Lasy White American

So, I've started running this week (when I say "running" I really mean jogging, but running just sounds more hardcore). I have kept it up for five days straight (whooo), but in order for me to stay motivated I have to track my progress

Being an ex-Tech student, of course I would map it in Excel. Please see Figure A.

Figure A: Running times per day. Please note that there is still a space left for day 6.

I still have tomorrow to plug in one more data point, but if I interpolated correctly there will be little change from the 10.6__ mark.

Really, I'm not going for speed, but rather distance. It seems strange that although I can keep running for longer periods (today I pretty much ran the entire 3 mile [5km] distance), my times don't improve. I think I jog slow, or I power walk really fast...

Anyways, other than just being able to continuously jog for longer periods of time, I haven't noticed any other physical improvements. My legs are sore, but I guess that means it's working? I'm hoping that by week two I'll notice a little waist line improvement :)

I'm also coupling this light exercise with some diet improvements. I haven't had fast food since I've been to Australia, and if you don't count the Wednesday night fried calamari, have pretty much eaten healthy meals.

Just some old notes

I wrote this in between some lectures during college, and I thought it was amusing now that I no longer have to sit through any more of that stuff.

Amperes Law is a lymerick
and the curling integral equations
jump off the page, becoming
extended metaphors;
a meaning within a meaning
within the bounds of point A and B.

I'll derive my life in the bounds
of this plane and you can watch
the half-life degradation
of my passion.

It's a little parallel to what I'm feeling now, what with my newly awarded degree. I spend five years of college dreaming about all of the creative things I could do when I wasn't so busy with school and just had a mere 40-50 hours of a vanilla job. Now I have all the time in the world, but no ideas. I think that's the definition of irony.

Anyway, here's a silly comic I found:


via http://www.harkavagrant.com/

murr

I make nothing useful, creative, or unique. I am terrible at art.


I hate everything.

The Great Purge

My inspiration for actually churning out some motivation to type again came from the following passage I read on a blog about purging:

"The more I purge my belongings and move towards a simple and non-materialistic lifestyle, the less I want to accumulate “stuff” ever again. I thought I had purged most of my “stuff” prior to moving into the place we are in now, but alas 2 years of living in one place brought into our repertoire many items that we “simply can’t live without”!

I hope that in the future I can hold more perspective on this point and continue to learn the difference between wants and needs. I can only imagine there are many things we’ll encounter in our travels that we see as “needs” that many native-dwellers would disagree with. For example….shoes. Shoes are pretty non-negotiable for me. I like them, I need them. If I don’t have them, my tender tootsies are miserable. I can’t walk more than a few feet a minute without them. Yet for others, shoes are more of a luxury.

….Shoes, a luxury. Ha! And here I am wondering whether or not to bring my pretty pink high heels, or just to “make due” with my black slingbacks. Yikes!"

I am in the middle of the Great Purge 2010, in an effort to try and weedle down my possessions to fill the space of three suitcases. Today I managed to take a car load of things to Goodwill, and list some of the more high end items on Ebay. It was the last hurrah, as I have probably poked through my items several times by now. The first round was the most emotional; as I moved through items I remembered the sentimental or monetary value of them, even if they had never been used (I was real bad about this with my shoes). The second time made the "donate" pile grow a little bit larger, as I'm sure a few days mulling over the idea of donating these things seated itself deep in the survivalist part of my brain. Do I need the American Eagle hobo bag that I bought 6 years ago and never used? Sure, it was cute. I had gone over it several times in the past as something I needed to keep and use, but it always seemed to lodge itself into the darkest depths of my closet, never to be found again.

During this final attempt, I found myself thinking more rationally. Will I ever use the purse? (Maybe) Is it more important than packing dress shirts for work, or nice shoes, or the cheese grater*? (No!) To the "donate" pile it went. 30 minutes later it was still there. The next day it was still there. No urges to go and pick it out of the pile, second guessing myself again.

I do realize that I don't need to bring over much besides my passport and some cash. Clothes would be nice, and 3 suitcases provides for a lot of packing space. I'm not exactly showing up in Oz with my skivves and some documentation. During a conversation I was having yesterday, we discussed how free it felt not to be inundated with so much crap. The things you can do without cartloads of crap to worry about. She was very right about the feeling of freedom, and as I was handing my stuff to the Goodwill helper, it felt like a burden was being taken away. It's just stuff.

Stuff can be bought, lost, stolen, given away or destroyed. Why attach such a value to it?


*I love my grater. It's perhaps the best kitchen tool I've ever purchased.

So,

this week I will be setting some goals for my Etsy. I need some inventory, and I've had this urge to craft. Unfortunately the past few weeks have been hell, and I've been too lazy/tired/busy to actually do anything about it.

But I have a few projects that I want to do, and I think this week I will actually have time to do them. So I'm going to try to finish one project a day, starting Monday, for a total of 6 projects by Sunday night.

Wish me luck! :D

Some new shoes

I've always admired people who live fabulous lives with seemingly little effort-- The people who just get out of bed one day and decide to liquidate all their belongings and backpack across Europe. As an avid planner, I have to try excessively hard to be spontaneous (probably drives R nuts, who comes up with a crazy scheme to drive to Canada on one of his visits-- which we did, and it was amazing, but I would have never thought of that by myself in a million years).

What I lack in spontaneity I would like to make up for in fascination. I would like to be that interesting, well-rounded person in a social gathering that is talking about their latest art show and in the same breath how fun skydiving was. I'm terrified of realizing one day that I'm a boring person. I want something to always talk about.

