It's Only A Paper Rose

Alas, this year I didn't win the dice-roll on the flu shot—the strain making the rounds doesn't appear to have been covered by the vaccine. Roundabout the evening of the 8th, I started feeling some vague prickling in my throat; that night the fever set in. Unfortunately, by the time I got to the doctor (I miiiight have been in denial about it just being a bad cold) I was outside the effectiveness window for Tamiflu, but at least I got the diagnosis so I could clear my calendar.

I'm now firmly in the "you get to do one thing today" stage of recovery. Today it was yoga. I walked to the studio, took a class (resting during some of it), then picked up a couple of groceries. Rather than walk the mile-ish home, I waited a good ten minutes for a bus to take me five blocks. (One thing the flu always does is give me a lot of sympathy for folks who deal with chronic energy-sapping illnesses.) Got home, ate, and promptly went to sleep—for what I thought would be an hour, until Brian woke me up a good four hours later.

I'm not sorry I went; something they don't tell you about training/bodybuilding, but when you're used to regular exercise and then you're bedbound for a while, your body hurts. I feel miles better, physically, than I have for a good week now. But it also meant I wasn't able to make it to the film festival I've been helping friend of mine put on. Which kinda bums me out...I was looking forward to seeing her triumph. But sometimes that's how life works.

Tomorrow my one thing is probably going to be getting my hair done. Wednesday I'm teaching two classes, and I think I should just have the energy...

Still, I'm doing some things that are less energy-intensive, too. I've been catching up on some letters I owe to people. Luckily I ordered some adorable stationery recently (thanks for the rec, osprey_archer!) so that's been fun. I've also been working on my Giant WiP of Doom, though I'm sadly rather far behind...still, March is a long month, and I've been updating weekly rather than all in one chunk which gives me a little extra cushion. And people have been reading, and leaving comments! Which is, of course, the point, but given that it's an unfinished piece that's clearly going to be quite long, I wasn't certain what to expect. So hurrah for successful serialization! Now to see if I can keep the momentum going, especially as we start to get into the murkier middle depths...

On the more liberal side of the current tug-of-war over basic workers' rights, one concept that's seen some experimentation is the idea of the six-hour workday, wherein the traditional workday time is cut by a quarter. The idea is that, especially in white-collar brain-intensive jobs, studies have shown that six hours gives you the best ratio between availability and reasonable productivity, before fatigue sets in and workers start making more mistakes and/or seeing deleterious long-term health effects - so we should take advantage of that and hopefully reap savings in terms of less stressed-out workers.

Interestingly, however, over the past few weeks I've been having almost the reverse issue. Most of my workdays over that time have been only a couple of hours at most - a massage appointment here, a yoga class there, a shift at the spa a couple days a week. And yet I've been discovering the hidden cost to going for weeks without a break, even when the bulk of any given day seems like it should be fine for relaxing.

For one thing, a massage appointment isn't just a massage appointment, especially working out of my home. If someone's coming over, I need to make sure the living room, kitchen, bathroom, and hallway are clean; the furniture is moved; and the table is set up. Depending on how messy the house was before and whether Brian helps (which, dear man, he often makes himself available to do), that's often a two-to-three hour job before I even get to the appointment itself. (Although, on the upside, the house stays a lot cleaner when I have regular clients than it does otherwise.)

For another, although yoga teaching doesn't require any cleaning, there's the transportation time to consider. When I'm teaching at Uptown or Lincoln Square that's maybe ten or fifteen minutes each way on my bike or the bus; however, my regular class is at Sauganash, which is either a 35-minute bike ride or a 45-minute transit ride away, depending on my energy and the weather. For an eight- (or even six-) hour workday, an hour and a half round trip isn't a huge deal, but the proportion compared to a single two-hour shift is, unsurprisingly, much higher.

And that's not even taking into account the mental effects of going weeks without a proper day off. I constantly remind my clients that relaxation isn't what happens in between everything else you do; it's a conscious choice that requires active practice. Needless to say, it's much easier to make that choice when you're not likely to have to suddenly get up and dash - i.e. when you've got that full day off.

