apple morning

I got some gala apples from the grocery yesterday. I have been craving for fresh fruits but I am flabbergasted by how expensive they are. I got a few apples and a couple of grapefruits.

I had strange dreams last night of moving into a new office that looked like a house. People had typewriters instead of computers.

It really depends on the apple... but I would love a David Tennant doctor anytime.

What am I up to today? Surprisingly, maybe because I took time to wake up slowly, and then made myself breakfast without rushing, and then I made time for taking photos (all photos taken with my digital SLR), I am actually feeling benevolent about working. I have lined up my frogs and it will be a rather long day.

But on the side I promised myself I will 1) read 2) draw or paint in my small notebook 3) write at least one scene for the novel - there is a character who has been hovering in my head trying to catch my attention.

up before the sun

Starting on a new schedule today. Last night I went to bed at 9AM. Up at 3AM today. Will do this for the next couple of weeks and see how it goes. The energy left at the end of the day is just not enough to let me do things. So I figure I'd call it an early night and get up before everybody else does and then do my own thing.

It's a different kind of feeling to check off your to-do list before the sun has even woken up.

I had a nightmare last night.

So today I will be deliberately seeking out positive and pleasant thoughts and things.

I would have much preferred dreaming about the Weeping Angels than what I actually dreamed. Which was standing in front of my clients about to start on a presentation and realizing at the last minute that the presentation was only halfway done because I had a false memory that it was already done. And all the time I thought it was happening for real. And it stretched on for a while, very long minutes of trying to figure out how to fix everything and not being able to come up with a good enough idea to save myself. Being whisked away by the Tardis would have been perfect then but I did not know it was a dream. It felt like the end of days, the end of a world, and it was so frustrating.

Needless to say I woke up feeling not well-rested. :(

So today I will endeavor to make that particular nightmare not come true and to layer it over with bright happy things.

I could use some cheering and cheering up.

Sunday Morning

April is not my best month. It started off with two trips out of town for fieldwork (for me that means visiting households to conduct two-hour interviews with consumers) which left me too exhausted to write or make art. Then it has been a mad rush to get things done before another wave of fieldwork comes in at the end of the month. This cycle will last until early July and I have been struggling with finding the time and the energy to write and make art. It is rather frustrating, and it reminds even more strongly of how work can eat up so much of myself.

There was a ray of hope sometime at the end of the second week when I got to talk with a dear friend from years back who is now top boss at an ad agency and was asking me if I would be interested in rejoining the workforce as part of their team. I had half a week to think about it. When time was up I told her I was interested in exploring the possibility further.

So what does it mean? It means leaving the home-based work setup I have had for the past three years. It also means faster savings for London which is the most important and biggest dream I have right now. It means funds for self-publishing my books. It means funds for setting up an art exhibit. (With my old self, money would simply mean retail therapy.)

But more than the money, I found myself looking forward to a new social group. The one I was hoping to bond with in the past three years has proved to be very disappointing. I had thought they were my long lost tribe but I was wrong. It was just like high school all over again with all the cliches and givens and templates. I was an outsider in high school. You get the picture. Heck, I could not even expect a decent reply to a text message. Few things smack of being totally ignored and unimportant as a totally unacknowledged text message.

There is also the advantage of learning new things, and a change of scenery.

However, it must not be misinterpreted that I am bored. I am never bored. And I don't miss agency life. It is more like I see now that it may be time to step back into the old fray as a whole person compared to what I was before and to go into it with my priorities clear and my goals clear. Maybe this time it will finally work with me instead of against me.

I have tried many times in the past three years to consider exploring re-employment but each time the answer from my heart and my core had been a resounding No. This time it feels different, so I finally said Yes. Maybe the lessons have been finally learned. It is Time.

I still don't know how it will all turn out, or whether it will even push through with this agency or another, or when it will happen. But it will happen. I know that now. I will flow back into the system but I will be different. I come from my personal hero's journey, a Wanderer who needed to define herself, and now getting ready to shift into a Warrior, someone with a context and a cause and a purpose. (References from The Hero Within by Carol Pearson - a great enlightening book!)

So these are my thoughts on this Sunday morning as I prepare for some deep working (delving into analysis and interpretation of data) to make progress with the project. I am hoping that having written this blog post I will be able to do some writing with my Camp NaNo stories -- I am way behind and in danger of not completing as I have only written a bit over two thousand words out of forty thousand.

