The Laursonian Institute

I had a crew once.  You know, multiple people who all mutually enjoyed hanging out with each other.  Do you think you outgrow these?  Or did I just leave mine behind?  Can you find new ones?  And do I even want a new crew?  I’ve always been awkwardly self sufficient.

I’ve been getting some flack from people around here about being out of touch, not in contact enough.  I was doing dishes tonight and suddenly felt lonely.  And I called my sister, and felt better.  I realized this:  I very rarely get lonely enough to reach out.  I’m much more apt to keep myself busy and not lean on others because it feels like my troubles are my own troubles, which will go away in time, and no one else can fix.  There’s always one exception to this – there’s always one person and one person only I really want to help me.  It was Ban.  Then Steen.  Cerise.  Steen again!  Tiff.  Jess.  Armand.  Darin.   And now that I’m married, Lewis fills this spot permanently.  It’s not that my other friends were less loved or less appreciated or less needed, even.  Just that I seem to be only able to be really open with one person at a time.  And other than that, I’ve always been the one to receive calls from my friends who need someone to talk to – not the one who makes them.  I don’t want to be that person.  Which leaves me with what I’ve got – I miss having people close enough to me that I would call them just to say hi, and see what’s going on today.  I just don’t think there’s a way to forge these friendships without crisis.

I’ve only had three real crews – the Band, the YSIB set (of which I was more of a hanger-on), and my Russkiis.  The Band and the Russkiis both are formed out of tough times – friends from new schools, teenage years, learning to grow up together, to live life together.  I’m not in the market for someone to help me grow up – I have Lewis who is my partner in everything and is the only person I need or want to grow old with.  I suppose grad school is potentially one of those times we should all be super-bonding, but grad school is full of self-driven, independent, serious folks.  We only got where we are by not needing our hand being held.  It does not really breed people who need people.

Every day feels like I’m reading the preamble to the text of my life.  And that preamble tells me so much about myself, and so little that has any application to my life.  So I’m ready to admit I’ve always played as well alone as with others, and that most times playing alone is less stressful because you’ve got no one else to please. My friends will still always be bothered that I don’t call out of the blue.  I’m honest to goodness not ignoring anyone, I just have a very high threshold for a need for human contact.  I fully acknowledge this might perpetuate this lack of friend cohesion…

July 17th, 2009 | Tags: friendship, loneliness, socializing | Category: life | Comments Off

I want to be able to relax completely.  I always think that this necessitates my doing nothing so that I can stop and think through all the things I put aside while I’m busy.  It turns out, thinking stresses me out because I spiral into goodness-knows-where and the enormity of life engulfs my good intentions.

Today is one of those days, even though I have been doing a fair amount of work and I’m feeling sorta busy.  I wish I knew how to vanquish my pessimism.  I know, logically so, that my life is good, and that everything will turn out fine in both the short and long term of it.  I remain consumed with a feeling of inadequacy and inevitable failure.  Failure in both hind- and foresight.  Trapped in this irreconcilable middle, feeling as though I’ve screwed up my life so far, and I’m certainly not strong enough to change my own behavior, so I’ll screw up my future in the same way.  I vacillate between the two – the knowledge that I’m doing well by myself and that I’m exceeding the expectations of 20-somethings as a whole, but that in my specific circumstances I’m a poorly performing graduate student with no vision and no promise for the future.  Part of my inner self knows that I’m well suited, like my mother, for a variety of mundane tasks – secretary stuff, administrative stuff, organizational stuff – and that sometimes makes me feel like I’m an office worker trapped in grad school.  As though getting this PhD is proving something irrelevant to myself, and that I’ll take my doctoral title and go back to making photocopies for somebody I find illogical or incapable in a company whose business philosophy is retarded at best.  Yet that I have some sort of quixotic martyrical desires and, while frustrating, this work would be fulfilling.  Somehow trying to make my own career in a subject I think is fascinating seems irresponsible, and that what I really need to be doing is settling down, having a steady job, and starting a family.

My aggravation with this thought pattern seeps into every little nook.  I seethe at my perception of peoples’ expectations of me.  I shy away from opportunities to make good impressions.  I ignore the work I know I have to do, because doing it at all seems like such a futile endeavor when I feel as though I’m just pretending to be some kind of promising academic.  I’ll end up selling everyone’s hopes up the river when they all figure out that the university job I’ve applied for is undergraduate advisor for some archeology department in Montana.  The office aide at some company you’ve never heard of in Tacoma.  I don’t see how I get from where I am – weirdly, sitting my house in California – to where I’m supposed to be, that doesn’t involve me moving to Auburn and getting a bullshit job.   What I’m saying is this:  where the hell am I supposed to even be?  What am I trying to accomplish?

