The radio pierces through my dreams.
Or maybe it’s my nightmares, I never seem to remember anymore. We’ve come a long way from the days when my college roommate, Holley, used to holler “Karen, it’s your fucking alarm!” Now, Jake turns from one side of the bed to the other and I’m wide awake. I don’t dream anymore. I don’t really sleep anymore.
The radio is yelling. The dial is in between stations, but close to one so that the music mixes with static. The volume is turned up so high that it makes me jump out of my skin. I pound the tabletop savagely until the room is once again silenced. If I keep my eyes tightly closed, I can postpone the inevitable.
At least for another seven minutes.
The radio comes alive once more and I show it who’s boss. But it’s not whipped into shape, it takes only another seven minutes for it to commence its nagging. I pound it twice more before I give up. At this point, I have eight minutes to make it out the door. But I don’t jump off the bed. I lie there with my eyes open, staring at the patterns on the ceiling.
As a child I always envied the kids with stars on their ceilings. With my less than stellar eyesight, I was unable to see my own hands at night, let alone a pair of florescent constellations. After my eye operation, I went out and bought a set of my own. Now I can stare at star whenever I wish to, even in New York City.
Even at nine A.M.
I finally drag myself into the bathroom, eyelids shut. Reaching for the bubble gum toothpaste, I move my arm up and down and side to side, like a well trained robot. I take my time because I know that I will need to open my eyes to brush my hair and I’m not ready just yet. I can hear the minutes ticking. The fear that I might have a 9:30 meeting grips me and I drop the toothbrush, wash out my mouth and comb my hair within a split second.
I race back to the bedroom and thank my lucky stars that I shaved last night. The long black skirt picks me and I throw on a white shirt and dig into my black shoes, I grab my bag, throwing in the keys on the way out. I yell back to the birdie, “See you tonight, Cupcik.”
Hailing a cab, I check my wallet and the time simultaneously. 9:15, I’ll make it in on time.
I dig into my bag and pull out my second most precious electronic item. I press play and turn the volume to twenty. The music takes over my soul.
This might be a good day after all.
Previously? The Need for Speed.
I didn’t use to believe in randomness.
As a person who spends too much time on each of her moves, my decisions and choices are never haphazard. I have specific reasons for almost each step and can recite them to you if you so wished. I try to think before I speak and I search for meaning behind my actions. The idea that people do things without thinking never made sense to me.
I can agree that, often times, people aren’t aware of their own motives. Many of us are affected by our subconscious and do things because they ‘feel right’ or ‘come naturally’. To me, even forgetting was an active decision. The fact that you forgot to buy a dress of the occasion meant that you secretly didn’t want to go at all. I guess I didn’t like the idea of taking away credit. Since humans are amongst rare animals that have thought and decision-making capabilities, it didn’t make sense that they wouldn’t constantly take advantage of their unique capability.
Accepting randomness sounded like a copout to me. Instead of taking responsibility, people got to say “oh, I forgot” or “it didn’t mean anything”. Everything means something. Things happen for a reason. If you forgot, it most likely wasn’t all that important to you in the first place. Instead of hiding behind excuses, I wished people would be bold enough to tell the truth.
“Actually, I don’t enjoy going out on Friday nights.”
“I’m afraid I didn’t like that movie at all.”
“I just feel like you always bring me down.”
There are better ways to phrase honest sentiments and it’s important to do that, but so is not being fake. And I just figured why lie forever when you can tell the truth once and be done with it?
Everything means something.
I’m not sure if I believe that anymore. The above sentence makes it really hard to deal with major calamities beyond your control like murder, rape or losing a baby. I’m adjusting my mind to the fact that sometimes things happen for no reason at all. At least no discernable reason. And it’s okay not to know the ‘why’s.
Sometimes it’s best to just move on. To know that something will only affect you if you let it and that you won’t.
Maybe entropy is more likely to be the world’s model than order, but it still doesn’t excuse your not thinking about your actions and words. Next time you run across a situation where you seem to have done something inadvertently, pay attention to your feelings and thoughts.
