March 24, 2011

• status update

  OK, so it has been a long time since I posted — much longer than usual. There are a few reasons for that, and some are better than others. Superman and I were in the Philippines for two weeks of diving, which was lots of fun. For people who like diving, I’d say that Dumaguete was amazing for critters and muck diving, but Tubbataha didn’t live up to the hype of being super-amazing reef diving.

  Basic trip stats:

  • 25 dives
  • 7 books
  • 6 flights
  • 5 nights at a resort
  • 7 nights on a liveaboard dive trip

  I took some pictures while we were there, and here are a few.

  If you can’t get summer to come to you, sometimes you just have to go find it, even if it’s halfway around the world:

    

  Dumaguete had the best muck diving I’ve seen so far:

   

  This is a pair of ornate ghost pipefish, which are related to seahorses:

  

  This is a tiny little shrimp that is smaller than your pinky nail, and looks exactly like the leaves he lives in:

  

  You can’t really come back from a dive trip without a picture of clownfish:

  

  And I still have my special fondness for nudibranchs:

  

  Most people go to Tubbataha for the sharks. This one is resting and getting cleaned by two little cleaner wrasses:

  

  I thought Palau was better. But it was still just good to get back in the water:

  

  And for your amusement (or disgust), this was probably the most horrifying thing I saw while I was in the Philippines:

  

  It was good to get away for two weeks, but the time leading up to vacation (and the time since getting back) ended up being three times as busy. I had a really big launch right before leaving on vacation, and that got insane for a while (there’s nothing quite like trying to “negotiate” (I’m using the term generously here, because that implies a certain level of rationality) with publishers, except for perhaps trying to “negotiate” with record labels — I don’t know which is more painful). We’ve been back for almost two full work weeks now, and there have already been a few days where I was pretty dubious that the work that needed to get done would fit into the time available. So for much of the time, I have either been very busy, or completely unplugged.

  The other reason is that I’m feeling a bit unmotivated and adrift about most things in general right now. I do what I have to get done, but the extras, like blogging, attending meetings where my absence won’t be noticed, or taking out the trash, have been falling by the wayside a little bit. 

  I’m feeling kind of fat. I know, I’m not fat. But I feel fat. I don’t care how many times Superman says I’m not fat, or how low my BMI is, because I have my own ideas about what I should weigh, and I weigh three pounds more than I should. Things like this bother me much more when I feel like I don’t have control over other stuff in my life. If I’m unhappy about something, then I at least want to control my weight and make it a number that I like (and yes, I know that I have a weird relationship with numbers). 

  My wrists and back got better while we were on vacation, and promptly got worse again once I got back to work. It’s frustrating to know that physical therapy can’t fix my issues (which are annoying enough that sometimes, I can’t open jars or play Wii, and can never lift or carry heavy objects, and sometimes have difficulty driving or walking), and the only thing that makes me have these problems is the one thing I have to do every day — sit at a desk, use a mouse, and type.

  I’m stressed and I’ve been feeling kind of conflicted about work. I’m still not sure, after spending almost eight years as a lawyer, that I want to be a lawyer “when I grow up.” I like my job as much as I think I could possibly like a job in law — there are even times when I love my job. My company is great, the products are cool, and the work I get to do is often very unique and quite interesting. My coworkers are fun, my boss is ideal, the money is excellent (our bonus checks for 2010 dropped into our accounts while I was out on vacation, and I ended up getting about 60% of my base salary, which is something of a miracle in this economy, and I feel really stupid complaining about whether it’s my destiny to be a lawyer when I should really just be glad to have the job that I have), but sometimes I still stop and think, “Is this what I want to be when I grow up?” and I try to calculate how long I should work in order to retire (I’m hoping to do so by 2020, but I’m not sure I can last that long)… I wonder if maybe a change of scenery would help — our department has “rotations” to other offices, so I could go work in Asia or London for six months, maybe, but then I wonder if what I need is something completely different. I kind of think that if I have such a great job, and I still have doubts, then maybe I should be doing something else. Coming up with “something else” is the hard part.

  For now, I’ve been using small things to distract myself from the malaise — making donations (giving money to good causes provides a distracting lift; my high school exchange program host family lives in Sendai, Japan, so I’ve been alternating between emailing with them, donating to disaster relief, reading the news, and avoiding the news), researching life-changing jobs (some are short stints that I could potentially do for a few months, and come back here afterwards), and reading as many books and watching as much TV as possible.

  Having some plans also helps:

  • Dinner Saturday with Superman and two of his friends, at a restaurant we’ve been wanting to check out for a while
  • Dinner in a few weeks with my sister for her birthday
  • Chicago at the end of April for Kanga and Roo’s wedding, and to go back to Alinea
  • Z-town at the end of May for Kanga and Roo’s “second wedding,” and maybe to hit up some restaurants in Europe

  Sigh. I just had a big vacation, and… I feel like I need a vacation.

  • 9:51 pm
  • 1 Comment