So I was thinking on the MARTA today that I need a list of things to do after I'm settled in a 9-5, but before I get Alzheimers. Right now it's pretty short and vanilla, but I hope to let the ideas fester and eventually make it on to the list.

JILL'S LIST OF STUFF TO DO BEFORE DEATH

1. Have an art show
2. Write a book
3. Take skydiving lessons
4. Learn to sing (if at all possible-- I'm pretty bad)
5. Learn to paint
6. Take some photography classes
7. Go to somewhere in Asia (specifically Singapore, Japan or China)
8. Learn French
9. Go to a nude beach
10. Get my Masters degree and teach some classes
11. Leran how to ball room dance
12. Go to somewhere that it's seasonally light outside for 24 hours, and stay awake the entire time
13. Learn how to screen print
14. Get a Gocco printer and use it
15. Learn to sew clothes (things I'd actually wear)
16. Learn to be a masseuse

That's all I can think of for now, but I'll add more as I think of them.

The Adventures

It's been a whirlwind summer so far. I got back from England a little over a week ago, moved the day after getting back, and school is starting on Monday. In between all of my crazy inter-continental adventures has been work and general adult things. I also made my first legit sale on Etsy! Yaaay! (no offence, T :D And I still owe you a new keychain!!)

Anyways, I'll post some photos from the trip, sticking to the highlights since the rest can be found on my Flickr.


This is pretty much the quintessential English picture: The token tourist stands outside a red telephone booth while it's raining. The thing that broke the magic is that most of the booths are kind of old and dirty. I would fully expect there to be some broken crack pipes and needles chilling out in the piles of old fast food wrappers.



R took me to this little garden where you can get tea and eat scones with clotted cream. So English, I'm surprised they didn't hand me a passport with my scone. To get to this place involved a very pleasant walk through the countryside of Cambridge where we ran into some cows (!) and stinging nettles. It was probably the squeest day in my life. R knows how to show a lady a good time :)



We took the train in to London, and did all the touristy bits. Basically went up the Thames and then back down, stopping to ooh and ahh at all of the old shit. I'm still overwhelmed that I actually saw all of the famous bits. Like, this was stuff that I had only seen on TV before, and now I was prancing around it. This is me looking very smug in front of Buckingham Palace. Unfortunately, we had to decline the Queen's request to have some tea. We had a full schedule of stuff n' things to do.



Yes, I am awesome...



At the end of the Tour O' London (TM), we wandered through Hyde Park, and found the famous Rose Garden. R could not deny the calling of his English blood, and sat to contemplate difficult things on the garden's bench.



I was staying up in Cambridge with R, which is a nice college town filled with many many old scholarly buildings. We have Tech Tower, which is like, 100 years old or something? Cambridge was celebrating their 800th year as a college while I was there. One of his roomies had a kitty, who spent most of his days outside. I didn't have a back door key, so he sat and watched me eat my late breakfast and meowed to be let iiiiiiin.


While R was at work some days, I wandered around the town. They have a river that kind of meanders right through the city, and a little trail that you can follow all around the river. They have some squee house boats at some places :D There's also a ton of open fields and parks that begged me to spread out a jacket and read a book for a few hours.



That's all for now... I have some more of the days we spent up north with his parents. But alas, it's late and I'm hungry...

Yet another scheme...

So I've recently been analyzing my budget again, and there's this huge line item that seems to be looming over all of the other bills and what nots: birth control. With it being $40 a month, it's more than what I allocate myself for fun money. I've kind of not been keeping up with it since I haven't seen the man friend in almost 2 months, and I've just felt much happier that the hormones aren't coursing through my veins.

I'm just trying to justify spending more on contraception than I do for stress relief. I pay more to have myself hormonal and moody for three weeks out of the month, then horribly bitchy and crampy for another week. Continue cycle. It's very hard to rationalize.

With the impending move and increase in spending for "necessities"-- what gets cut out? Fun or function?

Finally

Managed to unpack all the boxes and get my room arranged. It only took me a little over a week...

BEFORE! (the disaster zone)







AFTER!








This is my little office nook, since I don't really have a proper desk. I can just pivot the monitor around to face my bed when I want to watch a movie.



I love all my little artworks! I forgot to get a shot of my little knick-knack shelf on the other side of the room...



I am soooo glad to be done unpacking!

The MARTA Bus

I've started taking the MARTA bus to work from my new place, seeing as how my car is still a terror to drive (will be fixed v. soon though). It takes about 2 hours to get there, with 2 trains and one bus ride. Somewhat not worth it for a 4 hour shift, but I have little choice in the matter at this moment.

I really don't mind where I am now (the working of fast food and taking public transportation). While hard, the work isn't stressful and I have a lot of free time to read while waiting for buses/trains.

But I'm getting completely bored with myself. I have nothing interesting going on right now. The most I can mention about my night is that I spilled a strawberry milk shake all over my apron. Sure, my internship was challenging and stressful (from the challenges and the constant diving into moral turpitude) but it gave me something to talk about. It made me sound interesting. I could be clever and witty, and mention something out of world news and relate it to something happening in THE INDUSTRY.

I miss sounding like a scholar, or at least an adult. It's like this summer has me working backwards. I'm back in high school, with a crap job and absolutely zero interesting unique facts about myself. I'm not the independent person from last summer with a car and a real job that had me wearing collared shirts on Monday. I yearn to be back in school, to be learning, and not sitting in the continuing stagnation of my mediocrity. I am Jane Everybody, with my name on my shirt handing you your chicken sandwich.

I am a boring person.

Do you at least want to hear about the milk shake that exploded? Yeah, that shit went everywhere. I'm STILL finding bits of strawberries in my uniform.