Photography Friday: Upcycling

Eek! I'm late! Sorry about that. This was written and ready to go Friday but I've had no internet access until now. Without further ado ...

























Upcycling: (verb) reusing old fabrics in new projects, thereby giving them a new use. For example, in the photo above I took an ill-fitting duvet cover and transformed part of it into a skirt [with enough leftover for PJ pants, cloth napkins for my mom, and possibly the start of yet another quilt]. The mittens below are another example:

Take a wool sweater accidentally shrunken in the washing machine, trace around your hands, stitch and turn inside out to create mittens.

Given the durability of fabric and recent innovations in synthetic blends most fabrics will not wear out before we tire of them, whether it is clothing, bedding, tablecloths, etc. By upcycling, we keep perfectly usable goods from landfills and stretch our creativity in finding new uses for materials.

Good for the environment, good for stimulating creativity and resourcefulness, good for an evening's entertainment. A second chance, a new lease on life for something whose time has not physically come, merely that we have grown tired of it and are forever wanting something new [and yes, I'm quite guilty of that!]

If we reused everything once, we’d only consume half as much.

The epic battle: TV vs. hobbies

My friends used to think it was quirky but “very Jessica” that I didn’t own a TV in my apartment. I never had one in my dorm room in college, and couldn't squeeze one into my small city apartment later on, so I've grown accustomed to life without sitcoms and evening dramas [I suppose if I was really determined I could watch shows on the internet, but by now I've completely lost track of the new shows].

Now that I’ve moved home with my parents TV has started to become part of my nighttime routine, especially since my parents are both addicted to a nightly Chinese-language soap opera.

I have newfound appreciation for the amount of time TV can potentially consume. Before my days fell into the rhythm of:

7-9:30 run or craft, breakfast, shower

10-6 work

7-10:30 dinner, call boyfriend, hobbies, household chores, miscellaneous things that need to be taken care of

With the reappearance of television in the landscape I accomplish much less in the evenings. Not that accomplishment for the sake of productivity was ever the ultimate goal, but I enjoy my hobbies. I love making things or writing to friends or reading a good book. And while television would seem a sad excuse not to do the things I enjoy, it is true that actively overcoming the inertia of constant, passive entertainment can take far longer than I’d care to admit. I know I’m not alone in this.

I'm not against television per say, but I definitely need to find ways to work around it's constant draw. I have some projects that require handwork that can be completed in front of the TV so that's one temporary solution, but I'd like to find a more permanent one that limits the total hours I watch. When I head to school in the fall I won't be furnishing my place with a TV, but I know that eventually I may get one, so it's handy to start thinking up solutions now.

Photography Friday

Strawberry shortcake with homemade whipped cream and biscuits. June 2008.

Ah, dessert. As much as I am all about healthy eating, I confess that I love dessert. And why not? One of the keys to moderation is the occasional indulgence. Note: occasional, and reasonable. Not necessarily a 64 oz. Supergulp slurpee [nothing against slurpees, I had my share in my youth, usually on the 3 hour road trip to and from my grandparent's house], but a little mindful indulgence in foods you truly enjoy, preferably of good quality [and increased enjoyment]. And when they are occasional and reasonably portioned they become a special treat, which is the meaning of indulgence anyways.

So when did our feelings towards desserts change? These days I feel it is less about indulgence than about guilty pleasure, that we are less mindful of seasonal and regional variations, and that quantity has replaced quality. We suck down the daily caramel frappuccino for the sugar and caffeine jolt to start our mornings, more hooked on the habit than relishing the morning indulgence. And by frittering away our calories with high fructose corn syrup "breakfast" substitutes or trans fat laden munchies that we mindlessly down between meals, there is no room at the end of the day for a small sweet to end off the meal, one of many "traditional" desserts built upon a base of milk, flour, eggs, sugar and butter - ingredients you can prnounce in quantities that can be adjusted to suit individual tastes.

No, I'm not saying that we should go out and indulge every night. Again, that runs counter to the meaning of indulgence. Rather, if we took away the mindless eating or overly sweetened/fatty meal substitutes we've come to rely on, and brought back regular, balanced meals, there might be room for a bit of a treat at the end of the day. I'm not one for total deprivation, but when you indulge yourself, make it count.

I love biking. I really do. Some times I forget just how much I love it, like this morning as I was dithering over breakfast and the newspaper, trying to talk myself into heading out for a short ride while my lazy body wanted to go back to sleep. Luckily my brother came down and asked if I’d been out for a run, which was enough to shame me into going for a short ride as planned.

