What Now?

Better living through chemistry?

So it turns out that what I did on my spring break, in addition to visiting my family and doing a ton of grading (and in fact I'm not quite done with the latter), is going on antidepressants.

I finally decided that my ongoing sadness no longer qualified as "winter blues" or "overwork" if I was spending hours crying for no clear reason on more than one sunny day over spring break. Plus there was the fact that I have been dreading not only the return to classes, but also this summer and next year; I mean, when one starts dreading both work and time off from work, there's not a whole lot left to feel good about.

I was on Lexapro once before, during that ghastly last year at St. Martyr's, and it was hard to tell definitively whether it made things better or not -- since, of course, I have no control group for my life -- but I did keep my head above water as things got worse and worse that year, and in the end I walked away from academia and moved several states away to start life over, all without having a lot of panic, so I guess that's something.

Anyway, D. -- who is a big believer in better living through chemistry -- has suggested more than once this past year that I talk with my doctor about antidepressants, and I have resisted every time, but when she suggested it again on Thursday, a day that I had spent mostly in tears, despairing about the future for no clear reason, I decided to listen. This was after I tried to improve my mood by getting some exercise ... and proceeded to cry for the duration of my half-hour jog. It was all pretty pathetic, and I finally decided that D. was right and that perhaps the time had come for some chemical intervention.

Now, what I probably should have done is to wait until my therapy appointment on Tuesday and discuss it with my therapist first. But the last time I started Lexapro, I felt terrible for the first couple of days, and I wanted to get that horrible feeling out of the way before I started back to school, especially since I'm chaperoning a weekend trip next weekend; so if I didn't start the drugs this weekend, it would really be two weeks before I could start if I wanted to do so without feeling horrible at school. So I went ahead and called my doctor Friday morning, and lo and behold they could squeeze me in that morning, which I took as a sign that I should charge ahead.

The doctor was very nice, especially when I started crying right there in her office -- kind of embarrassing, but I'm sure I'm not the first -- and we discussed the various options and decided to go with Lexapro, since I'd been on it once before and tolerated it fine with no real side effects (after those first miserable days, which apparently just go with the territory of starting an SSRI). So I started the drug on Friday afternoon and am now in my third day.

So far the only side effects are that I'm jittery and really tired, although the latter effect could also just be the result of having spent so much of Thursday crying. I'm taking just half a pill a day for the first week, which my doctor didn't have me do the last time and which seems to have really minimized the side effects this weekend. So maybe I could have waited and talked with my therapist first, but of course I didn't know that until I started taking the pills, so I'm not going to second-guess the timing. (I'm actually kind of nervous about telling my therapist, since I don't really know how she feels about medication, but that nervousness is probably all about my internalized sense of shame about taking medication -- illogical but still real.)

Speaking of second-guessing: Of course, right after I took the first pill on Friday, I actually felt more cheerful than I had in a few days and immediately worried that I had panicked too early and that if I'd just held on for a day or two longer, I'd have felt better anyway. But I've been doing that "just hold on" business for several months now, really going back to last summer, although it's gotten worse in the last few months. So I think I was just feeling better because I'd taken a definitive step to improve life.

So while I'm envious of my colleagues who took exciting trips over spring break and who will come back to school on Monday rejuvenated from their trips to Puerto Rico and Italy and elsewhere, I'm hoping that my spring break decision will ultimately wind up having just as therapeutic an effect on the rest of the year.

Keeping my shoulder to the wheel

I'm keeping panic at bay today, fretting about how much work I have to do this week. There's nothing to be done for it except to keep breathing, do one task at a time, keep making progress, and remain confident that everything will get done by the deadline.

