In which apathy turns to motivation, somehow

Now that the house is (mostly) clean, and all the stuff is (mostly) sorted, and after the chaotic two weeks that resulted in this state; I cannot get motivated. Part of it is uncertainty; there are a lot of details regarding this move that can't be dealt with until all my immigration paperwork is done. I have no power or responsibility in the paperwork, as the university is taking care of it. This means that I have no deadlines, and no idea what stage it's at or how much longer it's likely to take. I tentatively have somewhere to live when I move, assuming I can move in January. Added to that is the uncertainty that we can't know when the house is going to sell. Hopefully very very soon, but it's the wrong time of year, and the economy isn't helping. We should have put it on the market as soon as I got laid off, I guess, but selling in the summer would have had it's own large list of problems.

Selling the car is my current anxiety. We need to be rid of it, as soon after the holidays as possible, so that we don't have to keep paying insurance on it. I'm barely driving it anywhere these days, and insuring a car that's just sitting in the garage seems pretty absurd. I have gotten response on the car, though, and the craigslist ad has only been up for a day, so that's looking a little more promising.

Mostly I think I'm exhausted. This past year and a half hasn't been what it was supposed to be at all. Buying a house shouldn't involve 6 months of potential lawsuits because the seller is a jerk. Starting a career shouldn't involve nonstop worrying about layoffs. My old car shouldn't have been totaled, and the first year of marriage shouldn't be this unhappy. Luckily, R and I deal well with adversity, so all this insanity hasn't damaged our relationship. I do feel cheated, though, of the "honeymoon" phase most of my recently married friends seemed to enjoy. We didn't get any time to simply enjoy being us, because within a month of R moving here, the car was totaled and we were dealing with the $6k debt left to us by the seller, and by the time all that was taken care of, my company was up to layoff round number 4, and I was feeling constantly doomed. I planned 4 separate honeymoons, and we didn't get to take any of them, because bad stuff kept happening.

At the same time, it feel ridiculous to complain, because my bad stuff is so middle-class American. I haven't ever worried about putting food on the table, or having to drop my dogs at a shelter, or wondering if I can run the heat today. I don't have to worry about local violence, or running out of water, or whether the people I care about will survive the winter. I'm moving across the ocean for an amazing opportunity (and also health care! and public transportation! and no more expectation of putting in unpaid overtime!) to further my education, broaden my career opportunities, experience living in a different culture from my own, and to travel. A lot of travel. I totally wouldn't have this opportunity if I hadn't been laid off, so I hope it's worth all the stress.

It was also nice to be able to sit down and think about where I really want my life to go. Without this past year, I don't think I'd be so sure that going back to school is absolutely what I want to do. It took several months of applying to all sorts of jobs and schools before I figured it out, and my experience as an industry engineer was certainly very helpful in that. I liked industry, but I love studenthood. I realize I can't be a student forever, since I'm not the child of multi-millionaires, but I do appreciate that at least for the next 4 years, I can be a student again.

Assuming I can get everything ready in time. I think I'll go vacuum the car.

Selling the House

I hate moving. Passionately. I don't usually waste a lot of energy on anger and hatred, for a couple reasons. I really don't like feeling angry. It's exhausting, it's uncomfortable, and I just don't like it. Some people get a (competitive? energizing? useful?) boost from anger, but I just get worn out. I can feel my brain working differently when I'm angry*. I grew up in a very non-angry household. There were no parent-teenager screaming matches. If my parents have ever had a fight beyond mild disagreement I certainly don't know about it. I am curious as to whether this is genetically influenced. On top of that, I'm highly trained in a field where anger doesn't really make sense. How do you get angry at a mass of air moving how it moves, even if that movement is different from your prediction? The laws of physics are consistent, and I think that's what makes anger so alien to my work. If you spend your day dealing with people, or animals, or plants, or electronics, you will get frustrated by inconsistency more than anything else, I think. Why did the client have to change what they wanted right before the deadline, why are the plants over here fine but those ones dead, and why does this application run on every computer except mine? I don't have that problem. Gravity's always there, and so is friction. Momentum is conserved, as long as the system is closed. Etc.

