Sitting on the floor in my closet. Listening to Zemfira while going over the contents of a box of my diaries.


My style of those days is nothing like blogging, - more epistolar, vague, overfilled with details... I hardly remember myself across these pages and I  absolutely do not recognize my way of reflecting and interpreting, can't tell why certain things mattered more than others.


To do me justice though, I had no control over any major events in my life back then, no resources and could hardly take care of myself.


Once a survivor, you'll get an immunization for the rest of your life. Enough motivation to stay away from the swamp, enough of anger, strength, imprudence, hunger.


I just need to keep it all together and to keep moving, and to keep working, and all the resources and opportunities will follow. Just need to solve the puzzle in my mind first and the rest will fall into place.

For years I've seen myself as quite athletic and strong - for a woman. Not necessarily the biggest and strongest person in an average room, but for 5'7" and 128-130lbs - definitely never a Thumbelina :)   And since I recovered from shin splint - I would run on a treadmill like a gazelle rushing to vanish on African horizon (if only 5K separated the said gazelle from the horizon), and believed I was in a good shape overall.

Ha.

The moment I step into Dojang I feel… small. Much smaller than the few adults in our class, somewhat closer to the teens. Shorter. Skinny in my dobok. Partially wooden and slow - but this can be at least explained that I’m still a beginner in the class of black belts (literally).
But how can I explain that even my voice seems to become thinner? I try to be loud - and no sound loud enough comes out. I yell - and unlike any other woman I’ve met in the class I sound like a teen :)

My world slowly continues to turn upside down…

Got my white belt.

A beginner's achievement, but still feels like an achievement. Especially since I passed the test 2 days after having another vein treatment, being completely distracted by news on my license application and changes in firm staffing, hungry and exhausted after 1.5 hour drive in traffic.


I guess if not by New Year, then - by my birthday I should get Yellow belt to avoid Tax season.

An elementary Math problem: The mail with my 1st Bachelor's diploma shows its status as "delivered" as of October 5th.  Today's date is October 26th. The International Evaluation department of the Licensing Association I'm working with are claiming they are still processing mail delivered on October 1st. As of Friday last week - they were processing mail delivered on September 28th. I started evaluation application process in July.
Question: will I get my license in hand before I retire?




In good news: Taekwondo lessons are great. That exact feeling that you're at your place despite not knowing what you're doing and even doing... n'importe quoi. A little crazy to follow the instruction in 2 languages: given I've already picked up - purely by listening - some Slovenian and Latin, trying to repeat Korean makes me forget what planet I am on. But hey - as soon as I realized I will be training in a studio that's part of World Taekwondo Federation - or WTF, which is a very precise summary of my life - I knew I was at the right place.


Looks like the vein treatment went well, and if it did indeed - I may have to put off another surgery for now.


Another dozen of Shakespeare works left. I'm of course, a lucky witch, whose Bookworm-ing goal fell for exactly the time when my commute to and from work takes about 2 hours every day. A once-in a lifetime opportunity, if you're a looking at going through dozens of serious and sophisticated works that require you to understand the subjects and conflicts raised, appreciate the language and to get fully submerged into the literature style.

Friday night, around 9.15pm. Putting Arthur to bed.

- Mom, we forgot our Human Body outside! We need to bring it in!
- ???
- Mom, we left our HUMAN BODY at the lawn! Outside! Somebody may take it!
- Erm… Uh… What?! What body?!
- The HUMAN BODY we put at the lawn today!!!
- Sunshine… it’s not a Human Body, just a skeleton. It’s for Halloween. It’s supposed to stay there for now.
- Yeah! So when a bad person comes to our house, he sees the HUMAN BODY, gets scared and runs away!
- Yep. That’ll work too.

I seriously can’t wait for Arthur’s English vocabulary to catch up. Can’t wait for him to start sharing his wisdom with kids and teachers at Kindergarten:

- Um… Arthur was telling me you put a HUMAN BODY at the lawn by your house?... To scare away bad people?...
- Yeah, our home security provider raised our fee again, so we just thought: oh, screw this!...

Passionarity then, huh? :)

"... the ability for and urge towards changing the environment, both social and natural, or, physically speaking, towards the disturbance of inertia of the aggregative state of an environment"
http://creativity.netslova.ru/Passionarity.html


A politically correct synonym for the yet another Russian "awe up in the ass".

