Looking up

Just taking a minute to reflect on the border between my current state and my home state, here's a picture of the Columbia Gorge. Beautiful picture from Craig Wolf of Hood River outside of Portland:

Also, I saw the Northern Lights! I'm pretty sure, anyway. I've never seen a green sky before, but I saw one two days last week in the evening. It was really cool. The hills were cutting into the green. It very much looked like this picture, except without the Crown Point building:

A few cool ones of the aurora above Mount Hood:

I just flipped through some pictures from J. I love him so much. I think that every moment not spent with him is one less moment I'll ever have with him. That's how much I love him.

So, here's my view in the morning...looks way closer and jaw-dropping in person. I wish I could take one to show the real experience!

My view this morning

I had a terrible day at work today. I'm having a terrible time there in general. The culture and my culture don't mix. Imagine a group of soldiers and officers...now imagine them all getting hired at Starbucks and working in one department. Not that they are bad people -- in fact I like many of them. It's just the total mismatch of cultures being shoved into each other. I think asking questions is good, but it's considered insulting and insubordinate in some cases in this culture. I think offering to help is nice, but my offer comes across like I'm trying to butt in (because everything is so compartmentalized and segmented). I know I can't change the culture, and I certainly don't want to invest the effort required to do so, but I feel like I have to do something.

I am struggling so much just to have normal conversations. I feel like it's just constant miscommunications. There's no teamwork. I'm totally isolated and excluded, to an extreme. It makes me feel lost, being there. I am already lost in life right now, but I'm totally isolated, excluded (structurally but also excluded from the "good old boys" club at nearly every meeting), and frustrated nearly all day. I feel like I'm having so much difficulty that I'll get a horrible recommendation. I need to once again take a proactive approach and try to start communicating with my boss about the difficulties I'm having and how to resolve them. The problem is, he is a big part of the problem. He treats me like I'm unimportant, which makes me withdraw comments, stop making suggestions, stop taking initiative, etc. I feel like I'm useless and like I can't do anything right. That is the effect of this culture on me (and it's not just the officer side of the house--the civilian side is not great either, but it's hard to tell how much is due to reacting to the culture like I'm doing). I don't need that, especially because of the lack of good people in my current life. I've become totally isolated (a necessity in order to finish the school project) and that's not a good situation to be in when your work culture sucks too. I need a positive culture in my life to make up for the pain of the last few years of graduate school. I'm going to target healthy work cultures for my next job.

I'm nervous about leaving my job because of (lack of) finances and a weak job market in the NW for my level of experience in my field. I don't have confidence I'd get a job right away. I need to stay here at least a year for my resume's sake. I just don't know if I can take it much longer than that. I had wanted to stay 5 years for the retirement payout, but I don't know if I can last much longer than a year and a half here. I do want the stability of a government job, but not if I can't make my situation better. Everyone seems so...just plain unhappy all the time. People crying, I was about to yell at people today, griping. Everyone just seems unhappy. It's so hard to go to work in that environment that just makes me frustrated, upset with myself, and feel like a failure, because I have no life outside of work right now.

But I just don't feel like I'm ready for this position. The job description actually said 5 years of experience was required, which surprised me because when I applied it had said 3 years. I had about 3 years of professional experience, but not 5. So I feel like I got put into a position that should be "in training" but I have no one training me and no one to talk to. It is setting me up for failure. It's fine to challenge someone in a role, but in order to be challenged you have to be somewhat decent at the task first--otherwise it just makes it more stressful. So I just end up feeling dumped in the ocean to fend for myself and constantly trying to figure out who to ask. I also think they forget that I've only been there 7.5 months...they never did any training with me and I didn't know what to ask for before I was in the role, so I basically got no training (except for one aspect). I'm just horribly frustrated. Once I recover from school and get my life back on track over the next month or so, I need to start applying to jobs. My goal is still to leave in June 2014, for now. I might still try to go to Ireland for a month. Who knows, maybe J and I will elope and get married out of the country next year. I have so many conflicting desires because I feel the need to get out of this environment, but I don't want to be seen as a job hopper and I need to start saving money for a family. How can I achieve both? I need to start thinking about this now that I'm done with school and am starting to have more resources available (very slowly...even doing laundry right now sounds overwhelming!).

I wonder how society would be today if no men were around. I was reflecting on how women are encouraged throughout life to depend on a man. And I know that sounds cliche, but I can illustrate it well with an example. I'm watching Bear Grylls climb down a mountain in South Dakota, building fires, etc. He said something that made me think about how many mountains he's climbed. I reflected on how many I've climbed. I've climbed a good number, but nothing compared to him. Anyway, it got me thinking about something I thought about this weekend when I had a question about my computer...I though, "I don't need to worry about figuring that out. I'll always have a boyfriend in my life who knows about that kind of stuff." It was something related to an issue I'm having with a data file in my Outlook program. 

