A Goal to Finish Today

Today hasn't been the best day for me. Yesterday I reacted in an entirely unproductive and loud way to a situation with my boyfriend and we haven't had a chance to talk since. I am feeling bad about it, so of course today I am having trouble focusing on anything too long. I had a lot of ideas on what to do this weekend: from baking bread to going with him to a microbrewery outside of Boston, but instead I end up at home feeling anxious and trying to figure out what I can possibly do all day long.

Of course that means that I finished watching the Angel DVD from Netflix this morning and then decided to watch the Frontline episode on Everest online. I will admit, the entire time I watched the Everest episode (very good, by the way), all I kept thinking was, "I will never climb that mountain in my life." I'm OK with that. It isn't on my list anyway. When I watch Frontline, I usually work on my crane project. Sometimes when I watch TV I do it too, but it is almost always while watching Frontline. That means that I have had some very thoughtful times while crane folding, which is part of the meditative aspect of repetitious action, but having it fueled by the topics Frontline covers makes it a bit more international. Of course, with the mood I was in today, I found myself stopping the Everest episode periodically (it also was longer than the usual hour, which I didn't realize when I started) to investigate changes I could make in my life. 

I am not a Jung fan necessarily, but I do like the idea of sympatico. Along your life you get reassurances that things are going the way they should- through coincidence or whatever. Spending time thinking today, I realized that somehow my sympatico isn't sympathetic. My workplace has become a miserable tangle of politics and buggy tools. People are leaving and more outsourcing is happening. I find myself more frustrated more easily than I would like and it hasn't gotten any better unless I put on my iPod and just look at my computer. I began thinking about (can you believe it!?) going back to grad school, with dreams of language classes dancing in my head. After a practical talk with Tim, I realized that that was more escapist dreams than a real plan. So here I am, trying to work out a real plan. An honest to goodness plan to change my work life to put me back on the path to sympatico. (And, if I am using sympatico incorrectly- sorry Jung lovers.) It is hard work to think about this seriously and unfortunately, I don't have Tim to bounce stuff off right now, but for once I feel like pursuing an actual goal instead of just thinking about the next step. And working towards this is putting me back on the path to balance.

And so, since I don't already have about a billion things to do, I signed up to be a proofreader for Project Gutenberg and did a couple pages. I downloaded open source translation software and played with it. I began to rethink my website to make it more professional and less idiosyncratic in case people look me up. And now, lastly, after writing this post (since it has been quite a while since I wrote a post), I have decided that I will complete my crane project. I'm not sure how long it will take, but the energy of focusing on balance and repairing that which is out of synch will hopefully infuse me and the cranes with hope that all will be better in the end. I have less than 100 to do. There are a lot of Frontline episodes to catch up on, so I'm sure I'll have enough to get me through this. Please mark this one as tentatively completed.