A hellacious week

Perhaps calling this week hellacious is a bit much.  After all, no one's died, there are no additional life-threatening illnesses and no car accidents.  Of course it's only Wednesday, so who knows what the rest of the week holds (knock on wood).  Personally, I'd rather not find out...unless the rest of the week holds me mysteriously winning oodles of cash and getting a nice vacation to make up for the beginning half of the week.

The week started on Sunday, as weeks are wont to do.  Shortly after midnight, early Sunday morning, Honey heard running water.  This was odd because we were all getting ready for bed and I didn't have laundry going, so there shouldn't be any water.  After a few minutes of searching we discovered the problem.  A pipe burst or broke underneath the concrete in our garage, causing the garage to flood.  We turned off the water to the house and went to bed -- after I sent a message to Bestie #2 saying "We're coming over for showers in the morning!"  Thankfully she lives nearby.

The broken pipe and lack of water did not seem to adversely affect the cats, who continued to sleep and look adorable as Honey and I cleared out the garage and tried to get things ready for a visit from the plumber first thing Monday morning.

The Teenager also didn't mind -- he just moved his sleeping spot from our house to Bestie #2's house.  She has been kind enough to let him stay there until we get this issue fixed.  I can work without water, but I don't want kids to do that.

So the water issue is interesting.  If all goes well, it will be fixed by tonight -- so four days without running water.

It's apparently time for things to break around here.  Last week, my car's CD player finally bit the dust.  It was ready for retirement, but I tried convincing it to hold on a little longer.  We won't replace it because we're planning on getting a new car within the next year anyway (as long as things like broken pipes stop surfacing).  My baby car has over 215k miles on it, all courtesy of yours truly.  It wants a break.  I want it to hold on a bit longer.  And I want it to play CDs again.

I've been stressed by a bazillion things that are due, but that's life.  This week I was supposed to handle things but I feel rather derailed by the pipe issue.  And then yesterday I received bigger news: I am apparently 1.065 elective credits short in my degree.  WTF????  Yesterday, as I was sitting in a meeting, I received word that Oh, BTW, even though you graduated and thought you were done, you're actually short an elective credit.  Short by 1.065 elective credits, to be precise.  (Originally the email said 3.5 credits but I found an error in their calculations.)  WTF?!?!?!?!?!  I graduated and you're telling me this now???

Words actually cannot begin to express my level of frustration and anger.  The registrar sent a credit audit in February that showed I just had to complete my dissertation and I'd be done.  I completed the dissertation.  I went through the hooding ceremony.  If I had attended the commencement I would've received my diploma -- three weeks ago.  Perhaps one of the most frustrating things is that my credit audit in February said I was done.   

After speaking to my advisor, I realize I have no real recourse other than to take a class over the summer, wait for the whole long process of transferring credits/credit review/credit approval/degree conference, and then be done.  And one good thing is that I had already signed up for a free workshop as part of my job and I can just pay a state university to get enough credits for the workshop so that I can be done.  I am not giving any more money to my alma mater (which should, perhaps, be termed conculco mater; forgive my inexact knowledge of Latin but hopefully I conveyed my point).

The horrible thing is that I have now heard of two other colleges that have done this to friends -- wait until they've graduated or are graduating and then say "Whoops, we miscounted!"  I am continuously amazed at the level of incompetence in the education system.  One would think that after years of dealing with it I would no longer find it surprising.  Part of me hopes -- each and every time -- that it's just a fluke.  The rest of me -- the experienced me -- realizes that the world is full of idiots.

In times of frustration and stress, all I really want to do is sleep.  I want to go to bed and hope to wake up in a peaceful world.  Since I can't do that, I am trying to content myself by looking at cute things, like pictures of Lotus and her newest toy from Bestie #2: a stuffed bunny.

Normally, Lotus rips up any new toy immediately, but this one she has carried with her the past few nights.  I think it's adorable.

In a rather apropos moment, as soon as I was done with the post -- and before I had a chance to save or post this entry -- my computer crashed and wiped it out so I had to re-do everything.  Really, computer?  Really?

I would like to go back to bed and wake up to no more problems, please.  I am stress eating and that is really not a good look for me.

Life is never dull (aka "How my time in Vietnam prepared me to live in the U.S.")

I am a flexible person.  I am a busy person.  I am a tolerant person.

I am a person who wants a break.

Life is never dull, that is for sure.  When thinking about what to title this blog post I had several different ideas.  I almost chose Why the Universe does not want me to write academically, but thought that would be too simplistic.  Yet it does seem that way at times.  For the past year and a half or so, every time I work hard so that I can set aside time to complete academic writing by a self-imposed deadline, something happens.  Something major.  Something like an illness, a burglary, a death, a car accident, or some similarly horrific crisis that usually impacts life in a momentous way.  This weekend was like that.

