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Being Present

By E

On February 22, 2015

This week has gone by so fast. My cousin A was supposed to visit on Monday, but she got a nasty stomach bug on Sunday and couldn’t travel after all. We had made a restaurant reservation for Monday evening that we decided to keep even though she couldn’t make it. We figured it could be an impromptu date night, and I was quite looking forward to it all day. It turned out okay: food was good if not great, and we had the place mostly to ourselves, but something was off about the evening. It felt like M’s thoughts were elsewhere, and I just felt invisible. It left a bad taste in my mouth, and once we got home, I let myself get totally distracted by chatting with a friend online instead of spending time with M for about an hour, after which we proceeded to watch the latest episode of The Walking Dead as we had agreed earlier. The evening wasn’t a bad one by any means, but neither was it what we had expected.

I woke up insanely grumpy on Tuesday, and couldn’t really put my finger on it. It took me pretty much the whole day to figure it out, and once M came home from work, we finally took a moment to talk about it. I told him about having been disappointed by the restaurant portion of our “date night”, and he told me much the same about what came after. We both felt better afterwards, and decided to give it another go on Saturday.

The rest of the week until the weekend was exhausting, and on Friday evening I was so beat that I went to bed quite a bit earlier than normally and slept like the dead. Saturday, however, was perfect. Lots and lots of extremely good together-time, yummy Chinese food and a movie we both enjoyed. But the best part was, we were both there, present, focused on each other. Such a huge difference compared to Monday.

It’s so easy to get distracted by everyday things. We both have a lot of things going on that have relatively little to do with our relationship with each other, and we spend the majority of every day apart because of work, my language course, our hobbies, and our friends. Not to mention the occasional alone time we both require. It’s easy to accidentally bring that disconnect into our time together as well, but I think for us to stay happy together, we really need to try and not let that happen. Saturday was living proof of how incredibly good it can be when we succeed.

Building Blocks

By E

On February 7, 2015

In In English, Life, Musings

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This week was really tiring but in many ways less stressful than January was. While it’s a little early to say, I feel like I’ve regained my balance at work. I made a few changes in how I do things and some adjustments in my attitude, and the results have been promising. We’ll see how it goes from here, but at least for the moment I feel better. I also finally bought a gym membership, which means I will try to go at least once a week with a friend from work. Eventually I’m hoping to increase it to twice a week, although the other time will have to be by myself as our work hours don’t coincide well enough at the start of the week. In any case, I’m very excited, because the lack of exercise has really bothered me. Regular exercise does wonders for my moods, but it’s so easy to neglect. I just need to stop letting laziness win. (Of course, yesterday’s workout left me completely crippled today, so it’ll be an adjustment to get started with a regular routine again…)

In other good news, there are now several friends scheduled to come and visit us! My cousin A will take a day off of her mid-February work-related visit to Aarhus to spend with us, which I’m really excited about, because I haven’t seen her in ages, and she’s never even met M yet. One of my dearest friends E will visit sometime in early March (the exact details haven’t been nailed down yet, but that’s the current estimate), and sweet S will spend a long weekend with us in late May. I’m really looking forward to seeing them all, and hopefully we’ll have more visits in the future, too.

As a survival strategy, I’ve found having things to look forward to is the most effective one. That, and taking care of oneself physically. I haven’t done the best job with the latter lately, but I’m hoping to get it right from now on.

Toe-dipping

By E

On January 30, 2015

In In English, Life, Musings

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Okay, so January has been unexpectedly hard. Work has been stressing me out for a number of reasons, but today I got to work from home since we finished our main project a day early, and I had some database work to do that can be done from anywhere with an Internet connection. And it was so relaxing! I could listen to music, there was no one talking around me (and I didn’t have to talk!), and as soon as I was done, the weekend could begin. I wouldn’t want to work from home all the time, but every now and then it is just peachy, and today I think I really needed it.

I’ve been pondering my relationship with my job a lot this month. It has been harder now than it was last year, and there was a moment earlier this week when I genuinely felt like I wanted to give up. Instead I chose to consciously change my attitude towards it, or at least try my damnedest from now on. I have a plan for February now, and hopefully towards the summer things will become easier.

