The weather forecast for the weekend promises warm weather for the weekend.
Well, 53 degrees, which is warm for Scotland. I am working all day Saturday, but you can bet your butt that I will be spending a part of my Sunday outside enjoying the warm weather. I might even wear leggings that end just below the knee (although that might scare people, so I may have to reconsider that option).
I’ve been in a serious funk for the last few weeks, and today I finally get to see the therapist and get back to feeling better. That makes this week’s writing challenge all the more fun. Week 18 is dedicated to something that I like I about myself. While I tempted to say I like my sarcasm and call it a day, there is actually a lot I like about myself.
I think the one trait or feature that I like most about myself is my self-awareness. It took a lot of therapy, and a long time to develop, but now that it is a part of me, I am grateful for it. While I do not always focus on the things that I know, and deal with the problems or the issues that I recognize in a timely manner, I am glad that I can at least spot them. I made the mistake of letting my depression go unchecked here for almost a year, and while I pretended it wasn’t that bad, in the back of my mind I knew that it was something that I needed to take care of.
I would have to say that another thing that I like about myself is that no matter how bad I get, how negative, how sick, or how sad, I seemed to have found a way to make some really strong connections with people. I have some really amazing friends and family that make me own my shit, that sit with me when I cry, and tell me that I don’t have to do anything by myself. My mom is helping me pay for therapy (seriously, my one complaint with health insurance is that it is hard to get mental health covered, and see a doc is expensive), my sister sends me baby pictures and videos everyday, and I get Skype dates as often as I can. I know that says more about them than it does about me, but I like that I was able to make those connections, and that there is something about me that keeps those people from throwing in the towel when I get to be a pain in the ass.
I know that it is technically the start of week 18, but I got a little lazy with the schedule, so I am catching up today.
Today when I spent a good portion of the day on my feet, feeling tired and resentful. I’ve been working with a girl who thinks she is the queen of the tutoring centre, and today she complained that her throat felt sore and she shouldn’t have to manage a group of kids. There were two other people in the centre: me, who has been dead on her feet for the past week, and another woman. Now, this woman just came back after suffering a devastating loss, a loss that she cannot tell anyone about…a loss that would have flattened me. She did not complain about being in the centre, did not complain about the work that we needed to do, and volunteered to work a zone and be with the kids. I took the kiddos so she didn’t have to, but she was more than willing. This was the second shift in a row that the first girl passed the work to everyone before even thinking of doing anything.
Off topic, but it made me really cranky, and much as I am trying to make myself better, as much as I am trying to break old habits, when I am cranky, I revert right back to the negative mindset I am most comfortable in.
Maybe a focus on this will help me. The task for week 17 is to write a letter to my teenage self. So here goes:
Dear Teenage Kim,
Believe it or not, you did not have a heart attack in your your teenage years. You actually make it to adulthood. For the most part you make pretty good life choices, but there a few things that you should know:
Stop worrying about every little thing. The world is not going to end if you fail a class, or a test (in fact, you do that later in life, and nothing bad happens to you), and no one is going to think less of you.
Take swimming seriously. You are going to slack off, but that is such a bad idea. You were in good shape, you weren’t horrible, and it is way better than trying to be a runner.
The people you are friends with now, the ones you think you’ll be friends with forever, will not be your friends in ten years. If you really want to keep some of them, you are going to have to work really hard and be prepared to be disappointed, a lot.
In fact, you are going to feel disappointed in people a lot, sometimes in the ones that matter the most, but mostly in the ones who don’t live up to your expectations.
Also, you are going to have drop those expectations. No one, and very few things ever meet them. You’ll save yourself a lot of heartache if you let that shit go.
Go to therapy. You don’t go until almost a decade later, and trust me, you wasted a lot of time being depressed.
Don’t worry about your virgin status. It will be worth it to wait, and even though you will make some bad choices, you don’t get pregnant, you aren’t gossip for anyone, and you’ve never had an STD. A lot of your friends cannot say the same.
