balance

As expected, the start of the semester hit me like a ton of bricks. I always have a tough time calibrating the work/life balance, which is something I think about a lot (probably more than is good for me; new goal: balance with thoughts of Tim Riggins). Achieving work/life balance is one of the trickiest aspects of "modern life," which is to say, adult life. Case in point: Anne-Marie Slaughter's enormously popular piece in The Atlantic.

I think that's what makes shows like Mad Men or The Wire so compelling to me--the work/life balance is one of the biggest, if not the biggest theme, & even though I was not a copywriter in 1962, or a homicide detective in 2005, I can still relate to those characters.

After about a year and a half at my first job, I realized that I didn't want "my life" to equal "my job." That sounds incredibly simple and obvious, & maybe it is, but I happened to work in an office where people truly shaped their lives around their jobs. It made them happy. I tried it, but it didn't work for me.

So now that I'm back to teaching & studying--what constitutes a job for me these days--I find myself trying to carve out little pockets of time for the things that I genuinely, desperately want to be doing.

Like cooking up a coconut-curry stir-fry.

Or reading a for-fun book with a cup of tea when I first wake up in the morning.

Or driving out to spend a weekend with an old friend in honor of her birthday.

So far, the balance is holding out, enough so that for my last year of grad school, I'm expecting really great things.