New glasses

These are mostly exciting because my last pair of glasses had become annoying.



I like them though. The old, annoying ones have (between this sentence and the last!) been donated to VSP for their charity efforts in other parts of the world. That's right -- go far far away, you stupid frames that were so pretty at first and got misaligned and chipped so quickly.

Blue Africa by Denise Levertov

As they roam over grassland
the elephants cast
a blue river of shadows.
Their ears flap as they listen.

One evening, caught
in icy wind,
the traffic snarling,
I saw for one moment
their fluent stride, and heard
a quiet in Africa,
hum without menace.
They listened to sunlight,
and flowed
onward, unhurried.
                  Remember,
they are there
              now.
Each in turn
enters the river of blue.

Sustainability vs day-to-day living, sanity vs Zillian

I wonder all the time how long I can sustain my current job. In all this time, including the last few quarters of exceeding expectations and happy happy joy joy, I've always felt like a tiny flea on the side of a large animal. One twitch in the wrong direction (and this large animal is twitching all the time -- in fact, it's galloping) could send me flying off, with a little flea scream, to land winded and somewhat relieved on the roadside.

I had planned to do a long post about this, how I freaked out and cried about it last weekend, etc, but find I don't have much coherent to say about Zillian anymore. I learned a whole lot this week about the very attractive possibility of working four days a week, which is something I think is a long-term lifestyle goal, but might not actually help with sanity in this case. After all, a lot of what bugs me is how much things change all the time, and if I were working fewer hours I'd be spending proportionally more of them on the required catching up. It also sounds fairly politically difficult to get permission for -- it's seen as a really big change.

I read some more about living life one day at a time, something the Dale Carnegie course is also pretty big on.

Only for today, I will have no fears.... Indeed, for 12 hours I can certainly do what might cause me consternation were I to believe I had to do it all my life.

Indeed! Very pretty. But I also worry that getting through life one day at a time is a recipe for drudgery, and encourages people to live at the very outer limits of what they can withstand. I worry about sustainability.

I've still got some ideas. Maybe putting in extra time -- educational time that would pay itself back in actual expertise -- is a way to feel more comfortable. Maybe staying technically full-time but working less, maybe all the way down to 40 hours a week, is eventually possible, though maybe not at my current level. Or maybe I should look to work for more of life's meaning and satisfaction, go further in, instead of trying to back away to find an unattainable "balance".

Maybe stumbling forward as I have been, working gamely along in the expected directions and freaking out every few months, is in fact as good as it's going to get, and I'm just not wise enough to realize it? Ugh.

Sanity 0, Zillian 1.