Don’t ignore your wanderlust. You turn down a year of studying abroad, a year of teaching English in another country because you are afraid that people will forget you, afraid of what will happen if you leave, but trust me, when you are travelling, you are alive and happy.
You’ll be 26 before you are comfortable with yourself. It is a really long learning process, but take it as it comes
You age like a fine wine. You are way better looking now that you wear more than jeans and a hoodie. Guys tell you that you are hot. They walk through restaurants in Spain to check you out. It is fun. Enjoy it.
You will get hurt a lot when you are out of your teens. A lot. Devastatingly painful hurt that you are completely unprepared for. I can tell you that there are days you don’t get out of bed and you have no idea how you are going to keep going, but you do keep going, and in the end, that is all that matters.
You eventually figure out how to let people past the snark and sarcasm. This leads to you crying. A lot. You also become a really ugly crier, so make sure that you bring tissues with you to meetings or other situations that you think might make you cry. Seriously. The amount of snot you produce is insane.
Skip school once in awhile. No one will care that you never missed a day of school when you are 29.
Bad things are going to happen to you. Bad things that came from choices that you made as a teen. I wish I could tell you to make different choices, save you from the hurt. But it wouldn’t be right. You will learn a lot from some of that hurt, and it will lead you to some really good people and some really great experiences. When you are 25 you will make the best decision of your life. At 28, you will do it again. Trust those. Those choices will make you happier than anything else you’ve ever done (including flying…yes, you get to fly, and then you almost puke in front of a really cute guy….not you at your best) and even on the bad days (and there will be a lot of those, sorry), you will be happy, and genuine and be surrounded by people that understand you, people that actually like you for your weirdness and your wanderlust, and that, teenage Kim, makes everything you will do from then to me worth it.
It is the first day of May. I’m not sure where the last few months have gone, but my calendar tells me that it is already May.
On the upside, I have been collecting interviews all week and I was able to knock two more things off my list of 30 things to do before I am 30. After a few tears and a wait list, and some phone calls, I have finally found a therapist. That was some much needed good news, and while the financial investment is stressing me out a little, I am so relived that I can finally get the much needed help that I needed.
The second activity I got to cross off the list was going to the symphony. The Royal Scottish National Orchestra presented Stravinsky’s Symphony in C. Led by guest conductor Thomas Søndergård, the orchestra delighted my ears for almost three hours. Thanks to my status as a student, I was able to get really great seats for a super discounted price.
(Don’t worry, this was before the show started)
I learned a few things at the symphony.
People do not know how to dress for a night out. Errol and I got dressed up real fancy, and most people in the concert hall were in jeans.
2. I have no idea when you are supposed to clap. The orchestra was amazing. I wanted to clap after each movement, but no one clapped until the end of the entire piece. Then, each time the conductor left the stage and came back, people behind the scenes clapped to make sure that the audience did.
3. Conductors, good ones, get really into their craft. Thomas Sondergard is a really good conductor. He was super entertaining to watch.
4. Your mind wanders when listening to music. I found myself daydreaming a lot. I loved the music, but it lulled me into a sleepy state and I started to think about all kinds of random things.
5. I would go to the symphony again. It was a great way to spend a few hours listening to music and not thinking about work, people, stress, anything. It was fun to get dressed up and be an adult, and it was really fun to watch people who clearly love music.
Here was the running order for the evening:
Schubert Symphony No3 Stravinsky Symphony in C Schubert Symphony No4 Tragic Stravinsky Symphony in Three Movements
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was truly a gifted composer. According to his Wikipedia page:
Stravinsky’s compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by theimpresarioSergei Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913). The last of these transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure and was largely responsible for Stravinsky’s enduring reputation as a musical revolutionary who pushed the boundaries of musical design. His “Russian phase” which continued with works such asRenard, The Soldier’s Tale and Les Noces, was followed in the 1920s by a period in which he turned to neoclassical music. The works from this period tended to make use of traditional musical forms (concerto grosso, fugue and symphony), drawing on earlier styles, especially from the 18th century. In the 1950s, Stravinsky adopted serial procedures. His compositions of this period shared traits with examples of his earlier output: rhythmic energy, the construction of extended melodic ideas out of a few two- or three-note cells and clarity of form, and of instrumentation.