But I actually thought that, I'll always have a boyfriend who can take care of that for me! So you can see what I mean...being dependent on a man. Rather, being encouraged and reinforced to think you are dependent on men. Girls, at least in my experience, have always been socially allowed to opt out of things. I did half ass knee push ups in middle school along with all the other girls because that was something I could get away with as a girl. Women at work kind of assume that the men will do any difficult moving task, even if it's not that hard (like moving a desk to a new office). The point is, when you grow up thinking that you can always just ask someone to fix something for you, you really do become dependent on them because you don't learn how to do it yourself. I've decided to actively combat this. 

That's why I ask for instruction so that I can take care of things myself. Like fixing lights on my car, replacing air filters, etc. Even the seemingly easy things to a guy might not be things that many girls typically know how to do. I have no clue how to work a lawnmower because my brother always got that duty (not that I wanted it!), but I know how to clean the house because that was my chore. I'm reflecting on how reinforcement throughout my life has led me to not learn certain things. I want to continue making sure I learn those skills so that I feel powerful and independent. I know many of these words sound cliche, but hopefully in context you are able to step back from those words and understand the meaning behind my explanation of gaining my independence back.

Wow! Well, I started out the entry with an intent to focus on the good things I had seen and done today (Mount Rainier was beautiful of course), and I spoke to my "non-work colleague" BC about really good things. She is encouraging me through this recovery process. We talked about how for the time being I need to focus on letting myself recover and not doing anything else -- letting myself catch up on errands, watch TV, cook good food, exercise, and not feeling like I have to go run out and do other stuff. I need to recover. If I could choose a few words to sum up this current period of my life, they would be: Lost, Loss, Recovery. For sure.

West Coast winter

Seaside, Oregon

View from our deck

Awesome painted clouds

Morning run on day 2

Seaside

I'm sitting on the beach looking out at the sunny ocean. Okay, technically I'm not on the beach, but I'm about 5 feet away and 20 feet above the sand (in my room). I'm sitting on my deck writing my fiction novel. This morning I went on an hour-long jog South from the hotel to the end of this beach. Yesterday I went on an hour-long jog North from the hotel. I'll post pictures later when I get home. I saw mussels, crabs, jellyfish, seagulls, surfers, and huge trees on the beach (driftwood). This is an absolutely beautiful November trip. It has been sunny and warm...about 60 the whole weekend. The smell of bacon and coffee is wafting up from the restaurant below me. Some men are flying kites, children are building sandcastles with their parents, and of course you have the few older men with metal detectors. Someday I'll go ask them what they tend to find...I'm curious.

I would like to make a tradition with my future family to come back here every summer. I plan to go back to the beach about 2-3 more weekends before the year ends. Instead of having a vacation before heading back to work, the weekend vacations will be my "vacation". I want to start some family rituals once I get married. Summers at the coast and San Juan Islands, winter trip to Leavenworth, WA and Bend, OR, Puget Sound kayaking trips, winter vacation in a tropical location, and travel to other countries. R's family used to travel frequently and I always admired that. They used to go down to Guatemala and live for a month or two, or over to Asia. They travel more than anyone I've ever known. I always looked up to his dad -- a doctor who really enjoys his hobbies and does IMMENSE amounts of mountain climbing and traveling. I think he used to climb Mount Hood every weekend for a few years. I want to start some traditions and be able to look forward to doing the same things every year.

On the drive down here, I felt so happy to be "home" in Oregon. It was an intense drive because in order to get here you take a straight-shot through Astoria and through the complete wilderness. You basically drive through the forest for a big chunk of the drive. I used to be pretty experienced at this because it's a pretty similar environment to how I grew up driving, but for the last few years I have been living in very urbanized environments that are far from nature. Here, nature is surrounding me. I sometimes fear that the NW will become developed and lose its natural beauty. Like the former Oregon Governor McCall said, "Come visit, but don't stay." I sincerely hope that the NW can retain its beauty and not become much more developed than it is.

There is something spiritual to me about the ocean. I feel at home. I am at the end of the world right now -- the very left-most edge of the U.S. I love that feeling for some reason. When you stop to think about it, it's kind of amazing why people love the ocean so much. To Spock, it's just a bunch of water hitting the land. But there is something higher about the ocean. You don't really objectively think of the ocean that way. That is why I call the beach spiritual.

Moving forward

I came up with some ideas this weekend about where I want to go next in my life. I'm feeling pretty depressed because of all I went through, but I am on an upward slope. I have only had 10 days since I submitted my final dissertation, so I've barely had a chance to recover. That's why I want to come down here this weekend -- to take some time to recover and get back to myself. I've been dealing with some unfulfilling experiences in the last year and now many of them have been fixed in the past 2-3 weeks alone. I have left behind many of the things that were making me unhappy. One year ago I decided to embrace my feelings and take a leap of faith -- I moved back, found a job, and left a relationship behind. The difficulty about making big choices like that that is that even though you might like some aspects of something (i.e., a relationship, a job, a geographic location), you must follow your heart. Sometimes your heart is hard to hear over everything else. In October last year, I finally decided to take a leap of faith and believe what I thought my heart was telling me. That led to me finishing school, ending a relationship, moving across the country, and finding a brand new job. All of that! It has been a slow turn of the ship over the past year, mostly due to my dissertation being so painfully slow to finish.