But anyway. I do hate moving. A lot. I really like the process of going through everything and getting rid of stuff, which I associate with moving, but which most people call "organizing the closet" or perhaps "spring cleaning." I haven't lived in once place for long enough recently for either of those activities. But the actual packing is horrible. Getting the entire house showable is worse. Housekeeping is not one of my strengths, because it is boring, repetitive, boring, never-ending, boring, not rewarding, and did I mention boring enough yet? I can happily cut lovely large pieces of fabric into little pieces and sew them back together, or loop yarn around itself for hours. These processes can be tedious, and repetitive, and even boring. Sometimes they are spectacularly frustrating. There are three big differences between quilting (or knitting, or sewing, or even gardening) and cleaning for me. The first is that I can multitask better. I can't watch tv while cleaning the first or second floors of my house, I can't listen to music while vaccuuming because I barely tolerate the vaccum's noise level, and I certainly can't enjoy lovely weather while cleaning. The second is the materials. I get a great deal of sensory happiness out of pretty fabric, soft yarn, and good soil. I do not get this out of cleaning chemicals or rubber gloves. Cleansers aren't pretty, they aren't soft, or crumbly, or fun, and they don't smell good. My third reason is the reward. If I'm quilting or sewing or knitting, I get to watch a project grow from bits of fabric or a ball of yarn into something tangible. I end up with a quilt, or a purse, or a scarf. And then the project is over, and I feel like I've accomplished something. If I'm gardening, I watch seeds, dirt, and water turn into food. I can see a bed of flowers turn into a butterfly haven, or eat tomatoes straight off the vine. I don't know that this falls into accomplishment, exactly, but it's immensely satisfying. And looking at all my lovely canned tomatoes makes me pretty happy. You don't get rewarded like this when cleaning. By the time the kitchen is sparkling (as sparkling as those hideous old countertops can get, that is) it's time to make another meal. Quasar can shed new hair onto the clean floor when I'm still vacuuming that room. The puppy toys and video game controllers stay in their bins for almost enough time to vacuum the basement. Papers get filed just in time for the mail to arrive with new bills, and you can't ever get rid of all the dust. My ugly entrance tile is just as ugly clean as it is dirty, and the bathroom countertops look dirty even when they're clean. I never get the relaxing feeling of amazing, spotless, and perfect surroundings. All the cleaning is like my own personal heck (not as bad as a hell, certainly, but not neutral either) and I get to hang out in it while trying to pack.

Packing is pretty interesting. See, I can't get an apartment until my work visa paperwork is done. I've found a temporary roommate situation that looks good, and is inexpensive, and would let me get to know a couple people while looking around the city for a more permanent abode. The things I'll have to take if I'm moving into a third bedroom of an inhabited apartment are different from what I'll need if living by myself. Then there's figuring out what R needs here before he moves, and what to do if we need the same stuff. Plus the issue of suitcase space and weight. What will fit? How do I tell without packing it all? Is it worth it to pack my clothes now to figure it out? What will I want sent to me first? Does it all fit in one box? Why do we have so many books, and how can I think of leaving them behind?!?!?!? How can I leave my scrapbooks, but how can I take them? This kind of moving is very complicated, and trying to pack everything up or get rid of it while cleaning the entire house is horrible. We spent hours tonight that should have resulted in a clean second floor doing laundry, putting new sheets on the bed, moving boxes from upstairs to downstairs, vacuuming the ceiling (it made a very visible difference, and we aren't crazy, I promise) and sorting through jewelry to get it off the counter. One shouldn't leave one's jewelry out when strangers are walking through the house.

I feel like we're getting nowhere fast, but we keep doing things that have to be done in order to have the house walk-through ready. It's tedious, boring, frustrating, and I hate it.

*Remember, my career path is very thinking-intensive. When explaining my former job to the non-technologically-inclined, I summarized with "I'm paid to think." I'm very sensitive to (perceived) changes in how my brain is working. I once gave up caffeine, got over the physical addiciton, and realized that I don't like how my thinking feels without it. My brain works better when caffeinated, unless it is also very very very sleep-deprived. If no caffeine is walking though ankle-deep mud, then caffeine is like walking over pavement. Everything is sharper, quicker, and easier. Exhaustion is more like trudging through dense fog, and anger is like trying to decide which way to go. I don't like it when my brain works awkwardly. This, combined with my very high natural alcohol tolerance, is why I've never been beyond slightly buzzed. It is probably also why I have zero desire to ever try out other consciousness changing substances.