The symphony was definitely one of the more fun activities to cross off the list. I am 20 days away from completing number 10, and I am thinking to combine part of 5 with 6 and go to Turkey to ride in a hot air balloon. I’ve also been fantasy planning a million different trips, but hope to get at least one in the books for June or July….even if it just a quick weekend away.
Learn how to drive in the UK.
Present at an academic conference
Start a new tradition
Go back to therapy
Visit three new countries
Ride in a hot air balloon
Quit the tutoring centre
Volunteer for a literacy programme
Read a book that has more than 500 pages
Make my bed everyday for at least three months
Have a solid draft of my thesis completed
Master scorpion pose
Attend the symphony
Learn a rap song from start to finish
Host a dinner party
Create a budget so I can pay down my student loans
I’m sitting in a window box of my friend’s house feeling sorry for myself.
My depression has gotten really bad. Really bad. It happens, and when it does, all I want is to be loved on. Instead, I got sent home from work because I was really pale and it is clear I have not been taking care of myself, and I’m pretty sure my relationship just ended.
So the challenge for the week is to write about the best part of my week.
I’m coming up short on this one. I undertook this challenge to follow up with the gratitude challenge that I did last year to help me remind myself that even though things were going wrong in the grad program, there was a lot around me in my life that was going well.
So, on this Friday as I sit in the window box wallowing in my depression, I guess the best part of my week was last night.
I met a cat named Loki last night. He was really friendly. I’m not sure how he got into the building, but he met me when I walked in. I’m a sucker, and I was sad, so I sat down to pet him. He rubbed on me and purred, and when it was clear no one was looking for him in the building, I let him follow me up the three flights of stairs and into my place. He spent about 10 minutes wandering around my place checking things out and occasionally coming back to me to rub and purr. I would have let him stay the night, but he had collar with an address, so I took him back downstairs and let him out back into the world.
I guess in the grand scheme of things my life is not that bad. I am living in Scotland, which is pretty fucking awesome. I have a job, my PhD is progressing nicely, and even though the depression is getting the better of me right now, my health is okay.
I just wish I could rewind to the beginning of March when I was in California soaking up the sun, hanging out with my muffin, and not surrounded by my never ending cycle of negative thoughts.
Now I would love to fast forward two year to when I am getting my degree and can figure out my next move.
Beach bum. That is still a viable career option right?
I’ve been lucky enough to see quite a few, and even got to be an extra in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert a couple of years ago when I saw it with my mom and sister in Hollywood. Last night I was lucky enough to be invited to the Edinburgh Playhouse to see Let It Be, an amazing tribute to the Fab Four.
The show encourages singing along, standing up to dance, and lots of audience participation. I am a fan of the Beatles, a fan of the my friend who invited me to be her plus one, and a fan of musicals. We were lucky enough to have some great seats, and thanks to an atmosphere of Fab Four fans, I got to enjoy my Monday night letting it be.
It was very fun to watch people that have been fans since the very first performance, and fans that came way later to the game and the culture that the music represents. The women sitting next to me knew all the words, screamed very loud, and probably would have slept with the impersonators given the chance. All in all, it was a great evening. The Edinburgh Playhouse was built in 1929 and holds over 3,000 people. It is the UK’s largest non sporting event theater.
This is the second musical that I have had the pleasure of seeing this month. At the start of April I had saw I am Thomas
It was a very strange show, but strange in a good way. Dec and I were definitely among the youngest in the audience, and he was probably the only person who understood not only the history, but all of the football references that were used to tell the story of the last man publicly executed in Scotland for blasphemous speech. It was a good birthday present, and another chance to see a beautiful theater in the city.
The Royal Lyceum Theater was opened in 1883 and holds almost 700 people. I wouldn’t mind seeing another show there soon.
Next week I will be off to the symphony at the great Usher Hall. It gives me a chance to cross another activity off my list of things to do before I am 30, and spend an evening pretending that I am cultured.
