July Already??
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Daily Eruptions
Apparently May and June are black hole months for me at work. In 2005 and 2006, both of those months just got completely swallowed up in tech issues and small details and I feel like I went to bed at the end of April and woke up in July. I can hardly remember the events of the past two months. Part of it is that in both my professional and personal lives a great deal of the work was internal, so there's very little "evidence" of change or growth or progress of any kind.

Luckily, I survived and have managed finally to set up both new computers in both of my offices at work. I still have to figure out how I'm going to update each of them on a weekly basis without their being networked and I have to find a printer/scanner for the studio, but those issues feel like small potatoes after the struggles I had just to get the machines up and running. I don't know what it is about me and PCs. My Apples and I have always gotten along great, but PCs are simply not intuitive for me. James says I have a lack of knowledge and familiarity with PCs because of my job path, and I'm sure he's right. If I had gone straight into the business world, rather than playing around in the nonprofit world for so long, I would have gained PC experience and expertise much more quickly. I considered buying two new Macs to work on at Sudie's, but her tech guy knows nothing about Macs and I want her to have support on her technology for the life of the computers, regardless of whether I am here or not, so I decided to go with her tech guy's recommendations. The computers are faster and much cooler than the old, clunky laptop I've been working on for the last year and a half, so I think I'll be happy once I get used to the new machines.

As for my personal life: I started the first steps of a lifestyle management program I'm hoping will help with the ADHD, including a moderate dose of a medication from which I am seeing only the subtlest of results. Hans and I had a major eruption in our marriage that, while extremely scary at the time, seems to have gone a long way toward smoothing things out for our future. I did a face plant and sprained my right ankle in a big way while I was out "celebrating" the solstice last month by running a wooded trail I had never been on before. I'm learning that medication won't prioritize my to-do list for me or even help me make sure I'm working on priority tasks once I've categorized them - translation: medication is not discipline in pill form. I'm learning that I need to make a plan for reevaluating my strategies every time I adopt a new strategy so that I don't find myself reevaluating only a few days after adoption and too soon for me to see any results. I'm learning that I need to set aside time every day with a clearly defined start and end in which I can obsess and worry and second-guess - and then I need to get on with my day and follow through on whatever schedule or plan I have created. I'm learning that my time really is my own but that it is finite and I have to impose limits, whether I like it or not, on what I attempt to accomplish if I want to see results. (Although, my most recent One Spirit catalog listed a book about how to do everything you want...Refuse to Choose! by Barbara Sher, but, as a perfectionist and a procrastinator who already thinks she can do more than she really can, I'm a little too scared to read that right now.) Most surprising, I'm learning that I still have a lot of work to do to learn to trust myself. I seriously thought I'd tackled that issue already. Wasn't that what college and the early nineties were all about? Academic probation and suicidal impulses and therapy and losing Ken (and Marc, and John, and Aaron's friendship) and learning to be without a boyfriend and surviving PIRG and surviving weekly critique workshops in a master's writing program in Los Angeles and awful, awful, sexist, ageist Ned at ACMG in Seattle - weren't all of those experiences designed to teach me to trust myself? Can't I be done with that lesson now? Maybe all of those were successful lessons and I did learn to trust myself then, but have somehow forgotten everything I learned in the years since? I knew how to trust myself for six weeks in 1998 when I was on a cross-country bike trip, but, psychologically, I crashed immediately after and maybe I still haven't recovered. Distressing, but what is there to do except face it, and get going?