As I was biking under tall trees and past beautiful homes [this area is really charming to bike through], I was reminded of all the times in the past few years I’ve wanted to bike, but had no opportunity to do so. These past few years running has been my exercise of choice, in part because it requires so little equipment and can occur almost anywhere. Biking and rollerblading required gear I couldn’t store, swimming and dance or yoga, facilities I didn’t have ready access to. In college I had readily replaced team sports like badminton and cross country with dance classes, swimming, yoga and the occasional weights, but once thrown out into the working world I was back to a pair of running shoes and all the dirt paths the park had to offer.

This summer, though, reunited with my bike, rollerblades, and a community swimming pool within striking distance, I think I'll give my knees a break and take advantage of other forms of exercise that I love. Running is my default, my backup, my longstanding partner in the quest for lifelong exercise and well being. But even best friends occasionally need a break from each other, and because cross training strengthens your body by challenging it in new ways, this long-term relationship can only improve with a bit of absence.

The Value of Time Off

For the third time in my adult life, I find myself unemployed. Unlike the previous two times where I was between jobs and searching frantically, this time unemployment [or “funemployment,” as my friend dubs it] is a deliberate move – two months of freedom before I go back to school, two months to do whatever I want.

Of course, I won’t be doing whatever I want. I plan to use this time as investment in the future, both towards grad school and beyond. On the surface it seems rather silly, giving up a steady paycheck for some nebulous “prepping for school,” and I’ve had many moments where I question the logic of this decision. Given my other two stints of funemployment in the 3 years since graduating college, it almost feels excessive to take yet another break for self-discovery and inquiry into the workings of the world.

Certainly a short break, say one or two weeks, would seem reasonable. Yet despite the fact that I am entering a professional program, I’m not exactly clear on my career goals once I leave school, which I feel is both foolish and to be expected. I care passionately about the field and about learning additional theories and tools to further my career. While I have [finally!] narrowed my interests down to a couple fields [thanks, in part, to the questioning that accompanied those previous two periods of funemployment], I’ve defined those fields in such a way that they’re really just broad generalizations that encompass many areas – “wellness,” for example, could mean nutrition or fitness or emotional well being or neighborhoods or community strengthening or the environment.

So part of my reason for taking this time off is to further narrow down my interests. Another reason is to explore the academic literature, popular literature, current fields and their potential areas of growth. Investigate the resources available to me, both in school and in the surrounding community: opportunities to get involved, innovative community or research projects, mentors, worthwhile classes and student organizations. Get a leg up on coursework and build a solid foundation, so that I will actually have time to take advantage of the resources I discover, because the coursework will be ever-so-slightly less challenging.

By nature I am drawn to the interdisciplinary and the collaborative, and I plan to take courses in other schools. As with undergrad I anticipate my classes will be eclectic at best, but I hope for a “focused eclectic” selection this time around. Unfortunately we are all of limited time and means in this world, and I need to focus in on my strongest interests and most realistic choices. Yes, the arts and the power of creativity in strengthening emotional and even physical well being fascinate me, but in all likelihood that will remain a side interest or hobby rather than the main focus of my career, and I must choose accordingly. Yes, I am interested in adolescents and women, but perhaps I can learn enough about these populations on the job and in my own time that I do not need coursework on them [or perhaps one course will be enough], so that I can instead gain other technical or academic skills to better support the work that I do in those populations.

Really, I only have two years in school, and I intend to make the most of them. The plan is to hit the ground running, and use these two months to build a foundation for the two years to come. That sort of investment is worth more than the additional paychecks [which themselves would hemorrhage rent, transportation, food and utilities …] By writing this out I’m giving myself a visual reminder to rein in the self-doubts and provide an agenda for my free time. It may not fall under conventional wisdom, but if I stick to the agenda I think it will be more than worthwhile.

Random notes on getting more out of life ...

One of the things about escaping from the school vortex for the past 3 years is that it has allowed me to the freedom to explore my interets and passions without the pressure of an externally-derived timeline: midterms every 4 weeks, papers due 11 weeks into the semester. If you're like me and worried about your GPA in college, it can be difficult to let your mind wander off down paths of intellectual interest or personal passion because reality keeps dragging you back to the reality of This Assignment, This Test, This Lecture to Attend.