However, I am rediscovering my world again. It has only been 2 weekends of "freedom" so far, but I have already figured out some of the directions I want to go in. I have a chance to have a fresh start in my life. I have time now to pursue the things I put on hold off and on for the last few years. I have a chance now to decide how I want to live my life and to start doing those things I love ALL the time now. It is really crazy...this concept of free time after work. I still don't quite know how to deal with it all because I've barely been keeping it together for the past few months, but I feel like I'm sensing a direction for my life.

• Go on lots of mini-vacations on the weekends.
• Plan big trips next year to Hawaii and Ireland/Scotland.
• Take banjo and piano lessons.
• Start preparing to buy a dog in a few months.
• Start deciding between Seattle and Portland in terms of where to buy a house.
• Write a fiction book.
• Run a lot. There is a project I have planned for the running aspect that I am actually planning on seeing if I can publish later -- so I'm not sure I want to talk about it here yet. It is akin to a travel guide you might read before hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, except that it's not for the PCT. It's for something else. I'm very excited about it. R helped me draw out some diagrams this weekend in his art program. It's going to be fantastic. I might actually turn it into a blog with visuals and photos, but if I do have the option of publishing it, I might do that so I'll have to hold off on talking about it on here until I decide. 

Other careers

I feel like over the past year I've really thought hard about my career choice. I absolutely love the concepts of my field and the research, but the logistics of working in the field make it a little hard on me (due to a dearth of opportunities in areas I want to live). There are still workable jobs for me and once I get more experience I can apply to plenty of places like Nike, IBM, Columbia, Starbucks, Microsoft, Boeing, etc., but for the time being the less experienced jobs aren't plentiful in this neck of the woods. So, in the past year I have found myself wondering, what else would I be happy doing if I could? And I found that I had plenty of things I would love to do but have not pursued to-date:

Animal trainer. I loved working with my horse. I loved training my parents' dog. I've never had any formal training in animal science, I just really love working with animals. I see all these dogs out here at the beach and I can't help but smile. Every once in a while I'll smile at an extra cute kid, but animals are what I love. I have always watched a lot of animal documentaries. I would love to be a dog or horse trainer and have spent more time specializing in that field. I haven't had a dog yet because so far I've been focused on other aspects of my life (graduate school, traveling, moving just to have a job, etc.). But now I'm at the point where I want to settle down so that I can be around animals. I always fantasized about having a farm where I could have animals, which brings me to my second career...

Organic farmer. For the last 5-10 years I have often found myself wishing I could buy a farm and grow plants. I haven't put a lot of emphasis on this in my life so far, but only because I have moved around way too much. It's difficult to grow things in apartments, especially when you move every 6-12 months. I'm tired of moving and would love a house to have a big garden in. I would love to have horses, a goat, chickens, etc. I have talked myself out of the goats and chickens because I have so many other interests to balance -- particularly the fact that I want to go exploring and adventuring every weekend, which would make it hard to take care of chickens and goats. I plan to compromise on this desire to be an organic farmer and have a dog, possibly a horse, and a big garden for my own food. 

Biologist or marine biologist. One of my favorite classes in college was Oceanography. I took it when I was attending school in Chile. My whole life I have found myself daydreaming about tracking animals or going out in the woods to learn about animals and follow them. One of my friends became a biologist who works with birds. All the time I see these pictures of her in the woods, tracking birds and just watching them. I would be content to do this all day. When I was a kid and my family spent 2 weeks every summer at the beach, I would spend a huge majority of my time just staring out at the distant ocean watching for whales. I would be happy to just study animals all the time. I've always loved it.

Travel writer. I feel like now that I actually have time to do stuff, I would like to devote myself to "adventuring" more again. I've had to put that on hold for the last half of a year as I focused on my dissertation. Now I'm back! I feel that I would have enjoyed being a travel guide if I had gone a different path in my career. If I had time to devote to that sort of thing, I would have focused more on my travel writing and designing adventures for people. I still may decide to follow that path for fun. Maybe start up a blog of my own and really focus on it. R could help me because he's really creative and knows a lot about design stuff and takes great photos (he was the photographer for our friend's wedding last month).

All in all, I find myself more inclined to have fun in life now that this weight is off my shoulders. I've had LOTS of fun so far, but I've just not been having fun for the past year as I tried to turn my ship of a life around. Now I find myself thinking on a daily basis about how I could have an alternative career that would let me live in a really cool house with a border collie, possibly a horse that I could ride on the beach like I used to, and travel adventures (including city adventures) all the time. I plan to achieve some of the goals I listed above by doing things just for fun. I might not want to become a marine biologist due to the schooling and logistics involved at this point, but perhaps I could buy a house on the water in Seattle and become a part of the killer whale watchers network. I will compromise so that I can do all of these things. I'll definitely do them anyway just for fun, but if I can, I would love to see if I can make a little money at it. Why not, right?