Updates on a Life
Aug. 13th, 2018 11:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icysilverthread1. I have been graduated from school for nearly a year and a half. I am relaxing by inches into the idea that I will never need to do school again. I rather feel I am bucking the Ancestral Tradition of an academic life, but so it goes when one half of the family cares deeply about Ancestors and the other half about University. I am trying to remember that my choices are my own.
2. When my boss compliments my work, he says that I'm very good at X for a new grad. I tense up at the first half and relax at the second. For the first time in my life, I have mentors I can learn from. I am growing into my strength and being given the space to grow as hard as I please, but not expected to do more than I wish. No one is looking at me like I'm a threat if I know too much. I am at least mostly sure that I'm not being measured with a four-foot yardstick. I have at least mostly relaxed enough to have opinions and judgements, and for the most part those opinions are trusted and respected.
I have had too many storybooks and relatives both tell me that the best intellectual work of one's life is done by twenty. I never expected to be growing into my life now.
There are lots of reasons that I am still living in a city where I have not one personal friend, and 90% of the answer is that my workplace is such a marvel of interpersonal functionality. I haven't the faintest notion how I got so lucky, but I am going to run with it as far as I can.
3. The California wildfires are both horrifying and horrible, and it's difficult to look away. The news is, of course, filled with people who can't fathom that an event might have multiple aggravating causes. Not least of which being that if you build in a floodplain, only a fool would be surprised when it floods; likewise, if you build in a dry-side forest or scrubland, you shouldn't be surprised when it burns.
California can't fix climate change alone, although it is at least trying. Urban sprawl, mismanaged forests, and decades worth of indiscriminate fire suppression are not easy problems to solve, but I am hoping that they do not prove intractable.
I have too much to say on the subject and it is all filled with grief.
4. The journey from late teenagehood to adulthood has felt rather like a cable-car, swinging perilously on a single rope that one dare not let go or slow down. I don't yet think I've made it to solid ground, but I imagine I can see the ground ahead.
I went to visit my family the past week. August is when the tomatoes are taller than I am just starting to come in and the blueberries near gone; alas but the raspberries came and went. The strawberries are a new addition to the garden, and most welcome. There haven't been strawberries planted there since my earliest memories. The oregano looked like it was taking over rather more of its corner than it should; I think no one has paid it all that much attention in years. It's my mother's and aunt's garden and it is astonishing how much they manage to grow in the middle of the city. Someday I shall have my own garden and tell stories about how much better theirs was, just as they tell stories about my granny's garden that is no longer.
5. Its uncomfortable to be neck deep in a political argument and realize that one is looking at one's own opinions from a different branch of the Trousers of Time. Not surprising, since [redacted] and I are very like the same personality born in different circumstances and we both like to argue. Still, a bit disconcerting.
6. There is something fundamentally right about looking across the water to islands on the other side. I have water here where I live (thankfully) but no islands and I still feel the lack of a too-empty horizon. The pity of falling in love with an ocean is that it is very unwilling to move, and equally I am unwilling to figure out how the fuck boats so we meander along in parallel and not as close as we might be. I am too poetic and sentimental about my ocean, and she too inhuman for kindness and too unexpected for promises.
2. When my boss compliments my work, he says that I'm very good at X for a new grad. I tense up at the first half and relax at the second. For the first time in my life, I have mentors I can learn from. I am growing into my strength and being given the space to grow as hard as I please, but not expected to do more than I wish. No one is looking at me like I'm a threat if I know too much. I am at least mostly sure that I'm not being measured with a four-foot yardstick. I have at least mostly relaxed enough to have opinions and judgements, and for the most part those opinions are trusted and respected.
I have had too many storybooks and relatives both tell me that the best intellectual work of one's life is done by twenty. I never expected to be growing into my life now.
There are lots of reasons that I am still living in a city where I have not one personal friend, and 90% of the answer is that my workplace is such a marvel of interpersonal functionality. I haven't the faintest notion how I got so lucky, but I am going to run with it as far as I can.
3. The California wildfires are both horrifying and horrible, and it's difficult to look away. The news is, of course, filled with people who can't fathom that an event might have multiple aggravating causes. Not least of which being that if you build in a floodplain, only a fool would be surprised when it floods; likewise, if you build in a dry-side forest or scrubland, you shouldn't be surprised when it burns.
California can't fix climate change alone, although it is at least trying. Urban sprawl, mismanaged forests, and decades worth of indiscriminate fire suppression are not easy problems to solve, but I am hoping that they do not prove intractable.
I have too much to say on the subject and it is all filled with grief.
4. The journey from late teenagehood to adulthood has felt rather like a cable-car, swinging perilously on a single rope that one dare not let go or slow down. I don't yet think I've made it to solid ground, but I imagine I can see the ground ahead.
I went to visit my family the past week. August is when the tomatoes are taller than I am just starting to come in and the blueberries near gone; alas but the raspberries came and went. The strawberries are a new addition to the garden, and most welcome. There haven't been strawberries planted there since my earliest memories. The oregano looked like it was taking over rather more of its corner than it should; I think no one has paid it all that much attention in years. It's my mother's and aunt's garden and it is astonishing how much they manage to grow in the middle of the city. Someday I shall have my own garden and tell stories about how much better theirs was, just as they tell stories about my granny's garden that is no longer.
5. Its uncomfortable to be neck deep in a political argument and realize that one is looking at one's own opinions from a different branch of the Trousers of Time. Not surprising, since [redacted] and I are very like the same personality born in different circumstances and we both like to argue. Still, a bit disconcerting.
6. There is something fundamentally right about looking across the water to islands on the other side. I have water here where I live (thankfully) but no islands and I still feel the lack of a too-empty horizon. The pity of falling in love with an ocean is that it is very unwilling to move, and equally I am unwilling to figure out how the fuck boats so we meander along in parallel and not as close as we might be. I am too poetic and sentimental about my ocean, and she too inhuman for kindness and too unexpected for promises.