Maybe you’ll discover that the act wasn’t so random after all.
Previously? Seed.
It all starts with a single seed.
A tiny, imperceptible seed of thought or emotion. An uneasy feeling that you could swear wasn’t there a minute ago.
It has no apparent trigger. It’s not the outcome of a recent occurrence. It doesn’t have any visible relevance to the previous moments of the day.
Like the Big Bang, it expands within you in less than milliseconds. What was an annoying moment becomes an overwhelming state of mind.
There’s no going back now. The pull is too strong and it warps everything around it. The word “right” is not a part of your mind’s vocabulary anymore.
There are no whites. No goods. No positive sides.
You’re in the land of jet black.
The forest is so dense that you can’t even see the grass or the road. Everywhere you look is trunks, locking you in like a prisoner.
There is no light. No tunnel. No way out and no way back.
You try to think back to the moment all the grays disappeared but all you can recall is being here, feeling desperate. It’s as if you have never been elsewhere. You were born here and you will die here.
You want to yell but words won’t cooperate. You want to cry but your eyes are dry. You want to ask for help but there’s no one around.
You’re alone.
Anger rises within you. “Stop this,” you yell at your mind. You think of all the suffering people in the world. The people with real problems.
You start naming the good things in your life, but it doesn’t even flinch. The goods morph into not so great. They might even be bad. It has taken over your sense of judgement, perception and memory. It doesn’t like to leave loose ends.
Maybe resistance is a stupid idea.
Giving up seems to be the best option. Just thinking about it covers you with a sense of relief. Maybe the dark is not so bad after all. Maybe you’ve belonged here all along.
The phone rings. You say, “Hello?”
The voice is cheerful. “Hi, honey, just checking up on you.”
A single tear escapes.
Previously? Cynical Copout.
I’m fed up with cynicism.
I didn’t really encounter large doses of cynicism until I came to the United States. In college, when people acted bitter and negative, I kept looking for reasons. I couldn’t understand why a teenager, attending a decent college with a healthy body and a caring family would have reason to be so scornful. What had already happened in his life to make him so distrustful and so full of hatred?
My childhood, while not uneventful, was pretty decent compared to how it could have been. We had ups and downs but no major calamities. I lived through a divorce and a remarriage, way too much teasing for a soul like mine to handle, and a constant lack of belonging. But I never turned bitter. I’m not asking for a pat in the back. I had other emotions to deal with. I was sad to the point of misery. I chose to run away, leaving behind a family I adored and starting my life all over again. It just never occurred to me to be a cynic.
So for the longest time, I kept thinking that these people must have had a much more miserable life than I had had and that I had no right to judge how they dealt with it. It wasn’t like I’d dealt with my issues maturely. Running away hardly deserved praise.
Now that years have passed, I’ve decided that just like running away, cynicism is total crap. It’s useless to the person who hides behind it and to the world in general. Talk about a wasted emotion.
Just like running away, a cynical attitude is a copout. It’s choosing to hide behind a mask that will be used as an excuse not to take any responsibility. It’s taking the easy way out.
It’s so much easier to sit there and complain. It’s so much easier to distrust. It’s so much easier to hide behind the protective walls of anger.
I’ve come to believe that having faith is a much harder emotion than lacking it. Not in the religious sense, though that case might apply too, but in the day-to-day interactions. Expecting a person to cross you gives you an excuse to feel justified when the person does, intentionally or not, end up doing something that’s not in your favor. When kicked, it’s so much simpler to say “See I told you so?” or “What’s the point of getting up when I’ll end up back down here again?”
What’s hard is picking yourself up and trying again. What’s hard is trusting others. What’s hard is smiling and being happy. Believing in yourself. Believing in others. Believing that there is still so much you can do for the world and having the courage to try.
Recently, I was telling my manager about my intentions of starting a non-profit organization and he kept telling me that it was a waste of my time, my passion, and my intelligence. He said that I can’t change the world. I looked at him and simply replied, “You’re wrong.“
What if everyone felt the way he did?
It’s easy to be cynical. It’s hard to give it all you got.