I'm not complaining, exactly - I made the choice to take on the workload I did, for various reasons. (Income is helpful! Practice at my trades are good. Feeling useful and productive is nice, too.) And in a lot of ways, I'm privileged - I don't have to take on less-than-ideal schedules if I don't want to, for fear of not making rent or running out of grocery money. But I cannot even articulate how relieved I am to have a couple of full, real, genuine days off on my schedule tomorrow and Wednesday. And while I understood intellectually why a yoga teacher friend of mine would occasionally cancel plans with "I'm sorry, I need to stay home and eat cheese," I grok that mindset in a much more real and immediate way now.

As of this morning, I have completed all paperwork, meetings, studio walkthroughs, and desk shifts required...and as of Monday, I'll be teaching my first yoga class! (My first two yoga classes, actually, since I picked up a sub that evening.) Earlier in the week, I was anxious bordering on terrified; after some breathing and journaling and other anxiety-acceptance measures, I'm feeling at least a little more sanguine about it. The manager at the studio has been super chill and supportive, including responding promptly and positively to my numerous emails about questions and small administrative details. And no matter how badly I screw up, I know I'm not going to be as bad as The Worst C1. (I don't think I ever wrote about it here; suffice it to say, the girl barely moved from the back of the classroom the whole time, she didn't touch anyone, she spoke in a soft near-monotone that sounded for all the world like she was reciting a memorized script, and her whole playlist was atonal noise rock, including savasana (?!). At the very least, I know I have a better playlist.) But there's still a lot of anxiety for me in getting up and being open (and thus, to a degree, vulnerable) with a whole group of people, for a whole class. Which, I suppose, is a sign it'll be a good learning experience, too.

Anyway, onto the book stuff!

What I've just finished reading

*hangs head* I have not finished anything this week, either. I strongly suspect I'm letting my anxiety occupy too many emotional cycles; I've noticed that I tend toward obsessive behaviors when it gets going - refreshing social media, occupying myself with ticky administrative details, looking over my calendar repeatedly, etc. (Why, yes, I do have a family history of obsessive-compulsive disorder, how did you guess?) It's surprising, how much time and energy it takes to be anxious. Anyway, I'm working on it.

What I'm reading now

The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon. Dialect or no, I've been finding myself wishing that I was reading a physical copy of this book; Peter Riegert is turning in a perfectly decent performance, but there are so many wonderful descriptions and delightful turns of phrase that I really want to savor but that just go by too quickly. I finally have taken to using a combination of Audible's "bookmark" feature and (for ones I think Brian will enjoy) transcribing and texting them to preserve their ephemerality: "the sudden awareness, like an inverse satori, that he has made a grave, if not fatal error...his jaws snap together, making each tooth ring out with its own pure tone as the impact of his ass against the ground conducts its Newtonian business with the rest of his skeleton." "The winter sky in southeastern Alaska is a Talmud of grey, an inexhaustible commentary on a Torah of rain clouds and dying light." "They all looked shocked; even Gould, who could have happily read a comic book by the light of a burning man."

For all the lighthearted metaphor, there's a very real atmosphere of melancholy and uncertainty in this story; not grief, precisely, but the recognition of opportunities missed, the sense of having taken a wrong turn somewhere without knowing precisely what it was. Perhaps this is appropriate to a tale of Jewish culture, even alternate-universe Jewish culture; I know it probably resonates with me more now, at this point in American history, than it likely would have even a year or two ago.

I'm a bit torn on the worldbuilding; there are hints of a broader global alt-history stemming from the decision to relocate Jews to Southeast Alaska instead of Israel, but whether due to my personal ignorance of world/Jewish history or simply to the fact that it all goes by a bit too quickly in audio format, I'm having trouble piecing together exactly what's different from our more recent history. That said, the tensions and troubles and cliques and feuds and foibles of this particular group in this time that never existed are beautifully rendered. The plot is mostly pretty standard religious-political-conspiracy stuff, and it moves a bit slowly, but one gets the feeling it's more of an excuse to spend time in this world and with these characters, and said characters are entertaining and well-drawn enough to be worth the investment. I'm wondering how it'll wrap up; the themes don't point for a truly happy ending, and neither does the alt-history-noir setup, but given the effort they're putting in to untangling this mess, I suspect Landsman and Berko will pull at least "bittersweet".

all about love, by bell hooks. This week's chapter is on community, and the importance thereof in giving us a place to practice love, especially for those of us raised in unloving and dysfunctional family situations. I've long been a proponent of making community connections a bigger part of our lives - it's something that doesn't get a lot of emphasis in our mainstream culture, with its deleterious emphasis on the nuclear family as the social unit uber alles - but I'm not sure I agree with her framing. She seems to come from a place of fundamental certainty that everyone participates in a community in good faith; thus, she believes that, while distancing is sometimes necessary, there is no reason to ever cut ties with a person; everyone can and will change for the better when presented with evidence of the hurtfulness of their actions. She cites one friend in particular whose family was incredibly hurtful towards her when she came out as a lesbian; apparently after some years, their attitudes changed and they were able to have a worthwhile relationship.

