on balance and getting shit done

I took a personality quiz recently (don’t you love those things?) called the Action and Influence Survey, and my profile came out as a “Supportive Specialist.”

Supportive Specialists are a great help when it comes to getting a task accomplished. They influence others through kindness and cooperation. These people enjoy being involved in a task that is a challenge but do not like the feeling of having too many issues floating around at the same time. Supportive Specialists will be good at getting the details of a task accomplished and helping people work together while the task is being accomplished. They desire some realistic expectations from others regarding what needs to be done. Sometimes they will not operate effectively if the task is too ambiguous. Although not always true, Supportive Specialists will generally be the most effective at taking another person’s ideas and making sure they are implemented. They think more in concrete terms and will be more effective if ideas are explained in such a way that makes practical sense. They are indispensable to a group when it comes to getting a job done efficiently.

Let’s put it bluntly: I get shit done. And I take pride in that! Not to say that I don’t have flaws, but I’m pretty good at following through with what I say I’m going to do.

Some of the negatives in my profile that jumped out at me, though, are the points that I don’t like the feeling of having too many issues floating around and that I may not operate well if the task is too ambiguous. Those are definitely true for me. I’ve written before about how I struggle to dream big enough to set goals and I think this second point pinpoints why.

But as for the first, being in the workforce, especially in my current role, has pushed me to create coping mechanisms, and I think I’ve done so well enough that I almost thrive on having a lot of moving pieces in my day!

On any given day at my current job, I wear a lot of hats. I sit at the reception desk, meaning I am open to near-constant interruption, from volunteers and donors coming in, visitors asking questions, and my co-workers bringing me tasks to do. On top of that, though, I am expected to do bigger picture creative and detailed work; namely, writing checks, managing the database of donations, and crafting acknowledgment letters that tell our story.

Some days I feel like my brain is going to ooze out of my ears if someone brings me one more piece of paper that needs my attention.

That’s the feeling of having too many issues floating around: brain melt.

So what do I do?

I make lists. And then I can crystallize the numerous issues floating around into individual issues that don’t seem so overwhelming anymore. And I take the issues one at a time and I get. Shit. Done. That’s what I bring to the table in my relationships, in my home, in my jobs, and in my “extracurriculars.” I freak out a little bit, and then I get to crossing things off the list.

And sometimes, true to my introvert nature, I just simply withdraw. I do tend to enjoy having a lot going on, but there are things that require more focused concentration, like writing. It’s easy to do all the things that need my immediate attention and never settle in to give those bigger picture things my attention, because I do find crossing things off the list so satisfying. This past Friday I got rare permission to go work from a coffee shop because I haven’t had a chance all year to update the content of the general acknowledgment letter we send when someone makes a donation. I’ve been pulled all over the place by a chaotic food pantry order, the installation of new network printers, etc etc etc. So I got an iced coffee (the Special Blend from San Francisco Coffee is delicious!), stuck my headphones on and wrote for an hour and a half.

I don’t have the need or ability to laser-focus like some introverts, but I do obsess over projects when I first start them. I tend to lack the ability to stop something in the middle. This is a problem sometimes because it means that if I don’t have time to write an entire blog post, say, I won’t start writing one at all, because the thought of having to leave it unfinished for a time is so odious to me. I’m not that good at taking advantage of small bits of time to chip away at things. I’m a little bit all or nothing. But it also means that by the time I dive into something I’ve usually agonized over it and put so much thought into all its details that I’m able to carry it out pretty quickly.

So for all my hemming and hawing all year, I wrote two acknowledgment letter templates at the coffee shop.

And on Monday I was ready to dive back into the grind of the freezer repairman coming, the donations being processed, the volunteers needing assistance, and the phone ringing, ringing, ringing.

It’s all about balance.

motivational prints

There are two quotes that have been all over the internet lately that make me feel all pumped up. The first is from a poem by Mary Oliver. I forget about poetry sometimes. I used to read it a lot, and I wrote it for a few years as well. I forget how heartbreakingly beautiful words in the right sequence and meter can be, how vivid the imagery can be, how evocative the emotion. I kept running across this quote that said, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” and eventually found the whole poem it came from. And of course my next step was to find a print of it.

What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life Print

The next quote is unattributed, but it’s girl power at its finest.

bird print, she believed she could so she did, flowers, 8 x 10

She believed she could, so she did! I just want to shout it from the rooftops! I want this one next to my bed so that every morning and every night I’m reminded of what I can do. I may be insecure about learning to program, I may be tired some days and feel like I don’t want to clean the kitchen, I may be racked with indecision over a choice in life, but if I believe I can, I will.