Defying Gravity

I've been sorting through a lot of stuff that I've moved from one place to another without really thinking about it. All kinds of things, like high school newspapers, terrible film-camera photos that don't actually capture anything (tons of these from jr high dances, since we were all camera-shy back then) and just a lot of paper. Random notes I didn't think I should part with. Random ugly knickknacks that induce memories, but the same memories as other things like photos. Just a lot of stuff about my past. All of it from high school or earlier, because in college, I had a digital camera and a scanner. Also, I moved every 8 months and that's the best way I know of to become an anti-pack-rat.
I've had a great time looking through everything, trying to figure out when/who/where, and smiling at the awkwardness of the photos, and giggling hysterically at some of the notes written and the problems faced. "OMG I like these two boys, and everyone says I should date X, but I think Y likes me better and this is the biggest problem ever faced in my 13 years of life what do I do?" Only we didn't use OMG in junior high. I've even cried over notes and photos of classmates whoe've died. I created a small pile of the photos of recognizable people, the photos that aren't too fuzzy, too dark, too "we're all hiding behind our hands because we're so HIDEOUS" to add to my scrapbooks. I've kept two notes to give back to the writer if I can find her this xmas, because I know she'll laugh at them as much as I did. I kept a couple newspaper mentions of myself and close friends.

And then I threw out everything else.

It felt amazing, like letting go of a whole persona that didn't fit me any more. I feel like I've removed unneeded baggage, stuff that no longer matters to who I am, and just let it go. I've kept things that relate to people who matter now, and events that mattered then, and the rest of it is gone. I feel lighter now, and more ready to take on the crazy path ahead, both because I've reviewed the path behind, and I've rejected the dead ends. They were there, I learned from them, but I don't need to keep revisiting them, to make sure they're still dead ends. I'm terrible at letting go, but I'm trying to do it more, because you can only drag so much around with you.


That feeling of letting go of the familiar, but unsatisfactory, paths and embracing uncertainty on a promising (but unknown) road is why I'm still thrilled about moving. It's also the feeling that motivated me to start this blog. It's definitely what made my final title choice. I played with all sorts of ideas, from nerdy to nonsensical. I picked the defying gravity theme for a couple reasons.

1. Singing the song "Defying Gravity" from Wicked has been immensely helpful in picking myself back up after getting laid off. Even though I knew the layoff was nothing personal, and based on economic crisis beyond my control, and it's pretty amazing I stayed as long as I did considering how recently I entered the job market, it's still pretty disheartening to be told in your first year of real-world work that you're done, thanks, buh-bye. "Defying Gravity" is upbeat, and all about pushing boundaries and striving and that even though you could fail, if you don't try you won't know if you could do it, which is pretty much the best antidote to a layoff ever. It reminded me that even if I only got to work in KS for a year, I proved to myself that I could handle it. That's pretty awesome.

2. Aerodynamics became a major field of study in part because people wanted to fly. Without aerodynamics, there cannot be airplanes. Creating something that can GLIDE without knowing what you're doing is easy, but sustained flight is something completely different.

3. I can't believe I'm doing this. In high school, I was the shyest of the shy. In college I reinvented myself somewhat, increasing my confidence and learning to love social events and meeting people. Now I'm moving to a new country, that I've never seen, to work with people I've never met. I've talked on the phone to the profs who will be my bosses, but I haven't even emailed the post-doc or the other PhD student. And since R will be staying in KS until our home sells, I'm moving there by myself. If you had said to high school me "So in a few years you should apply to and accept a PhD position in the Netherlands" she would have been too nervous to say anything, but would have thought something like "sure, when pigs fly." I think high school me would have found defying gravity easier than moving so far. Current me is ecstatic, and thinks that meeting a bunch of new people, learning a new language, and living in a new country is crazy awesome. But I'm still a little surprised I was gutsy enough to even try for it.

I have learned to love adventure, to enjoy pushing out past my comfort zone, and to try new things without fearing failure. I still try to avoid failure, because it's never fun, but I'm working very hard at not fearing it.

I used to resent certain people for doing what I wanted to do, and acting how I saw myself inside but was afraid to be outside. Now I'm becoming who I've always felt like, but been afraid of. And that makes me feel so much lighter.

Sleep

So I've been tending to sleep really oddly lately. I attribute this to three things; stress, lack of effort, and lack of reason to get up in the morning.

I think the stress of being jobless and my natural inability to sleep if I'm not *really* tired started the problem, and it was compounded by being able to sleep in as long as I needed to. I've had intermittant trouble falling asleep since forever, I think. According to the internet, that's Initial Stage Insomnia and it can be brought about by a bunch of different things, including stress and anxiety. I do know that if I'm worried about something, ESPECIALLY if it's something I have no control over, I will think and think and think about it when I should be sleeping. This is frustrating when facing layoffs, say, or when jobless and looking at a broken economy and a very broken industry. I'm pretty sure almost everyone has occasional nights like that though, so I think was makes my problem insomnia is the second reason.

