things-to-figure-out.

I’ve been putting off an update here because the longer time stretches and the more that happens, the more I lose sight of why I come back here. It starts to feel like this space is impossibly far away from my actual life. I’ve been living some sort of fairyland-crazy life the past few months. I’ve felt trapped beneath a mountain of work (with no end in sight), meanwhile there’s been a parade of friends and family and good food and beaches and moving to a new city full of new adventures.

I don’t feel just one thing. I feel everything. J and I were talking about the emotional life of characters (after a play we saw last weekend), and he said that actors have to channel the fact that humans are feeling a constant, tumbling flood of emotions. You aren’t just HAPPY or ANGRY. From second to second, different emotions are flowing through you, and every so often one emotion lands and sticks a bit longer. Good actors bring this emotional depth to their performances. Good humans (like me) acknowledge that we’re feeling a lot of things all the time.

I’m sitting in my living room right now in our (new) little corner of Chicago, as of three weeks ago. The sky is blue, there’s a tree outside this window, and a warm fall breeze is blowing. I can see the Sears Tower (I mean the Willis Tower). We don’t have a coffee table yet, so there’s nowhere to put my feet up. I’m sitting on the ugly-but-comfortable couch smelling a plum cake that I just pulled out of the oven.

There’s a lot going on right now. My to do list feels endless. Beside the things-to-do, there are things-to-figure-out. WEDDING. Finding freelance work. Finding friends in a new city. A project for the first actual class I’ve taken in seven years.

I’ve been thinking about/working on eating frogs first thing in the morning (i.e. Mark Twain, who said something about eating a frog first thing in the morning so that nothing worse will happen to you that day). I’ve been picking out frogs to eat, and they’re mostly work-related. Write this report, write this proposal, research this corporate partner. My choice has been guided by picking what I’m least excited about doing the next day.

It’s been working and it hasn’t. I’m remarkably adept at self-deception and avoidance (I think that may be a byproduct of spending any time working in an office, no?). I realized today that the piece I was missing was also choosing what things were most important to do. I’ve left writing out of the mix. I have a task on my mile-long to do list that tells me to write. I always leave it to last, and very often I find myself just moving it to the next day. But if it’s important, I should probably do it first (after I eat the frog). So I'm going to start choosing three most important things to do along with a frog, and I'm going to do them before everything else.

Anyway, this is where I am and this is what I’m thinking about. Things are feeling new and uncertain these days, but I’m adaptable (I hope). And I have big, wide-open windows and plum cake, so that’s pretty good.