Obviously, I have a lot of issues with this paradigm. I'm all for giving people the benefit of the doubt; we're all human, we all make mistakes. But she seems to be falling headlong into several common social fallacies; the fact is, there are drama queens, and missing stairs, and other individuals that a community is better off without. Setting boundaries with these people, and actively limiting your social interactions with them, is a net social positive - not only because it increases your happiness, but because limited options due to social censure is its own lesson. I'm more torn on the question of whether they can learn; presumably, we need to give people the benefit of the doubt in order for them to learn, but based on my past experiences, I have a very difficult time trusting that someone with an established pattern of behavior will have any desire to change, let alone gain the self-awareness to do so. I'm sure it can happen, but I have a hard time trusting that it is what's going on in any given situation - especially when it's so much easier to claim you're trying to change without actually, y'know, doing any of the work. Maybe this is a reflection on me and my trust issues more than on anything inherent to humanity, I don't know.

What I plan to read next

Back before I put a moratorium on new book-buying, I had pre-ordered Cherie Priest's new book Brimstone, which just arrived in the mail. I have a feeling my to-read shelf is going to go neglected in my next selection...

After years of attending classes, working on their cleaning staff, getting to know the teachers and managers, not to mention paying for and attending Teacher Training and Extensions, filling out applications, and getting my CPR certification...I've been invited to audition for a yoga teaching slot at CorePower.

Obviously I'm pleased about this. But it's turning out to be a bit more nerve-wracking than I anticipated. The grapevine has it that 75 people applied to the Uptown studio alone; presumably not all of them are auditioning, but chances are there'll be a lot of people looking to fill just a few available spots. This has always been my concern with CorePower's business model; they market teacher training heavily because it's a big moneymaker for them, but as the local yoga market has reached saturation and their regular teachers settle into their grooves, the number of classes they need taught has shrunk significantly even as their potential supply has grown commensurately larger. I feel like I have some advantages versus the crowd: I've been attending for years and know a lot of folks in the community, I have a lot of flexibility in my schedule, plus I'm already on their payroll, albeit in a very minor capacity. (Cleaning staff are paid minimum wage plus a half-price membership in exchange for at least 1.5 hours of work per week.) But on the other hand, if the rest of the TT groups this go-round were anything like mine, we're going to have a serious glut of talented, capable teachers looking for a spot.

Upon reflection, I suspect what I'm feeling is that sense of insecurity that comes from having put most of your eggs in one basket. I'm not a joiner by nature; I tend to spread myself out, preferring to build minor connections in multiple communities rather than become a central figure in a single community and thus beholden to its failings and dysfunctions. So this whole "being a recognizable face in a large group" thing is new to me. And...it's a little anxiety-inducing, realizing that I've invested a not-inconsiderable amount of time, effort, money, and social capital in a community that may or may not return my investment, whether due to a lack of affection or simply a lack of availability.

None of which is to say it'll be the end of the world if I don't make the cut. It'll mean some changes in my focus, which are always uncomfortable when you've gotten into a habit. But they'll also be opportunities for growth, just in a different direction than the ones I'll face if I do teach for them.

I suppose we'll see which of my patron Five Gods deities shows up on audition day - the Mother of Summer, or the Bastard...

I love that Swedish has a word, "mysig", that basically encompasses the whole concept of "warm and cozy and snuggled down against the weather".

Still dealing with the dregs of this cold. My throat and sinuses no longer feel like they've been scrubbed out with sandpaper, but I've got a serious case of Joni Mitchell voice going on. (This may or may not be related to having had friends over last night for dinner and games. Still worth it - everyone got on well and we had a great evening.) Plus winter, after slacking for months, seems to be running to catch up; it's well below freezing outside. But it's sunny in my living room, I have nowhere to go except perhaps yoga, and Google Play has served up an excellent playlist of slightly wistful 90s and 2000s pop that nicely fits the theme of "snuggled down with books and blankets and tea on a cold day". To break out (and hopefully not mangle) my rudimentary Swedish, "Det mysig helgen börjar nu."

