faint gray lines

Two years from the deadline, here are the things completed or in progress from my 101 Things in 1001 Days project.

Travel
• Visit Jack Daniel’s Distillery.
• Ride on an Amtrak train.
• Visit DC.
• Visit the National Mall.
• Visit the Smithsonian.
• Visit the MLK monument.
• Visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
• Tour the Newseum.
• Renew my passport.
• Visit San Francisco.
• See the Golden Gate Bridge.
• Ride on the Pacific Coast Highway.
• Dip a toe into the Pacific Ocean.
• Visit Portland, Oregon.
• Visit Powell’s Books.

Health and Wellness

• Receive an annual physical (1/3).
• Run a 5K race every other month (3/16).
• Attend a yoga class every other week (13/70).

Citizenship

• Volunteer with Girls on the Run.
• Participate in a Hands on Nashville project in a Metro school.
• Vote for Barack Obama.

Bon Vivant

• Get a massage.
• Start a book club.
• Watch 50 new-to-me movies (40/50).
• Attend one live show per quarter (4/11).
• Host a game night.
• Take a sewing class.
• Go on a monthly date night (12/33).
• Make a meal of Stephen’s choice once a month (9/33).

Writing

• Attend a reading.
• Take a writing class.

Matters of Spirit

• Read the lectionary each week for a year (18/52).
• Select and complete a devotional for the Lenten season.

Arts and Crafts

• Use up the box of tiles.
• Design holiday postcards each year (1/3).

Photography

• Have a business headshot taken.

Professional Development

• Give a presentation (Skillery, BarCamp, etc.)
• Complete the program management certificate from the Center for Nonprofit Management (4/6).
• Complete the nonprofit leadership certificate from the Center for Nonprofit Management (4/6).
• Attend one networking event each month. (24/33)
• Finish one nonfiction book a month (19/33).
• Take a negotiation class.
• Join another professional organization.

Miscellaneous

• [redacted x2]

I’ve felt, lately, how the bud must feel before the bloom. I’ve had lots of great, honest conversations with people and I’ve gone out of my comfort zone. But some things I want to accomplish take time to accomplish—more time than I’d like or, some days, feel like I can tolerate.

Today I took a class on presenting (it counts toward both of the certificates I’m working toward), taught by a PR consultant in town. A part of me always expects very old criticisms: stand up straighter, brush your hair, stop mumbling. But, much to my surprise, her initial feedback was to praise my wardrobe choice and her follow-up was to remark that she wouldn’t have thought most of my work was written or digital, that I am a “fantastic speaker” with a “great voice.”

That I am a better speaker when I stop worrying about following the script, because I know what I’m talking about.

Cue the cognitive dissonance.

Much of the dialogue about women lately has been about how we perceive ourselves and how that influences how we behave, determines whether we take risks. I’ve talked with women who appear confident but confess they’re just as anxious or insecure about this or that as I am, that they too have had x reaction to y stimuli.

Maybe that is really the trick: and rather than or. Feeling that way and doing.

Two Seconds

The fluctuating temperatures and early-spring pollen have wreaked havoc on my sinuses, so when I woke up Saturday for the first of the seven races I’ve paid for this spring and felt terrible, the goal was simply to complete the race.

Then, when I got out there and was actually able to run in longer bursts than I thought I’d be able to, the goal was just to finish under 50 minutes.

Despite pushing it so hard in the last stretch that I barely was able to yell “On your right!” to two teenage girls who ambled onto the race course like there wasn’t a giant banner that said FINISH thirty feet away and a bunch of sweaty people wearing numbers heading right for it, my time was 50:01.

That’s What He Meant

Our neighborhood had a beer festival this weekend, and Stephen bought tickets ages ago for both of us. Even though I don’t drink beer since going gluten-free a year ago. And even though I had a sewing class scheduled in the middle of the festival.

We gave my ticket to a college friend and, when I returned from my class to pick them up, I had my finished project in the back seat. While I navigated away from East Park and the hordes of people walking toward Five Points, my hands wrapped so tightly around the steering wheel that my knuckles were turning white, Stephen picked up my project and asked, “What did you buy a pillow for?”

I’ll take that as a compliment.

Fish Tale

Month two of the Remedial Book Club brought a change in venue to a non-smoking bar and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.

Some books—like last month’s selection, To Kill a Mockingbird—get better as you get older. Others? As Randal said, “This book was about as exciting as actual fishing.”