I seem to have a set amount of effort I need to use up between sleep cycles. This effort can be mental (intellectual might be a better word) or physical, but not emotional. In fact, the more exhausting my emotional state, the more likely I am to stay awake worrying at it. It's sort of like a piston doing work, actually. Given a certain amount of fuel (previous night's sleep) in the combustion chamber, the piston MUST move a certain distance, producing work, where the factors are the weight of the piston and the pressure of whatever's on the other side of it. It's like the mental effort is the work and physical effort is the outside pressure. So a lot of physical exertion will lower the amount of mental work I have to do, but can never totally substitute for it. I guess that makes emotional work equivalent to increasing the efficiency of the fuel burn, making the piston do more work. Unfortunately for me, job hunting requires little physical effort, and the intellectual effort of finding things is canceled out by the emotional work of believing you will find something. Housework requires minimal physical effort, but no mental exertion whatsoever. I think this lack of mental effort explains my current preference of nonfiction for light reading. Or creating elaborate spreadsheets. Or doing math for no reason other than entertaining myself. So I haven't been using up my sleep-fuel at my normal rate, leading to staying awake for longer periods of time between sleeping.

An obvious way to eneable myself to sleep would be to limit the amount of sleep I get, only partially fueling my engine. That's where the last issue comes to play. If I don't have anything to get up for, except to feel tired all day so I can fall asleep at a "reasonable" hour, I'm not going to. So I get totally refueled, only later in the day, so I fall asleep even later, and the cycle gets absurd pretty darn quickly. Eventually I hit an all-nighter, which lets me fall asleep at a normal hour, and I reset the weird sleep patterns. At this point, I'm wondering if just sleeping intuitively and ignoring what the clock says might be the best way to go. After all, there's nothing intrinsically better about being awake during the day and asleep at night. It made more sense pre-electricity, sure, but at this point, I'm not convinced it really matters.

If I'm really lucky, I'll be on Delft time when I fly over there, and then the effort of dealing with a new place, new people, and a new language plus moving and starting my new job should let me reset to a normal sleep schedule, with less jet lag than I'd otherwise experience. That would be kind of awesome, actually.

If physical effort were enough, I would have crashed at 8PM last night. R and I have moved the elliptical, two couches, and a queen sized mattress. We've also cleaned the kitchen, master bedroom, guest bedroom, and basement, and have made significant progress on packing up the office. And here it is, 6AM, and my eyes are a little dry but my mind is still bouncing around. I envy R so much right now. He decides it's time for bed, his head hits the pillow, and he's asleep. I have never experienced that. I can fall asleep immediately if I'm exhausted, or sick, but that's it. I can't just say "it's midnight, and to maintain a schedule similar to most people here I need to sleep now" and then fall asleep. I have to say "it's midnight, and today I learned how to program in BASIC, so I could write an app to analyze data, which I analyzed, and then I came home and did stuff and now I'm tired" before I can fall asleep.

Immigration; Part 1

Scan passport and email image to immigration coordinator.

This was a pretty easy step. There was some trouble with remembering to use the scanner software, but I got it figured out. Why are there "scan" buttons on scanners that don't work unless the computer has the software open, and the user chooses to scan via the software? All the "scan" button does is send an error message to the little scanner screen. You don't even use it to photocopy; for that there's a separate "copy" button. Redundancy is only worthwhile if both methods perform the task. The "scan" button is pretend redundancy.

I hope nobody's confused when they see my high school passport photo. My hair was about 30 inches longer and my glasses were way less awesome. It's amazing how haircut and glasses can totally change a person's face. My hair was a different color (possibly the natural one?) too, but since the passport has translucent blue over the whole photo, I expect that's insignificant.

Let's try this again; Career Version 2.0

A new career move calls for a new blog, I think. For those who don't know (although I doubt many strangers will find this blog compelling) I have a new job, 5 months after being laid off. My new job is in a new country, which I think will help me stay motivated to write this one. My life in Kansas generally wasn't exciting enough to make posting worthwhile, especially since my job, where I spent the vast majority of my waking hours, was incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't had to deal with math and government paperwork simultaneously. Not to mention most of it was company confidential, since I was on a development project. And you have to admit, daily posts of "I went to work, came home, played with the dogs, spent time with R, and went to bed" is pretty boring, even for an "I ate cereal" style blog.
This one might turn into that as well, but if nothing else, I'll start a 365 photo project as soon as I find my camera. This blog will also serve to track my progress with immigration paperwork, house selling, possession disposal, and all the other details of moving across the Atlantic in 2.5 months. While that information might not interest anyone else, it'll be helpful for me to have a record of it, I think.
I'm planning to play with semi-anonymity on this one, because I imagine I'll be a lot more stalkable in a country where my name isn't so ubiquitous. I'm not sure if I'll keep it up or not, but you can't switch to anonymity after you've broken it, so I'm starting out that way.