Thus, a list:

• Grade 29 one-page mini-essays on Huckleberry Finn.  [Done]
• Grade 30 13 personal essays from my sophomores
• Grade 30 short creative writings on Act 2 of Othello [Done]
• Prep Act 3 of Othello [Done]
  
• update a software thingy for one of my non-teaching responsibilities [Done]
• Grade 28 in-class essays that my juniors are writing on Tuesday [here's where I broke down; something had to give, and I'll just have to wait to grade these until this weekend]
• Help lead a student leadership workshop on Monday evening [Canceled because of weather; hallelujah!]
• Prep a Huckleberry Finn discussion [Done]
• Finish revamping this year's version of my dangerous words research assignment [Done]
• Reread Chapter 1 of Randall Kennedy's Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word and prep for class conversation [Done]
• Write formal mid-year update letters home for all eight of my advisees, by Thursday at noon [Done for the five juniors, still have the three seniors' letters left to write]
• Department meeting on Monday, faculty meeting on Tuesday, faculty compensation committee meeting on Wednesday
• Literary magazine meeting and Friday night event
• Figure out remaining due dates, etc. in  juniors' syllabus/assignment sheet through the end of the term [did some work; more to do]

None of these is a big deal in and of itself; it's just the accumulation of them. But in fact it's very helpful to see them all listed out like this, and now I have things to cross off one at a time, which will help me stay calm.

Plus there's various "real life" tasks that must be dealt with, not least the fact that the door locks on my car door have been working less and less consistently, such that as of this weekend I'm keeping the car unlocked so that I don't get locked out of it altogether. D. is going to take the car to the shop tomorrow, so I don't even really have to deal with it, but it's still adding a dollop of stress.

So what am I doing right now, when I should be working? Um, watching the first episode of the PBS American Experience program on "The Abolitionists." I was eager for a break, and D. and I finally saw Lincoln last night (and found it as amazing as we'd heard), and I've got abolition on the brain.

The good news is that if I can get all of this done this week, next week should really be easier, and I should be able to get back to working on the FGS history book, which is relegated to the back burner this week.

The other thing that has totally been on the back burner is health and well being. This morning I said to myself, "Well, I'll just exercise and eat healthily next week; I don't have time for it this week." And then I heard myself saying that, and thought "good heavens, what does it say about me and my priorities if work always gets a higher priority than taking care of myself?!" So I promptly put on my coat and went out and walked for half an hour; it was very cold, but the sunshine was good for me, and I'm determined to at least do a little self-care each day in the midst of this otherwise hectic pace. 

A clean house miscellany

• I'm writing this in a house that is clean, CLEAN, CLEAN! So here's the new plan: D. and I have someone over for brunch once a month. Brunch because it's an easy meal that leaves one time to relax and chill out afterward. Once a month because that way we'd actually keep the house in fairly reasonable order. I cannot tell you the HOURS it took to get the house into its current clean state, mostly because I'd stopped cleaning at least two weeks before I went to South Africa. It was pretty grim. Here's a hint: I finally finished emptying my suitcase and got it down to the basement this morning ... almost four weeks after I got home from the trip. Yeah, it's been ugly. 

• Of course, when I say "the house is clean," I should admit that there is a box filled mostly with papers that need to be filed, papers that instead of filing I stuffed into a cardboard box and stuck under the desk. Now, over the past week I did actually go through the mounds and mounds of the paper that was taking over the living room, so all of these papers are legit and I didn't just throw all the junk into the house into a box. But I felt I should be honest in the midst of my clean-house gloating.

• Oh, and I should also acknowledge that, while I sit on the couch writing this, I'm eating tortilla chips and hummus. So it's entirely possible that the pristine house won't stay clean for all that long.

• But that's why I then need to have someone else over for brunch in May! A grad school friend used to say that "no one really vacuums except when someone's coming over"; whether or not that's true for everyone, it's certainly true for us, so clearly the only available option is having guests over regularly -- not frequently, mind you, since I'm increasingly introverted as I get older, but regularly.

• D. doesn't actually get any real joy out of a clean house -- that is, she's no happier in a clean house than a messy house, since she has this amazing ability to just not see mess at all, which is great for her mental health but terrible for the state of our house -- but she does enjoy socializing, and she knows that I'm a basketcase having people over unless the house is really clean, so I think having a social deadline means that, as happened this time, we'll actually work together to clean the house, which doesn't really happen otherwise. Not only that, we actually got inspired enough to clear off some cluttered surfaces and decoratively place knick-knacks on the now-dusted surfaces, so the living room and dining room are both prettier places than they were a couple of days ago.

• All of this is on my mind not only because I'm writing this post in a house that is, did I mention, clean!, but also because I've been reading an interesting post and comments on couples and chores over at Wandering Scientist (linked to by Nicole and Maggie, who are going to be doing their own post on the subject as well).