Eventually, however, I do need to decide what I want to do with myself, career-wise. Maybe not this year, but I can’t wait forever with it, either. What I’m doing now is fine for the time being, but it’s not a long-term solution, and I need to find something that could be. (This subject deserves a longer, less vague post, but I’m tired and I’ve stared at the screen way too much today as it is. Plus there’s the fact that I still don’t know how detailed I want to be about work-related things here. Still, I predict more musings about this in the future, so stay tuned!)

Æbleskiver

By E

On January 12, 2015

In In English, Life, Musings

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Whenever I used to come home from my Danish class, I felt like I had done a hefty physical workout while simultaneously working on a particularly demanding translation. Simply put, I was exhausted, and usually also socially drained to the point that my response to everything was irritation and hostility. I have told M countless times that I hate both the Danish language and Denmark as a whole, neither of which is actually true. Both frustrate me from time to time, but more often than not, I enjoy them. Yes, even the inane language.

Towards the end of last year, the classes left me less crippled. Tired, definitely, but not the same way as before. At some point the teaching turned from complete gibberish to understandable words and then sentences. I still don’t understand everything, but I do get the gist of most everything that is said in class. It’s considerably harder for me to actually produce Danish, but I’m getting better at it. It’s hard for me to tolerate the mistakes I inevitable make, especially when trying to talk, but I keep trying.

Today was my first class after the Christmas break, which ended up lasting for over a month because I couldn’t attend class last week. And boy, does it show! Whenever I was asked to say something, I struggled. The words I needed would pop into my head in Spanish and Swedish, but certainly not in the language I was supposed to use. So frustrating! By the time I got home, I was totally beat. Granted, it’s not as bad as it was when I only just started the classes, but there’s still a clear difference to how it was in December. Still, I did manage to borrow a book from the library all in Danish, which made me immensely proud. I’m learning, and while the pace is snail-like in my own mind, the progress I’ve made is undeniable.

(The post title is the first word I learnt in Danish a long time ago. It’s the name of a typical Danish Christmas dessert that M adores. Æbleskiver are small pancake-y spheres that are eaten by hand after dipping them in strawberry jam and powdered sugar. I’m not a huge fan of the Danish way of serving them, but I quite enjoy them with apple marmalade, no powdered sugar required… Of course, M thinks I’m a total heretic.)

Of Hopelessness

By E

On August 3, 2014

In In English, Musings

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I’m starting work tomorrow. It’s been a year since I last had a job, and I quite miss it. I have no idea if I’ll enjoy the actual work or not, but at least it offers the opportunity to learn new things, form new social contacts and generally just have routines in each day, and I welcome all that. Not to mention the ability to earn a living, which is obviously extremely important on its own.

If there is one thing I’d like to avoid from now on, it’s unemployment. I don’t know anything quite as soul-sapping as the hollow feeling of browsing job ads one by one, desperately hoping to find something that is even remotely applicable to your own qualifications and coming up empty again and again. Of course, there are the few exceptions when you find something, write an application for it and for a while you feel like you actually accomplished something worthwhile again – only to receive the dreaded “thank you but no thank you” email in your inbox some days or weeks later. Back to square one. Back to feeling utterly worthless.

It spreads everywhere after a while. As the number on your bank account dwindles, you narrow down your choices little by little. No more shopping for anything but the bare necessities, and even those should be a cheap brand or on discount. You don’t really need cheese on your bread, after all. It’s also best to not meet your friends in the city centre, because that means expenses you can’t really afford, or squirming when they offer to pay instead. Buying presents becomes a nightmare, because you can’t really afford anything anyone would want. If anything breaks, you really need to consider whether you can’t actually survive without it. Repairing or replacing it might well be beyond your means. It’s not real deprivation; not yet. It’s just a slow slide towards the tears in society’s fabric where ultimately you’ll end up incapable of affecting your situation anymore. That way lays hunger, mental and physical illness, and isolation.

I didn’t fall that far. I still had options by the time my soon-to-be employer said yes instead of no thank you. You have no idea how grateful of that I am.

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Write Words

Tag: stress (Page 2 of 2)

Being Present

Building Blocks

Toe-dipping

Æbleskiver

Of Hopelessness

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