Sometimes I think that my dissertation could have been finished six months or a year earlier if I had been able to devote all of my time and energy to it.  That did not happen.  Our house was burglarized as I was conducting research, my grandmother was diagnosed (and eventually died from) end-stage lung cancer, Bestie #2 was in a bad car accident, and there were numerous illnesses, a major divorce, and several other life-altering events all in the course of about 18 months.  And while the events themselves are distressing, the fact that they keep happening when I am trying to be productive, the fact that I am derailed frequently, is starting to amuse me.  I am sure that there is a lesson in here somewhere, I'm just not sure what it is yet.

I've been working on an article for an academic journal for a while.  A long while.  And each time I get close to the end, something happens and I allow myself to be distracted.  This weekend I hoped to put all of that behind me and finally finish the work so that I could stop thinking about it.  I was close -- so close! -- and then Life struck again.  The pipe that brings water into our house, the one that connects to the water heater, broke underneath the cement in the garage.  At least that's what we think happened.  We'll know for sure in the morning when a plumber comes out and inspects.  And so Life throws another curve ball and we attempt to hit it out of the park.

There are several things for which I am thankful this weekend:
 1) Honey's amazing sense of hearing, which caused the "I wonder why there's water running at midnight" musing that led to the discovery of a garage on its way to being flooded.

2) Bestie #2 living only 1.5 miles away and being willing to have us under her feet for most of the day -- after all, it's really hard to stay in a house when there is no running water.

3) Our trip to Vietnam a few years ago -- and life experiences before that -- that taught us how to shower in a bucket, wash clothes in a bucket, and all that other fun stuff that goes along with no running water.  Thankfully, right now we haven't come to that (see point #2 for the reason why!).

4) A flexible job that allows for me to say "I'm working from home today because I need to wait for the plumber."  I actually do have to run a training in the afternoon, but at least I can be home in the morning and hopefully by the time noon hits (please God, before that!) I'll have an idea of what we're facing.

Now my fingers, toes, legs, and everything else are crossed hoping that insurance will cover this if the plumber needs to rip up the concrete in the garage to replace the broken pipe.  Actually, I keep hoping that somehow we're wrong and it will be an easy fix, but Honey is very handy and sadly pretty sure that all signs point to our initial diagnosis.  And so we wait for the big day, tomorrow.  Don't worry, Life, I can take it.

Week Six: Recovering a Sense of Abundance

I'm returning to my "go through one chapter a week" plan with The Artist's Way.  Week five derailed me for a bit, for whatever reason, but I'm back! And not a moment too soon.  Week six is all about tackling a "major creative block -- money."

Confession: I have a serious money problem.  And it's not just a spending problem.  It's a problem discussing money.  Period.  Oh sure, I have the "If I won the lottery, I'd..." conversations, but when it comes to a serious conversation I freeze up.  And run away.  And avoid it at all costs.

Confession #2: I am actively working to overcome this issue.  Needless to say, it's made life a bit difficult, since said life is supposed to include a partnership over budget issues.

I can stretch a penny like nobody's business. For example, I can usually figure out how to feed 12-16 people for under $50 and still have it look like this:

If the budget for the meal is even smaller, the dinner may look like this:

And, for the past few months, I've kept it to under $25, which means only making one or two dishes (usually a huge pot of stew or soup and a salad), but I can still feed everyone.

My sister wins in the buying-things arena because she can coupon shop better than anyone I know and can usually bring home a carload full of goods from Target or Rite Aid for next to nothing.  We both had to learn, growing up with very little.  We know how to stretch, how to make do, and how to enjoy.

Confession #3: I hate the word "budget."  I feel like I'm going into convulsions when I hear it.  For years I didn't know why, and I still don't think that I truly understand everything, but now I have a feeling that it probably has something to do with budget = not enough.  At least in my mind.  And I always worry about not having enough.  Ask my family.  They'll tell you that usually I make too much food.  That, I think, is left from the days of always being hungry, eating very little.

Growing up, money always caused fights.  Perhaps that's another reason why I avoid it.  I don't like confrontation.  Oh sure, I'll become Darth Vader on steroids if I feel someone is threatening one of my babies, but other than that I avoid conflict. (I'm working on that, too.)

Julia Cameron writes that most of us believe that work is work, play is fun, and the two don't intersect.  We somehow feel like what we have to do with our lives and what we want to do are two different things.  I know I definitely believed that growing up!  Now I have a few lovely women in my life who show me that life can be different.  They have embraced their creativity and their desires and have found a way to work from this depth.  It's truly inspirational.

And so as part of this week's tasks, I'm to write in my morning pages about the god I believe in and the god I want to believe in.  Those tend to be two different versions of reality.  And yet if I go back to the beginning of my journey into The Artist's Way I remember that my creativity and desires come from someplace.  If I believe that they come from God, then shouldn't I also believe that this Creator has given me the means to use my own creativity?

It seems Peanuts was on the right track:

Our Puritan work ethic here in the US seems to tell us that hard work = value/good, so something that is easy must have a lesser value.  Why is that?  Maybe we have certain talents and so particular tasks just seem easy or more fun or less stressful because we are working from within our talents instead of fighting against them.  It doesn't necessarily mean less work, just a different kind of work.

Part of this old cliche, "let go and let God," really seems to be about money.  If I believe in scarcity, then that is what I'll face.  If I believe in abundance, then that is what I'll see.  I've tried this on a small scale, being intentional about little things, trusting that everything will work out, and when I am really focused on that intentionality, life tends to appear very abundant indeed.