My first couple of days at the new job went well enough. Thursday was a bit rocky - I was having a lot of anxiety, and as a result barely slept Wednesday night. (I made a Facebook post to that effect, which my supervisor caught, and suggested that since I didn't have any bookings in my first few slots that I come in later, which meant I could catch an extra hour-ish of sleep. It was much appreciated.) I got through Thursday but was still incredibly wound up, so I spent a bit of time on the phone with my mother hashing out what exactly was bothering me so much.

Mostly it came to feeling more than a little adrift; the whole venture is still very new, and I get the strong feeling management is still getting products and procedures sorted out. (I keep hearing about these amazing products and experiences we're supposed to be selling, for instance, but nobody's given any specific training on them. I asked the spa manager how aromatherapy massages were going to work, for instance, and she reassured me that everything would be premeasured and easy to use, which was nice, but...not what I asked.) My gut feeling, reinforced by my supervisor's messaging, just says to leave it alone while management gets everything restocked and sorted, but some part of me is terrified that while we're in this nebulous phase I'll do something wrong, or say the wrong thing, or something. I'm trying to sit with that fear and acknowledge it while not letting it affect my work or my life overmuch. And true to my psyche's usual form, just having it articulated helped a lot.

Friday was better, if busier. One of the biggest changes from my old job is the pace of the churn; I'm doing 50 minute massages with 10 minutes of change time, whereas I'm used to 60 minute massages with 15 minutes for sheet/client changes. (Five minutes doesn't sound like that big a difference, but when you're having to wait for folks to get dressed and then take them all the way across the sizable spa space before heading back and stripping sheets, it's a noticeable lack.) The general policy appears to be that, as your schedule fills, the front desk blocks you off for a break somewhere in the middle of your shift, which gives you a chance to catch your breath and generally makes it much more manageable. Hopefully it'll keep working that way in practice.

But in the meantime, I think the next couple of days are going to be about snuggling down and recuperating - I have letters to write, and books to read, and cats to snuggle. And I might've just ordered a bunch of new teas to try as well - The New Mexico Tea Company and their amazing labels will be my downfall, I swear. Hurrah for cozy weekends!

Tonight Brian and I went to see Mythbusters Unleashed, which is staged (as Brian put it) rather like a science-themed traveling medicine show; for most of the segments, Adam and Jamie would take scientific principles that are relatively dry or abstract (force equalling mass times acceleration, for instance, or the power of friction) and find colorful ways to demonstrate it (having a large male volunteer try to hit a high-striker carnival bell with a gavel versus a fourth-grade girl with a sledgehammer, or hoisting Adam up nearly to the ceiling by two shuffle-paged telephone books). It was fun, in an Exploratorium Onstage kind of way.

One of the more thought-provoking moments, however, was when Adam was talking about his personal history, and how for so much of his life he had lots of different interests, but never had a focus. So he would spend some time learning a new skill or subject and get better-than-average at it, but would inevitably hit that wall where in order to have a hope of actually becoming good, he'd have to dedicate a serious chunk of his life to it. And he'd shy away, because that wasn't what he wanted, and would lament all the time he'd wasted learning that skill, when it was apparently his destiny to only ever get a step above mediocrity.

And then the day came when the studio called him and asked him if he would be interested in joining a show called Mythbusters, which turned into, well...Mythbusters. And even though they've just finished filming the final season, and for the first time in fourteen years he won't be spending huge amounts of time at it, he's discovered through the show that his calling is in science - specifically, the storytelling and communication and public outreach aspect of it. He might not have the specialized know-how to make cutting-edge discoveries or devote his life to research, but he has the intelligence and enthusiasm and charisma to explain and demonstrate basic principles and new discoveries to folks who otherwise might never even think about them; and all his many weird and varied skills help him to do that, as they give him a broad background of experiences from which to draw, which in turn helps him solve problems by thinking in new and different ways.