After a long week...

Doing 3K on elliptical, full speed and high resistance. Sweating like nobody's business, going backwards to catch breath on the peak of the "hill" and finishing up Coursera course. Predictably, nearly all theories on self growth, success - subjective success and achievement revolve around the idea of constant improvement, focus and adapting way of life to the vision of ideal future. A well formed and expressed idea of the course though was that "success" in modern terms of way of life refers more to a "well balanced" life than to the life where just one part of it is taken to the extreme. That's extremely close to my definition of a  successful life, and the way I try to arrange mine.

In such thoughts worked my abs, biceps, hips. Came home winded up, cleaned the kitchen.
Wrote 3 thesis for the article on fear.
Looked through my goals for the week, realized I never made an attempt to draw an elk this year, and it's  already October. Put on an elk drawing online lesson, took a pen and legal pad, drew an elk:

Saw that I never opened the DALF study book, took it, opened it, put on the CD, listened to the comprehension text. To my great shock, understood the text was about an ex-IT guy who was not fulfilled with his job, so he quit and became a carpenter and is much happier with his job and workplace environment now.

Realized I'm behind on Shakespeare. Downloaded all remaining works according to my list from Librivox and put a note in agenda to buy blank CD-RWs.

Saw that I never went back to Taekwondo this year. Put a note to the upcoming week - to call the Taekwondo studio next to our King Soopers and inquire about schedule and membership fees.

Had some wine, but was still too wind up to go to bed. Cleaned the bathroom and closet. Cleaned the shelves in the bedroom. Ordered kids' poem books in the library.

Wrote a page-long list of stuff to do for the coming weekend.

Two shoe boxes full of my diaries have been stashed in a secure place for months.

For months I have had no time to get back to the contents of the box, glimpse through the diaries, see once meaningful little things from friends and lovers, finally go through the piles of the paper, pictures and cards and see what's all that was about. I anticipated some feeling of nostalgia of the kind of girl I used to be, I thought the memoirs of the days, of all the problems I had would be "cute and sweet", and how I would feel disappointment - yet again - for wasting time in my adolescence and childhood, and not being able to stand up for myself. And then - since past is not going anywhere anyway, there're no rush in getting my hands on the archive, right?


Expectation vs Reality.


I could not make my way through 3 note pads of diaries. Some of those events would come back to me other than from my diaries, but in hindsight - it was one big endless groundhog day, which I'm trying to dilute with escaping to books and my own world as much as possible. There were occasional trips to very nice places, but they still left me feeling like inside of a fish tank: you're in a wonderful place, but fully dependent on family's agenda, mood swings and perception of comme il faut behavior. Except, perhaps, two trips to summer camp where if I saw an opportunity within hand reach - I could actually grab it.
 Hundreds of pages - probably -  talking in very details, although never directly,  about dead ends, solitude, sickness, sadness, rejection, lack of support, lack of direction in life.

Needless to say that brought up no nostalgia and no sweet feelings of younger self. It definitely raised some immediate anger, frustration and intention to push forward harder now, to use all the resources I have and to make sure I do not waste a day. Since I have already lost so many of them in first 16 years of my life, and you never know, in what... Afganistan I could be born in my next life :)

Bang your head at the wall.
Sigh.
Sip tea.
Realize works tends to come your way and build up faster than you can do it. And the thoughts about current day and week, and about everything it would be nice to do - tend to build up and run ahead of you even faster.
Bang your head at the wall.
Feel - probably caused by all this rush - some thoughts in your head. Some about work. Some about... your other job. Some - about volunteering. Some thoughts - rhyming. Until it becomes completely unclear what you need to do now, and in what order. And if you need to write down your thoughts and ideas now - not to forget them later - which one do you begin with?
Print out your completed project. But you'd rather go running instead.
Bang your head at the wall.

I love Colorado summer - nearly 6 months of good weather stretched from mid-Spring to mid-Fall. On the other hand it's quite misleading: you live in a day with green grass and leaves not yet turning for weeks, and weeks and weeks until you realize it's actually mid-September. And a little over 3 months until 2017 is over. And there's so much to do, and nothing is completed: the evaluation team is not poked hard enough, 990s are not learned quickly enough (if they can be learned at all), pictures are not draws, Shakespeare's works are still not read. And don't be fooled - it's already September...

