Running Thoughts (2)

Yesterday, I went to the gym. After changing out of work clothes into gym clothes, I reached into my purse to grab my headphones and found...they were not there. I remembered having them at the gym the week previous, and I remembered setting them down on the floor of the faculty-staff weight room while I did weights. And I remember walking out of the weight room earlier than usual because I was frustrated with something.

I.e., I left my headphones in the gym. And I checked with the front desk people and they have no record of them being turned in. Which means someone—and I have my suspicions about who—took them. Now, they were in the faculty-staff weight room, so either some old professor took them, a poor grad student took them, some secretary took them, or the gym staff themselves took them rather than sign them in as lost and found. And this royally pisses me off.

Today I finished the project that's been the bane of my existence at work for the last two months. It was the course from HELL—not only a subject I have no experience in or knowledge of, but also a pretty poor manuscript. And now it is over. Sure, I'll have to do some revisions when it gets back from copyedit, and possibly further revisions when we've had someone from the department look it over for accuracy, but I don't have to build the damn thing anymore.

This is a very good thing. My boss said he was starting to get worried I'd quit over this course. He doesn't know me very well—I would never have quit, because then the course would have won. (I will be quitting next year, but that's for other reasons, of course.)

At any rate, I am pleased as punch and actually feel a bit of enjoyment in my job again. I'd been getting quite down over that project, dreading coming in and having to deal with it, edit it, code it, slog through unorganized materials to find missing pieces...well, you get the picture.

I take the LSAT on Saturday. I took another practice test last night and I didn't do so well. I think the course had gotten to me—I'd been editing it's awful, muddy prose all day and my reading abilities were not so good. I'm hoping a quick trip to the gym this afternoon and a study session out of my house will remedy that poor performance. I just get way too distracted at home.

My wrist just majorly popped. I'm not sure that's a good thing. I may need to have my physical therapist aunt look at it on Saturday.

My computer finally fully works again. First, Firefox and Mozilla broke, so I did some maintenance to fix that; that maintenance made Dreamweaver (the program I use the most) break.

The solution that eventually worked was to reinstall the system software without bringing over my preferences—a big-ass pain, since I then had to fix permissions on most of the files I had to bring over—and now everything works.

I did, however, lose a few emails. Again, a pain, but not a giant problem.

The key thing is that my productivity is back. A recommendation: Do not try to convince yourself that Adobe GoLive is an adequate substitution for Dreamweaver. It's not. At all.

I love mozarella so much. Just reading this article makes me want to cry with joy.

Imagine: sushi-style service, CHEESE instead of fish. Ohhhhh good golly, YUM.

I feel sort of ashamed, but I have a new TV addiction—Nip/Tuck. It's both vacuous and deep at the same time. There's superficiality and serious effed-up psychotic shit all at the same time. I LOVE it!

This week my husband and I celebrated our four-year dating anniversary. It seems pretty momentous to me, since I'm the girl who couldn't keep any relationship alive for more than six months before I met him.

It's sort of odd to look at my life and realize that I've been with my partner for four years. Every day, I learn new things about him; every time I make a mistake, I tell myself I'll fix it next time, and I am amazed in thinking about it that there are new things to know and mistakes to be made still. There are fathoms to him and to me that neither of us has come close to exploring yet, and we've had nearly half a decade to try.

This time of year is weird for us, because September 11 comes a day before my birthday and four days before our dating anniversary. I remember in 2001 that, even though such horrible things had happened the day before, we still celebrated my birthday and we celebrated our anniversary. That was important to me—not because it was MY birthday or anything like that—but because fear can't rule our lives.

A little digression.

Four years. Anniversaries. I'll always know how long it's been since 9/11 because I'll always know how long I've been with my husband. In ways, it's an uncomfortable link, but every year it reminds me how precious life is and how important it is to keep living, keep loving, keep going.

This is really my private blog, and I have weird mixed feelings about a) people I don't know reading it and b) people I do know, but only superficially reading it.

My coworker asked me the other day if he could read my blog. I almost choked—I thought he meant this blog. But, no, he meant my other blog. I don't mind if he reads that one—it's substantially more public.

But this one...this one is where I muse and wonder, expose private thoughts and worries. I'm not sure I'd want him to find it. I'm not sure I want most people reading this blog, except the people I know will be kind and respectful of it.

And that gets to an interesting point: blogs are by nature public. They exist out on the internet where almost anyone can find them with a little search engine moxie. But so many people disclose such private matters on their blogs—how can this not be contradictory? I ran across a blog the other that was started by a man hoping to get over his ex-wife's leaving him. Intensely personal stuff, this.

I don't like to edit myself, and I like having a place where I can broadcast, however quietly, the things I want to say. I guess I would have been much happier if my coworker hadn't asked to read my blog. He wanted to make sure it wasn't full of vitriol about work; it was nice of him to be concerned, but I generally don't bitch much on either of my blogs about real people that might get their feelings hurt. If he'd just started reading it, I wouldn't have to worry about saying things indiscriminately. When I worry, I think it brings the quality down.

So I'm glad he didn't find this one. Whew!

It's gone. I may post it again after meeting with JT.

Thank you Emily for this.

You are a RPIG--Reserved Practical Intellectual Giver. This makes you a Rock of Gibraltar.

