A Full Life

One day last week after coming in at 3 a.m. from the theater, my roommate said to me, "You try to do too much." I told her that if I quit some of the things I'm involved in, I'd just find others. I've been thinking about that, and I wonder if it's true. There are a lot of activities around campus I'd like to be involved in, very worthy things, but I doubt they'd all suit me. I can also easily find ways to fill my time which aren't productive. What I want to do, though, isn't fill my time -- I want to fill my life.

What does a full life look like? This is something I've tried to work through in different blog posts before, and I keep coming back to it. As someone who is planning on graduating, getting married, writing books, and having a family, the future looks full. As someone who has the choice between working on some important writing or getting on Pinterest, I need to consider how what I do now affects my dreams.

I'll totally use all these in the future!

 Sure, I can waste an hour on the Internet. I can also fill an hour in the theater or getting homework done ahead of time or working on a craft project. Those last three are all productive. But are they getting me where I want to go? Are they helping me make my life what I want it to be? On a definite critical level, probably not. But if I skip those sorts of things, am I skipping over the stuff that really does make my life full?

Maybe I have too many other things to do right now to try and find answers. I need to search for an internship. I need to work on two writing projects which aren't my novel. In a couple of months I need to start planning my wedding.

Course of action: try to live in a way that I won't regret.

The Swing of Things

I've noticed before that transitioning between school and home and back is weird, not because it feels unnatural or off, but because it doesn't. Rather, when I get to the other place, the things that happened before feel oddly distant. The new reality is prevalent. In theory, this should smooth the transition, but it doesn't mean I snap back into good school habits the minute I set foot in my dorm.

Here, for your education and enjoyment, is a comparative study of instincts while at home and habits necessary for school.

Home instinct: Wake up in time for Good Eats at 10 a.m. (Too bad Cupcake Wars is on half the time.)
School habit: Be awake at 7:15 to be ready for class and start functioning immediately.

Home instinct: Talk gibberish to pets in high-pitched voices.
School habit: Have actual conversations with roommates, who prefer a normal tone of voice.

Home instinct: Crochet. All. The. THINGS!
School habit: Homework first. All craft projects second, or even third.

Home instinct: Eat when hungry -- which results in not eating till 2 in the afternoon, thus not being hungry for dinner, thus requiring extensive snacking before bed to not end up ravenous in the morning.
School habit: Eat meals at regular times, because the dining commons will close and then you'll have to buy food from somewhere.

Home instinct: Take life at a slow pace. Prioritize naturally, based on what opportunities come up.
School habit: Work according to deadline, or be woefully underprepared.

Home instinct: Get around to projects long abandoned and things left untried, because there is finally time and space for them.
School habit: Do what is necessary, and in down time, rest. Exploration into new territory is too much work.

I miss the openness of being home at a time when I don't have many responsibilities. I like the focus of being at school at a time when I do. The hard part is reconciling my mind from one to the other. It doesn't feel like a big mental adjustment, but the things required of me do change enough that I have to be intentional.

Time to get back into the swing of things.

Crafting

Every once in a while, I get in a really crafty mood. Sometimes it's the result of a project that's been mulling in my head and finally spills out, demanding attention (must! buy! yarn!). Other times it's from a need to do something with my hands and be away from people. Often, it's the drive to try something new.

For the last week or two, I've been working on my Halloween costume, a Regency-style dress so I can be Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice. (Yes... book nerd...) I've never done such an involved sewing project before. I had to carefully read the instructions, troubleshoot problems, and worst of all, hand sew buttonholes. I even opted for period accuracy and hand stitched the visible seams. I usually wouldn't put in so much time for a Halloween costume, but my hope is that I can possibly use it in the future for reenactments and cosplay. (And now I can be Lizzie Bennet whenever I want.)

Making the dress started me thinking about the patience it must have taken to live in a time where people had to make their own clothes, grow their own food, and repair their own tools. Things we take for granted, even get irritated about if they take too long, were simply considered work to be done. People had to be productive in order to get to what was more important.

Except I realized that didn't have anything to do with me making the dress.