Week 15 is dedicated to my favourite topic: Things that make me laugh. I think everyone who knows me well knows that it is fairly easy to make me laugh. Well timed jokes, locking the car door as someone tries to open it, cat videos….all of these things make me laugh.
And if ever someone needed a laugh right now, it is me.
This week the one thing that has really been making me laugh is inappropriate workplace conversations. The department that I am based out of just recently hired a new research assistant, and while trying to get to know him, we were all talking about ourselves and a little bit of our background. In the course of that conversation, it came up that when I got hired on, the rest of the team who is close to my age Googled me to see what they could learn about me.
Fun fact: if you Google me, the first thing that comes up is a porn illustrator.
Yep. You read that correctly: A PORN ILLUSTRATOR! The office wondered if my supervisor had lost his marbles, and at one point I got an email from the admin assistant asking me if I liked to draw. I of course had no idea why she would ask me such a thing, and it wasn’t until I had been in the post for several months that they filled me about what happens when you Google my name. I decided to share that story with the new guy….he wasn’t impressed. Everyone in the office had a good chuckle though. I like to think that it lightened the mood.
Professionally, things have been picking up with my data collection. I was really afraid that sending out an online survey would not net me any responses, but I have been pleasantly surprised about the response rate in the last three days. I may have just figured out this whole PhD student thing.
I finally get to write about something related to my research! It has been a bit of a struggle, but I have managed to get some surveys out and today I spent the day inputting the results into SPSS.
The last time I used SPSS was for the grad program at CSUF. I worked with three other people to write notes and put together a complicated semester worth of data sets and questions. We made step by step notes on how to do everything from simple regressions to comparative factor analysis. At the time, I couldn’t tell you what I was doing. When writing up the results, I copied the wording from my handy dandy manual and just plugged in my numbers. I’m a stubborn qualitative researcher; I just don’t care about the numbers. My supervisor is a scientist, so he is quite insistent that I have some quantitative data to back up all the hippy dippy feelings (he hasn’t quite said those words, but I know that this is something that he would say).
After a quick trip to YouTube to refresh my memory on how to properly set all of my variables, I was able set up all of my questions and create a set that can now be analysed for all sorts of fun connections. I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel having to use SPSS again, but all in all, I am happy that I remembered as much as I did. I will probably have to consult the internet for the proper language to use when describing the trends, and will probably have to look up the proper way to create the charts and graphs that I will need, but it seems a lot less scary than I thought it would be.
and just for fun, here is proof that I actually worked on my surveys today.
I’m excited because this means that my research is finally underway, and I am making progress with my PhD. I have a couple of months left until I advance to full on PhD status, but with this underway, I know that that meeting will be a cinch.
Update on my 30 things to do before 30: I bought tickets to the symphony, and made my way up a little higher on the list for a therapist. I can’t wait to be able to cross some more things off my list.
Today I taught myself how to sew. Turns out, it really isn’t that hard.
Well, threading the needle was a bit of a challenge, but once I got my hands working properly, and all the knots in place, it was not the scary undertaking I thought it would be. half an hour and three buttons later, my jacket is wearable again.
I am counting today as a success.
The challenge for the week is to discuss something in my life that is stressful. It might as well have been a challenge for me to write about something that is not stressing me out. I’m so good with stress, that most of the time I don’t even realize that I am stressed. To be honest, the one thing that is stressing me out the most right now is my mental health. I’m not managing it well right now, and because of that, I am worried about everything from my relationship, my friendships, and my work. While I’ve been working with my depression for awhile, lately I have been having a hard time making the good stretches last.
This stresses me out because I know that I have a problem, but I can’t seem to come out on top of it. People are always telling me that happiness is a choice, and that I can wake up everyday and choose to be happy. Unfortunately for me, it just doesn’t work that way. I know that I have a good life, I know that ‘on paper’ I have no reason to be depressed, but I am all the same. What stresses me out is the never-ending cycle. I know what I need to do to be healthy, I know what I should avoid doing and saying, but lately, I can’t seem to help myself. I feel like I am writing about the dark and twisty every week, and feel like when I get a handle on it, I then fall back into my negative thoughts.
