This whole 'moving' thing has seemed abstract and far away. I'm pleased to be leaving my job and setting up a new life in Melbourne, but I haven't spent enough time there to visualise the life I'll be leading (especially with the job question mark).

It's 2 weeks from today that we need to be moved out, so today I got boxes and storage quotes. Somehow boxes in the lounge makes the whole thing real. I've moved So. Many. Times. in my life, and this one should be relatively easy. Just one foot in front of the other. I don't love the packing up end of it, but I enjoy moving into a new space. I'm committed to doing a better job making the next one my own than I have this one.

I've just returned from several days away with my mother. I was pleasantly surprised to have a truly great time. I haven't spent a continuous week with my mother since... probably since I left home. And frankly, a continuous week with *anyone* can be taxing, so I didn't know how it would go. We didn't once get on one another's nerves, we never ran out of things to talk about, and we were both relaxed. it was great! I'm so glad I did this :)

So, I've quit my job, right? You'd think I'd be highly motivated to find another one. In the abstract, this is true. I'm excited about the prospects and the options I have available to me. In the moment, however, it fills me with the sort of irrational dread and despair that goes with monsters in the closet and walking into the dark basement to find the source of that eerie noise.

Graduate school is a strange, neurosis-driven place in which most students seem to believe (on some level) that their furious activity is only keeping them one step ahead of being revealed as a total impostor. The deeper you go down that hole, the more you have invested, the more you have to lose. I understand how it happens, I suppose. They spend years pouring in more information than can reasonably be absorbed, and helping you out by explaining all the ways in which your work falls short of the required standard when you try to demonstrate your understanding of it (without necessarily telling you this is equally true of your colleagues or of themselves as grad students). I took a non-traditional path by simply leaving grad school at its nadir, doing something else that provided money and esteem for normal levels of effort (unlike grad school), and then finishing off later without really rejoining the community. It was an enormous relief and I don't regret that choice, but it means that I never really conquered these demons, and every time I look at academic jobs, they come flooding back. As you might imagine, this makes job hunting in that arena challenging.

I've seen a couple research jobs that I'd like to apply for, but the aversion to sitting down and making a serious go of it is incredibly strong (and subtle). I cook, I clean, I work out, I garden, I run errands. ANYTHING else suddenly becomes urgent as I approach these things. Like this LJ entry, for instance....

In reality, the worst that can happen is that they don't consider my application. Would that really be so hard?

When I was in grad school, one of my students was murdered by her abusive ex (father of her 2 kids). It was quite shocking to all of us, and then at the dignified and uplifting memorial service held by the department, the 2 grandmothers started using the podium to score points against each other. It was painful and awkward. But because it was a sociology department, we did a lot of rehashing later about 'class-appropriate expressions of grief' and how we respond to people to transgressing those norms.

Joshua's father is using his death as a theatrical opportunity to manipulate his mother and sisters, who have all cut him off. At some point, he quietly talked Josh into making him the executor of his will. So he has now, in the words of my niece 'stolen the body' and is planning to bury him in California (where he's never lived) in a shared plot with his grandparents. He manipulated his sister into handing over my sister and nieces' phone numbers (which have been carefully kept from him to date), and is now phoning them to try to manipulate them into seeing him. The whole thing makes me wince. Not even in death is dignity allowed. It's got to be turned into a shitfight about how we came to this point, whose fault it is, and people's preferred solutions.

My 20 year old nephew is dead of a heart attack. How the FUCK does that happen? Can I blame the US army? Almost certainly.

EDIT: Josh had been home from Iraq on light duty with a broken knee. He had a massive coronary upon standing up from his desk yesterday, apparently due to an enlarged heart (cause unknown, may have been congenital). Was probably on a variety of drugs, no way of knowing without a toxicology report what role that may have played.

Friday afternoon, I resigned from my job and bought a round the world plane ticket that will return me to Melbourne in the second week of July after Portland, Boise, Seattle (airport only), London and Barcelona (after Nowhere). It allows me to combine seeing friends, family obligations, Will's gigging in the UK, going to a festival, and going new places in a way that's substantially cheaper than doing separate trips to North America and the UK. I'm subsidising it with having no fixed living expenses in Sydney during that time, so it's a fairly prudent approach, but it still feels/sounds incredibly indulgent.

It's been a long time since I've quit a job without another one already lined up, which is pretty scary. I expect to be able to line up another one at least as good as the one I've got (hopefully far better, since that's a fairly low bar for satisfaction) without too much difficulty. But because I'm me, I've also run the numbers. I could be out of work for a wee while before it actually started hurting, especially in city with lower costs of living than Sydney.