And even though I left undergrad with a fairly sparkly GPA and I will always be glad that I had the opportunity to stretch my mind and challenge the intellect, one of the odd paradoxes of the post-college working 20-somethings is learning how to structure your time when your time is, well, your own, and not governed by an external agenda and calendar. Hence the hours and hours spent surfing the internet, on Facebook, spent slumped in front of the TV ... and hopefully, eventually, you learn to get up off your butt and start pursuing things that matter to you, or even figuring out what those are, in the first place.



With that comes the need to structure the rhythms of your life. It can take awhile to fine-tune a system that works for you. I know it took me several years. It wasn't until my first "real" job that I discovered I need to plan 1-2 social engagements over the weekend - any more and I'm too drained when the week starts, any less and I start to feel like I'm going crazy, trapped by the circular vortex my own thoughts [ah, but not the centripetal force because that doesn't exist! Nerd alert, nerd alert ... physics joke!] It could be as simple as lunch with a friend, but I need tha balance in my life. Similarly, I figured out that I need to work in spurts, that my quality of sleep improves when I sleep early and wake up early, that I like to run in the mornings.



I discovered I need to cook 3-4 x's/week to have home-cooked meals for most lunches/dinners and that, more importantly, I like eating out 2-3 x's/week to see friends and give myself a break from my own cooking. I realized how important it is to have a relatively neat work environment to feel inspired to tackle projects. Cooking is therapeutic. Sewing is a great stress reliever. I like to multitask podcasts to crafting but not to exercising. I do great setting numeric goals for myself and setting off on a fast sprint [again, working in spurts].



Some questions to ask yourself:



-What are you interested in? What do you care about, and are you spending your time where your passion is, or is it frittered away on other tasks that hold less meaning to you?



-If you 're not sure what new direction you'd like to explore, is there something you've always wanted to try? What about when you were a child, what were your dreams? What stories draw you in, what people are you fascinated by and why?



-How can you pursue this, and what's hold you back? Take a class, volunteer, talk to people, research the subject ... just get out and do something!



-If your efforts are self-directed: When do you do your best work? Morning? Afternoon? The hour before a deadline? The dead of night? Schedule your hardest thinking or your most difficult tasks for those times.



-How do you recharge? Do you like quiet time, or do you feel most energized when meeting new people and hanging out with a large group of friends? It's important to schedule this into your life!



A little planning can go a long ways.

Goal Setting and Laughter

In my job I run across lots of different people. One thing that has struck me is that the ones who persistently stick with the large-picture goals that they set out for themselves, despite short-term setbacks, generally have a positive outlook on things. You know, the people who are able to climb back on the bandwagon, even after falling off for a couple days or a couple weeks. And when you're talking about goals like weight management, exercising more frequently or being "good" in your eating habits, not everyone is able to bounce back from a string of days or a hard time in personal affairs.

The pattern I noticed between those who bounce back and those who don't, the ones who are more successful at maintaining habits for the long-term and sticking with their goals tend to have a positive outlook on life. They try not to take things too seriously, and understand the ways they react to stress and how to handle unexpected changes.

If you were to sit back and think of the characteristics of someone who keeps going with their goals, you might guess they possess some combination of optimism, determination, persistance, and that knack for taking life's obstacles in stride. Interestingly enough, those are not the overt personality traits that I've picked up.

Instead, what I've noticed is that they tend to be the type to make jokes, seek light in a situation. They're the ones who like to joke around at work or with people they've just met. You know, that person you want in your team because the day goes by faster when you're working together. Interesting how being equipped with these seemingly "social" traits also seems to help out when dealing with setbacks in life, no? I'm sure it isn't cause-and-effect but associations [epidemiology terms I'll explain later], but still, a fun observation for today ...

Goal Setting Towards Simplification II: Overcoming Procrastination

I’ve never liked that last-minute crunch that comes with lack of planning – you know, when you underestimate what needs to get down and then rush down to the wire to finish a project. Some people thrive under that pressure; I hate it because it never lets me get to all the details, I feel rushed and panicked, and my work always feels sloppy and unprofessional [remember, I’m also a recovering perfectionist]. The cautious, controlling part of my personality prefers to sketch out a general outline of steps well in advance of the deadline, and then chip away at this list as the deadline approaches.

So far so good. But here is where I would run into trouble. As I mentioned earlier, I’m great at thinking up the details but horrible at prioritizing them, and you can imagine the list for every project can quickly grow unmanageably long, to the point where I often felt I needed to be working a bit on every project on a daily or weekly basis. Then I’d burn out, procrastinate and push off certain tasks, and their constant presence on my list wearied me further. Intellectually, it makes great sense to tackle a tiny chunk every day and slowly tame the Project List that way, but on an emotional level it was just too draining. I was putting a lot of time and energy into procrastination and avoiding procrastination, and beating myself up for not being productive. I think I even swore off To Do Lists for awhile because they produced nothing but guilt.