Meltdown

Our weekend ended with a trip to Target, as weekends often do. We stopped by the Easter section to see if there were any Peep-themed non-food merchandise we might wear at next week’s race (Rachael Anne named our team “This is For My Peeps”). That’s where we first crossed paths with a mother about ten years older than us and her two small children still dressed for church at suppertime. The kids were in high spirits, excited about Easter.

When I remembered I needed wipes for the car interior, we crossed paths with them again. The boy, about four, was whining that he’d found something he wanted to show her to buy for him.

We ran into them again at the checkout line. There were only three registers open and about twenty people with carts waiting. There were people of all colors and ages and three different types of religious headwear. I noticed this because we were all sort of looking at one another. Every last one of us was trying very hard to ignore the screaming blond boy who had taken off his tiny penny loafers, thrown them, and planted himself on the floor of the store and cried until his face turned pink. Someone else’s little girl carefully collected his shoes and placed them nearby, only for him to throw them again. His mother continued to purchase her cart, stopping only to chase after him when he made a break for it and started to run back into the store.

They were still inside, and he was still screaming, when we stepped into the crisp evening with our purchases.

“SNOOZE,” I said, my eyes wide with disbelief at the spectacle we’d just escaped.

“No joke,” Stephen said. “I hope you didn’t break the alarm clock chucking it at the wall.”

I know from others’ stories that my experience as “a woman in tech” has been a charmed one. I was the only woman in my freshman class who majored in computer science at the small, rural public university I attended, and I was frequently the only woman in my programming classes. My professors were supportive and I had amazing classmates who helped me with assignments when I struggled with concepts. I missed out on some LAN parties in the men’s dorm, but that was about it.

I know I am lucky. And I try to remember to check my privilege and listen to and support women who are still blazing trails, even after discovering rather late in my collegiate career that my interest in technology was more about using it as a tool for marketing and for communications, where my real passions lay.

But here’s the thing: I have a hard time taking your complaints seriously if you decry sexism and gendered language … then in the next breath talk about wanting to be respected for “act[ing] like a woman.”

The notion that women all have the same behaviors, experiences, interests, aesthetic, etc. that can be classified as “act[ing] like a woman” is part of the problem. It’s deciding that a certain set of behaviors is “like a woman” and another set is not.

You can do or have everything, just not at the same time. I’m trying to be mindful of this. The slow process of marking off items from the 101 things list is a living meditation on the subject.

We’re halfway through Lent. I’m finding my choice of devotional to be a good one. Today’s reading (Luke 11:29-53) offers a different take on the “light under a bushel” passage: what you focus on shapes you.

I’m forcing myself to turn my focus to solutions.

I’ve been displeased for too long about how many races I’ve run toward goal #30 (the answer: zero). I’m not even sure how that has happened! To remedy this, I’ve filled in my spring running schedule so there will be eight consecutive Saturdays of races. I’m too competitive to turn in eight terrible times, so I’m sure I will drag myself onto the treadmill, the elliptical and the greenway more often. This will mean I will be better about hydrating and better about eating small meals throughout the day, rather than having a giant cup of coffee in the morning and waiting until noon to eat lunch. It will also mean I am more likely to drag myself to yoga on Sunday afternoons for recovery.

I’ve also been unhappy for too long about how long it is taking to finish the novel I started writing in 2008. Ugh, yes: five years. I even realized a few nights ago that when I threw out the first rough draft and started writing fresh, it was at a December 2009 writing retreat. So I’ve been plowing through each evening for about an hour, making executive decisions, sending e-mails to friends in the morning asking if Character B’s behavior is appropriate given situation A, sharing word counts. So far, so good.

Speaking of writing more, Colby has been blogging more, and I really like yesterday’s post about conflict. If I learn anything from 2013 it’s going to be this: conflict is often scary, but usually necessary.

My head is a jumbled mess of allegories and sidenotes these days. Something about time on the mat or on the elliptical or on the greenway sweats out the useless and sorts out the useful—and of course I’ve taken the last month off. Thankfully, my appetite has too, so I am mostly on track with healthy eating habits, even if I’ve made no progress on the Health and Wellness portion of the 101 Things initiative.

I have been thinking about some history that keeps repeating itself. Some of it has to do with things other people do. I’ve noticed that, a lot of times, people engineer a situation they want to control so it doesn’t get too big, doesn’t attract the eye of any challengers. Large enough to look like a parade but not so big they need a permit, so to speak.