I love supporting artists on Etsy and I love having fun prints around my home, so these two motivational quotes will be making their way to me soon. It never hurts to place inspiring reminders in your path!

What gets you pumped up? Do you like decorating with motivational prints?

Menu Plan: March 2-8

I felt really on top of feeding us this week, which was nice. That’s the beauty of having a menu plan! No matter what else is going on, you can rest assured that you’ll have good wholesome food to fill your belly. Although on Friday, for whatever reason, what I really wanted for dinner was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and some popcorn so that’s what I made! For all my careful planning sometimes I just don’t want to eat what I had intended to. I’m planning more heavily for later in the week this week, so I’ll have to make sure we have sandwich supplies on hand to fill in for lunches at the beginning of the week!

SUNDAY
“Joe’s Special”, with the ingredients I didn’t use on Friday’s meal!
salad
cut-up pineapple

MONDAY
We’re both planning to go to a meetup that’s from 6-8, so I’m thinking we’ll just wing it with sandwiches on the go, and possibly meet up with some people afterward for a drink/snack.

TUESDAY
at trivia! I often try to plan a meal that’s quick enough to eat before we go to trivia at 8:00, but I’m getting a haircut Tuesday and would rather plan to eat out!

WEDNESDAY
Southern chicken cornbread casserole
frozen mixed vegetables

THURSDAY
slow-cooker chickpea coconut curry

FRIDAY
potato goulash with sausage

SATURDAY
chicken yakisoba, sub tofu for the chicken

What’s on your plate this week?

life truths & the divergent series

Potential spoiler alert: If you haven’t read all of the Divergent series and think you might like to, proceed with caution. I don’t give away much plot, but I do quote the ending.

I read Twilight <img src=”https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=unpunctuated-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0316015849” width=”1” height=”1” border=”0” alt=”” style=”border:none !important; margin:0px !important;”)/> in college and felt disgusted with myself. I swore I wouldn’t waste any more of my time or brainpower on the rest of the darn books, but I just had to know how it ended. I committed an act of biblio-heresy: I skipped the middle two books in favor of reading the last one, to know the conclusion.

Sure, I was a little confused, but my friends (befuddled by my choice) graciously filled in some holes for me.

And yet, when senior-year boredom hit, I succumbed to the inevitable and went back to read New Moon and Eclipse.

A few years later a friend recommended The Host to me, Stephanie Meyer’s non-Twilight book. Having caved to the Twilight craze, I read it and was astonished to find that maybe Meyer wasn’t such a horrible writer after all. While it didn’t change my opinion of the actual writing in Twilight (which is rather low, in case you couldn’t tell), it helped to change my opinion of the author.

Given the wave of dystopian young adult fiction that has taken over the psyches of people aged 12-112, I think it’s worth examining, rather than scorning out of hand.

Maybe I am biased and I only say that because I rather enjoy it.

But I went to a play the other night, and one of the characters, a professor of comparative literature, promoted reading Twilight with his book club. Sure, he was doing it because his fiancee had jilted him at the altar because he wasn’t Edward Cullen, but his larger point was this: we literary snobs may not acknowledge its worth, but if millions of people the world over have devoured it, in tens of languages no less, then there’s something to it. And we owe it to ourselves as cultural participants in the literary landscape to give it a shot and see what it’s all about.

I, who unironically love Nicholas Sparks, can hardly protest.

I am late to most trends, and young adult fiction was no different. I avoided Harry Potter until the second book was already out because I thought I didn’t like fantasy. But I was gifted the first (in paperback!) for Christmas one year, devoured it, and immediately cajoled my grandmother into taking me to buy the second because I NEEDED it. After that I pre-ordered every single one. When the last book came out I was in Boston with my parents and knew that my hardcover copy was waiting for me at the bookstore at home but I just. Couldn’t. Wait. My mom told me if I could find a local bookstore in Boston that would make for a fun outing to visit, we could buy it there instead. I found one, that also had a cafe, and we had a lovely breakfast there. I lugged that darn book around Boston with me ALL DAY and stayed up late in the bathroom of our shared hotel room devouring it.

I guess I might like fantasy after all.

I love immersing myself in this world that is entirely “other” from mine. I love the page-turning plots, the character twists, the utter escapism. And I have to say, I think there is a lot we can learn from this fiction.

I recently took the plunge into the Divergent series expecting to enjoy it with Twilight level angst and slight self-loathing. And while the writing and characters were firmly “of a type,” I was pleasantly surprised by the series’ portrayal of love and loss.

I was firmly Team Jacob in the Twilight world. I hated Edward and Bella. I think they made each other less, and the book where Edward was gone and the pages were blank for months and months of Bella’s life made me sick. Letting yourself be subsumed like that is not love. Needing someone so much that you can’t exist without them is extremely unhealthy. Jacob made Bella come alive. They had fun together. They had real conversations. So I could never give myself over to the whole Edward thing.