• And some day, when D. is out of school and we're out of debt -- which is to say, not any time soon -- we are so going to hire someone to clean the house every two weeks. I long for that day. In the meantime, the social-interaction-as-cleaning-motivation will have to work.

Fashion advice?

Okay, I'm turning -- not in desperation, not yet, but in hope -- to those of you who are better equipped to handle the difficult questions of female fashion. And that's pretty much all of you!

So here's the question, or rather a series of questions:

My usual attire is either blue jeans (preferred) or chinos (for work), but neither of those seems particularly good for traveling, since jeans are heavy and distinctly casual and chinos need ironing. So my thought for the South Africa trip (during which the weather during the day will be 70s, with cooler evenings) had been knit pants, since they'd be comfortable for the plane and for walking and would be easy to dress up for the couple of occasions that are slightly more formal. And if they're nice enough, maybe I could even add them to my teaching wardrobe, which would be a nice bonus.

So, first question: Do knit trousers seem like a good idea for the trip? I've never really worn them, but they seem like they would work. I'm talking about a looser sort of trousers, not anything like tights, heaven forbid!

Second question, of greatest importance: Er, how does one not have a visible underwear line when one wears knit trousers? Because I simply cannot run around South Africa -- or any other country, for that matter -- with the outline of my underwear showing. But the Lands' End knit trousers I tried on tonight were most egregious in this area; the pair that fit pretty well were beyond the pale in the underwear-showing arena, and the pair one size up that didn't show anything were way too baggy. So that option was a bust. Those of you more in the know: Is what I seek a possibility? Can one be simultaneously modest, comfy, and tidy?

If the answer to the second question is such that I can move forward with this idea, then do you all have any suggestions for brands, stores, etc. where I might look? Lands' End was a bust. L. L. Bean has "indispensible knit pants," which, like Ford's Model T's, come in any color you like, as long as it's black. There are also Travelsmith options, for which I think one pays a bit of a travel premium, but I'm okay with that as long as they work. Any other suggestions?

And if knit trousers seem like they won't work, any other suggestions?

Thank you for workshopping my clothing with me! This is what happens when one doesn't like shopping; these shopping-necessary moments throw one for a loop!

Recalibrating

A couple of weeks ago, I had a heart-to-heart with one of my AP Comp students, who barely pulled a B- last term and is off to a similar start in the winter term (or maybe worse, since the expectations have risen in the new term). She's a nice kid who is clearly doing all the reading and is working hard on her papers but just can't seem to find interesting things to say or, when she occasionally does, can't support it. At the moment, these seem to be insurmountable problems for her, and she's understandably feeling frustrated. When we talked, she said that she really was trying to think well about each assignment, but that whenever she seemed to have thought long and hard enough, it turned out that she still hadn't thought enough. I told her that the task before her was to recalibrate her thinking, to change her sense of how much thinking is enough. When she seemed to have done enough thinking about an essay assignment, she needed to think some more. She promised to attempt this recalibrating process.

Only a few hours after that discussion, I was having a frank conversation with a friend/colleague in which we wound up sharing our greatest anxieties, and I got really teary as I talked about feeling so paralyzed by the deep shame I feel about my terrible housekeeping that I hadn't had a friend over to the house in a couple of years. This is something that I'd really like to change in 2011 -- I want to be the kind of person who invites friends over, both for casual "hey, let's hang out" evenings and for dinners -- but the thought of letting someone see the way that D and I have been living lately is untenable, and the thought of changing things, of creating a clean house that would be a pleasure to me and to potential guests, is so overwhelming as to seem impossible to contemplate. I was really quite upset after the conversation. I mean, I do try to clean and straighten up, but it's just never enough.

Only later that night did I realize that I needed to take the advice I'd given my student: Recalibrate! If the amount of cleaning and straightening that I thought was enough wasn't doing the job, clearly I needed to recalibrate. And let's face it, learning to clean more is a heck of a lot easier than learning to think more! So maybe I had underestimated how much time "normal" people spent in cleaning, and I simply needed to increase the amount of cleaning that seemed like "enough."

I got a bit of a start on the recalibration process that weekend but promised myself that I'd really buckle down over winter break with bringing the house into order; once that's done, I can start figuring out how much cleaning is enough.

