally natural thing to have. For the whole first part of your life, you make so few choices, but then when you finish school, suddenly there are a million possible options, and usually no obvious best choice, and at the same time there’s enormous pressure to make the right choice because you know how much it can affect.
The only thing I have to share is that I spent my 20’s in a holding pattern and am only just now at 28 getting on track to actually do stuff I want to do, and so I can tell you that it is OK if everything doesn’t come together for a few more years, and that if you choose one route and that doesn’t pan out and you end up going back and doing the other thing, that’s OK too.
I’d echo this.
One thing I’d do in your position is to collect all the references from your professors/ mentors/ advisors that you possibly can, right now, regardless of whether you’re going to use them immediately. I’m sure they’re used to people telling them they’re putting out lots of feelers for various options and can do a reference based on their knowledge of you as it stands at the moment even if they don’t/ can’t make any specific comment on a proposed thesis or job description. If you later want something specific – cross that bridge when you come to it. For the time being, scan them, make several hard copies as well as putting them all on a stick, file the originals and hard copies along with your certificates for first aid and other training and care for them properly. So they’re there whether you use them next week or a couple of years from now.
Maybe you could think about where you want to be in 1 or 2 or 5, maybe even 10 years from now. Imagining being happy with yourself 5 years from now, do you want to look back on successfully completing the next stage in your firey-EMT training/career and your other current jobs? Or would you rather have skipped that and got right on to a thesis on somethingorother.
I’m the worst person to advise on this by the way. I’d married Mr ShitheadtheHorrible by the time I was your age and more or less wasted the first 5 years of my own 20s. As well as that, jobs, study, and the rest were so, so much easier to get and to move on from back in 1970.
My daughters are 10 years older than you. They spent most of their early 20s travelling and generally doing other stuff. One did complete her basic and further degrees, the other didn’t. So I can’t use them as examples either.
Sorry for being MIA this week. Cyclone flooded out my town, been helping with the cleanup.
M, that is a good thing to do.
I’m currently fucked up, but just with it enough to do good stuff like eat/cook. Not enough to be well.
Dvärghundspossen:
Yep, the last couple years especially have seen warm dry summers and mild rainy winters, almost like Mediterranean climate. I hear they’re already planting vineyards in Gotland and Åland. Once the cypress trees come in, you can vacate there and imagine you’re in Rhodos.
Here in Helsinki, the last remnants of snow and sea ice are just now melting, over a month early, as incidentally happened last year too. Lack of snow and ice means temperatures will be likely higher than average in March and early April, even more so if the current warm-air flow continues. Plants will start growing, and then we can expect some serious frost damage if the weather turns cold.
(I’m a horticultural scientist currently stressing over my material, since raspberries grown in pots and wintered outdoors are particularly vulnerable to freaky weather.)
Hey, you’d expect any location to have experienced some “really cold” weather within living memory, but there’s been little cold to counter all the warm. Most people don’t notice it because they aren’t like me, obsessively comparing current temps to the 20th century seasonal averages. (Of course, my memory or yours could be biased so you should also look at the weather statistics.)
Recently the weather trend has been cold snowy winters in Eastern North America, which is apparently a prime location for global warming denialism, while many other places are super warm. A few years ago we had some snowy, average-to-cold winters here in southern Finland, and at the same time reports told the arctic was extremely warm. I knew intellectually it wasn’t much cold here, but it felt cold because we’d already gotten used to mild winters and also, ALL THE SNOW.
@contrapangloss
I completely understand what you’re going through. With so many options, it feels like once you make a choice you are eliminating everything else. It can be paralyzing. You’re giving up good things that you know for things that might be better, but you won’t know that until you get there. Definitely scary.
Making the decision to leave is really, really hard, especially when you have so much to tie you to a particular place. I made that decision almost two years ago, when I moved overseas, leaving behind a boyfriend and a job in Chicago and family in Indianapolis. I feel like I fought that choice every step of the way, right up until I got on that plane. It’s scary leaving behind everything and everyone you know. My situation is not perfect, but I am so glad that I came here. I’ve done so many things that I could never have expected, with more to come.
I’m going to leave a quote here that really helped me around the time that I moved. The first step is the scariest and hardest step to take. After that, they all get easier.
If you do choose to go to grad school, don’t stress too much about not having a project. I went into both my Masters and PhD programs without a specific project. There are even PhD programs that allow students to rotate between a few labs for the first semester/year so that they can decide which group and project will be the best fit. I started my PhD with a pretty broad title, so I was able to work within that to find the particular topic I wanted to work on. Grad school supervisors are really great at helping you figure it all out.
I agree with katz and mildlymagnificent. Whatever you choose, you can always change your mind later. I know I did.