And maybe I can sketch something during my fifteen minute breaks.

How is your Sunday going?

quick shots

I've been busy -- mainly drawing, painting, writing, reading, and today it was working.

My house chores are way behind but I'm pleased with the creative productivity.

The week started well and hopeful.

Latest piece. I have quite a number of drawings waiting for color in line.

Making the wait for a meeting worthwhile with a book. Finished two books this week.

I have a watcher keeping me safe and supervised every day.

it's a brand new day

Every day is a brand new day. Yet today is somehow more magical that the last few ones that have gone before. Something is shifting inside me, my soul compass pointing to its True North. The clouds of doubts and fear clearing from the sky of my dreams. The oceans of my heart pour in with the tide, pulled by the moon. The moon is my heart, sometimes broken in half, sometimes whole and brimming with light. The morning is an ally, the sun is the hand that holds me all together, fire melding all my broken parts.

Today I feel myself venturing farther and deeper even though everything seems to look the same. The words call, waiting to be poems. The colors swirl with excitement, waiting to be anything on a blank page. The muse sits just beyond the ordinary, a hand held out, and her sigh is an endless music.

bits of the new (and re-newed) in my daily life

I'm training myself to sleep early and wake up early. I am also trying to complete 8 hours of sleep so I would not feel so easily tired and always craving for a nap in the middle of the day. My sleep patterns, according to the Sleep Cycle app, leave much to be desired. I find it very difficult to fall asleep and I keep on waking up at 2-3AM regardless of what time I went to sleep. This is one of the better nights:

But in the past few days I have been already able to get up at 6am from a routine of getting up at 8-9am. Next target is to get up at 5am.

I now swim everyday. Except when the pool is being cleaned or when there are noisy rowdy kids in the pool. I like swimming in the very early morning, right before breakfast, around 7:30 or 8AM. By that time I would have had my first cup of coffee, written my morning pages, cleared the work email inbox, reviewed my to-do list, made up the bed, fed the cat, and gotten the breakfast food ready for cooking.

I stay in the water for 30-45 minutes. I do laps until I'm out of breath and my arms are aching. I also do some yoga poses in the water -- standing poses in the middle of the pool and some sitting poses by the stairs of the pool. I use the fountain faucets as water massage on my back and shoulders.

I eat a full breakfast almost everyday now. Since I wake up early I do not feel the need to rush. I also try to eat fruit as often as I can. Fresh fruits are bit expensive but I get lucky sometimes and find fresh fruit packs at a discount or like the other day, a friend sent me a bagful of fresh sweet mangoes in season.

I go out of my way to buy and include vegetables in every meal. I love vegetables. But they wilt and spoil quickly and making frequent trips to the store is not efficient either. However, the fresher the vegetables, the longer time they will keep. So now I make a special trip once a week to another, farther, supermarket that sells much fresher vegetables and even offers organic vegetables. I turn the long walk into an exercise and also a chance to do a walking meditation.

my quick-to-prepare chicken and vegetable noodle stir-fry

I use public transport or walk whenever I can to save on gas. I also save on parking fees.

I have further distilled my possessions down to the essential. Even my home decor is down to the essential -- I only kept those that really make me happy and that really mean so much to me. I have put out for selling a good portion of my stuff -- anything that I am ambivalent about, haven't used for months, forgotten, postponed/ put aside too many times, all the extra extras and just-in-cases that escaped previous de-clutterings. Since I have become clear on what I exactly want I will also be less susceptible to impulse purchases and the lure of retail therapy.

I have reduced my entertainment collection (movie, anime and TV series DVDs, music CDs, and video games) to these two Muji towers. Before there used to be an equivalent of about double that. I expect to reduce that collection further.

I clean and clear as I go all the time. Even when I am very tired especially in the evenings. The kitchen has to be clean. The dishes have to be washed. Everything must be put away in their proper places. Believe me, the joy in the morning when you are greeted by a bright clean home!

I make time to read everyday. I love books. I have always had a passion for reading and gaining all those tidbits of trivia and knowledge that eventually become contextual reference points for various situations in real life later on. My weird habit is to read multiple books at the same time. Don't ask me how I can keep up with all the plots and stories, I just do. This week I added a few more to my current reading list and I am absolutely happy about it. I used to put off reading because of work. Now I give time to reading, not just work.