Today was the first day of winter break -- heavenly! glorious! -- and I did in fact tackle a cleaning task. Of course, the project as a whole is so huge as to be overwhelming, so I have told myself that all I have to do is to do one hour of work each day, and it can be on anything that I want as long as it's improving the order or cleanliness of our home. I tend to get wound up in the planning -- what should I do first? Oh, but I need to do step X before I can do step Y, and when am I going to do step G? -- so I'm intentionally sidestepping all of that and simply tackling whatever presents itself that I feel like doing.

So here's what I got done today: I ordered a new lid for our crockpot and cleaned off the top of the refrigerator, organizing all sorts of stuff in doing so; the top of the fridge had become a de facto dumping ground when we moved in three years ago, and it had pretty much stayed that way. Now, is either of these the task that has the biggest impact or that would most affect a guest's or our own comfort? Um, no. But it's what I was moved to do, and thinking too much about the jobs that I should do first paralyzes me. Besides, cleaning off the fridge was actually a big, messy job, and there was something very therapeutic about doing some serious scrubbing. And I do think that most of our housekeeping incompetencies are because we don't have "a place for everything," so there is something to be said for tackling these projects are about deciding where things belong.

So that's one of my end-of-the-year projects: recalibrating my own expectations for cleaning and taking a dose of my own medicine; if I can tell a student to change the way she thinks about something difficult, then I can darn well do the same myself.

The Great WN & D Get-Out-of-Debt Plan

Today D. and I had a Serious Conversation, one we'd been dreading for a while. It was on Finances, one of our least favorite topics, but it had to be done, and so we did it.

The problem is that D. and I have managed to accrue some debt in the last three years or so. Well, we bought a house, so of course we got ourselves all mortgaged up! But we've also gotten into some other debt, some of it for very good reasons -- especially borrowing money from my mom so that we could make some home improvements that have made the house more comfortable and energy-efficient -- and some of it for less good but still not entirely unavoidable reasons (such as the fact that we were living on only one salary for most of that time). The debt isn't out of control or anything, at least by what seem to be modern American standards, but any consumer debt is a bad idea, and we needed to tackle this problem.

And we really did keep meaning to do so, especially once D got a new job and our monthly financial situation eased tremendously. We took sporadic stabs over the summer, but something kept coming up; major repairs on each of our cars and the need to fix the roof leak kept using up each month's money that we'd planned to send to the credit cards. We actually had some money in our checking account that was earmarked to send to credit cards, but I was afraid to send it because we didn't really have any sense of a monthly budget and I was worried about losing those liquid assets in case we really did need them in the checking account after all. And we weren't actually sure how much we owed anyway, and it was all just so scary and discouraging to contemplate that we simply didn't contemplate it.

But there was a piece in the Oct. 11 issue of the New Yorker on procrastination, and although I was only mildly interested in the article itself, I did take seriously the information that many people are in worse financial situations than they would be otherwise if they could just stop procrastinating on filling out the paperwork to invest in their companies' 401Ks. That at least I have done, mostly because our HR person does it for us so that we just have to sign (I love her!), but we had definitely been dragging our feet on some basic financial steps. Clearly procrastination was costing us money each month, and we were going to have to think about money so that we could work toward our goal of not having to think about money.

So today was the day to have the conversation. Here's what helped: D and I each played to our own strengths and avoided the parts that we hate the most. So I spent two hours fiddling around with budgets and calculating debt and doing some basic math (and here's where I have to confess that I don't know how to use spreadsheets and so did our budget in a Word table and used a calculator to do the actual math -- but it looks pretty!), and it actually wasn't stressful once I made myself sit down and get started, and then D. got on the phone with the credit card companies (which is the sort of thing I dread) and transferred balances and negotiated interest rates and all the rest.

