Incremental

It occurred to me today that perhaps one reason why I don't really clean my house is that when I do I approach it like a final exam.

When my parents were going to visit just recently, I spent days getting everything just right and thoroughly done - scrubbed down the kitchen, straightened cupboards, dusted every horizontal surface in the place, deep-cleaned and polished and sanitized all the bathrooms, laundered sheets and towels, vacuumed every horizontal surface that was covered with some kind of fabric.

This past week, though, I had invited some friends over for dinner (a brave first attempt at socializing in my own house and payment for many meals over at their house), and had scheduled it for the night following both voice and guitar lessons, so I just didn't have all that much time. I got groceries in between the two lessons and the next night ducked out of work a bit early to get all the food ready, but for cleaning I couldn't do the deep clean thing, as I had for my parents. I just didn't have enough time. So I did basics - instead of filing and sorting all the mail and clutter around in the living room, I just made a stack and moved it out of sight. Instead of taking everything off the coffee table and getting out the Pledge, I just dusted around the stuff as it sat there. I wiped a moist cleansing cloth quickly over the bathroom surfaces. I did vacuum, but didn't take any cushions off anything, it was just a quick once-over.

Now I'm sitting in my spare room at the computer, which didn't get done on that occasion because they wouldn't be coming in here, and everything is a bit dusty. And it occurred to me that I could just kind of dust it, now, quickly. Without having to dust everything, and also vaccuum and straighten and file and sort and degrime sanitize. And maybe I could keep up all my cleaning this way, in just little bits and bobs whenever it occurred to me. Rather than approaching cleaning as a huge, laborious, time-intensive final exam.

But this idea is making me uneasy so I'm going to put off dusting this space until I think a bit further about the two approaches.

List of enthusiasms

Brief enthusiasms that never went anywhere

• yoga
• throwing pots on a pottery wheel
• opera appreciation (although I did make it to one performance at the Sydney Opera House while I lived there)
• Italian
• German
• Russian
• carpentry and woodworking
• aviation
• home decorating
• professional fiction writing
• that idea for a novel

Medium level enthusiasms that I got something valuable out of but didn't pursue to the degree I could have

• French
• Japanese
• knitting
• working with a personal trainer
• cooking for other people
• writing poetry
• video

Enthusiasms that took

• philosophy
• web design and internet communications generally
• 20th century modern art
• moving back to the US
• guitar (so far so good)
• blogging!

Catch-up festival of the bullet point

I haven't written here in a while. There's been a lot going on, and somehow I seem to have been going through it wordlessly - or, not really, but expressing myself more via Facebook status updates and phone calls and 1:1 conversations than here.

My horoscope this week told me to "hush", but I'm going to try the writing thing again, just to see.

Here are some of the things, to catch you up.

• Work drama. They're downsizing, 10-15%, last Friday was the deadline for voluntary severance so we're finding about all the leaders and long-term stalwarts we'll be doing without, and then the involuntaries they're predicting will be sometime in July.
• Also, I hate my new job, the new building, the new brands, all the new people, the new drive to the new parking spot, the cafeteria, the cubicles, the smell of the building, the ladies room, the frowns on everyone's faces, especially all the light blue shirts, just everywhere.
• Hate not having a budget, ownership of the strategy or execution, ownership of the agency selection or relationships, having to consult at a pre-kindergarten level on all the stuff I know best.
• Miss last year, which had its own challenges but in retrospect had a wonderful team doing good, fun, original work, measuring its success, celebrating it and getting reward for it. I could lead if they would let me lead. I miss the success that I thought I was going to almost have now, and am so so disappointed in what it's become.
• The downsizing is coming right after a total restructure where everyone has a different job than they were doing in December, and they're trying to enact a culture change, and there's a madman in charge.
• And there's still, on the outside, an economic downturn so our options to cut and run are limited.

