And The Worst Part Is, Before It Gets Any Better, We're Headed For A Cliff, And In The Free Fall, I Will Realize I'm Better Off, When I Hit The Bottom
--"Turn It Off", Paramore
I've been having trouble sleeping recently. Without the threat of having to wake up for work, my body has naturally acclimated to its previous rhythms of staying up all night reading, writing, and watching. There were some days during the last seven days where I've literally gone to bed at nine in the morning. This wasn't nine in the morning where I stayed out all night with friends or actually did anything of import. This was nine in the morning where all I did was read about eight chapters from a book, watch some television, and otherwise surf the internet.
It's not healthy.
As my cousins and friends say all I'm doing is getting myself into bad habits which are going to have to be broken when I find a new job. In the meanwhile, all it's accomplishing is getting me to a point where I'm wasting daylight. I wake up at noon or later--sometimes all the way to two or three in the afternoon--and I get down on myself for wasting so much of my morning. It's not like I want to work. I mean--who does? Part of me is glad to have the time to catch up on the rest. There were days where it seemed like all I was getting was four or five hours of sleep for months at a time. Part of me is glad to have the refresher course into remembering what it's like to sleep for a full eight hours. But I know I should be concentrating on sleeping at a decent hour AND getting a decent amount of sleep. They're not mutually exclusive, I know that. I've just always had that superstition that I do my best thinking after the rest of the world is asleep and I guess being unemployed has made me reflect more and more on this mantra.
I've been watching this show Life Unexpected (which I'm hoping will replace Everwood as my family values fix) and the episode today centered around the idea that it's possible to move on your life without sacrificing all that came before it. Basically, it was one of the episodes where everyone is getting adjusted to the new living circumstances, misunderstandings are resolved, and everyone learns a huge lesson in how much adjusting is acceptable and how much is going too far. During the course of watching this I started thinking people can make these big changes to one aspect of their lives without upsetting the whole apple cart, so to speak.
That's my problem as the way I see it right now. It's like the last five years of having a serious career-minded job hasn't meant anything to me. I've basically been trying to recapture the days of when I was terribly unemployed before. In those days read, write, and watch were basically all I did too. I wouldn't sleep till I saw the sun come up and I wouldn't wake up until it was almost about to set. If it wasn't for looking for jobs here and there, and going on interviews, I would have considered myself massively lazy. As it was, even I thought I was wasting some of the best years of my life. I mean--it's not like I had a lot of unemployed friends to hang out with in the wee hours of the morning. And the friends I did have always wanted me to come out when I was just barely getting ready for the day. There I was, with the power to adjust my schedule to take advantage of all the free time in the world. What do I do? I purposely arranged it so that no one else was active when I was at my most active.
That's no way to live.
Just because I've had a setback in my life doesn't mean I can't put to good use all the lessons I've learned from having a steady job these last couple of years. The waking up at eight in the morning wasn't all that hard. The getting into and staying in a work mindset for six to seven hours a day isn't a ridiculous request.
Yes, I have the time to slack off. That doesn't mean I should have the inclination to do just that. I should endeavor to stay in work mode even if I don't actually have a job at the moment. There's plenty of tasks that could be accomplished in the hours I've been whiling away. I could work doubly hard at my novel. I could send out more resumes, look for more and jobs, and other stuff job-related. I could visit my friends more, eat out more when they're actually up and about rather than expect them to stay up during the week just for me.
Being let go is a huge change in my life, but it doesn't mean letting myself go entirely. I don't have to let a little stumble mean falling all the way back down the ladder again. There is such a thing as holding to a middle ground of doing all the things I wanted to do but never had the time for and doing all the things that made me into a more responsible and more composed individual all these last few years.
Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers
I've been having trouble sleeping recently. Without the threat of having to wake up for work, my body has naturally acclimated to its previous rhythms of staying up all night reading, writing, and watching. There were some days during the last seven days where I've literally gone to bed at nine in the morning. This wasn't nine in the morning where I stayed out all night with friends or actually did anything of import. This was nine in the morning where all I did was read about eight chapters from a book, watch some television, and otherwise surf the internet.It's not healthy.
As my cousins and friends say all I'm doing is getting myself into bad habits which are going to have to be broken when I find a new job. In the meanwhile, all it's accomplishing is getting me to a point where I'm wasting daylight. I wake up at noon or later--sometimes all the way to two or three in the afternoon--and I get down on myself for wasting so much of my morning. It's not like I want to work. I mean--who does? Part of me is glad to have the time to catch up on the rest. There were days where it seemed like all I was getting was four or five hours of sleep for months at a time. Part of me is glad to have the refresher course into remembering what it's like to sleep for a full eight hours. But I know I should be concentrating on sleeping at a decent hour AND getting a decent amount of sleep. They're not mutually exclusive, I know that. I've just always had that superstition that I do my best thinking after the rest of the world is asleep and I guess being unemployed has made me reflect more and more on this mantra.
I've been watching this show Life Unexpected (which I'm hoping will replace Everwood as my family values fix) and the episode today centered around the idea that it's possible to move on your life without sacrificing all that came before it. Basically, it was one of the episodes where everyone is getting adjusted to the new living circumstances, misunderstandings are resolved, and everyone learns a huge lesson in how much adjusting is acceptable and how much is going too far. During the course of watching this I started thinking people can make these big changes to one aspect of their lives without upsetting the whole apple cart, so to speak.
That's my problem as the way I see it right now. It's like the last five years of having a serious career-minded job hasn't meant anything to me. I've basically been trying to recapture the days of when I was terribly unemployed before. In those days read, write, and watch were basically all I did too. I wouldn't sleep till I saw the sun come up and I wouldn't wake up until it was almost about to set. If it wasn't for looking for jobs here and there, and going on interviews, I would have considered myself massively lazy. As it was, even I thought I was wasting some of the best years of my life. I mean--it's not like I had a lot of unemployed friends to hang out with in the wee hours of the morning. And the friends I did have always wanted me to come out when I was just barely getting ready for the day. There I was, with the power to adjust my schedule to take advantage of all the free time in the world. What do I do? I purposely arranged it so that no one else was active when I was at my most active.
That's no way to live.
Just because I've had a setback in my life doesn't mean I can't put to good use all the lessons I've learned from having a steady job these last couple of years. The waking up at eight in the morning wasn't all that hard. The getting into and staying in a work mindset for six to seven hours a day isn't a ridiculous request.
Yes, I have the time to slack off. That doesn't mean I should have the inclination to do just that. I should endeavor to stay in work mode even if I don't actually have a job at the moment. There's plenty of tasks that could be accomplished in the hours I've been whiling away. I could work doubly hard at my novel. I could send out more resumes, look for more and jobs, and other stuff job-related. I could visit my friends more, eat out more when they're actually up and about rather than expect them to stay up during the week just for me.
Being let go is a huge change in my life, but it doesn't mean letting myself go entirely. I don't have to let a little stumble mean falling all the way back down the ladder again. There is such a thing as holding to a middle ground of doing all the things I wanted to do but never had the time for and doing all the things that made me into a more responsible and more composed individual all these last few years.
Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers
Labels: assistance, ennui, Life Unexpected, Motivations, Paramore, unemployment
posted by mojo shivers @ 1:17 AM
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