Here are the steps we took today that have now improved our financial situation:

• Of the money we had sitting in our checking account, I put $1,000 of it in our savings account to pay for a couple of house repairs needed this fall and to give us more of a liquid assets cushion.
• We sent the rest of the "extra" money in our checking account to the higher interest-rate credit card.
• We transferred the rest of the balance on that higher interest-rate credit card to another credit card for which we'd gotten a zero-percent interest rate for the next year; and after that year is up, it's still a significantly lower interest rate that on the original credit card. So now the consumer debt is consolidated -- much easier, and saving an incredible amount of interest each moth.
• I set up a monthly payment from our checking account to my mother to repay our loan at a faster pace than we'd been doing. We're paying her a crazy-low interest rate, but of course there's also the emotional interest (which has been entirely on my side, not hers, I should say), and I will feel much better to be sending her bigger checks each month. And once that debt is paid off, that money will go to the credit card debt.
• On the theory that one should pay oneself first: the budget that I drew up includes adding to our savings account and to retirement funds. I hope that this will keep me from fretting during my morning shower about whether we'll ever be able to retire (which, sadly, is often the sort of thing I think about as I'm waking up in the shower).
• Plus, we'll now be setting aside money each month so that we can have a proper vacation next year; I figure that we'll both feel much better about sticking to a budget when we know that there's a nice reward in it for us next summer, and I haven't actually had a vacation since 2007 -- I deserve one!
• I now know that all of the bits and bobs of extra money I make tutoring and proctoring SATs go straight to the credit card; no more letting them get lost in the checking account -- now I'll simply deposit the check and then immediately send that amount to the card. It's good to have a plan, and in some ways I'm a scrimper and saver enough so that I will actually take pleasure in the tutoring and proctoring. Actually, I totally love one of the girls I tutor, so it was already a pleasure just to hang out with her for an hour a week, but now I have a good destination for that money as well. The SATs don't pay well at all, but every bit helps when paying down a debt, and now that we're not paying any interest on the majority of the debt, those small checks should really add up. Tutoring, I'm embarrassed to say, pays ridiculously well; an hour of my time should really not be worth that much, but apparently the local market will bear the fee I'm charging (which is a standard fee for FGS tutoring). And it's all reducing our debt, which will make it easier to contemplate giving up two hours a week to tutor these two students.
• I'd been hoping not to teach summer school again, but a clear sense of our financial situation has shown me the wisdom of sucking it up and doing so again, at least for the next couple of years. But it's only three weeks a summer, and the director of the program has just approved a fun class that I proposed, so I'm hoping I can make the task of teaching in July less onerous for myself.
• This is also stewardship season at church, and I'd been avoiding filling out my pledge card because I really just didn't have any sense of how much money we actually had in a month. I've now made my pledge, and while I wish it were larger, I think it's a fine amount of money that is both more than I was giving up until now, before I became a member, and is still responsible given our get-out-of-debt goals.
• D. and I are going to try to set about the lifestyle change of avoiding using our credit cards whenever possible. Not that we go crazy with them or anything -- neither of us has a shopping problem -- but we use them for gas and groceries and everything else. I think using a debit card or cash instead will make us more aware of how our expenditures are fitting our budget. Much of that budget was guess-timation, since I don't really know how much we spend on groceries or gas or cat food, so we'll have to do some revisiting and tweaking in the next couple of months, and I think avoiding credit cards will help us do that tweaking.
• If all goes according to plan, we'll be out of debt (other than mortgage and D's student loan) by the end of 2012. And the "according to plan" has A LOT of wiggle room in it, since of course I know that there are always unexpected expenditures and things going wrong. I think that we've now got a reasonable goal and one that won't make us feel like we're scrimping in the meantime. (I budgeted in pizzas and restaurant meals and books for our Kindles and other treats so that we don't feel like we're being punished in the meantime.)

So the bottom line is: Big sighs of relief on the credit card front! and on the domestic budget front! and on the planning-for-retirement front!

This was hardly the most fun I've ever had on a Saturday afternoon, but it wasn't actually terrible, and I'm hoping that we will reap the rewards of the Great WN & D Get-Out-of-Debt Plan for some time to come.

Trying to suck less

August hasn't been all adventures, of course. I've also been trying to be a responsible adult and get projects done around the house -- much less fun than the adventures!

A year and a half ago, a colleague and I came up with a very helpful mantra: "Suck less." It arose from a serious case of January sluggishness in which we were having trouble motivating ourselves to do anything at all. So we decided to set the bar really low: We didn't have to stop sucking; we just had to suck a little less. It's been a great mantra, one that we still remind ourselves of pretty frequently and that always lights a wee bit of a fire under me to take care of pesky tasks that I'd rather avoid. And since I tend to spiral pretty quickly into the realm in which I'm convinced that I am the suckiest person ever, this is an especially good mantra for me.

