Uninspired-Musings

Update time!

Nothing of any major consequence has really happened since I last wrote, but I still feel the need to do a brain dump regardless.

I think I am going to start watching Doctor Who, finally. I’ve been meaning to for seemingly forever, but I tend to be really, really slow at getting around to exploring shows that I’m interested in because I spend so much of my time reading and aimlessly wandering around the internet. Doctor Who is available on Netflix meaning I can watch it on my phone wherever I am, so I guess we’ see how long it takes me to make my way through the old episodes. (ETA: I watched the first two episodes last night and I really, really enjoyed them.) Breaking Bad has also recently popped up on my radar as a show to check out, too. It’s not on Netflix though, so boo. On a final TV-related note, I am fucking dying over here waiting for season two of The Walking Dead. Why? Just check out the awesome trailer on YouTube. Wow, a whole paragraph on television! Who am I becoming!?

Tell-lie-vision aside, my life has been fairly static this past week. It’s finally getting dark earlier and the nights and mornings have a very unmistakably-autumnal chill to them. Being the Ice Queen that I am, this makes me stupidly happy. This summer really wasn’t awful, but I’m ready for cooler weather and the relaxed mindset it brings. Actually I need to ditch relaxation and get moving with productivity, heh. I’ve been really lazy and unmotivated for the past few days so I need to get it together and put my game face back on if I want to plow through all  the shit I have to do.

But for now? Laundry, more Doctor Who, and waiting for my food from Rialto Pizza to arrive, huzzah!

I am currently reading Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks by Ethan Gilsdorf and it has made me do quite a bit of pondering as to the concept of escapism and how it presents itself in my own life. Even though it is no big secret that I am overwhelming nerdy in the academic sense and geeky in the fandom sense (zombies, anyone?) I have never really thought of myself as one to legitimately seek shelter from the pressures of my daily life in fantasy worlds. Generally, I am not one to get swept up into video games, movies, and novels for extended periods of time. I always seem to find myself drifting away from mythical beasts and foreign worlds back to things like course requirements and savings plans. Yes, it seems as though even my subconscious mind is rooted quite firmly into this world. There is one rather big but, though: I do not find myself particularly rooted to this time. I am futuristic girl, through and through.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have crazy, “far-fetched sci-fi-tastic” ideals about myself as android or something out there like that. My future-based escapism is so subtle that I didn’t even begin to think of it as such until reading Gilsdorf’s book. Yes, my particularly drug is fantasizing about my “future self”: a slightly more together and refined version of who I am now. A self with better financial planning skills, more self-discipline, well-developed social skills, and a perky set of DDs. (Hey, a girl can dream, right?) I spend so much time daydreaming about what I could be someday (and running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to become this highly-evolved “Christina 2.0”) that I’m very rarely completely present in my day to day life in any real, meaningful way. Sure, I go through the motions, but 99% of the time, I’m just biding my time until I get back to my inner life and continue “leveling myself up.”

Granted, it could be argued that my form of escapism isn’t as detrimental to my overall well-being as playing World of Warcraft or something all day because the way I escape from what ails me is still firmly founded in reality, but I feel like the root my behavior vs a WoW addict’s behavior is still more or less the same. No matter how you cut it, I am shortchanging myself in a really big way by allowing enjoyment of my present life to take a backseat to something that is (for now) just a fantasy.

So how do I mesh my “fantasy life,” and all the time-consuming activities that come with working towards it, with my real life successfully? No idea…just yet, anyway.

Last night, the combination of post-surgical exhaustion, half a Vicodin, and a low of 53 degrees Fahrenheit led to me having some of the best sleep I’ve had in months. My sleep was so amazing, in fact, that I slept through my alarm and woke up 40 minutes late this morning. Oops? Somehow I still made it to work on time (albeit with a rough eyeliner job and a half-assed lunch in my bag), so all is well that ends well I guess.  Err, well enough…despite all of that sleep, I’m still so exhausted that I would crawl under my desk and nap if that wouldn’t end horribly.

I’m ready to have my energy back so I can get back to focusing on things more interesting than the rate at which the inside of my mouth is accumulating scar tissue. On some level, it has been sort of nice being forced to take some time to wind down and rest, but I have never been one to enjoy staying mentally inactive for long periods of time. On a similar note, I’ve been doing really badly in terms of “52 books in 52 weeks” this month for whatever reason. I’ve just been hyper-focused on getting my ducks in order to make sure I’m closer to who and where I want to be by this time next year and reading has been taking a backseat for the time being; that said, I did start reading Time of the Twins in earnest this morning on the bus. As everyone who has spent more than five minutes alone with me know, I’m really great at planning things, but not amazing at actually executing them, so I’m attempting to combine the planning and execution stages with this latest endeavor (GRE studying and financial planning for the upcoming academic year) so that the wheels will already be in motion before my attention span goes wandering off again. I’m really looking forward to solidifying a lot of plans for the next three to four months so that I can blog about them in earnest, but I’m not quite there just yet and I don’t want to put the cart before the horse on this one.