I dare you to be happy. I dare you to trust others. I dare you to drop your mask and put yourself out there. I dare you to give it all you got.
I double-dare you.
Previously? More Than Genes
I’ve always favored high Renaissance art over most other periods.
I think there are two reasons for my fascination and awe with that specific period. The first reason is not specific to the artists of that time, but it was strongly exercised. Most of the elements in the paintings of that time either present a story or have objects which represent icons of some idea or belief.
I’m quite sure I’ve mentioned previously how I like that this sort of art rewards its viewer for having done his homework. If you know that a pair of shoes symbolizes marriage the painting containing them takes on a new level of meaning for you. I like that almost every item has a purpose. It somehow implies that the artist’s job was harder since he had to adhere to certain symbols and tell a specific story and the artists relaying the same story found profoundly differing ways to envision the same scenario.
The other reason I love Renaissance art is the preciseness of the strokes. The realness of the imagery. The incredible resemblance of the picture to an actual scene. It is the lack of that very essence that gave me a dissatisfied feeling when I looked at an impressionist painting. The blurry look made me feel like the painting was unfinished. Like the artist cheated and gave us the feeling of being there without having to work hard to create the details. They lacked the meticulousness I enjoyed.
For me, it was as if the fact that you could replicate real world with its minute detail made you a qualified artist. Cause anyone can splash paint onto an empty canvas, but not everyone can draw the curves of a woman’s body or the branches of a tree realistically.
Last week, I went to the Metropolitan Museum and spent a long time looking at the works of some of the most famous impressionist painters. I had never previously seen these works anywhere besides a book. I’d never seen them in their full three-dimensional glory. As I stared at the canvases, I was awed by the dichotomy of the lack of meaning when viewed close-up and the scenery that emerged as I moved back, away from the painting. It seemed that with each stroke, the painter must have always kept the big image in his head and had total control over what the stroke meant for the painting as a whole.
Today I watched one of Jake’s friends paint a scene here in Martha’s Vineyard with watercolors. I marveled at how quickly a picture emerged with each movement of her brush. I was fascinated at how she wasn’t really concerned with each angle being correct and each color matching the world precisely. I loved the idea of letting go of the need to be so tightly coupled with the subject of the painting.
I realized that even my favorite painting style represented something about my personality. That I had enjoyed the methodical, mathematical world of exact replication and symbols over the loose and relaxed. The more I thought about it, the more it felt good to let go. Suddenly, making your own paintings, listening to something from within and combining that with the beauty of nature seemed so much more powerful and rewarding.
Maybe this is how letting go starts: one painting at a time.
Previously? Tradition.
Traditions are at the core of our daily life.
I don’t know whether the appropriate word is tradition or ritual but the concept is similar in this context. There are certain things we do every day/month/year on a certain date to celebrate an occasion or to remember something or even to forget.
To me, Jewish religion has always been all about the traditions. My family isn’t very religious so I never learned Hebrew. (Well, actually, I did speak it fluently when I was four, but that was mostly cause we spent an entire summer in Israel and I was enrolled in kindergarten, but upon our return to Istanbul I promptly forgot all of it.) We didn’t go to synagogue much or light candles on Friday night. But we did observe the major holidays and we told and retold the stories. Today, when someone asks me why I still fast on Yom Kippur or suffer a week without bread during Passover, I can recite the full story of why we observe that specific holiday. I still recognize and appreciate all the people who suffered so that I could be here and I agree with the idea that we need to remember our past and not take things for granted. But, to be honest, I don’t observe the holidays for those reasons.
I do it cause it’s become a personal tradition.
Both my mom and my sister suffer from health problems that disallow them from fasting. My family is miles away and I am often alone on the eve of Yom Kippur, but I fast. Cause I always have.
It’s so engrained at the core of who I am that I don’t even see it as an option anymore. It’s not something that can be reconsidered; it’s a part of me.
But religion is an extreme example for my point. I realized this week that we have little self-traditions that at one point became something that we don’t consider from year to year, we just do them. For Jake and me, coming to Martha’s Vineyard to celebrate Fourth of July is one of those yearly rituals. The entire family collects at the island house and often there is a guest family as well. It’s very low key but it has become a tradition.
