The Great Morale Booster of 2013

  While I've made some great progress so far in 2013--I've already lost 4 pounds on my new diet (sidenote: counting calories sucks when you like Coke and Chipotle so much), I've added over 8,000 words to my edit-in-progress, putting it over 50,000 now [cue excited shriek], and I'm even getting back into a better exercise routine.
    Yet, 2013 has already been a little tumultuous. My car may now have transmission issues. The check engine light came back on with the same error code as before. My release date for my edit-in-progress may need to be pushed back a few weeks. And I'm still not any closer to moving out.
    However, perspective is the theme here. Whenever I feel like nothing seems to be going right, I turn to Ally McBeal. Yes, the television show. Why? Because nothing in my life ever seems as awful as she seems to think things in her life are.
    Ally McBeal always makes me feel like my life is in way better shape and the winning combination is just about to make itself known. Although season 1 and 2 did a better job of this--I'm now on season 3--her neuroses and hallucinations and self-sabotage make me feel like things around here are on the verge of turning around. It may seem silly, but if it weren't for Ally McBeal, my outlook on life would be a lot more pessimistic than it already is.
    Over time, the show has actually become funnier, too, which helps. And, Ally became more of a sympathetic protagonist. I actually hated her character when I first started watching this show, but I kept watching it because it was cathartic. Over time, especially with the addition of Lucy Liu's character, the show has become funnier, more complex, and more entertaining overall.
    If you can get through the obnoxious theme music (the show's theme, not Ally's personal theme music), you're golden. I muted the Carole King theme song from Gilmore Girls almost every episode I saw over the years because it was so annoying to me. The Ally McBeal theme has grown on me a bit (sidenote/funny coincidence: Vonda Shepherd, the theme's singer and show regular just sang the Gilmore Girls theme song in an episode I watched earlier), but it's a little too loud and not quite pop enough to be catchy and enjoyable. Unlike the theme from Friends ("I'll Be There for You") or Scrubs ("I'm No Superman").
    Back to this show's ability to help boost my morale: Money problems, job dissatisfaction, disappointment with the progress (or lack thereof) on my personal projects that I work so hard on and which mean so much to me--all of these things seem to be much less terrible circumstances than how Ally McBeal's life seems to her.
    So, if that's what it takes to keep my morale up, I guess I'm only sorry there are only 5 seasons of the show to watch. Hopefully by the time I watch the series finale, some of these issues will be resolved and I won't have to start over or find a new show.

Lillian: "...When Jesus closes a door, he opens a window."

Mary: "Yeah, so we have something to jump out of."

-Saved, 2004

Losing Time Or Making Time

  My dad likes to say that age is nothing but a number. I think that's something older people say because they don't like to feel old. I think age is a lot more than a number. Sometimes it can indicate maturity, legality, and other times, it's just a social identity that shows we relate to our peers.
    I feel distinctly old today, being it's my birthday. While 24 isn't a very big number to some people, it seems pretty big to me. I'm leaving my early twenties for my mid-twenties, and I feel like this is a milestone in my young life. 23 seemed young enough to still play the college-aged young person card, and 24 seems like the real line between youth and adulthood.
    I have been really struggling with the desire to become independent and self-sufficient and the desire to remain somewhat innocent, footloose, and fancy-free. On the one hand, I want to be financially independent, but on the other, I would really enjoy having a little more free time than a full-time job allows. Not so I can go to the brewery every day or watch TV even more than I do already, but because there are things that I want to do that I don't have time for right now. Like this blog.
    I want to have more time to write. I want to have more time to read. And yes, it would be nice to have more time to go to the movies or watch them at home. But it's more than that. I want to have time to cook for myself, shop for groceries more than once or twice a month. I want to take walks and do yoga. I want to spend time with my friends and my family. Plus a million other things on my to-do list. And I feel like right now, I'm budgeting my time as thinly as I'm budgeting my money.
    I feel like I'm missing out on some of the things I should be enjoying, some of the things I think I have a right to enjoy, because I don't have time to enjoy them. Most people would diagnose this as having my priorities mixed up. If you have your priorities straight, you can always make time for everything. I don't think this is always true. There are a finite number of hours in a given week, and there is only enough room for a portion of everything you want to accomplish. We end up sacrificing so much of what we want to do in favor of what we are obligated to do.
    It isn't easy juggling your wants with your obligations, especially when time or money is the constraint. But the only way to achieve your goals and make your wants become a regular part of your schedule is to say yes to yourself and those wants instead of no, procrastinating and making excuses why you can't. You still may not be able to get all of them in every single time, but you can at least make the effort.

Coulda woulda shoulda.

Commute or Telecommute - That Is The Question

  If you haven't noticed, and the only way you couldn't have is if you read Insistent and Persistent in an RSS reader rather than directly on the site (though I hope if you do that, you at least visit the site occasionally...), I put a new header at the top of the home page.
    I know the design quality is poor, but what do you expect from a philosophy major with only MS Paint as a tool instead of Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator? My hope is that it will bring a little color to the page :)
    In other news, I got to thinking about working from home today after I read an article on Thought Catalog about the topic. I don't think I'd want to work 40 hours a week from home, because, honestly, I would start buying cookies and ice cream and I'd probably gain another five pounds every month or so. But the thought of working a few hours a week from home is appealing. Maybe two half days or one full day. I wouldn't be interrupted with meetings or drama or crises, and I wouldn't have to drown out my coworkers with my Walkman.
    On the other hand, I wonder whether that is really a good solution to whatever stress or overwhelmed feelings I have, and I know that it probably isn't. Working from home might help relieve some stress, but there are other, better ways to deal with it.
    One is to stop eating so much crap. We eat out so often at work that the only motivation I have to eat out less is financial. I am desperately trying to either eat yesterday's leftovers for lunch or to bring a sandwich and fruit for lunch at least two or three times a week. Also, I really need to quit drinking so much soda, and probably stop having more than the occasional beer (though after the infamous tequila shots incident, I've been damn near abstinent with almost all alcohol).
    The main thing I need to do is stop interneting so much! Of course, I wouldn't cut back on my blogging, but I spend way too much time reading and researching online when I get home, especially considering I spend a lot of my workday online doing the exact same thing. TV is a de-stressor, and reading books are a de-stressor, and writing is a de-stressor for me, but reading news and ads and polls online are all probably doing my mental state more harm than good.
    The last thing I need to do to help my stress levels is to be more active. I'm not a runner or a bicyclist or a tennis player or even a stairmaster user. Because those suck. They're painful, they're not fun, and they make me feel worse, not better, about myself after. Usually because my lung capacity fails me almost immediately. Yoga is the only form of exercise I can stand, but I always give up on it after a while, usually due to time constraints (or since I left school, financial constraints for going to classes). I just have to keep reminding myself that I don't hate it and then make time to do it, which is always hard. Especially with all the interneting.
    My eventual goal was always to be a writer, one that makes money from her writing and can actually make a living at it. But working from home seems to me right now to be just another way to become a recluse. And I like people. Some of them, anyway.

Write More. Read More. Plan More. Critique Less.

Would you work from home if you could? Would you miss anything about going to a workplace?

Discuss it in the comments below!