People who've followed my personal agonizing over my career might recognize this theme. I have so many weird and varied skills and pockets of knowledge, but for so many years, I had no real drive to develop any of them. So I'd write a bit here, and play the guitar there, and study psychological or sociological principles one day, and then read up on how they were used in marketing, and another day I'd be looking at the latest studies in neurochemistry, or learning about physiology so I could diagnose myself and avoid a doctor's bill, and now and then there'd be some yoga in there, and then a friend suggested I go to massage school.

And I suddenly felt like the savant in her element. Helping people feel better appealed to my humanistic bent; all the basic physiology/pathology I knew gave me a good foundation and kept the science courses from being overwhelming. The psychology and sociology and storytelling helped me understand how the profession is viewed and how to frame it most attractively to potential clients; the yoga (and associated knowledge of alignment/proprioception) helped with body mechanics. Even the employment-law and ethical stuff my mother used to lecture me on when I was a kid turned out to have relevance. For the first time, I had a focus, something I was enthusiastic about and not scared to devote a good chunk of my life to; and it intersected with almost everything I enjoy. (Still working on getting the music in there.)

I still worked hard in school, don't get me wrong; there's a reason I was barely available for those seven months. But having that foundation, that basic understanding of how these subjects worked and how they fit together, made all the difference; it's why I got one of the highest MBLEx scores on local record, and why I feel I really have the potential to be great in this field. In a way, I've been studying for it my whole life.

I don't know if bodywork is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life or not. But having had that experience, of finding that point of intersectionality between so many different interests and realizing that it's not necessarily a question of either/or, was a life-altering experience. I don't think I ever consciously articulated it before now, but for so much of my life I was afraid I was going to have to Pick One Thing and focus on it exclusively - that was the message I always got about acting, about writing, about any kind of career-level undertaking (at least if you wanted to excel at your career). Now I know that, even if I do decide to do something other than bodywork later on in life, I'll still have this knowledge (plus whatever else I've picked up in the interim); and chances are I'll find something else that has a high intersectionality with my interests. I'll just have to trust that my intuition will help me figure out what.

Today I start my new job! I'm slightly apprehensive about it, more so than is really justified. I mean, I've worked there before (student clinic is basically an internship), so I know the procedures; I know where everything is, I know the place is well-run by high-functioning and ethical people that I like. I've even heard through the grapevine that clients have been asking after me (although we'll see if they book with me now that I'm a professional and command twice the hourly rate, heh). And I genuinely like and am good at the work. So there's no reason to be concerned.

And yet I can't help feeling just a bit anxious, more so even than the usual "starting a new venture" nerves. Now that I think about it, I wonder if it's the very perfect-seeming-ness of the position that's contributing. I mean, if this were just another office job, it'd be...well, just another office job. I've never really self-identified as "secretary" even when I was doing it full-time; it was always a stepping-stone. (I was rarely certain what it was a stepping-stone to, but I knew I wasn't going to be a secretary my whole life.) "Massage therapist" maybe wasn't my first choice on the list ten years ago, but it's been a bit of a revelation; I don't have the mental blocks about it that I do about music and writing and acting, so I can do it wholeheartedly and with clear intentions; a particular joy I've rarely experienced before and never in a career-type context.

So starting to do it as a career is a little scary. Not because I'm worried I'll fail, really, but because I'm concerned I'll lose that joy. (The phenomenon of people losing former enjoyment in an activity they're being paid to do is a well-documented bit of human nature - something in how our brains are wired seems to think we only need one reason to engage in any particular activity, and "money" replaces "genuine enjoyment" dispiritingly easily.) And because I identify so strongly with this work, if I stop enjoying it, or if some other aspect of it doesn't work out, it's a much bigger part of my identity that I'm having to reshape.

I think my challenge is going to be twofold: more immediately, figuring out how to stay focused on doing my best work in the moment; and more overarchingly, figuring out how to stay engaged and fulfilled in the field, even during the inevitable plateaus. I strongly suspect "continuing to learn new tricks and techniques" is going to be a big part of that second one; despite it being a little premature as yet, I've been eyeing local physical therapy education programs. But I don't have to worry about that now; I can take this one day at a time. So...onward!

I said earlier this month that I love the transitional seasons, and it's true. But Life, as it tends to do, has taken me at my word. It's been a month of changes: some minor; some major, but distant enough in my social network to be relatively minor in terms of their day-to-day effects on my life; a few pretty profound.