But I am spending a lot more time scrutinizing my own behavior and thought patterns, taking responsibility for my part of things not going the way I’d like, and trying to do what I need to do to get the results I want. I am spreadsheeting the hell out of things—but about other things I have finally learned to give myself a range to work with between deprivation and excess.

I am also looking forward to the inaugural “remedial book club” meeting later this month, where my husband and I and some of our friends will read through the books he never read in high school. He threatens just to read the Wikipedia entries.

• Visit San Francisco.
• See the Golden Gate Bridge.
• Ride on the Pacific Coast Highway.
• Dip a toe into the Pacific Ocean.
• Visit Portland, Oregon.
• Visit Powell’s Books.

This year’s progress on the 101 Things in 1001 Days goals:

Travel
1. Visit Jack Daniel’s Distillery.
2. Ride on an Amtrak train.
3. Visit DC.
4. Visit the National Mall.
5. Visit the Smithsonian.
6. Visit the MLK monument.
7. Visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
8. Tour the Newseum.

Health and Wellness

9. Receive an annual physical (1/3).
10. Attend a yoga class every other week (8/70).

Citizenship

11. Volunteer with Girls on the Run.
12. Participate in a Hands on Nashville project in a Metro school.
13. Vote for Barack Obama.

Bon Vivant

14. Get a massage.
15. Watch 50 new-to-me movies (20/50).
16. Host a game night.
17. Go on a monthly date night (5/33).
18. Make a meal of Stephen’s choice once a month (4/33).

Writing

19. Attend a reading.
20. Take a writing class.

Arts and Crafts

21. Use up the box of tiles.
22. Design holiday postcards each year (1/3).

Photography

23. Have a business headshot taken.

Professional Development

24. Give a presentation (Skillery, BarCamp, etc.)
25. Attend one networking event each month. (14/33)
26. Finish one nonfiction book a month (9/33).
27. Take a negotiation class.
28. Join another professional organization.

Miscellaneous


1. of 6 private goals completed.

Edit: Make that 30 things. Some last-minute New Year’s Eve plans helped kick off some progress on another goal:

30. Attend one concert per quarter (1/11).

Working the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve is always interesting. One time I used up the vacation time I’d hoarded all year. I left sometime around December 16 and didn’t come back until January 2. That’s a luxury that, now that I’ve switched to exclusively digital marketing (and B2C, to boot), I can no longer afford.

I’ve found that there’s something even more luxurious about going into work those days, too. The office is quieter, the pressure of most deadlines is off, and those vacuums force you to grow to fill them. And you can use the vacation days later.

This afternoon I was sipping some mint tea to power through some tasks before meeting Stephen for dinner, and I noticed the usually pushy, New Age tag (“Develop your intuition,” one insisted. “Live in your strength,” another nagged. OKAY, TEA.) dangling over the side.

Sometimes the bossy tea knows what it’s talking about.

Here is what I want, most days but especially today: I want not to care.  Not about the important things—those deserve focus, or grief, or joy, or whatever response is appropriate—but about the unimportant things.  I don’t want them to have the space in my head anymore.

I don’t want to care when some internet acquaintance tries to make a national tragedy all about how they feel, or when Jay Carney (or anyone else, really) is clumsy and makes it sound like only parents feel horrible about what happened.  I don’t want to split hairs when someone who’s never been within three degrees of anyone affected acts like they lost a relative while people I know have been through similar situations and are not proverbially falling out.  I don’t want to grind my molars at people who talk about prayer, or at people who no longer feel like a thought is real if they haven’t typed it, or a thousand other missteps that happen when everyone’s scrambling to be heard without first figuring out if and why they need to be.

And even beyond senseless tragedy, thousands of miles away, I would like for more indifference. I don’t want to care when people do socially awkward things because they don’t know how to handle …  I don’t know, and I don’t want to care enough to hypothesize.  I don’t want to take it as an insult when it’s apparent that the reason I’m not remembered is because I have too much of my act together.  I don’t want to care about apologies I’m never going to receive or requests that will never be honored.

I want to stop wanting to stomp my feet and scream, “Forget hovercrafts.  Where are the adults I was promised?  When does it actually get better?”

I want all of that unimportant crap packed up and moved out so I have room for what is important.  My marriage.  My health.  My relationships with the good people I have been blessed with as friends and coworkers.  Art in all its forms.  A quiet, personal faith.  Acting on what I believe.

I am tired of wasting even a second of my life on anything else.