1- It does everyone involved good if you say no if you don't think you can make it somewhere. On Friday, I really wanted to go support Poetmom at her reading. But it was an hour away from me, and I had a few things I needed to do after work before I could get there. A last minute flag-on-the-play meant I just couldn't make it in time. I knew I was going to be harried getting there, and I should've just expressed my regrets from the get go instead of cancelling at the last minute.
2- I ended up at a yoga class after doing the stuff I needed to do. It was the perfect anecdote to the anxiety surrounding rushing and canceling plans.
3- Sometimes it feels really good to organize. I spent hours and hours today organizing our condo and our tax documents. Brian went out to do homework at his school. The only time I can happily do housework is if I'm alone. Something about doing it while someone else does anything else (even if it's homework) makes me feel like a martyr. But organizing alone is a fantastic feeling.
4- Bouncing off my wonderful yoga experience, I meditated today, and I'm going to take a yoga class tomorrow morning. I think today's meditation is keeping me relatively calm as I react to:
5- I'm behind on my writing. Again. It's so strange how I really, really, really want the stories in my thesis to be great, but I'm often finding myself resisting working on them. Maybe my next post will be a Letter to my Thesis, ala RB.
4 comments:
Ooooommmmm. Really glad to hear you're feeling calm. I think it's the yoga and the meditation. I sent you an e-mail about this but there's no reason to think you can't keep working on your stories after the thesis is done. I always, always remind my grad students that it only has to be good enough -- they can work it up for publication later. In sixteen years of working with grad students, I've never seen even a PhD thesis that was ready to go straight to press. I don't think we should expect anything different for the MFA, even if we'd like it to be ready to go. I felt quite freed once I lowered my expectations (thank you, RB!).
Thanks TI. That's great advice. Let's both follow it!!
Last minute flag on the play??
You're not even a sports fan! :)
Hahah. I did grow up in a house of very avid sports fans though. :)
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