For me, doing something like sewing a dress simply because I can is a way to instantly feel accomplished. Since I'm good at doing crafty things, trying a different crafty thing feels like something new, but really it's just another exercise in things I know I can do. It doesn't take too much effort, but I still end up with a tangible manifestation of how skillful I am.

lotrolife.com

Even when I try something completely new to me, the beginning stages are often easier to grasp, so it feels like I'm making progress. I do believe it's important for a person to be able to do a wide variety of things, but in RPG terms, my weakness is a tendency to multiclass. And giving in to the excitement of trying new things can take away from working on more important things -- skills where I now need to put in a lot of effort to improve and really accomplish something.

Namely, writing.

Because I love learning, it's easy to feel satisfied when trying something new. It is much harder to get past the beginning stages and dedicate myself to becoming an expert. Writing my novel is proving difficult. It's no longer new and interesting, but if I want to excel at it, I'm only going to improve if I keep working, rather than distracting myself with easier projects.

It's funny how doing something by hand can show you how short your attention span really is.

Microposting

I'm trying to catch up on the episodes of Writing Excuses I haven't been listening to for the past year. If you want to write genre fiction, or any fiction, you should listen to this podcast. Anyway, every once in a while they do an episode of "microcasting," where instead of 15 minutes on one subject, they answer a variety of questions in one 'cast. Since I didn't have one really solid idea for a post this week, I decided I would micropost.
~~~
"You should really be wearing shoes back here," my boyfriend told me.
"I'll be fine," I said. I have a hobbitish tendency to refuse shoes during the summer, and my feet are pretty tough as a result. Consequently, I wasn't afraid of walking through the timber to help find firewood for the bonfire on Friday. However, timbers on old farms have often been dumping grounds for junk, as I should have known.

After stepping on what was probably a shard of a broken toilet, I hobbled back to my boyfriend's house, leaving nice splashes of blood on the leafy ground. Even after bleeding though one layer of bandages, I didn't think it was all that serious, so we gave it another layer and I sat around the fire for a couple hours, and only sitting, as my boyfriend insisted. When I got home, my parents gave it a look and decided I should go to the emergency room. I now have four stitches, a pair of crutches I only needed for two days, and some Finding Nemo and Iron Man stickers the nice people at the ER gave me. Today I've mostly regained mobility, though I'm still walking a little on the side of my foot, but the stitches aren't supposed to come out for another week. Oh bother.
~~~
When I need a respite from people, I tend to archive-binge on my favorite webcomics. I've added a new one. Order of the Stick is now on my list of comics to follow, and next time I need to be anti-social for a couple of days, I know where to look.
~~~
Sometimes you need to tear down something old so you can rebuild. On the other hand, sometimes you can just slap some paint on it and it will be fine. Both of these philosophies have been key as my family's been fixing up our old house. Today we tore out half the front porch, and the roof above it is sitting precariously on temporary posts as we tear out the rotting supports beneath. My mom has a vision of a new, pretty porch railing and flowers planted in front of it.

Looking at our house, it's easy to get discouraged about the amount of work we have to do. Weekend after weekend is spent tackling some project that usually leaves the house a mess, and we know that soon there'll be yet another project that will make it look like we're actually tearing the house down, not fixing a pocket door or putting sand paint on the ceiling or wiring upstairs. But we've come pretty far. I found some pictures a while ago of when Dad and I took down the old cabinets in the kitchen prior to knocking out the crumbling, icky plaster. Now we have a blue and white kitchen with a Bible verse painted on the wall. Eventually we will refinish the old wood floors and put in carpet and finish painting and rebuild the front steps and fix all the screen windows and get air conditioning and tile and fix the hole in the attic and reroof and put stairs up to the attic and clean up the basement and string the stairs to the basement and plant more flowers and get new siding and....

Sigh. I love this house. This old, stupid house.
~~~
Before I get out of my car to work in the mornings, I pray that I'll be a good worker and a good witness. I don't really know how to do the latter. Labor comes naturally to me. Reaching out to people doesn't. I'm used to school and church, where most everyone is nice and we all have something in common -- Jesus. At work, most everyone is nice, too, but most of the other people I know don't wrestle with custody issues for their kids or have cheating boyfriends or no teeth from former meth addictions. I listen to them talk about these things - I think that's a good first step -- and when they ask about my life, I tell them. And when I mention having a good family and supportive parents, I'm told I'm lucky. I know I am, now.