There was a time in my life when I would have just suffered through and made the best of it. Hell, I was willing to do it this time around and had to be shaken out of it. I'm so habituated to feeling trapped by circumstances (usually economic ones), that it's hard to remember that most of the entrapment is in my head. There are always alternatives. Life is too short to mark time. I only get today once, and I'd prefer to make it count.

As you may know, I have a thyroid problem. Most of the time, I take a pill every day to replace the thyroid hormone my body isn't producing, and dont' think too much about it. Sometimes, that balance gets messed up, and the changes are subtle enough, and come on gradually enough, that I don't recognize that I feel rotten. I imagine people on antidepressants have similar difficulties detecting when their drugs quit working. When the hormone balance is off, I feel tired, fuzzy-headed, emotionally flat, disengaged, disinterested in things like it's all just too much effort, and my blood sugar is all over the show. (Except when there's too much hormone and I feel restless and anxious). Having been raised Catholic, I am wired to assume that anything wrong with me short of blunt trauma is probably the result of some sort of personal failing, so it doesn't occur to me to look for a medical cause. I just need to harden up, or get more sleep, or manage my stress better, or get more exercise, or .... something. I don't need a doctor to tell me that, right? ( Read more... )

For a number of years, I went through a cycle of hair angst. I'd cut my hair short, love it for a while, and then start to get bored. I'd look around at other women's long, luxurious, feminine hair with envy and think: 'look at all the options I'd have!' So then I'd spend a couple years growing it out, only to find that I spent most of my time with it pinned up out of the way, looking unduly matronly. I didn't do the various things that I had imagined I *could* do, because frankly, I can't be arsed. I love having no-nonsense short hair, it suits me. After several cycles, I finally figured out that it wasn't about my hair at all. I learned that when i had the urge to change my hair, what I needed to do was change my life. Hair was just a displacement object that was actually in my control.

I'm starting to think there might be a parallel here for cities. I love warm weather. I don't want to be uncomfortably hot, but I love being out in a singlet and skirt in the evening, without fear that I will suddenly need a parka. I like freedom from the chronic low-level stress I get from bracing myself against the cold and wind. I like not having to carry extra layers everywhere. I like sundresses, al fresco dining, bare feet and hanging out on the deck. HOWEVER, this my second go at a city where the weather is really nice but I can't find my people. Being chronically lonely in what otherwise feels like paradise sucks a bit. Maybe I just don't like warm weather people? Maybe pleasantly warm places don't foster the sort of community-oriented, creative, geeky intellectuals I need? Two cities is hardly enough to call a trend, but it's definitely given me a heads-up that my quest for awesome cities that ALSO have nice weather may be destined to leave me unhappy.

( So what am I going to do? )

I've been feeling under the weather all week, but too under the gun at work to stay home (also too involved in difficult-to-schedule meetings). Yesterday I took a good hard look at my calendar and decided that there was nothing Friday that couldn't be rescheduled if necessary, and gave myself permission to stay home if need be. This morning, I woke up before the alarm, swallowed with some difficulty, and decided that was the appropriate decision. (Could I have worked through it? yes. Would I have spent the weekend sick as a result? most assuredly) I emailed my boss*, turned off the alarm, and went back to sleep. I woke again after 8, and logged in to work long enough to reschedule my meetings.

I'm not particularly good at being sick if I'm not feeling like death, so I treated it as a fairly low-key bonus saturday and pottered. Read the internet, assembled the worm composter to make a home for the worms I finally bought the other day, did the washing, did my bookkeeping, etc. I wasn't up to going to gym, but I did a modified workout in the lounge.

My big adventure when I decided to leave the house to buy milk was walking 15 minutes to the garden centre to buy some seedlings. I bought lettuce to replace the crop I recently exhausted, along with sorrel, sage, chard and lemon basil. I was tempted by more things, but then I would need more pots, and carrying pots home while sick would be a mission.

I spent the afternoon pottering with plants in a non-demanding way, and found it very restorative. I have happy pots of herbs, window boxes full of greens, and a much lower stress level than before.

*smartphone bonus--sending emails from bed without even sitting up!

Autumn descended on Sydney yesterday. The weather was surprisingly fine (after a fairly wet weekend), but there was a subtle change in the air and the afternoon shadows had taken on a perceptible slant. As happens every year (even though I love autumn), I had a little pang of grief for the end of summer.