More Than Work

2014 was a year that I really tried to put what I wanted to do ahead of work. That meant giving up my pay to visit friends in Florida and California, requesting long weekends off for my birthday and Labor Day, going Up North for a full week, and taking an unpaid two-week vacation to Turkey and Germany, since I’d only been a permanent employee for two weeks when I got on that transatlantic flight. I got lots of drinks with friends and starting buying myself books again, made a list of summer activities and crossed them off one by one: kayak the Huron, Cinetopia Film Festival, Shakespeare in the Arb, drink lots of sangria (could do better at that one).

It’s a mixed message, because the rest of the time I was working over 50 hours a week—extremely bitter about that fact, as I had not requested that many hours and couldn’t get rid of them. I planned to quit all three pointless jobs to make room for my trip to Turkey. I didn’t have to, though, because I got one real job instead.

2014 was not a year I tried to really work on what I wanted to do. I didn’t submit to the translation contest that spring, or the extra one that summer, although I’d completed a full first draft and liked that text more than any of the others I’d previously attempted; I didn’t keep, or even make, an editorial schedule for my blog like I had intended; I didn’t make any business plans or take any classes or really try to envision my ideal life, beyond fewer work hours, more sunlight and freedom. Instead I read extensively about a lot of successful solopreneurs, creatives, obnoxiously/appealingly/but not too outrageously well-off and hard-working people in the blogosphere, and envied them, and then switched tabs to my money spreadsheet and stared at my savings account’s steady growth, thanks to better wages, controlled lifestyle inflation, and too many hours at those three pointless jobs.

You know what I did at the end of 2014? I cut my monthly contributions to my emergency fund ($16 IS TEMP fund) in half—since my employment was no longer temporary—and started what I named the BIG MONEY fund. Maybe I should call it the Big Dreams fund. Maybe I should stop thinking so hard about my savings, but although the level of my obsession and reveling in these details may be unhealthy, I love it, and I won’t. The Big Dreams fund could help pay to move to another city in a year or two, or buy my own car in a new place (though I'd rather it not). It could help throw a once-in-a-lifetime party and buy a once-in-a-lifetime dress. Maybe it will start a business, or buy a house. Now it’s time to get to dreaming and planning, so when the money’s there, I know what to do with it.

1. The beach at Olympos Valley on Turkey's Mediterranean coast
2. My little desk chez moi
3. Lunch under the citrus trees at Bayram's in Olympos Valley.

Laps, Lapse, Hello

So 2014 has come and gone, and so has January 2015. I’ve been exercising regularly again, after a lapse of more or less two years. I tell myself that this time, it’s going to stick, as if I can go to our local YMCA 3-4 times a week this week, and next week, and the week after, and again and again. (Of course, I could. This is attainable.)

As if I can win the battle with myself, whether or not to leave my cozy home or head straight from work to the gym without dinner, 200 times this year, and 200 times next year, until suddenly, I am sleepwalking to the Y, without a care in my mind. (Automation is the highly improbable end goal of my many habit-forming attempts.)

I’ve barely run at all since I fulfilled my last gym requirement in high school. I’ve used ellipticals, finding their movements fun, usually painless, easily accommodating of simple books or TV shows. But lifting one leg and pulling it forward and setting it down again, and then lifting the other and moving my body forward in space? I’ve barely tried it since escaping the gym teachers, and felt miserably out of shape every time I did.

But now, I’m going back and forth between the elliptical, and running tight loops around the track at the top of the Y building. Because running hurts, because I don’t want to discourage myself too quickly, I’ve started small. I’m running just over half a mile now, when I run—8 laps. Sometimes I feel confident and run fast; a lap later, I’m out of breath, a stitch in my side. But with the tiny track, it’s almost like progress happens on its own. The laps are so short that it’s easy, sometimes an accident, to go one lap further today than I did the time before.

I want everything to be this easy.

The Fortress of Europe

As viewed from a ferry in the Bosphorus. Built across the strait from the older Fortress of Asia. Instrumental in Mehmet II's conquest of Constantinople. I really get a kick out of the name: the Fortress of Europe.

Happy November from a person who is happy to be back on Michigan soil, after a beautiful trip to Turkey and Germany.

(More photos on Instagram, and more to come, here and there.)

Accomplished

Some days I write one sentence that I like, and I'm satisfied, content to read it over and over and congratulate myself.

But then, that good sentence, it needs to be followed by another good sentence. That can really freeze you up.

On Sunday I overcame the handicapping perfectionism and said fuck it, I want to see these pictures on the wall. The gap's been haunting me for months.