Interestingly, the most personally profound are less changes in external status as they are in internal outlook. For one, I've reached the point in my education where I start to look at people and see them differently; in much the same way Brian looks at a new place and immediately scopes out the places where the wireless access points and cameras and other network equipment all are (or if they aren't, where they should be), I've gotten to the point where I can look at someone's movement and posture and immediately suspect what's going on with their musculature/fascial system - where they're tight, where they're inhibited, where they're probably feeling pain/discomfort. So far it's mostly just generalities, but I'm starting to see those around me way a bodyworker sees them, and it's kind of an awesome ability. Even if it occasionally makes me despair when I pass by the same woman day after day wearing the same unsupportive heels that make her entire foot collapse inward.

For another example, I'm actually genuinely excited for my friend Donna - she's the one expecting her very-much-wanted child. (Latest news - it's a girl!) After some discussion, Brian and I have volunteered to be godparents; it'll mean making an effort to visit regularly and remember birthdays and Christmas, but honestly, Donna's practically family anyway, and one of the things I remember most fondly from growing up was the variety of close friends my mother had, from whom I got to learn about many different options in terms of lifestyle and priorities. (It helped me feel less railroaded when I was a teenager, which, growing up in suburbia, felt like a time when the world is simultaneously telling me "You can be anything you want to be!" and "So long as it's going to college and getting a job and getting married and having 2.1 children and buying a house and being a good consumer!") And it feels like the right thing for me; I want to help raise the next generation, but despite my recently-reexamined views on the importance of childrearing, I still am just not feeling any particular desire to have kids of my own. But I'm thoroughly jazzed to be in the helper/supporter role, and am even kind of looking forward to when she gets older and we can take her for a week here and there and give her parents a break.

On a more external front, graduation is coming up fast. I'm definitely going to apply to work at the school clinic, but I've also come up with an idea for a target market that I could build a clientele around - they're both greatly underserved and would likely have need of my services (both in the "needs the work due to physically demanding job" sense and the more nebulous "needs a safe place where they feel cared for" sense). I'm kind of excited because it's the first solid idea I've had that feels right for me. It's still just an idea, of course, and building clientele is as much luck and perseverance as it is ideas, but I'm hopeful. And it gives me something to focus my marketing-class project on.

Less concrete but equally profound has been the continued realization that I have, somewhat unintentionally, become Part Of The Yoga Community here in Chicago. Mostly it's just little things, like meeting someone for the first time and having them comment that they've heard about me from their favorite teacher, or having someone tell me about being at a yoga-related event and having my name come up in the group. (Luckily in a flattering context, at least that time.) I guess it's not terribly surprising; I go to various CorePowers regularly and am unshy and friendly and sort of stand out...but. But.

In all honesty, it's a little bit scary for me. I don't have the greatest experience with community participation; a lot of the traits people initially find attractive about me (forthrightness, confidence, analytical ability, fearlessness in speaking up) tend to read differently in mixed-company scenarios (tactless, arrogant, judgmental, overpoweringly opinionated). In many ways, I still speak Human as a second language; it's difficult for me to read multiple people's reactions in the moment and censor myself accordingly. So I try to make the most effort to spend time with people I know understand me in one-on-one or small-group scenarios. But community links are important, and helpful in one's career as well as one's social life, so I'm making an effort to strengthen those relationships. My marketing class notes actually had an insightful suggestion on that point: "You have: two (2) eyes, two (2) ears, and one (1) mouth. Use them in that order." It's taken me upwards of three decades, but I'm slowly learning when to be quiet and listen.

And this isn't even getting into the more distal-social-network events that're happening - deaths, marriages, pregnancies. Life moves fast! And I feel eminently lucky to be living it somewhere I love that has opportunities for me, even if I'm a bit scared I'll make a hash of them. But to paraphrase Miles Vorkosigan, it's all about the momentum - keep moving, keep learning, or you might as well give up. Things move quickly - let's jump on that train! Onward!

I'm pleased to report that last week's growing depression-and-self-pity miasma has dissipated. Things had lifted noticeably by Friday, though I had a bit of a vulnerability hangover to deal with; and over the weekend I felt much much better. I suspect just getting all that off my chest was a relief in and of itself, even if I still didn't have any particular ideas for a solution. (The fact that the weather went from dark and cloudy and chilly to sunny and breezy and beautiful probably didn't hurt, either.)