I make time to write everyday. In addition to my morning pages, I scribble into my notebook or type into my Evernote all my thoughts and ideas and feelings. Later on I process some of them to see if anything needs to be resolved. Ideas are weighed and stored in a file where it will be used, not forgotten. Writing is very cathartic for me and my one ultimate dream job is to be a writer. So if I will somehow make that dream come true in some way I guess I should get as much practice as I can. Like reading, I used to put off writing for doing work. Now I use my work as an excuse to do more writing. I brainstorm with myself by writing. I thresh out ideas in writing. When I started writing more I noticed that it became easier to handle stress. When I am starting to feel stressed (I get stressed so easily!) I start to write. Sometimes writing a blog post helps calm me down. Like right now.

I now have a stricter work schedule. Being clear with where I want to take my life (that will be shared in the next few posts), I make sure that the work I do in the meantime does not overwhelm nor take more than its share of fair time and effort for each day. So I have allotted time for work in the early morning until 3PM only. If there is a need to do "overtime" work then I extend until 5PM. This means that future projects will have to take this into consideration. With this strict schedule and a clearer image in my head of the boundaries of work in my day, I have also succeeded in controlling my procrastination to a much, much better degree.

These are just some that are more firmly in place. They were much easier to do when I became clear with my life goals because every little bit of these daily habits contribute to the bigger goals. As I recalibrate my day-to-day I am able to comprehend better how the little things matter and I also learn to be more patient while trusting that all the effort will amount to something significant.

What new habits are you trying to learn?

a solo morning swim and a full breakfast

I've been trying to wake up earlier for the past few days. I want to get a very good working system in place before the two simultaneous work projects start on the hard parts (i.e. fieldwork and analysis).

So far what has been consistent is that I do my best work in the mornings, before lunch. And then I could sustain it after lunch until about 3PM. And then it all starts to go downhill. So if I have a lot to do I am better off waking up early so I can have the big chunk of the morning available to me.

On the other hand, I also have to make sure that everything else is in place -- an exercise or fitness activity, a full breakfast for brainpower, and an organized (and doable) goals list to keep me on track for the rest of the day.

Today has been good so far. I got up at 7:30AM. Did some yoga stretches and then headed for the pool for a 30-minute swim (nonstop laps until right before the noisy kids start to arrive at the pool area). Then I cooked myself a full breakfast and instead of a newspaper I read articles from Zite - an iPad app that lets you customize web news and articles according to the topics you want. My favorite subjects are mostly on Productivity, Psychology, Happiness, and Writing. No use ruining the day with bad news and gossip from standard news websites.

coffee, egg, salami, honey oat bread, cream cheese

Work flowed smoothly after breakfast. Although the real test will be when fieldwork and analysis stage happens. Right now it's mostly preparation and getting a lot of details in place. It's demanding and time-consuming but it's made up of little bits of tasks that are easily divided and clustered. Fieldwork and analysis are huge tasks like tough meat that need extra work to be handled well. But I am optimistic.

will be office lady today

Drinking a hot cup of coffee while I slowly nudge myself to full wakefulness. I will be out all day today, and I will be working in an office --- a place I have rarely been in the past 1.5 years! It's for a project where all I have to do is interview groups of people for a research study. It will be a bit of a long day -- I leave by 9AM and the interview sessions begin at around 10AM. Estimating by the schedules given to me I will finish at around 8:30PM, or even 9PM if things get delayed along the way.

I have decided to wear a nice pair of jeans (since I will be interviewing mostly college students and I don't want to go all formal on them -- I want them to feel relaxed and comfortable with me) and a plain soft slightly frilly top paired with a chunky necklace for a splash of color. Hopefully this achieves some sort of dressed-up casual that will not intimidate nor alienate the young people I will be talking to. (On the plus side, this top is super comfy, which will matter after I've been sitting for more than six hours in the same room asking the same questions.)

This necklace is a steal -- I bought it during one of my out-of-town projects in Davao City. There is a popular strip of stores selling local goods and I bought a string of these beads and had them made into a necklace. It came out much much cheaper than if I had bought a similar piece back in Manila. I hope to go back there and buy more "raw" beads for my crafts.

Have to get ready now. Hope to have some sanity and strength left to write again tonight!