I didn’t appreciate the strength of this tradition until this year. As I mentioned a few days ago, I recently found out that I most likely have a third herniated disc on my back. My neck is causing large quantities of pain over my back, my arm and my spine in general. I’ve been depressed and grouchy. So when Jake mentioned our plans, I told him that maybe going to the Vineyard when I felt so crappy wasn’t such a good idea.
Hell broke loose. (Well, it didn’t. mostly because Jake’s such a wonderful person and didn’t give me the guilt trip that I was already feeling.) I could tell he was sad but I was so busy feeling sorry for myself that I didn’t spend enough time caring about his feelings.
As Saturday got closer and closer, I realized that I got depressed at the idea of not going, too. We always went to the Vineyard this weekend and now I was the reason we weren’t going to go. I realized that breaking this tradition meant that I was admitting something was seriously wrong with my body. And I didn’t like the idea that something was so wrong that we would alter a tradition. So what if my back hurt some? Staying in New York represented caving into my sickness and it would be downhill from there.
So I didn’t.
I bought a neck brace and we took the trip slowly. As I stare out the window to the endless water and trees, I am really glad we came. My back already feels better, my nerves are calmer, the wind is caressing my face and the kitty is giving me curious looks. There’s a reason this trip became a tradition.
And you don’t mess with traditions.
Previously? Horny.
Some people are turned on by power.
Others, by money.
No matter what people tell you, there’s something non-physical about their partner that turns them on.
I don’t mean to undermine the importance or relevance of physical attraction. Often, it’s the first thing that people notice and at times it can completely nullify your chances of seeing someone more than once.
Physical attraction is extremely important, but for me, it’s not necessarily the outcome of a physical trait. There are certain personality traits about a person that can make me physically attracted to him.
Love is one of those things. With every boyfriend I’ve ever had, I’ve gotten more and more attracted to him as I fell deeper and deeper in love.
Power doesn’t turn me on; neither does money, not even education necessarily. I’ve met some extremely well educated people who make me want to puke as soon as they utter a word.
Kindness turns me on and strong family values. I think I’m not the only woman who likes men who are kind to dogs, babies and the elderly. I am turned on by patience. By someone who’s truly interested in what I think. Someone who makes me laugh and doesn’t have a bitter and cynical look on life.
Yesterday I found something new.
One of my teammates and I went to a meeting with a research person who wrote an application that we’re supposed to use for our client-side applications. This one hour meeting grew to four and a half hours as the guy gave us a full background on why they had built this package and how excited he was about it and some of the problems they were aware of, etc. While I could tell that my teammate was about to pass out from boredom, I was so excited that my neck pain disappeared for some time.
I discovered that geeks turn me on.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. There are several kinds of geeks. One kind thinks he’s better than the rest of the world and looks down at everyone who asks questions. This breed is often bitter and condescending.
The other kind, the one that excites me way more than it should, is the kind who is so thrilled by the work that he wants to share it with the whole world. He comes into your office and says, “Look what I figured out, isn’t it neat?” He’s not showing off, he’s like a little kid who discovered a new toy. He’s giddy.
Maybe that’s what really turns me on. The giddiness. The intoxicating level of fascination with something that is obviously driven by large doses of passion. And that turns me on.
It’s contagious.
It’s not the intelligence or the technology. It’s not the knowledge.
It’s the child-like ability of exercising pure joy.
And this guy had it. I sat there, getting drunk by his love for it. At that moment he was much hotter than Tom Cruise. (Okay, so Tom doesn’t do it for everyone. Put your own hottie here, since that’s not my point anyhow.)
My list of favorite people just got incremented by one.
What turns you on?
Previously? Durable.
Some things are best done alone.
There is a long list of actions which are more fun with a multiple people. For me, traveling, dancing, going to the movies and dining are some of those.
Then I have the ones that I often do alone but enjoy much more in couples. Like bathing and sleeping.