I've mostly used this mantra for professional rather than personal stuff. But last week, as I was languishing on the couch in a fit of "how much do I suck? let me count the ways," I decided I needed to resurrect the "suck less" mantra, haul myself off of the couch, and start getting something done. For the last week, I've mostly been alternating between having fun adventures and trying to suck less. (I initially wrote "try to be a less sucky person," but I'm trying to make this about my actions rather than my identity.)

I haven't yet managed to finish anything, I'm afraid, but I have at last tackled several projects that had been stuck on the "to do" list with no progress being made. I've unpacked several boxes from the basement that had been stacked up since we ran out of energy during our move two years ago; I've done some hard manual labor in the back yard and have more to do tomorrow; I've emptied out the two-drawer filing cabinet in which we had simply piled rather than filed papers, and started sorting through the papers and creating organized files; I took the car into the automechanic for some needed work. All of these projects are at the half-way point and won't be finished before I head out of town Thursday morning for a quick end-of-summer visit to my family; even taking the car into the shop turned out to be more complicated, as seems to be the way of all projects I tackle. But my goal is to have everything far enough along that I'll be able to finish them before the faculty week o' meetings begins two weeks from today.

I'd like to start the new school year on a less sucky note, feeling -- at least temporarily -- like a competent adult who's taken care of real-life projects. And then what a relief it will be to tackle school projects, which are so much more in my realm of competence!

Odd Hospitality Priorities

I'm managing to carry on with the weekend's relaxation while also, at long last, managing a little productivity. I have decided that, after I teach each morning, all I have to do is get a couple of things done in the rest of the day, and otherwise I can loll about to my heart's content. The things I'm accomplishing are a little on the random side -- repainting a window sill, touching up some grout, throwing some mulch in a bare spot of the garden -- activities determined solely by whatever task is flitting through my mind when I'm in the mood to get something done, but it's a "system" that's working for me at the moment.

However, I have an overnight guest coming on Saturday -- my college roommate, who is passing through this way -- and the house is an embarrassment, so this afternoon I finally made a "to do" list of things to accomplish, with priorities for this week and then for next, after her visit. The goal is to convince her that I live in decency rather than sloth -- a tall order, quite frankly.

But enough of the "flitting about" style is still with me that the one and only thing I have managed to accomplish on this list is finally clearing out the ashes from the fireplace -- and yes, I chose one of the hottest days of the summer to clean up after this winter's fires. This was on the "to do next week" list, and I'm sure that my friend is far more interested in having a relatively pleasant living room awaiting her than in inspecting the fireplace (the glass doors of which will be closed anyway). But I was suddenly kind of in the mood to do it -- having clearly not been in the mood to do so for the past couple of months -- so I went with that impulse and found it quite satisfying, even if the rest of the living room is still a dump.

But, um, I may want to rethink my hospitality priorities in the next couple of days!

Oh, and apropos of all of this, Jackie of A Patchwork Life today pointed her readers to the blog Hyperbole and a Half, which I hadn't known and am looking forward to reading, and one recent piece on "This Is Why I'll Never Be an Adult" seems especially relevant to my inept housecleaning! "I did three things yesterday. Now I'm supposed to keep doing things? It's like the things never end!"

2010 resolutions -- one month in

So here we are, one month into 2010, so I thought I'd report on my goal of "reaching out in 2010."

The first way I meant this goal was about reconnecting with old friends and making new ones. And the specific benchmark I decided on was going out or getting together with folks socially once a month. And this January I actually went out twice! The first time was a colleague's birthday party, and then last weekend I had a blind date of sorts, getting together with a friend of a mutual friend, who sent us both an email earlier this month saying "hey, it just occurred to me that the two of you both live in Adventure City and might like each other!" I have to say that, in both cases, the social experience was just meh, but I'm not going to let me put that off of socializing in general. But I will say that it's increasingly clear to me that I get most of my day-to-day social needs taken care of at school, so I'm really only socially restless during the summers. No, the bigger issue is the need to maintain and care for deeper friendships, those few people whom one can tell one's gravest worries and call when everything is crashing around one. Not that things are crashing around me at the moment, I hasten to add, but if they did I would really be largely bereft, and that worries me. So the reaching out goal certainly continues.