It finally dawned on me that I was working at cross-hairs with my own temperament. I was working against myself in setting up goals, and therefore wasting a lot of energy to try to achieve those goals.

I realized that I’m no tortoise, I’m more like the hare, but unlike the hare I make it to the finish line within deadline parameters, and thanks to discovering this about myself, I actually make it with more time to spare than before. Rather than spacing out my progress with little assignments on a daily basis, I prefer to work in spurts, setting sizable chunks to accomplish in a week, say, and then giving myself a 2 week break from the project before I tackle the next major milestone. This allows me to break large projects into smaller, self-contained modules, which keeps daily tasks in perspective and allows me to track progress in a concrete fashion, and it avoids burnout by giving my mind and creativity breathing time from every project. Each week I just rotate through my “priorities” for the week, and it keeps things fresh by providing constant variety.

By making this small shift from a small, steady trickle to dry spells punctuated by substantial gushes of work, I’ve been able to tremendously cut down on procrastination. I feel better about myself and enjoy the process much more than I did before, because I can concentrate on a few things at a time, rather than trying to make creeping, and often immeasurable, progress on everything.

Setting Goals Towards Simplification: Decluttering

I admit it. I'm not the best goal-setter in the world. I've often read about the importance of setting both short-term and long-term goals to keep you on track and focused, and while this makes a lot of sense intellectually, in practice I haven't been great about setting goals, short-term goals in particular.

I could blame any number of factors for this, but a large reason is due to faulty goal-setting when I was younger, which resulted in an association between setting goals and failing to achieve them, and thus a subconscious aversion to goal-setting in the first place. Bad, I know. But imagine the overworked undergrad [how melodramatic of me] staring down a long list of readings and assignments at a coffee shop ... only to put her head on the table and sleep for a couple hours.

Classic. And completely the product of

1) Underestimating the time that tasks will take,
2) Overestimating my ability to be productive,
3) Providing no rewards for small milestones achieved [always one to look beyond and to the next set of challenges that lie ahead]
4) An out-of-control To Do List, utterly unprioritized and entirely too comprehensive,
5) A personality that gets lost in the details sometimes [and lets those details wind up on the To Do List],
6) Ignoring the rhythms of how I function best.

This past weekend, after 7 years of living away from home in various dormitories and apartments, I moved back home. It is a temporary move for a couple months before I move out again for grad school, but staring down the heaps of boxes and overflowing bookshelves in my room, I decided I need to downsize.

I've been trying to downsize for a couple years now. I know my problem, I have too many clothes that I love, too many hobbies that I love, too many books that I love, too many accessories that I love ... And it doesn't help that I'm both supremely indecisive about where to unpack belongings, and that we just recently moved back into this house and so I'd never really unpacked in the first place. Overflow on top of overflow. But when my living environment is too messy and jam-packed it feels restrictive, uncomfortable.

Any cullings that happen now would be the third or fourth sweep through, and yet, after reading about Rowena's challenge to herself to get rid of 100 things, I thought I'd take up the challenge as well.

So here's where the goal-setting comes in. Though normally averse to it, last night as I was drifting off to bed I thought I'd set up some goals for the day so that I keep the unpacking and culling process moving along [I have another week of work left so I'll be commuting up to the city, and I didn't want to leave my stuff strewn all over the house to prematurely wear out my welcome at home]

1) Get all the boxes out from downstairs and into my room. This would involve some unpacking and just cluttering up the room further. One step back for two [hopefully] steps forward, eh?

2) Hit a total of 30 things removed.

And tonight as I sit typing this, I'm at:

1) All boxes removed from downstairs [though admittedly, I moved a couple things into the guest room downstairs which I'm hoping I can turn into a mini sewing studio for the summer; and admittedly there is a suitcase sitting just outside my door]

2) I've removed a grand total of 28 items so far. Some were small, like bits of costume jewelry that I frankly don't wear; others were larger, like the wool peacoat from high school that I just might need, you know, one of those distant days in the future.


And yes, it does feel nice. So I missed out on #2, just barely ... but I've got an hour and 45 minutes until midnight ... just kidding. I'll take that as "close enough" and fight that battle another day.