Finally, I have a whole set that I prefer to do alone. Reading, writing my book, and watching people make that list.
So does going to the museum.
After I left the hairdresser, I decided I had to finally see the Blake exhibit at the Met. My hairdresser is six blocks from the Met and it was a lovely day so I started strolling along Fifth Avenue. The Blake exhibit had just closed but thanks to a recent post in photographica, I knew my first stop would be the roof garden, displaying the works of Shapiro.
   
Up until recently I didn’t know much about African art and hadn’t had any exposure to it. Last fall, in my art class, our teacher talked so much about tribal arts that I became completely fascinated with these works. I love the incredible level of detail given to each piece. These works are symbolic and most were used as part of a performance. They represented so much of the culture and belief system that we can deduce a lot about their priorities through these. I can sit in the room and stare at these carvings for hours at a time.
  
  
I believe that enjoying a piece of art is an experience best lived individually. Each person gets something different from being in a museum, especially one as large as the Metropolitan. There are pieces that I just walk by and ones that make me want to sit and stare for literally hours at a time. When I’m with someone else, I feel pressure to enjoy each piece equally. I worry about my friend being bored or feeling rushed. It’s one thing to visit a small showing of a few paintings, though I would still probably prefer to go to it on my own, and a completely different one to visit a large museum with some of the world’s most awe-inspiring works of art.
Today I felt really glad to live in New York City. Glad that I could just walk a few blocks and take however long I wanted to look at the brushstrokes of Seurat. I didn’t have to rush it into a weekend and drag my friends along.
I had the luxury of enjoying it on my own.
Previously? Movies.
This was an imaginary compilation that I was assembling in my head; all my happiest and proudest moments, cut together into a five-minute edited greatest hits of my life.
“What would you have in your lifetime highlights video, Neal?” I asked him.
He thought for a while and said nervously “Getting a B in my geography O’ level.”
He looked hurt when I burst out laughing.
“Oh come on…” I said, “You’ve got to do better than that. You can’t have that on your tombstone – Here lies Neil Evans. He got a B in his geography O’ level. What have you done that you really loved and will always remember? What are you really proud of?” – John O’Farrell, Walking into the Wind.
Reading the above dialogue made me think of what would be in my five-minute movie.
Happiest moments are easy: getting into Carnegie Mellon, getting my green card, most of my days with Jake, and my sister’s giving birth to my twin nephews.
Most of my happiest moments revolve around school, reaching a goal I’d been striving for for a long time, and my family.
The proudest, however, are a bit more complicated. I’m proud of my family and their accomplishments, most importantly their incredible capacity for love. But this movie is supposed to be about my proud moments. So I’m not sure their achievements qualify.
My first proud moment would probably be the same as a happy one. Getting into a college in United States, especially one that has a good reputation for computer science, was a huge accomplishment for someone with my grades and it was something I’d been dreaming about since I was twelve.
During college, I’ve done a few things I’m proud of, but one of my most taxing moments was when a male friend of one of my residents (I was a Resident Assistant on two floors of an all-girl section of one of the dormitories) was depressed. Suicidal is probably more accurate. I didn’t really know this boy all that well but he’d been on my floor before and I spent most of the evening talking to him and I stayed in that room and listened to him for hours. While I’m totally aware that it most likely has nothing to do with my actions or words, seeing that boy around a few days later and having him hug me made me feel proud of myself. That would probably make it to my video.
So would graduation. I am the first member of my family to graduate from college. My mom dropped out of high school and my dad out of college. My sister didn’t even attempt at college. So graduating and getting my undergraduate and graduate degrees simultaneously was a very proud moment for my family and me.
Most recently, I am proud of the fact that I didn’t let New York and the investment banking life get to me. That I had the balls to give up a lot of money and reduce my work to part-time so that I could do more volunteer work.
I have a long way to go. I want my life to be full of happy and proud moments. I want to look back and say that I had a great life and I did everything I wanted to do. I want to make sure I had the guts to live it to its fullest.
What would go on your five-minute film?
Previously? Intelligent.