Okay, beyond work stuff

• Guitar is going well, I'm getting better, I'm learning lots but still not good enough to play in front of people.
• But my aim is to find some folks to jam with, and ultimate dream is to play a song at a coffee shop open mike night.
• And I started singing lessons as well, to make the open mike experience less painful for my potential future audience.
• I'm thinking a lot about having a rock and roll lifestyle at this advanced aged, what it means, how I will accommodate it. I've been thinking a lot about role models like Exene Cervenka, Joan Jett, Kim Deal. Women of rock, older than me and still living the life. If they can do it, I can maybe do it.
  
• Everyone has been so welcoming and excited about my guitar thing, too. I have no idea why there aren't more women who do this, apart from maybe it just takes a lot of time and hard work.
• I have a big new amplifier and a neighbor who's away on weekends, and so I have license to turn it up.
• And I have still been going to my teacher's gigs, including one tomorrow night, four hours drive there, four hours back.
• We spend lots of time talking about life and random things, apart from guitar. I will write a separate entry sometime about the experience of driving through Wisconsin past the barns and fields, in the middle of the night, in a car with just us, talking about life and random things. I treasure those trips because this is such a specific little window of life right now and I know it won't last, but right now this is kind of the beating heart, the quiet nighttime center of my life. Ah.

• Body stuff - still in transition, my eyes are still post-40 and bad and my grey hairs are starting to show in all kinds of light, but after a very worrying time earlier this year the rhythmic cycle seems to have kind of reset itself so that's one thing I don't quite, quite have to cope with just, exactly, quite yet.
• In addition to the rock stars, I'd love to find some more women a little bit older than me to use as spirit guides through this stage.
• I'm trying to be out about my age. Which is healthy.
• But just tonight I thought of maybe starting an online community called "No Script" for people living unusual lives that are hard to explain to people.

• Weather-wise, it is summer now, but only just. This strange northern place where I live - the snow melts in mid-March but it's just brown and squashy for all of April, the grass doesn't green up until very late April and the very first little bits of leaves were only just starting to come out around Mother's day. Now we have green grass, green trees, baby ducks and goslings in the ponds. The flowering trees flowered and are now half buds and half leaves. People are wearing shorts and t-shirts around, but today when I left work although it was sunny it was cool. I could wear that silk Country Road sweater than in Sydney you could only, only wear in winter time because it was so hot. It was fine. I had jeans on, and black boots with wool socks, and it was fine. This is a northern place and even in summer it doesn't get very hot.
• Which is probably good, because I found out that Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder is real. It's actually called "Atypical Seasonal Affective Disorder", and describes people who get depressed in the summer (another potential online community name - SummerSAD.com). It affects between 1-2% of the population, which I will point out is two standard deviations from the mean. Which makes me an official freak, that counts as a freak. They're not sure if it's actually the sunshine that causes it, or more the temperature. So having a minimum of both is actually great for me.
  
• But I wonder if this syndrome doesn't explain all sorts of other freakish things about me. I sleep in - maybe to reduce the number of daylight hours I see? I love night, I'm most productive staying up late (see time stamp below). I love snow. I have always loved rainy days, although maybe not so many in a row, and walking in a cold wet whipping wind is horrible, regardless. When we first moved to Denver I kept waiting for winter to start and it never did, because it was sunny all the way through until February. When I discovered the syndrome it was on a phone-in medical radio show, and they jokingly mentioned the cure was to move to Wisconsin. But no joke, here I am, and I think it will work for me.

• More body stuff - in addition to a bad cold I got and had to pretend I didn't have when I went down to a cousin's performance in a high school musical in February, I got a really bad shoulder problem, first started from a desk too high in my new office space, but exacerbated because I tried to solve it by sitting up straighter and straighter and being more and more stiff. Nearly eight weeks of physio required, and I cracked it, but it still comes back. And I have, apparently, a narrowing of the nerve canal or whatever in my neck on the left side, so whenever things go, I get a fizzy feeling all down my arm, or sometimes numb fingers or referred pain. This worries me as well but I'm trying to be vigilant and not worry and keep up the guitar stuff because Django Rinehart, as they point out, played with hardly any fingers at all. If the music is in you, you'll find a way to get it out.

