Le Guilt

Ahhhh...Le Guilt.

Hello again old friend, you've been shadowing my steps closely of late.

I've been working at the thesis for so long, carried the pressure to perform and achieve, do more, be more for three years now, such that when I take a moment or a series of moments for myself, Le Guilt pops up to nag me into returning my shoulder to the wheel.

I couldn't do it today. I couldn't face that 90 page, 16,000 word beasty. Just did not have the mental capacity. Couldn't face another day of coefficients, significance levels, *** things and probability odds ratio tables.

The sun was out. It was really really out. The wind was warm. The ocean smelled amazing. The sun sparkled off the waves.

Tomorrow you will have me trapped in the wheel again, Le Guilt, but today my brain and my soma are all mine.

I'll just be guilty tomorrow, to the power of pi.

Small Victories & Owls

At this point in my journey up the ivory tower, I'm ready to pull out hair over even the smallest hiccup and there have been several, including the notorious latte-laptop mashup and the SPSS 17.0 install fail.

Sometimes the journey up the ivory tower feels someone has most definitely smeared it with butter and is sitting at the top watching me grapple for a finger hold. Bastards.

But then there are days when a wee small victory opens up the horizon and the ivory tower gleams just a little less buttery in the sun.

I figured out how to make all of my results tables and graphs show up in their own tables of contents. Yes, I beat down that formatting wolf at the door.

Take THAT little red riding hood!

Then there's the sleep...well...the in-between sleep sleep. The kind where you have been woken out of your slumber by the sound of a mated pair of Northern Spotted Owls at dawn. Every morning at just before 5am the owls call to each other for a few minutes.

I'm being awoken by Athena's animal totem.

I'm going to use that to my advantage.

Look out, I'm named after Athena...goddess of warfare and wisdom (thus the owl) and now the owls have come to wake me up every morning. I'm sure Athena's arrow is next.

I'll save the arrow for someone really deserving (politicians beware).

Paranoid Academiosis

I have truly become the embodiment of a paranoid academic.

This morning my whole world stopped. I mean stopped. I think I may have stopped breathing. I certainly didn't stop sweating. That might have been the heart palpitations though...

I never leave the house without my flash drives. Upon those magical flash drives are my thesis draft and all the notes, data output and graphs, tables, journal articles you could imagine make up the gigantic recipe of thesis success.

I couldn't find them.

I couldn't find my bright red pencil case in which they rested either.

Nowhere.

Thesis vanished. 3 years of work and stress and insanity vanished.

The parrot just watched me lose my marbles.

Wanna know where my flash drives (and thus thesis ingredients) were? They were in my gym bag. Because at some point I decided to go to the gym and take my flash drives with me, just in case calamity struck while I was working out. You know, in case the place burned down or Thor hit it with a thunderbolt. I somehow figured taking my thesis to the gym was a good idea.

But then I left the flash drives in the gym bag. In the car.

I had a paranoid academiosis breakdown this morning in front of the parrot.

He's judging me, I just know it.

I hope this is all worth it. My mind can't decide and my body just thinks I'm coo-coo.

Upwards Over the Mountain

Life isn't finite.

Life is for living.

Life is for right now, right this second.

Life is a walk up the mountain and when we reach the summit we see.

Lori thank you for being a friend. Thank you for teaching me about being strong. Thank you for teaching me about bravery. Thank you for never giving up. Thank you for accepting our love. Thank you for your dirty sense of humour. Thank you for the boob comments. Thank you for being there.

I wish you a quiet and restful sleep, far from pain my friend. I know we will dance again together, when I make it upwards over the mountain.

Until then my friend. Love always.

"Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance."
~Kahlil Gibran~

Coffee+Laptop=Caffeinated FAIL

"Lindy Lou, you just cannot have nice things."

That's what Gramma told me. She said it early on in my life and at the time I just brushed it off. I'm a tomboy after all.

Well this morning, I heard a distinctly otherworldly "I told you so" moments after my spare travel mug filled with my workout reward latte threw itself all over the left side of my laptop keyboard.

I caught it. Too late of course. It turned my laptop upside down. I wiped it off. I turned it off, took off every key tab, dried it off and put each one back on. Yes, in the right order.

When I turned it back on, I couldn't get past the password prompt...because the "U" key was stuck and the backspace key is broken off and the left arrow key just won't go back to the way it was.

I turned it off again. I had a moment of shining brilliance. It hit me. THE BLOWDRYER! Yessssss....I will dry out the keyboard.

Part II of caffeinated FAIL commences.

I melted the following keys into art pieces: "Z", "X", "C", "F", Space bar.

Thus I have a long List of the Fallen due to today's caffeinated FAIL:

"U"
"Backspace"
"Space bar"
"Z"
"X"
"C"
"F"
"Left Arrow"

I'd like to thank those keys for their years of faithful service and for their sacrifice. Their time was over much too soon. I'd like to write a poem in their honour, but poetry just isn't my bag, baby.

I'd like to thank my friend Keith Ramsey and some other Twitter pals for their collective suggestion to try using an external keyboard, which is indeed allowing me to use my scarred and disfigured Toshiba laptop.

I've never paid much attention to how things look. Its the content of their character that's important to me.

Well that and I just can't have nice things.

Change is the Only Constant

Yesterday someone told me that "Good ideas alter the power balance of a relationship and that is why good ideas are always met with resistance at first".

That simultaneously gave me hope and disappointed me.

Why the resistance? Letting go of control is such a need that positive change and good ideas that don't come from you MUST be bad?

How does one market openness to change, openness to IDEAS, openness to trying to those who are late adopters?

How to be resilient in the face of closing ranks against change and ideas?

Its tiring.

Random Act of Cookie

This morning on my march to school the sun was shining and Bob Marley was playing in my ears. "Sun is shining, riddim' is sweet ya...make you wanna move your dancin' feet. To the rescue, here I am..." and at that moment I passed a man, tucked into a vent fronting onto Hastings Street. His face in the heat of the vent. Asleep on the sidewalk.

To the rescue...how? How can I rescue the homeless.

Well, I can't.

What I can do, is share. I can share coffee and a cookie. I know its not much but coffee and a cookie in the sunshine is Bob Marleyesque.

So, I brought the man a coffee and a giant chocolate chip cookie (mmmmmmmm cookie) and I hope that at least brought a "sun is shining" moment to his day.

Thank you Bob Marley, I feel like I'm a rainbow too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OLKvD8nob4