And this kind of thinking is why my friend sent me off to bed with "Good night! Nothing bad will happen!" which I did find comforting <3 #

News! Finally! And positive, I think #

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Credit: http://www.bighappyfunhouse.com/archives/11/03/30/14-54-33.html

Travel gives me a lot of time to think, the planes, the airports, the queues. And the jetlag – there’s no lonelier time than four in the morning, wherever you happen to be.

Probably clear from my last post that I’ve had a lot to think about, lately. Still going to have to be enigmatic and elusive (sorry!), but things are looking up.

Currently, I oscillate between fear that things can’t just work out the way it seems like they might, and this calm conviction that three months from now my life if going to be unrecognizable, and all this chaos and drama is going to turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.

I’m not normally a big fan of poetry, but there is one poem that I like – One Art by Elizabeth Bishop.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

– Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

I think she is saying it is a disaster, but still. I find it comforting. It’s hard to feel your world falling to pieces around you; it’s hard to lose the things you cling to. Yes, it brings potential, but at 4am that doesn’t mean that you don’t want to cry – that loss seems insurmountable, at the loneliest time of day.

And I just let it be. OK, this is my worst case scenario. It is not, in fact, a disaster. And, interestingly, the more I activate my best-case scenario, the more the worst-case scenario seems like a precious thing that I don’t want to lose, either.

At 4am, I look at myself and realize that I are not the person I aspire to be. I know that in a different reality I might have talked about change a lot, but been unable to actually do it because I wouldn’t have wanted to let go of something. But the something is breaking apart, and as that happens – it tells me to go for it. It’s time.

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© Copyright L S Wilson and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

When I get stressed travelling, I have this mantra that I repeat to myself:

Passport, wallet, keys, cellphone. Everything else you can buy.

It doesn’t mean that losing/forgetting something else might not be expensive, or a giant pain to fix. The point is, that only the loss of some things is a genuine crisis. I can’t pretend that I have a handle on everything, but those 4 things I can probably keep track of.

When things are uncertain, I try to anchor myself around things that I know.

Which is hard when things disappear, and for me April has been a month of that. My bike was stolen, from a locked room in a locked building. And not only did I lose my bike, I also lost my feeling of safety at home. My boyfriend and I broke up, and he hates me now. He always said that whatever happened, we were too reasonable to be acrimonious about it. This was always my worst-case scenario. Sometimes it sucks to be right. And two more things, one of which seemed the most important thing ever until the second thing went, and now seems trivial. And the second, which has left me devastated.

I can’t talk about what the two things are, but in some ways it doesn’t matter. The point is – three out of four of these things were anchors for me. My home is safe. My boyfriend was like my closest friend, and had been a close friend for years. And losing anchors, leave me adrift and lost and confused. The world is huge, and I would like something certain to cling to, and right now I feel – I got nothing.

Of course I don’t. I have great friends, geographically disparate (which, weirdly makes me feel even less anchored – go here, that’s where A is, but B is in this place, which is not a bad option either). I have money. I have places I could live. But perhaps this is it – I have options, and no certainty. And that makes me nervous.

Out for dinner with two friends. One of whom gives the best hugs. They make me feel so safe. He says, “everything is going to be OK”. My other friend looks at me like she thinks I’m a little crazy and says, “I don’t know why you are afraid. I have never seen you in a situation that you couldn’t handle”.

I’d like to make her certainty, my certainty. That whatever happens, I’ll figure it out. Because that’s also how I make my other friend right – I’ll figure it out, and then everything will be OK.

And I realize that, uncertainty is hard, and stressful, but with it comes possibility. And anchors are hard to lose, but without them, you’re very free.

Still raining today http://t.co/r2Ktm9pq #

Sky looks pretty cool this evening as does that boat! http://t.co/MHUYI6XZ #

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But, however you feel about her politics, it’s a pretty great movie. Meryl Streep is – as ever – phenomenal. I wasn’t really old enough to experience the Thatcher years, but in the movie, as in real life (I think) she was a strong woman, doing an impossible job. The media training bit is particularly fascinating – after she’s criticized for being “shrill” and deliberately works to change her voice. The proposal is my favorite bit – refusing to change, to give up her ambition. This is who you will be marrying. Be OK with that.

My friend and I are talking about the price you pay, as a woman, for success. The men who – in theory – support women being awesome, but in practice want their partner to be a little less awesome than they are. She tells me, she’s deliberately hiding how much she makes from her boyfriend, because she doesn’t want to deal with the fallout from that.