• More amp stuff - "the sound" that I'm after, apparently you can only get by turning up a tube amplifier a bit higher than it's supposed to go. No pedal can really quite reproduce it. I love this - a friend called my taste "high end" - and I'm now hearing it everywhere, but I need to get some earplugs. And maybe a farm house far from any neighbors with a soundproofed room.

• I now have a table. I have my grandparents' dining set, refinished and ready for use, and I have my godmother's every day china. I have had two sets of relatives dine off this table, and one set of friends, just this past week. It really is a revelation, and I hope not to be without a table for any length of time ever again.

• I don't knit any more at all. I'm sure I will again, but right now any spare time is taken with practicing scales, and with singing, which takes a bit of concentration actually. I hardly read, except when going to bed. And of course I haven't been blogging.

• I do hope to keep going to the poetry group, and saw lots of those folks at the Book Festival recently so there is a scene here. So I need to write some stuff, because what I take for the open mike section of the meetings is just blog entries, mostly about the weather. So I'm hoping to start putting little musings down again.

• One thing very much on my mind, the root of the values conflict at work for me, is the nature of good design, of form and function. Functional elegance. Perspicuity, is that the word? And then also the fact that artifacts carry with them their use in social communication contexts - like tag clouds for example. And that I have a PhD in this stuff. And work for idiots who have no idea.

Anyway.

• So whenever I feel like writing something or someone asks me "So how are you doing?" or I think of something online I want to build to connect people, it's all pain, and difficulty, and melancholia. When I think of having a real, deep, friendshippy conversation, it's always about the pain I'm carrying and dealing with. I suppose the fear and the past hurt.

• But actually I think I am doing okay because Astrobarry keeps telling me not to worry or try to puzzle anything out with reason, just yet, but to just "hush, and receive". And he wrote a whole big thing about living in the now and being present. Because emotions from past hurt are past - the hurtful thing can't be changed, and doesn't affect your value as a person. And the future thing isn't now, and will probably sort itself out, or will surprise you in various ways - in fact, if you worry too much, and try to control the future, and wrest it to your plans that you're able to concoct, you'll probably limit yourself to all sorts of new possibilities that will jump up that you didn't even expect.
  

Throw those hands up for goodness. Jump off that building and know that the rope will appear. Open your eyes. Live in the now. Be open, see what new experiences life brings you that you could never expect. Experiment, adventure, go look. Fill the well. Fill the damn well. The world is full of people, full of them, and you've hardly met any of them. Open your arms. Open your eyes. Open the damn heart (rather than stop it beating with your mind - private joke there).

I will drive across Wisconsin and back tomorrow and see some more barns in the dark and maybe be able to talk about some of this stuff more. And love guitars also, as well, the same night.

More as it happens, I have to rest for that!

Bridge going up

I've been driving over the bridges between Neenah, Doty Island and Menasha for a year and a half now. It's a great drive, very scenic, through some historic townships that have their own particular look and feel, and that were the foundation of the paper industry in which I'm here to work. I remember doing that drive and imagining visitors from Australia with me, showing it to them as an example of the way this place looks.

The bridges are kind of rough, some with metal grates and all with a metal split in the pavement. They have towers at all four sides, and railings. They are designed to split and raise up to let water traffic go through.

But until this day I had never seen any of these divided bridges actually split. I was driving north on the 114, coming from a bridal shower for a work colleague that at a house near the lake in Neenah, and the traffic was stopped by traffic lights and lowering booms, much as you'd get at a rail crossing. And the road before me started to lift up. It went up until it was basically vertical. I was a few cars back and whatever water vessel was passing was pretty low, so I didn't get a look at what we were stopping to let pass at all. Then it slowly went down, and the lights stopped flashing, and the booms went up, and we all continued on our way. First time.