You are loyal, kind, thoughtful and conscientious. You're a good person. You make everyone around you happier and better, even if you yourself are not at your happiest or best. You just care so much about your friends and loved ones that you can't help giving them everything of yourself. It can wear you out, but you'd never let on.

You're successful, smart and fun to be with, but your self-esteem could use some boosting. You don't like conflict, and you don't like demanding things for yourself, so you can feel unappreciated. But then you wonder if you don't deserve to be appreciated. You do!

You have many small crushes, but it takes you ages to get to a serious stage with someone. You get so caught up second-guessing yourself and worrying if the other person really *likes* likes you that you never dare to make the first move. Generally you end up with another clever RPIG who knows one when s/he sees one. This adds up to one long courtship. Fortunately this also adds up to one long marriage.

You would never cheat. You would never hurt anyone's feelings. You are so sympathetic and give so many second chances that it takes a lo-o-ong time for anyone to get on your bad side.

Your only problem is you can be *too* thoughtful -- you can end up worrying and getting hung up over nothing.

You may be a boy scout.

Of the 74573 people who have taken this quiz, 6.5 % are this type.

Do not plan to spend eight hours at an amusement park if you arrive in the morning to find fewer than 300 cars parked in the parking lot. Because you will be able to walk onto rides without waiting in line, you will discover that amusement parks are generally boring places. After all, you can only watch recently-graduated theatre majors sing 70s medleys for so long when you're taking a break from the high g-force pounding your body takes on the thrill rides. And when the fun house is closed, along with the waterpark and the around-the-park train, your only other options will be the the ferris wheel and souvenir shopping.

I so want to buy everything from this store.

"We can help you with your nemesis problem."

My husband is the BEST.

For my upcoming birthday, he's taking me on Saturday to ride ROLLERCOASTERS!

We LOVE rollercoasters. I love rollercoasters. We rode rollercoasters together when we first started dating and have said over and over many times that we should "do that again." But we've had trouble finding the time during the season.

For my birthday, I get to ride rollercoasters! I am so excited.

I've started working out regularly again. I have a schedule—Tuesday and Thursdays after work, I go to the gym; Friday, I take a yoga class—and I've been sticking to it.

And, wadda ya know, I feel a million times better—mentally, physically, emotionally. My self-esteem is back up.

But, see, I know that working out makes me feel better. I know that, when I make the effort to go to the gym or take a yoga class, I will feel a zillion times better, all-around. But sometimes it's just too hard to go (particularly at 6 am) and sometimes I'm just too tired. And sometimes, after I've begged off a few times in a row, I start to forget how much better I felt when I was still making myself go to the gym regularly.

I don't really know what this post is about except that I'm out of the mini-funk I was in for a while. It seemed memorable enough to share.

I'm going to actually be able to play with this one...the other had all these image files to create the fancy "rounded corners." My CSS is not quite up to modifiying anything that complex. This one I think I can work with.

I promise a real post soon.

Meanwhile, check out divine angst for my latest LSAT triumph.

I seriously screwed up my old template. Not having enough time to fix it, I just decided to get a new template. What the hey, I say. It's probably time.

Sticking with the standard, for now. I'll do some mods soon.

Lately I've been feeling sort of lost. I know I still want to go try this law school thing, but now that the bloom is off the rose, I'm not sure why. At work I've been working on a project and training my new coworker at the same time, and that's sort of taken my mind off the unbearably dull nature of the other 90% of projects I am assigned. So work isn't awful anymore—or right now—and that's also adding to my feeling sort of lost.

I'm not exactly happy right now, but I'm not unhappy. I just feel sort of lost, in limbo. I'm trying to figure out where I was a few months ago when the very concept of going to law school completely energized me.

I'm not expecting that an idea that is no longer new should thrill me in the same way it once did; but I'd like it if something would send a chill down my spine. I feel numb. I imagine this is what it must feel like to be on Prozac, except I'm not happy enough to feel as if I'm on Prozac.

I look around at my life and realize that I have it pretty good. I have a stable job that isn't awful, I work with people I genuinely like, even if we're not necessarily friends, I have a wonderful husband who also has a pretty stable job. We own a home. We have disposable income—enough to do some travelling over the next several months. I have a family that loves me and supports me, I honestly like my inlaws. My friends are great, even if some of them sometimes don't understand where I'm coming from.

So why am I itching for change? There's nothing wrong with my life—my life is good. Is it that it's not "good enough"? And what does it mean for my life to be "good enough"? I don't want to be one of those people who constantly jumps fences for greener grass, discovering time and again that the grass is no better over there.

I am happy with my life as it is. And if I knew it would never be better than this, I'd happily settle down. But I've known greater joy. I've known what it is to fall instantly into deep sleep at night because my day has been enormously satisfying. And I crave that experience again.

I don't know that law school will guarantee that joy, that satsifaction. But it has at least as good a chance as any other endeavor. I just have to rediscover why it's the endeavor I chose.

Today's weather has been beautiful for late summer. It hasn't even broken 90° today.

Of course, today would be the day I spend almost every waking hour inside, between work and choir rehearsal. I wish I could just go sit outside and enjoy the slight edge of coolness. (Or at least the lack of burning, blazing heat.)