Vitamins

In fall 2006, I was having a tough time. Junior year, taking the hardest classes I had yet, and not really knocking them out of the park. I was living with some good friends, too, but it was a 4-person 2-bedroom apartment, which is still kind of stressful.

I used to take multivitamins. I noticed, at one point during fall 2006, that I had just about enough vitamins to last until the end of the semester. After that semester, in the spring, I would study abroad in the Netherlands, and I guess I figured that senior year would be good and I'd go find a great job or something, and pretty much everything would be fine if I just got through that one semester. Every day as I took my vitamin, I'd sort of muse about it being a little suffering pill. After I got through those, it'd all be golden.

The weird part of this story is that I was pretty much right. I studied in the Netherlands, it was pretty fun, I got a cool research gig and had one of my best summers, enjoyed senior year, rolled on to Google, got into grad school, bummed around the world, and it's all been fine. Until this year: work has been tough.

For kind of dumb reasons, I happen to have another bottle of multivitamins. I figured, might as well take them, as long as I've got them. And then I started forming the same story, about having a little bottle of suffering pills.

But you know what? Could be that vitamins are bad for you. So I'm throwing them out.

Things contracting a bit

Sometimes life expands, and you start a thousand new projects and buy some stuff and make new friends. Sometimes it contracts, and you tie up loose ends, get rid of things, clean house. Now is the latter for me.

At work, I'm getting into a worn groove. Not quite a rut, but a path that a lot of people have stomped down before me and that I'm learning how to walk in. Depth is nice; learning to become a class-A grunt in any line of work is useful. You get blinders, though, too. Everything you and your friends/coworkers do becomes just the standard way to do things. (I'm a little convinced that there are things we grad students are doing poorly, particularly the worrying.)

Otherwise, things are fine, I feel healthy physically, I even have a bit of leisure time to do nothing. I'm done with my bike and my radio show (for now), got fun social things to do but am avoiding adding work for the time being.

I've been dreaming a lot less, since I started here a year ago. My brain feels fuller. I'm not worried about not growing. I am sometimes worried that I'm not doing what's important. (Working on changing that.) I'm still not sure how anyone can be content, ever, pretty much period. I still feel like an eager, angry, and excited kid.