This movie is about that price. And towards the end of her time as PM, when she’s pushing too hard, going too far, I wonder – if you always have to be so strong because the people are so quick to doubt, to judge, that you end up losing your ability to differentiate between when you’re being strong because you need to be strong, and when you’re being stubborn out of habit.

Anyway, highly recommend.

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Credit: xkcd

My friend and teammate says to me, “do you make a habit of spending your birthdays on planes… after breakups?

It’s only the second time.

It’s really how the dates worked out. With the timezone change, it means my birthday is going to last for 40 hours… I can celebrate on two continents! In two hemispheres.

It is also a way of completely ignoring it, should I decide to go that route. Sadly the dates didn’t work out for me to just skip that day, pretend it never happened, and have a do-over of being 26 (related: I won’t be experiencing April 12th this year, let me know if anything good happens).

Then, another friend and I were talking about “The List”. The list of requirements for your next partner, that you make after a breakup. Specifically it tends to include characteristics about your ex that you think were key to why you broke up, and if that one thing had been different, maybe it would have all worked out and everything would be hunky dory.

Over the course of my dating life I have put on the list: physicists, computer scientists (this one soon got removed, given the circles I move in it’s pretty much signing up for celibacy), men whose mothers don’t have careers, men whose parents are extremely religious, men who are religious themselves, grad students…

As our conversation progresses, I realize that the list is complete bollocks.

It’s trying to distill what failed and what we learned into a couple of characteristic, like if we could just find the intersection of all our desirable characteristics and exclude all the undesirable ones, there would be our perfect match.

Even if this strategy led us to someone, I can’t help but think we’d probably find ourselves in the pool of people they had eliminated.

Anyway, I’m chucking out my list. I’m just going to be Cate. Go places that I like to go, do things that I like to do, and keep adventuring. I’m sure love will follow – possibly with a religious physicist (although it seems unlikely that I would meet one), but maybe just with life and the world. Which sounds a bit soppy for me, but let me off. I will be spending my birthday on a plane, afterall.

credit / http://freeaussiestock.com/free/Victoria/Melbourne/slides/cow_up_a_tree.htm

I bought my laptop home with me for the long weekend. I was writing code at 9pm on Wednesday night. Last week, I worked Sunday night.

Sounds like I have a work-life integration problem, right?

I used to have these strict rules – laptop stays at the office. No work at the weekends. I drew lines around my day, theorizing that if I had a full evening and couldn’t work, I would have a real break.

I didn’t used to have my work email on my cell phone. Now I do – one of them even beeps when it arrives. I turned it on because I spent a day in transit and another at TEDx and wanted to be semi-available. I didn’t get round to turning it off, and mostly just keep it on silent. It’s not the problem I imagined it would be.

When I arrived in KW, I didn’t know that many people and was in a relationship with someone who worked at the same place. Since we broke up, and I’ve been finding different things to do with my evenings (even if that is often hanging out on the cross-trainer watching Drop Dead Diva – Amazon). Maybe I needed those rules, as I got over grad school and the constant guilt. When, frankly, I didn’t have as much else to do.

But now it’s a different story. And, I worked Sunday night because Friday afternoon I took off to do someone a favor – the timing worked well, I got a jump on Monday. Sure, I was working late on Wednesday but I left the office, worked out with my trainer, had a nice walk in the sunshine to pick up some dinner, and then came back to it as my colleagues in Australia arrived for the day, which meant I could sync up with them. And sometimes things are easier to do without interruptions – so after everyone else has gone home!

At any time, I could turn email off on my phone. But mostly I just don’t bother to look at it. I could return my laptop to the office, it’s just a couple of minutes away anyway. The symbolic separation was only ever that, and I don’t feel like I need it anymore. Besides, I travel for work. A lot. It’s pointless to pretend that doesn’t impact my life – it does. In positive ways, because I experience new things and see cool places, but in negative ones too. It’s hard, sometimes, but it’s a choice – so clearly I think it’s worth it. I just forget that when I’ve spent 8 hours in San Francisco airport waiting.

I read an article with Marissa Mayer and one of the things she mentions is that burnout happens when you miss the things that are important to you. The thing that if you miss it, it ruins your week. I’m not completely sold on this theory, or perhaps it’s just for me a week with no down-time would be a stressful and miserable experience. But I see the point – I didn’t lose out on anything by working a couple of extra hours on Wednesday night, I felt good about what I got done and enjoyed my chat with the Australian. And it was a free choice – perhaps that is the most important thing. I didn’t have to.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is, my work and life are a little more blended than they used to be, and I’m OK with this new way.