July 16th, 2009 | Tags: aggravation, introspection | Category: life | Comments Off

Yep, I said it.  We’re building a fence!  Or rather, a gate in an already extant fence.  By which I really mean that Lewis’ dad designed, framed, and hung said gate, and now all we’ve got left to do is put the facing back on it.  But it still feels very accomplished!  We only got half done this morning before Lewis had to go do TA stuff, but I think we’ll get it polished off tomorrow.  I’ll put some pictures up (though I know it’s only a silly gate)!   It’s going to be amazing to be able to walk through the fence on that side… we’ve only had one tiny gate that goes between the front and back yard, so you sorta had to walk through the garage or through the bedroom or living room until now!  So good.

I actually managed to get a little work done this afternoon too – read through a paper in preparation for thinking about a QP.  I don’t know why I’ve been dreading reading my own work lately, but I managed a few pages at least.  Got my gears moving, a little.  It would be nice to get past this mental block before I use up my whole summer… but if I don’t, it’s not a total disaster.  I’d rather I start Fall quarter refreshed, but better still refreshed and accomplished.   Anyway, some progress is better than no progress, and I got some progress made today.

Got lots of other bits and pieces done today.  I set up our finances for next year so I’ve got a fancy spreadsheet where I can keep track of things, which I’m excited to break in soon.   Oh, and I got a haircut scheduled for next week!  Yay!   I also hit up the Co-op, but I wasn’t really feeling that into cooking or planning this week, so it was a little meagre.  But I’ve got food plans for the next few days at least, and I at least got us filled back up on the essentials.  It would be good to get into the once-a-week swing of things again so we don’t have to buy so much at once.

Well, there’s my day in brief.   And on that note, I’m ready for a good night’s sleep!  I never sleep well when it stays hot all night (which it sure does on these 105+ days), but it finally stayed below 100 today, and there’s a nice breeze… it’s lovely!  I can already feel the impending comfortable snoozes! :)

June 29th, 2009 | Tags: chores, fence, shopping, work | Category: home, life | Comments Off

I’m having a day where I am simultaneously too big and too small for my own skin.  It’s impossible to explain the feeling of being too big for your own life, but it always reminds me of the Mayakovsky poem “A Cloud In Trousers”… one of the things I love best about Mayakovsky’s early work is the amazing clarity with which he can write about feeling disconnected from reality in an introspective, sometimes manic, cold, sad way.  That’s what feeling too big for your own skin feels like.  It feels like you have the ability to accidentally crush things, to destroy the important items in your life, to tear down all you believe in from neglected attention.  Unlike Mayakovsky, this doesn’t appear to ever cause me to walk down the street and call out the failings of others.  It makes me want to sit down, very quietly, and wait for it to blow over.  It makes me want to not open my mouth, to fail at conversations because it’s impossible to attend to what’s being said.  My hands bump into things, my feet trip over themselves, my gaze wanders.. my brain reduces to deplorable, functionless matter.

And this always happens as a result of feeling too small.  I’ve come across a bunch of stuff in cleaning lately, like old (we’re talking freshman year vintage) papers I’ve written, class notes, assignments, and some personality profiles I had to do for various offices I’ve worked in.  It all adds up to the same thing to me – that I don’t think I’m good enough to be doing what I want to be doing.  What I want to be do is become a professor of phonology.   All I have in my portfolio looks like mediocre work, me thinking too highly of my abilities, and this personality profile that tells me I’m great at organization and detailed execution, and crap at “big picture, abstract theorizing, and creative thinking”.  I just don’t think I can be any good as a researcher without theory, big picture, and creativity.  I know these personality profiles are ridiculous, but the damage is sort of already done.  It’s like reading a self-help book – when it says what you already believe, it takes on the timbre of reliability and truth.