It’s amazing to me how many people use words without really thinking about what they’re trying to say. Especially adjectives and adverbs, we’re so fast to pile them up. One of the guys I work with always utters the word “interesting” which makes my skin crawl.
It’s not that I don’t like the word interesting, it’s just that it means nothing whatsoever in the context in which he uses it. I say, “One of the reasons we want to split up these services is to ensure we can have deals where each tranche can offer a different product.”
He goes, “Hmm, that’s interesting.”
Huh?
Recently, especially during this seemingly unending design phase, interesting has become my least favorite reply. “Strangle” isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind. (that’s what I get for reading Choke in one sitting.)
I’ve also been thinking about the use of “intelligent” a lot lately. What do you think qualifies someone as intelligent?
Since I am a programmer and grew up with a strong math background, I’ve always heard people tell me that my ability to add up two numbers in my head quickly makes me intelligent. Or the fact that I scored high on the Math SATs and GMATs. I must be intelligent if I know how to code or if I did well at school. If I can speak several foreign languages. For some reason, people surrounding me have always associated intelligence with either math or sciences.
What about people who are extremely good with history or geography? Are they not intelligent?
How about artists and musicians? Poets?
People at the top of an artistic field are often referred to as geniuses. Leonardo Da Vinci was a genius. But then again, so was Albert Einstein and I don’t think his artistic skills were well developed ( though I could be wrong about this as it’s just a guess). So genius, I think, is used for people whom we consider at the very top of their field. Someone at an extraordinary level. Which gives me the warm fuzzies cause it doesn’t seem to discriminate on topic.
Intelligence, however, doesn’t work that way. At least not in my experience. You’re a genetic engineer? You must be intelligent. You wrote an award-winning fiction novel. Well, you’re great but not necessarily intelligent. It just doesn’t seem all that fair.
I must say that I have the highest respect for people who know the words that show up in the GREs. I’ve been trying to memorize some of those words and my brain simply refuses to cooperate. The math and analytical sections are no problem at all but as soon as I hit the antonyms, I’m ready to give it all up. I don’t need a PhD that bad. Really.
If intelligence was all about math and analysis and GREs were supposed to test your level of intelligence, why have those stupid words at all?
Now I know you’re telling yourself that I have two flaws in my logic. One being that I assume the GREs are worth anything. And you’re right. I don’t think they are and I think that’s pretty common knowledge. But I was just using it as an example and not as a basis for my argument on why non-math and science oriented topics should also be included in measuring someone’s level of intelligence.
The other flaw you might want to point out is that I assumed that a strong vocabulary isn’t a sign of intelligence. And that’s exactly my point. What is intelligence? What makes you define someone as an intelligent person?
I guess I define it as someone with strong deduction skills, a solid and well-rounded set of knowledge and an ability to apply the knowledge to their life and work.
What do you think? Tell me.
Addendum on june 24: this article seemed to be adressing exactly the issues I was trying to raise, so I thought you might find it interesting.
Previously? Alone.
How common is common sense?
I’ve always thought that the idea behind common sense is that there is a well of information out there somewhere that all humans are somehow tapped into. Or even something genetically transmitted from parents to children.
At least that’s how we behave when we run into someone who we think lacks in that department. We wonder, ‘where was this person raised, in outer space?’
So I’ve been thinking about what goes into what we consider common sense. I tried to think of examples of what I consider common sense and see how and where I learned them.
The first one that sprung to my mind was the ‘make sure to be aware of your surroundings when you walk’ idea. Anyone who’s been raised in a city knows that it’s crucial for your personal safety to know this bit of common sense. It’s extremely common, however, for a small town person to not have this bit of information, which is something they quickly learn once they’ve been in the city for a few days and are mugged. (Okay, so I’m exaggerating a bit.) It looks like we pick up some amount of common sense from the environment in which we’re raised.