Suddenly.

I know what I will be doing next summer.
And what I'll do to get there.
And a specific way to arrange my life around it, and what to ask in the first place, and how to play the potential benefits.


Seems that any time it looks like there can be no less time or energy whatsoever to fit in anything else in my day - the Universe casually gives me a hint on how to put together all pieces of puzzle.
Thanks, Universe. I'm on it. B-)

Someone - I think it was Brian Tracy - once said that the number of potential errors in a process is the square of the number of people that are involved in it, moving from one step to another.


If that's just me - I can make 1 error. If I involve 2 more people - I create room for 4 more potential errors. That's true and proven on a daily basis :)


Right now though I feel like apart from creating an exponential growth of errors, every party I deal with is rolling time backwards so I'm held back on the same point for days: from figuring out a process by trial and error on my own to escalating a month (!) delay in evaluation.
Does it really take half-a dozen calls to coordinate something as simple as a ceiling light installation of window replacement?
How can you possibly spend a month searching for 1 envelope, when it only takes 36 hours to locate it AND go through the contents - but after an escalation?
How can you find 1 document out of 3 in an envelope - and keep saying the other 2 pages were not there?
Wouldn't it be quicker and easier - on everyone - to include some instructions and hints for a new task? No, personal remarks and conflicting messages are not professional instructions.
Do I absolutely have to follow up on every thing I request?
I'm already doing plenty of volunteer work of my own choice. Where did you get my phone number?


So, every time I start thinking about MBA or PhD studies, and international work, a house remodeling project, a surgical procedure  - I can't help thinking what mayhem it will create tying to get though bureaucracy of registrars', collecting all necessary documents, organizing and coordinating people in different time zones and of different cultures, following up on every step of a project every day and running around trying to fit in calls and meeting people live into my already insane schedule, wasting hours bein on hold with hospitals and insurance companies and then trying to understand the bullshit basis of accounting they use on the bills and claims.
No thanks - not until I work close to home, and have a second independent and reliable source of income.


Arthur just said the other day he needs one Mom for himself, one for Adrian and one - to do the cooking. I'm already embodying all these 3 "selves" (and many more), but the idea or a virtual PA sounds more and more appealing now.

I have slept for 7 hours for four days in a row and now my mind is playing tricks on me

and generates most random dreams, the first dreams in weeks, maybe months.

Why would my subconscious mind show me a person I haven't seen in over a decade, and in circumstances that are not true to life and never were, with dialogues and intentions that are not realistic? In any case, looks like my mind is recovering so I  would just let it do its thing.

Nevertheless I found the last online dialog I had with this person a year ago, read it and then read into it again, and then I realized how pushy I might seem sometimes with my style of communication, with how many details I provide , and how my descriptions sound like one flow of thoughts. And how unusual, overwhelming and challenging this might be true a the other party who do not describe the past few years of their life with neither much excitement nor bigger vocabulary than social protocol prescribes.

Burnt at a baseball game.

But had such a great time and stayed focused with new potential co-workers I also had no clue what was going on the field.


Walking back to the office from light rail station, all hot, red, sweaty, exhausted and content with the day - I realized that all the 3-4 baseball games I have been to - were all networking events. That is, I've never been to a baseball game just for the sake of it, but only as part of networking - yep, a great example of great modern culture, - and never had a chance to actually though roughly see and comprehend the game.




Note to self: switch to tennis games as for business and networking. Then learn to play golf and switch to golf :)
Note #2: if your firm's partner tells you you can wear shorts to the office due to baseball game trip - he might actually mean it.

Every time I finish mopping the floor, take the posture of homo erectus again and wait until my face gains my normal colour back and my hands stop burning (oh, who am I kidding?! I never just "wait" for anything, I go on with the next thing to do on my list) - I tell myself enough is enough and I need to arrange for cleaning services to help if not every other week, then at least once a month.


But then I go and shoot an email to a handgun training facility to see their classes availability, and check updated schedule for Arthur's swimming and MMA classes he will start this fall, and well - since I'm on it anyway, check for Taekwondo adult classes for myself, and jot down a memo to buy a couple of presents and a gift card for the upcoming parties.
And finally, I circle back to the reflection that while eventful life happens in my house at an intense speed - housekeeping needs to be pushed back. Just for a little longer.