If I could put half the energy into my work that I do to the dark and twisty, I would have an amazing paper right now.
On the plus side, I have started my adventure to cross another thing off my list of 30 things to do before I turn 30. I have found a series of yoga classes that will help me with scorpion pose. I really wish that I had picked an easier pose. My neck and back hate me right now. I’m glad that I have a whole lot of time between now and my 30th birthday.
For my 29th birthday I made a list of 30 things I want to do before I turn 30. It includes everything from learning to drive here to cooking an exotic meal.
This week I got to cross one off the list. Number two on the list: Present at an academic conference has now been completed. I will be able to cross this one off the list for a second time in June (and fingers crossed a third time in December). I got to peddle my wares at the first annual School of Life, Sport, and Social Science Postgraduate Research Conference. I am the only educational pedagogic theorist in the school, and I like to toot my own horn over that. The conference was a chance to get my feet wet, and a chance to master the Pecha Kutcha style of presenting.
After a few weeks of stressing I was able to present my 20 slides with just 20 seconds a slide. I’m properly chuffed with myself about that. I was really stressing over the format, but by the time I stepped on the stage, I forgot about being nervous and just talked to the crowd for 6 minutes and 40 seconds. I was even asked some really great questions, and the programme leader for a programme I am working with emailed me to tell me that he enjoyed my talk. One of my supervisors was able to make it, and my desk mate and friend came to support me as well. I forgot to have him record it or take pictures, but all in all, I think the day was a success.
Not bad for knocking the first one off the list. I am in the process of doing a few more of these, so it is only a matter of time before I can cross some more off the list.
Learn how to drive in the UK.
Present at an academic conference
Start a new tradition
Go back to therapy
Visit three new countries
Ride in a hot air balloon
Quit the tutoring centre
Volunteer for a literacy programme
Read a book that has more than 500 pages
Make my bed everyday for at least three months
Have a solid draft of my thesis completed
Master scorpion pose
Attend the symphony
Learn a rap song from start to finish
Host a dinner party
Create a budget so I can pay down my student loans
Week 13 of the year is dedicated to someone I admire. While there are many people that I admire, I’m choosing to focus this moment on Malala Yousafzai. While procrastinating on my conference presentation, I came across the documentary He Named Me Malala. In 2009, at 12 years old, she wrote a blog for the BBC detailing her life under Taliban rule. When the world took notice of yet another injustice that of this region, Malala rose in fame by giving interviews and becoming the face and the voice for women in the region would wanted education. In 2012 she was shot three times while on the bus to school. Even while in the hospital recovering, she continued to speak out for women, and continued to speak out for the importance of education. In 2014 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and continues to build, and sometimes rebuild, schools for women, refugees, and those in a war-torn region.
“I don’t want to be thought of as the “girl who was shot by the Taliban” but the “girl who fought for education.” This is the cause to which I want to devote my life.”
― Malala Yousafzai
I admire her courage and dedication. At 18 years old she has done more for the world than most people hope to do in a lifetime. She has faced death, doubters, and incredible adversary to continue to push for a cause that she believes in.
I only wish I could be half as courageous and make a fraction of a difference in the filed of education. When I had my chance to stand up for what I believed in two years ago, I caved, and let it break me. I had the chance to pursue the matter, and to let the university know what was going on in the programme, but instead, I chose to just bury it and get out of the United States as fast as I could. I’m still terrified that somehow that programme will catch up with me and it will hurt the work that I am doing in the UK (stupid I know, but I sometimes worry that the sins of my past will catch up to me).
And now that I have watched a young woman who did not let being shot in the face stop her from defending what she believes in, then I should not let a momentary blip in my educational journey stop me from pursing avenues that I think will improve the learning potential for students in higher education. The two things can hardly be compared, and I admire the way she treated it as nothing more than a reason to continue trying to make the world a better place for women.
The Scamp Abroad 