The second way I meant this goal was about sharing my relative largesse, both because it's the right thing to do and because it will help me remember that what I have is indeed largesse. This goal is in many ways much easier to accomplish, and in January the disaster in Haiti made giving priorities clear, plus I had promised my alma mater a little dosh. It's still not an orderly and consistent set of charitable values, but it's a step in the right direction.

Now, back to goal #1, the reaching out to friends: I figured that two reasons I had been becoming less and less social in recent years were basic lack of energy and my embarrassing housekeeping, so I decided to keep myself honest on both of these points in hopes that improvement in these areas would lead to improvement in reaching out in general. And since you know I love a gold star, I have gone the stickers-in-a-calendar route, and it's working beautifully so far! I found a retro Barbie pocket calendar that tickled my fancy, and I get a shiny star sticker whenever I exercise for half an hour (trying to build energy), a little dog sticker whenever I spend at least 15 minutes on housework (washing dishes and doing laundry don't count, since those are the two things I was already doing anyway), and a smiley face sticker whenever I do financial housekeeping (paying bills, etc. -- the goal here is basic lessening of the underlying anxiety that I carry around all the time). Here's January. Not too bad, eh? It's interesting to see patterns emerge; the blank days are almost all Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, which make sense given my school schedule. It helps to be aware of such schedules since, for example, it pushes me to exercise on Wednesday, knowing that I probably won't take the time to do so again until Saturday. And, although the living room is currently a mess, I actually have been doing more straightening and cleaning around the house, knowing that I'll get a little puppy dog sticker if I do so. There's a part of me that feels like a little kid getting a reward for not wetting the bed, but hey, apparently what's sauce for the 6-year-old is sauce for the 42-year-old!

February begins in three hours, and I guess I turn over a new page then and start fresh. This is motivating me to call a friend who, like me, is apt to crawl into a hole and not stay connected with friends; given that we share this characteristic, we have a really hard time getting together, but darn it, I need a February date to keep my resolution, so I'll let that commitment fuel my social outreach.
 

Summer of Health

Okay, I have all of these final exams to grade, which means of course that I'm in major procrastination mode. So here's one of my major summer projects: I'm proclaiming this the WN Summer of Health!

Here's the hope/plan/thought --

• Physical health: My eating spiraled out of control last October (the Halloween candy was not my friend!) and never came back under control, and my exercise habit has petered to a complete zero such that even my used-to-be-standard half-hour walks are no more. I don't want to be old before my time, which means that I need to start prioritizing my health. Unfortunately, this is much more of a goal that I think I should have than one to which I'm deeply committed, which worries me a little about its outcome.
• Mental health: I had a first appointment with a new therapist today; I'm calling him the Avuncular Dr. D., and I think it has a pretty good chance of working out. We shall see.
• Spiritual health: God and I need to get square, and I'm thinking this is the summer to start doing my part. I'm back to combing Adventure City to find a parish, and I'm also thinking of finding a spiritual director.
• Financial health: After last week's money meltdown, I decided that I need to get my act together and find an investment counselor (or whatever they call themselves) and that this was the summer to make that happen. I've also taken on a course overload in the fall (to cover a colleague's maternity leave), which is going to be absolutely exhausting but will bring in a nice chunk o' change, and I'll be making some extra cash this summer thanks to various irons I have in the fire. Plus D and I have a meeting tomorrow morning to do the paperwork for refinancing our mortgage to take advantage of the even lower interest rates right now. So this seems like a good time to do some long-term planning and put some systems into place so that I don't feel so anxious about money so much of the time. I know that financial health may seem out of place with physical, mental, and spiritual health, but I see the former as reducing my stress levels so that I have more energy for the latter three elements.

So that's the summer ahead. I have a clearer path for the mental and financial health components and feel fairly unmotivated about the physical health goal and sort of so-so about the spiritual health piece of this. There will be further reports as I start pursuing each of these.

There's one other summer goal, but writing about that will have have to wait until later this week, because the next order of business is to tackle those blue books. Summer can't start until grades and comments are posted.