Also of help were my friends. I was surprised, in fact, at how many of you responded, far more than I had expected - I guess the whole "I'm afraid of failure but even more afraid of success" conundrum is more common than I realized. Big thanks to Ken, Maggie, Raven, and Robs (and my mum, although her input was via phone). You all invested significant time in helping me think it all over and pointing out things I hadn't considered, and it was extremely useful to have your perspectives. You are awesome and I love each and every one of you. <3

While I still don't have a whole lot of ideas in the way of solutions, I'm coming to realize that perhaps I don't need to find a way to solve this problem right here and now. While it's true that people tend to remain faithful to their fundamental personalities, they do grow and change and (perhaps most importantly) learn to overcome and/or compensate for their neuroses; and that's not even accounting for how their circumstances change too. It's perfectly possible that, rather than this particular failure meaning that I'm never going to achieve anything in this arena, it just means it's not the right route for me now. Maybe that'll change in the future, maybe not, but there's no reason to despair of ever making progress as an independent artist. So for now, I'm going to work on just continuing my daily practice/writing goals, even if I don't always achieve them, and even if they don't seem ambitious enough to actually accomplish anything. The fact is, 15 minutes of practice and 500 words a day is infinitely better than nothing. I'm just going to work hard on letting go of that expectation that I Devote X Hours A Day Or I'm Not A Serious Artist, and just keep the practice up and work more when I'm inspired. And if I manage to convince myself that it's okay to take on that coffeeshop gig, or submit that short story somewhere, well, so much the better.

In the meantime, today's been a good day for accomplishments, especially of all the stuff I'd been putting off last week. I got laundry done, and (after watching a dust bunny or two blow by like the tumbleweeds in Arizona) did a bunch of sweeping and general house cleaning, too. I picked up the dry cleaning and mailed a package. And I penetrated interstate bureaucracy deeply enough to figure out how to get my fingerprints taken and processed so that I can help with the same survey-administration job in the Detroit school district, which was no small feat.

So as a reward, I went purse-shopping. My small black Fossil purse is still in great shape, but I've lately discovered that being a transit-based urbanite makes having a larger handbag useful, since otherwise you end up carrying a second tote bag for your headphones/books/miscellaneous purchases/etc. And, much to my surprise, I managed to find something {a} non-hideous and {b} decently well-made that {c} fit my fairly narrow size/design requirements (bigger but not so big as to be unwieldy to carry, some sort of closure at the top since it rains here regularly) and {d} cost half of my self-imposed $100 budget. So I am pretty throughly pleased about that.

--While reading this fantastic post on Renaissance Florence and Machiavelli to my mother (who studied Renaissance art and history in college), I commented that she and it were probably two of the biggest reasons I'd picked Italian as a language to learn in Duolingo, despite the fact that it was arguably the least practical of the available options. She laughed, and said "That's because the point of the Italian language, just like the point of Italian culture, isn't to be useful or practical - it's to be beautiful!" I thought she was being a little facetious, but after reading that post again, I'm not so sure. Still, it made me feel a little better about my choice - and determined to read more on the history of Florence.

--Upon the close of a wonderful houseguest experience with my musician friends Olivia and Colin, I was driving them back to the airport, and made a joke about how could they please leave Brian and me a nice Yelp review. A moment later, Colin piped up from the backseat: "Review: 2 out of 5 stars. Hosts were too good to be true. Suspect I was heavily drugged the entire time." Awww. <3

--Technically two moments, but - due to my CorePower Yoga Groupon being about to run out, I've talked this week to a couple of teachers whose classes I particularly enjoyed, telling them that I'm probably going to try a different and potentially more cost-effective option in the area, and their responses were identical: "No! You can't leave! Join our yoga-for-trade program!" (It looks like they have a program where do either cleaning or front-desk work for three hours a week, and they give you a free membership. Assuming 12 hours a month, that's well over $10 an hour in trade, which is a pretty good deal, especially when you're an artist type without a full-time job. So I may well look into it. Also that explains how they keep the studios/locker rooms so spotlessly clean.) Despite the relatively low level of socialization in the studio's culture, I've apparently managed to form relationships with the teachers without even realizing it. Hah. One of them commented "I'm always happy when you show up. I'm all "Oh, Rose is here! I love her, she always tries." Thanks...?