Julia Cameron has a different way of putting this, "Because art is born in expansion, in a belief in sufficiency of supply, it is critical that we pamper ourselves for the sense of abundance it brings to us." Pampering may take many different forms.  For me, there are a few things that make me feel really good, and they aren't even that extravagant:

A good cup of coffee

A good book

Pretty stationary, usually greeting cards

A meal from one of my favorite fast food places -- Pizza Scmizza or Burgerville or Baja Fresh

But I realized recently that even though these are little things, I don't always indulge.  I would really love to go to a coffee shop by myself and sit for an hour and just write.  So why don't I do that?  I have plenty of excuses -- many legitimate -- but I can't blame God or the Universe or whatever for holding me back when I don't take the first step myself.

And so the tasks this week are focused on allowing little luxuries and looking at abundance:

• Find five pretty or interesting rocks or flowers or leaves as a reminder that abundance is in nature.
• Bake something. (There is a nutmeg donut recipe I've been wanting to try!)
• Send notes -- postcards or the like -- to five friends.
• Reread the Basic Principles and the Artist's Prayer each day.
• Say "yes!" to freebies.
• Collect images that represent what you'd love doing in life.
• Change or clear something in the home environment.

This week is a busy week, full of more work assignments and school assignments and other pressing tasks than I care to admit.  But I am going to find the time to create a little luxury in life, let my artist breathe a bit, and reflect on life's abundance.

Dates and Monsters

This morning I was thinking about what I would do for my weekly Artist's Date and I came to one conclusion: I have no idea.

In 2008, when I first went through The Artist's Way (Okay, honesty time here: part of The Artist's Way. Go away, Guilt Monster, I don't need you here. I know I chose to stop part way through the book, and no, that does not mean that I'll do the same thing this time.),  I was faithful with morning pages but never gave myself a weekly Artist's Date. Truth be told, I didn't see that as a priority.  And if we look at the whole truth, I gave myself plenty of excuses for ignoring the portion of the book that says "these are mandatory, just like morning pages." 

My resistance to the notion of Artist's Dates this time around sounds very much the same. My Guilt Monster (my own Jewish version of the Critic) rears its (ugly?) head and tells me all sorts of reasons why I just cannot buckle down and give myself time for a date:

• I don't have time to devote 2-ish hours to myself for something this childish. Couldn't I be doing something more productive? (My response, Guilt Monster: Go Away. I am taking care of me. I deserve a couple hours for me. Everyone else can have all my other hours, but these are mine.)
• I have no idea what to do. Isn't that a waste? Shouldn't I have a plan??? (Stupid Guilt Monster! I don't have to always be planned! I could try to paint something, or write a bit of my novel. I could decorate a cake or cookies.  I could go for a long walk.  Or maybe, just maybe, if the Universe gave me the snow day that I want for Thursday and just the right amount of snow, I could make a snowman! Or a snow family!!)
• If my artist is a child, that means I have no idea what my artist wants to do or would find fun because I have no idea what it was like to be a child (although there have been numerous times in my life when I have been childish -- sorry, Honey). If I never was a child, then this is just another ridiculous exercise in futility, this attempt to nurture some sort of inner creative child. (Guilt Monster, I am warning you -- you're on thin ice today! I may not know what children like, but I know what I like and I'll just go with that and eventually my creative child will let me know. Hopefully it won't involve adding more furry animals to the house...I think my child likes animals.)

 So I think that I've come to the conclusion, after a bit of Monster-wrestling (I won't say dragon-slaying because my Guilt Monster is still very much here and he's a bit too comfortable in his lair to leave just yet), that I do not have to decide right now what to do on my date. I will know later this week, Thursday or Friday or Saturday.  I will wake up, write my morning pages, and look out my kitchen window. And if I am really quiet on that particular morning, I will hear the whisperings of the Universe speaking to me on behalf of my silenced creative child, and I will know.  Or perhaps I won't, and that will be the day that I take my child for a walk and we learn to talk together.

Week One: Sense of Safety

It is the first week of the year, and with that goes the first chapter in the first book of The Complete Artist's Way.  This chapter, entitled Week 1: Recovering a Sense of Safety is designed to begin one on the path of removing roadblocks to creativity.  I have my share of those roadblocks, like the feelings of exhaustion I get when thinking about certain tasks, even likable tasks (such as adding to the novel). Perhaps the roadblocks are the results of underlying fears, or maybe, at least in the case of the feelings of exhaustion, I really am just too tired. (Or, as my sister would say, Vitamin B deficient.)

One of the supportive elements that I have going for me is my wonderful Mr. B, aka "Honey."  At first I was a bit hesitant -- should I share about my personal goal for the year (working through this book) when it might seem or sound silly? But I took the plunge and was rewarded with enthusiasm and support. What a great way to start the year!

I am in the first week, I've written morning pages each day (although not necessarily in the morning), and I've started reading the first chapter of the first book.  All in all, not a bad start. What will tomorrow bring?