I hung them up, without a ruler or a level or any kind of template. I even changed up the layout halfway through.

And it's great. I look at it, over and over, and feel a twinge of happiness every time.

Emma Is Still in Ukraine*, and the Dolphins Are Exactly As Far Away From Her As They Should Be

I may be watching the sun set on Lake Michigan from a house on the bluff, but I'm also oh-so-jealous of these villas by the sea:

Emma:  meow

me:  hi

how are you?

Emma:  I spent a day and a half in a seaside dacha

me:  ooooh

Emma:  it was great

but also very headachey

me:  the people weren't creeps?

Emma:  oh no

they were goofs

a lot of them were my students though

and there was a lot of vodka and chicken marinated in mayonnaise

I think I have accepted the mayonnaise

me:  ha

Emma:  I got my own little room at the top of the house and when I woke up I could see a line of sea

and there was a porch and it was all like dilapidated white stucco

me:  oh my god

Emma:  and I went swimming and there were swans and dolphins exactly as far away from me as they should have been

me:  DOLPHINS

Emma:  YES

me:  that's amazing

Emma:  and the water was cool and green

and rosebushes and beautiful green lizards

me:  eeeeee

Emma:  soon we're going to the dacha of one of my favorite students I guess

I'm so excited

he's so weird and fun

me:  is it seaside too?

Emma:  I think so

I just want to live in dilapidated villas by the sea

I hate my washer it always sounds like it is full of forks

*Okay, so she's on the Baltic right now, but until last week, she was in Ukraine.

(All photos stolen from Emma's Instagram, @marjoriestrees.)

Slack Summers

Because I still have no real idea, or at least no set goal, about what I want to do with my working life, I spend a lot of time thinking about it. I read about people's money philosophies, life philosophies, shitty jobs they had, dream jobs and how they got them. It seems like most of the time that I manage to post something on this blog of mine—which used to be about living in Europe, and then was a mishmash of having cats and being a person who read and wrote things occasionally—it's usually about work. Not that I ever seem to get anywhere in my career ruminations—I mainly just think in circles, trapped in the web of constant commuting, budgeting, and scheduling.

It's normal for young people to devote a lot of time to their careers. For many people my age, without families and obligations, it's what this phase of life is for.

But I also think it's silly. Part of why I have such a hard time with the career thing is that I've never felt like a job was going to define me, or knew what I should do. What mattered were my books and my plans and my friends. I miss learning. I like to read and eat and make things and see pretty places. (Not that I don't appreciate the fulfillment of a job well done. I just haven't yet found a good job that is worth doing.)

Even as I'm trying to find quiet moments of clarity for soul-searching, job-wise and life-wise, I also wish I made more time to just daydream. That's one of the things summer is for. I used to lie down on my bed and stare out the wide, open window at the sky above the houses and trees. I'd think about living—all the different things I could do once I was done with school, out of there. It was sometimes scary, but it was often a lot of fun. There wasn't so much pressure, or so many boring necessities to consider. No accountability, not like there is now.

Taisia Kitaiskaia describes it beautifully:

One moment you’re wrapped up in all manner of activities and the next you’re standing in your darkened apartment kitchen, an endless afternoon circling with the ceiling fan. The feeling is not unpleasant. It’s like slipping outside of time—societal, human time. It’s in these slack summers that I feel most immortal, as unknown and useless as a god, unseen by any mortal eye and somehow full of a vain and hopeless majesty. ("True Summer," The Hairpin)

*  *  *

Over summer vacation, as the heat got oppressive and the books ran out, as friends disappeared on family trips, grilled cheese for lunch stopped tasting good, and the days wore on, parents would forbid us from saying we were bored. We were supposed to do something about it, not complain. These days, I'm only bored when I'm chained to a place of work that is demanding very little, or even nothing, from me.

Three jobs and no definite priorities (just a lot of contingencies)—that's why I feel boring, so much of the time. Shuttling from one obligation to the next, with nothing worthwhile to report. Sometimes I read an article online that gets me thinking, but those thoughts are dulled as I return to copy-and-pasting or whatever other banal task I'm currently burdened with. Ultimately, the thoughts are forgotten in the shuffle of job after job and the neverending pursuit of responsible adulthood.

I'm aching for those real summers. You don't need to feed me, you don't need to entertain me. Let me read that stack of books, physical and imagined, that I've been building the past few years. I love the breeze through the window. I don't mind shutting down my mind when the afternoon heat gets too heavy; I am fully capable of staring at the cats and doing nothing else. Let me write angsty poetry by the light of the streetlamps outside the window like I used to. Life was real, even if I was doing nothing.