I’m just full of feeling useless, lost, and unspecial.  And poor.  Make me think about how I’m never going to succeed in doing anything I like, and so I should just drop out and get a real job and support our family so some day so we can afford to have not only a car, but maybe even children!  And once I get started with this smallness, everything slides in to place to make it sound like some sort of cabal.  Like I’m just realizing a conspiracy that no one thinks I’m very interesting or worthwhile, and that’s why things work out the way they do.  Why I have no advisor, why I can’t seem to get into this neuro thing, why my parents moved away, why I’m cleaning the house instead of living.  Argh.  I’ve been through this loop so many times I can’t even count.  I know I’ll sleep it off sooner or later.  Life will change, become busy, gain purpose, feel meaningful again.  I’ve just got to wait it out.

June 28th, 2009 | Tags: depressed, whining | Category: life | Comments Off

It was darn hot today.  The weather says it hit 106, but my house was a trooper!  We never really needed to turn on the AC, though it was 88 degrees in here by the peak of it.  We got new blinds installed a week or two ago, and it’s amazing how much keeping the sun out of the windows does for the temperature inside.  I’m very pleased!  Plus I washed and cleaned all the front windows today before it got hot, so it was looking particularly nice and sparkly when we finally got to pull the shades back up.

I’m doing an excellent job of wasting my break away, which I suppose is one of the activities I actually intended on accomplishing.  I do wish I could put myself to task a little better doing school work in addition to the projects and gardening I set up for myself.  It’s hard, because if you start the day with school work, you end up wasting the whole day sitting at the desk or table, and then by dinner time I feel like I’ve gotten nothing done, and that I’m a dope for having not left the house all day.  However, if you start the day in the garden or doing some housework, like I prefer, you end up spending the whole day doing not school work.  Definitely sub-optimal.  Perhaps I’ll have myself better put together when we hit July.   It really has only been a could of weeks since class ended.  I’m always too hard on myself!

I’ve been cooking so much, it really makes me happy.  This week I’ve mastered the Denver omelet (why did  it take me so long to figure out how to cook an omelet?) and I made red beans and rice for dinner today.  Mmm.   We’ve got so many delicious left-overs in the fridge, and lots of tasty salad stuff we haven’t even dug into.  For all that cooking more means eating well, it does sort of obliterate one of my better excuses to get out of the house.  But we’re doing a good job of saving money, anyway.  And it means I get to try out a bunch of new ideas – ricotta pancakes, mozarella chicken panninis, baked sole…

Money is still too much on my mind, but I think that’s always the way of things.  We did our budget for next year, and calculated it a few times over and came to a very sad conclusion: there’s really no way to pay for car insurance.  I’m feeling very deflated after this decision… I was really looking forward to having a car, and having a car of our own we could take places more guilt-free and easy-like.  The prospect of Davis without a reliable car next year is rather daunting, though do-able.  I guess it’s the first thing we’ve really had to cut out in the “you can’t afford that” category.  We’re just going to be barely scraping by next year – we’re already making so much less money than we were when we were both working, and our appointments next year (and the loss of the one-year-only fellowship Lewis had) means we’re making almost a third less than that.  We’re canceling all the extraneous costs (our veg box, our carshare dues) but that really leaves just a smidge of an emergency buffer after our necessary budgeted expenses.  So unless car insurance is magically rather affordable, we’re sunk.  And that means a few things for me, the spelling out of which seems so trite.  It means I’m probably giving up the gym, because I can’t seem to muster the gumption to bike there (particularly in 90+ degree weather), and it means I need to start shopping at the Co-op weekly or more often.  I’ve been getting so spoiled by the ability to drive to the store and bring home all the bottled water and cat litter my heart desired.  Now it’s back to the ol’ cubic feet calculations.  Whine, whine.  I know.  Like I say – it’s just the first of these “we can’t afford this luxury” things, and it’s a cranky one to let go.

June 27th, 2009 | Tags: car, cleaning, cooking, food, heat, money, procrastination, worry | Category: home, life | Comments Off

@lonnon the real issue is melting… difficult to successfully transport the ice on the bikes!

June 27th, 2009 | Tags: twitter | Category: life | Comments Off

Oh, Davis… our weather forcast says “much warmer than yesterday. Highs 100 to 108″. Time to break in the in-laws pool!

June 27th, 2009 | Tags: twitter | Category: life | Comments Off

cleaning out the closet, tossing old class notes. stick figure drawing in margins definitely reached its apex freshman year. miss it!

June 26th, 2009 | Tags: twitter | Category: life | Comments Off

cleaning out the closet, tossing old class notes. stick figure drawing in margins definitely reached its apex freshman year. miss it!

June 26th, 2009 | Tags: twitter | Category: life | Comments Off