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.