One plan I am willing to reveal is my is my plan to start working on a somewhat-more-autumnal layout for the blog in the very near future. So far I’m leaning towards making it old school “swords and sorcery”-inspired since my once-latent geekiness has reared its head in a big way lately, but I don’t have anything even resembling a concrete idea at the moment.

The past two days have been adventurous to say the least.

My lower, left wisdom tooth decided that it didn’t want to be friends anymore and attacked me with crazy waves of pain leading me to spend Tuesday morning in the emergency room at UMPC Shadyside and Tuesday afternoon getting my problematic tooth extracted by an amazing oral surgeon at UPMC Montefiore who managed to squeeze me into his schedule since the numbing medicine I got in the Emergency Room that was supposed to last 5 to 6 hours wore off after 30 minutes because my pain levels were so intense.

I spent yesterday in a Vicodin-induced haze that was punctuated only by brief awakenings to eat squishy things (pudding, jello, and ice cream) and text MsBrownBird. I’m back at work today even though I could have really used another day off because we’re pretty backed up and even though I’m not at 100% just yet, I’m functional enough to be of some use in the office. Despite my persistant state of exhaustion, my extraction and recovery have been pretty low-key thus far.

 I’m still not out of the window in which I could be stricken with Dry Socket, so I’m being super-gentle with my mouth, but I have managed to avoid chipmunk cheeks and excessive bruising, so I’m grateful for that. So yup, that was my unplanned medical/dental adventure!

My bedtime is approaching, so this will have to be a fairly short entry, but I have a few thoughts I’ve been meaning to get down for a few days now.

Ever the narcissist, I have been doing a fair amount of self-reflection as I close in on my 23rd birthday. I have realized (or perhaps finally accepted?) that, on the whole, I really like myself as a person and I’m fairly comfortable with who I am. As a result of stumbling upon this little discovery, I have been a lot more gentle with myself as of late and not taking every misstep I make as license to have a total meltdown and completely doubt my worth as a human being. All of that mental energy which was wasted on negativity has been re-purposed to the much more productive task of focusing on things about myself that make me, well, awesome. As a result of feeling awesome, and consequentially more self-confident, I have felt like a lot more things are “within my reach” so to speak.  Because of that, I’ve gotten a bit more ambitious and, as such, I have a lot coming up for this next year of my life; it is very much going to be a transitional year in a lot of ways. I’m not really ready to publicize everything I’m planning on doing this year quite yet, but I’m sure I will blog about them once there’s actually something concrete to say.

On a semi-related note, I have been really embracing my nerdy side a lot more lately and it’s been nice. I harkened back to my middle school days and bought some Magic: The Gathering cards this weekend and ordered the Dragonlance Legends Trilogy from Amazon today. I used to be way into traditional “swords and sorcery” style fantasy growing up, but sort of moved away from it for a time when I went through my “Pretentious Hipster Douche” phase where I read nothing but nonfiction and spent all of my free time writing poetry (bad poetry, needless to say) and brooding about my then-suburban-existence. Having escaped the clutches of pretension and teenage angst, I’ve moved back to my nerdy roots and embraced them quite a bit lately. Maybe it’s just a passing phase, but I’m really enjoying it for the time being at least.

 

Obviously I am not the greatest at actually updating reguarly. Rather than backpedal and fill in the boring details about the past month of my life, I’ll just jump to where I am now.

As I rapidly approach the “beginning of the end” of my undergraduate career and simultaneously explore the world of “real” employment, I have done quite a bit of reflecting and realized that I have figured out a lot about who I am and what I want that I probably wouldn’t have if I hadn’t spent so much time working during college. (Not counting retail, I will have nearly three years of full-time work experience when I graduate.) Even though I don’t plan on continuing to work in the non-profit and/or educational sector for anywhere near the rest of my life, I have had an opportunity to hone my soft skills, something that is sure to help me in whatever my future endeavors may be.

I have also realized that I’m pretty damn lucky to have well less than half the amount of student loan debt I would have had I taken a lazier and more direct path; I am especially pleased with this fact when considering that I will graduate with two degrees and a minor to boot. Admittedly, I haven’t always been proud of every little thing I’ve done during college, but ultimately my decisions have shaped me as a person in ways more good than bad, and in the big picture, that is what matters I suppose.

Throughout the process of laying plans for the completion of this phase of my academic life and tying up the lose ends which have amassed over the past five years, I have had my eyes fixed upon a new sun dawning on the horizon: grad school. While my plans for this part of my life are still quite hazy, what little shape they have taken thus far is quite a different one than I would have anticipated a year or two ago. I am giving strong consideration to returning to my home state of Maryland for graduate school, primarily for financial reasons (i.e. in-state tuition), but also because graduate school will quite likely be my last opportunity to make peace with the things I swept under the rug before moving north to Pennsylvania three years ago.

Despite the fact that graduate school is where my thoughts have drifted to more often than not these days, I won’t put the cart before the horse and hyper-focus on those plans in this entry, especially considering that I have two more semesters of undergraduate study ahead of me. Even as I remind myself of that, I can’t help but allow my thoughts to drift ever so slightly toward Fall 2012 (or perhaps Spring 2013).

What can I say? I’m addicted to new beginnings.