On a similar topic, I’ve worked with a girl who never notices subtle hints. If I’m upset and ask a friend to go for a walk, she’d jump in and say “Can I come along, too?” Not that we didn’t like her or enjoy her company, but she didn’t seem to realize when it wasn’t really appropriate for her to invite herself. I kept wondering how she’d managed to make it through her teenage years without having been totally burnt. Learning when to talk and how to act is a series of common sense tricks we pickup from our family and surroundings. These bits of information sometimes sting so hard that we never forget how we developed this piece of “common sense.” (And we rarely forget the “friends” who taught us this lesson first hand.)
Another example I came up with was building common sense through education. As I learned American Sign Language, many of the signs seemed common sense to me and so I’d retain them easily. Same for Japanese grammar. Even math felt like common sense to me. It seemed the more I learned, the more stuff appeared to be common sense.
Here’s what I think it all comes down to: common sense is a combination of what you learn from your environment, family, friends, books, school and all your deductions from this knowledge.
Next time you meet someone who seems to lack what you consider common sense, remember that it’s not a centralized resource pool in which we can all tap.
Just like most anything else in life, it stems from personal experience.
Previously? The Itch.
Ever heard of the term “too comfortable”?
When I read Heather’s Miss fiddle twiddle pick bang, it hit close to home. I’m fidgety, too, but on a much larger, non-athletic scale.
It seems I’m allergic to the steady state.
I constantly need to be planning the next step, the new challenge. As soon as I reach one goal, I start planning the next. It’s like enjoying the good times never even crosses my mind. I wrack my brain, trying to come up with yet another seemingly unattainable task.
In the beginning, it was easy. I decided to come to the United States. My teacher said I couldn’t, so I had the double advantage of reaching my goal and proving her wrong. Once I got to school, it was all about declaring a minor in Art, making sure I got all my credits right, getting the Resident Assistant job, becoming an editor, a sexual assault counselor, teaching computer skills, and so much more. School’s an easy place to set goals.
Fall semester of my junior year, I realized I was almost ready to graduate. By the end of spring semester I’d be done with all my credits and required courses, except one. In my major, there is a class only offered in the fall semester of your senior year. So I couldn’t graduate. The intelligent thing would have been for me to take it easy and enjoy my senior year like most students. But instead, I applied for a brand new master’s degree and bugged the head of the college until he relented. In the next three semesters I completed my undergraduate and my masters.
Then I worried about getting a job. As a foreigner, it was crucial that a company employ me so that I could stay in the country. Once more, I had a purpose. Something to occupy my time and make sure I didn’t stop worrying and get too comfortable.
Once I got the job, there was moving to New York City, furnishing my apartment, completing a bunch of projects, taking a three-month trip to London, and another for six months in Tokyo. Learning a new programming language, figuring out how to build applications the right way, learning Japanese. I spent hours sweating over my green card application. I found out all there was to know. I did it all. I got my card. During those years I also set goals outside work.
There was learning to live with Jake. Drawing in 3-D, Italian, French, Sign Language, writing a novel, yoga, and so much more. Anything not to stop.
About a year ago, I was ready for a new challenge; my job was too easy, I wasn’t learning anymore. But just taking another job wasn’t hard enough, I decided to push the limits again. I wanted a part time job. Only three days a week. So I started interviewing. I found a job inside the same firm. A great job. I started volunteering with the Deaf. I took eight new classes. I picked up the saxophone. Just cause I wasn’t working every day didn’t mean I’d lie around lazy. I did my job well, I got promoted.
And here we are. In a perfect situation. I have a great job. A relaxed summer with only three classes and I get to volunteer. My boyfriend and I are getting along incredibly well and I am head over heels in love, even after seven years.
But I’m starting to fidget once more.
It’s all too good. I can’t think of any goals anymore.
So now, I’m making them up. I want to get a PhD, I think. Start my own non-profit firm. Do some good for the world. I want to move to San Francisco. Make a huge change. Start over. Start different. See if I can still reach seemingly unattainable goals. See if I can keep raising the bar.
I’ve got the itch.
Previously? Gender Bias.
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projects for twenty twenty-four
projects for twenty twenty-three
projects for twenty twenty-two
projects for twenty twenty-one
projects for twenty nineteen
projects for twenty eighteen
projects from twenty seventeen
monthly projects from previous years
some of my previous projects
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