~~~
I've been telling myself I'll do this for two weeks, but now I'm telling the Internet so that it'll actually happen. On Wednesdays I intend to review the books I've been reading here for the blog. They will be pretty random, things that caught my eye in the library, but I hope they'll be enjoyable and interesting. Maybe I can point you at some good books.

That's it for microposting today. The only problem is it's hard to come up with a relevant concluding sentence with just the right kick, humor, or both. Oh well.

Interrupted rhythms

I consider myself to be a happily disorganized person. I prefer this to expending lots of effort to keep everything orderly and planned. It may not be the best system, but I can usually juggle projects with minimum fuss, and it works for me. Lately I've realized how the preservation of rhythm is one way I keep things straight without active work.

Sometimes at school I would get busy enough that I would forget which day of the week it was, but after a few second's consideration I could remember because today I had my lit seminar, and that happened on Tuesdays only, or I slept in this morning so that made it a Thursday. Rhythm from the days of the week and the habits that accompanied them kept me going so that I rarely missed anything.

I don't have that anymore. I also don't have nearly as much to do, but it's still messing me up.

For example, this last Sunday morning I had work. (Hooray, gainful employment.) Work is going to make me miss church about every other week, but I've only had the job for a week and it's not going to be regular anyway, so that rhythm is not in place. The Sunday before that, I was coming back from a wedding. The weeks didn't feel normal, so no weekly reminders, so no blog posts. (Sorry about that.) Plus work and new exciting taekwando classes are leaving me bodily exhausted, so I don't want to do anything but lie around and maybe read. This has not been good for my novel.

Still. Taekwando, twice a week. ...... that may be my only starting point, since I work most days but with unpredictable days off, my younger brother needs to share the vehicle with me on different days, my family takes on sporadic house-improving projects, and I don't have any other regular responsibilities.

Does this mean I'll have to start making a weekly schedule for writing and regular tasks, just to make sure I get stuff done?

I hope it doesn't come to that.

Summer

I've always been kind of a freak when it comes to summer. I like humidity, but loathe heat. I get bored and listless when I'm not in a learning environment. And I'll probably read more in the summer than I do during the school year.

One trick I figured out a few years ago was to assign myself goals -- or, shall I say, deadlines? -- to complete before the end of summer.  A lot of the ideas spring out of things I want to accomplish, but don't have the time or means to do when I'm at school. In the past I've successfully sewn a dress, completed a summer version of NaNoWriMo, and even sufficiently motivated myself to clean and organize a closet full of craft supplies. I'm interested in seeing what this summer will turn up.

On my reading list:

• Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett (I saw it at Barnes and Noble and it's been in the back of my mind ever since)
• 10,000 Leagues Under the Sea and a bunch of other stuff by Jules Verne. Have been meaning to get to it for a while.
• The Emperor's Soul by Brandon Sanderson
• Shades of Milk and Honey and the rest of the series by Mary Robinette Kowal
• Forgotten God by Francis Chan. Required reading, but I'm looking forward to it.
• A reread of good old Pride and Prejudice.
• Relatedly, a Jane Austen biography.
• A partial reread of the complete and unabridged Les Misérables -- got it for my birthday and haven't had time to finish it, though I've read a mostly-unabridged version.
• Lots more I've probably forgotten

On my to-do list:

• Practice my taekwando to the point of being better than where I left off at school. I'm just barely a yellow belt and I probably won't start lessons again until I get back.
• Finish crocheting a pair of opera sleeves
• Tame the barn kittens!
• Help family with house projects -- new drywall, refinishing floors, etc.
• Listen to a backlogged year of Writing Excuses, a favorite podcast
• And, most importantly, finish the novel.

 These things will be combating the all-important GET A JOB that is currently screaming at me, but right now, my summer is undetermined. Totipotent, if you will. (Plant bio still has not banished itself from my mind.)

My home state of Iowa has welcomed me back with thunderstorms and tornado watches. I'm embracing the humidity and current lack of heat. God willing, I will make this into a beautiful summer full of learning and new experiences.

Spring Cleaning

Today was strike for the last show of the year. Strike is where we tear down the set, put everything away, and clean up the theater so we can make another mess on a clean slate next production. We had some major clearing out to do up in the props loft, and it'll be an ongoing process.