Tobias and Tris in Divergent offered a refreshingly real example of a relationship (if you can look past the fact that they’re 16). They were okay giving each other space. They had angry conversations to work through their disappointments in one another. And man, did they handle loss.

This is love:

I fell in love with him. But I don’t just stay with him by default as if there’s no one else available to me. I stay with him because I choose to, every day that I wake up, every day that we fight or lie to each other or disappoint each other. I choose him over and over again, and he chooses me.

Hello! This is Marriage 101. Focus on the Family stuff. And here it is in black and white on the pages of a novel for young adults. (Okay, sure, she’s 16 when she says this, which I find hard to believe. So we’ll put that aside in favor of the truth of it.)

She tells him, “I think you’re still the only person sharp enough to sharpen someone like me.” Exactly the sentiment I missed from Bella toward Edward.

And at the end of the book, Tobias concludes,

Since I was young, I have always known this: Life damages us, every one. We can’t escape that damage. But now, I am also learning this: We can be mended. We mend each other.

Damn! When I read that line I felt like a weight had settled onto my chest. The weight of a deep truth. And if we avoided dystopian young adult fiction because it’s, well, dystopian young adult fiction, we might miss that truth, and the simple way it’s written so that teenagers can understand.

I’m all for parents playing an active role in what their kids read. If you’re nervous about something, by all means, read it first, and shield them from it if you choose. But when a pop fiction book allows for this much analysis, if it encourages self-proclaimed non-readers to stay up late with a flashlight (or, who am I kidding, a backlit tablet) reading under the covers, if it encourages us to talk about life and love and truth and beauty…then shoot, I am all for it.

take the damn sick day

"I don't owe anything to anyone other than myself."

That's what I was thinking as I lay in bed at 4:30 in the morning recently, awake because I had been thrashing around in that mucus-infused stupor known by the congested the world over. I was mentally debating whether or not it was justified for me to take a sick day that day (a thought process which was clearly aiding my "fall back asleep, dammit" mission). And ultimately I decided I should.

Here's the thing: I am sometimes selfless about stupid things. And I am sometimes loyal to a fault.

It's all over the internet that [the old standard of company loyalty is dead](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/jobs/24search.html?_r=0). Careers are a much more fluid thing, employees much less likely to stay with the same company for their entire decades-long career, or even for ONE decade, at that. And yet as the young employee that I am, I find it hard to separate business from personal when I think about some day moving on to another job.

My heart is all, "Oh, but the people are so good to me, and I've learned so much, and how are they going to do x, y, and z without me, and who will know how to do a and b???"

Anyway.

Taking a sick day is a microcosm of leaving a job, and somehow I've struggled with it. I feel like I need to be on death's door to deserve one, truly unable to get up out of bed. I always wish I would run a fever, because that seems like an acceptable excuse.

But having not slept for several hours of my night, and feeling the beginnings of a wicked headache coming on, I had a "duh" moment: I could take a sick day. I mean, they give us several of them for the year, and I've only ever taken one.

We wear this as a badge of honor: oh, I've never taken a sick day.

And yet who are we really serving when we come to work hacking and sniffling, toting Kleenex with us from meeting to meeting, staring blearily at our computer screens with heads feeling full of cotton?

We're certainly not serving ourselves well, our ailing bodies that scream for a blanket, a mug of tea, and saltine crackers. And I'd argue that we're not really serving our company well either, by not bringing our best selves to the floor. And we're not serving our co-workers or customers well by handing them our germs on a silver platter.

So I took a damn sick day.

I even kept plans that night that I had painstakingly made ages ago. I couldn't really rearrange them, and I wanted to go. I felt like I was breaking the rules. My mom always used to tell me that if I was sick enough to stay home from school, then I was too sick to go to swim practice (yes, I was the crazy dedicated girl who would try to do that). But I'm an adult! I am capable of gauging my body's needs and weighing them against the tasks in front of me and making the decision.

I went to work the next day even though I still wasn't feeling 100% because there was a task that I truly was, on that day, the only one equipped for doing. There are times when that will be the case. There are times when we need to suck it up, take the Dayquil, and power through. What I'm learning is to recognize the difference.

I tweeted this not long ago:

It's all about self-awareness. Most of the time we need kale, for its nutrients and health benefits. And a lot of times kale is yummy! But sometimes, we emotionally need the hot chocolate, WITH whipped cream.

A sick day is like that hot chocolate: we can be strong and get shit done, but sometimes we need to give ourselves grace.

So this is me, saying you're allowed to take a sick day sometimes.

You're welcome.