Yesterday I talked to my boyfriend on the phone for two hours. We don't get to talk very much. He is the one I bounce ideas off of, the person I turn to when I need to understand what I'm feeling and thinking. After that conversation, I felt like I had more space in my head, as if all the abstractions had formed words and had been written down, put into place. I felt rooted and ready for more things to come.

Earlier today, as I was hauling rolls of carpet around and watching our technical director pull old things to throw away, I pictured how I would use the extra space. There's still so much to do. We have props from productions going back 20 years and more, things I can't imagine how they were used. Still, they are there. Some of them with potential. Some of them just taking up space. We have to decide which is which so we can continue to become a more efficient theater -- we're far from perfect.

I'm not an organizer. I'm a worker. I don't outline my papers, and when I make plans to work on something, I often end up working on something else instead. I just start. I hold all my ideas in my head, and sometimes that is helpful and other times, distracting. I have to figure out which is which so that I can do all that I expect myself to do -- and there's so much more I could do. 

I am at a stage where I need to clear things out to be ready for what comes next. I have to get ready to leave for the summer. I have to finish projects. I have to work, I have to rest, I have to pray. And, because I'm obstinate and say I'm not an organizer, I will just let all these things stew in my mind. They will get done one at a time, much as I wish I could just finish it all at once. I want everything to be put in order. First step, pouring out the ideas, done. Next, time to decide what to do with them.

Writing as Work

I consider myself to be a very hard worker. If I've committed to do something, I will do it, and I will go above and beyond the generally accepted minimum. This is how I get things done at school. I'm working on someone else's time, doing things they expect me to get done. How can I possibly fail them?

But things are a little different if I'm working on my own time. I finished NaNoWriMo, but it wasn't a walk in the park. It was something I wanted to do, but it's easy to put wants aside for needs. Sometimes once all the needs are finished, it's hard to balance the wants.

For me, this is what makes writing hard. I have no limit to willpower if I need to get something done. But when working on my story, there is no one else telling me to finish it -- just me. And at this stage of revision, I'm unsure enough that I don't know when to give myself deadlines, let alone how to make myself meet them.

Another difficult thing is that writing takes time. Sometimes, you need to give it a rest instead of working a piece to death. Sometimes you need to get away from it so you can come back to the story with a fresh mind. And if you leave the story for a few days, it's easy to let those days be a week. Or weeks. Or more.

For fear of this happening again, as it did to my previous NaNovels, I'm proceeding blindly into the revision process. I'm great at revising papers. I can revise short stories. I can analyze someone else's story and clearly point out the good and bad points. Right now I can't do that with my writing, because basically my story's not written yet.

Sure, I have a NaNoWriMo draft. But in the past few years, NaNoWriMo has been a way for me to spew the ideas in my head onto a document. I find basic ways to make them fit together. I touch up a character portrait. And I finish -- something. But not the thing it has potential to be. Taking a rough draft and making it into something great is not yet my area of expertise, but if I'm going to be a real writer, I have to make that weakness one of my strengths. To do this, I think it's time to turn to a tool I've previously hated an feared: the outline. Perhaps if I had one of those going in, I wouldn't have so many problems now.

I love the ideas in my story. I've got a government that's outlawed all technology, a secret underground organization, an immortal beast who was once human, and a nine-year-old-boy trying to find out the truth about his family. The big pieces fit together, but as I'm refining it, I'm having trouble making my character's motivations align with the action I need.

I'm home in Iowa for the rest of January. My parents and siblings are at work and school, so for the majority of the day I'm by myself. I'm going to make this into writing time. I can't let what I have go to waste. For the next day or two, I'm going to be brainstorming and taking notes on how to put together my broken pieces. Then it's time to tame the beast. The deadline I have for my finished outline is January 11th. I have no idea if this is reasonable or not, but it's definitely more reasonable than me spending the entire month of January sleeping in and playing Wii.

Resolving is making me feel better, though it hasn't changed the fact that I don't necessarily know what I'm doing. Feel free to offer advice. It looks like I'm going to need it.