I've been a vegetable this week. It's been almost impossible to motivate myself to care or really feel anything; I'm still caring and feeling things, of course, but I'm also spending hours and hours fiddling blankly with my computer. I've been programming a bit, which is good: toying with GUI programming, trying to make myself a basic calculator (my last and only GUI program was a complex applet I wrote in 1998, and I haven't touched the stuff since). That's good; but I haven't been working on the UCSB stuff, which isn't so good. (Why do I care, when they're not paying me? Well, it's a weird bug, and they need my help, and I like them, and what's it going to do, distract me from my mid-day Star Trek reruns?)
So today I went to Emeryville and cruised around gathering job applications. I dropped off an application for the holiday season at Ross (discount clothing store), and got them from OfficeMax, Copeland Sports, CompUSA, and Semifreddi's--whee. I also mailed out a resume for the first time, for a job listing where they had the good idea of not accepting emails, to weed out the lazy. And I'm still waiting to hear from the personal contacts around and about, and Dan handed my resume to the hiring manager for a job I'm pretty perfect for, as far as I can tell; it's in Sunnyvale, but maybe I could work out some work-from-home action, and I'm hardly in a position to be picky--I mean, I want a job that won't make my life worse, but as long as I can keep up my aikido training somehow, the economy is more than bad enough for me to make compromises.
So anyway, I went back to aikido tonight after a few days off to recover from overtraining. I'm not sure I recovered, because I'm still thoroughly tired, because while I'm getting enough sleep, I think the huge cloud of things on my mind keeps it from being restful. I could tell it was time, though, because my body was getting creakier, craving the exercise.
Have I mentioned how I've needed to double my food intake while I lose weight? That makes me happy.
We set a date for my 6th kyu test! That deserves an exclamation point, because I'm excited. Friday, November 22nd, so I have two weeks to figure out how to roll properly without hurting my shoulders. Other than that I actually know everything on the test, such that I now get to explain the moves to people who have less seniority than I do (or who started training a long time ago and have forgotten everything). Roger and Caroline are testing at the same time, I think, the first tests in the new dojo. I can tell I'm onto something if I'm actually excited; it's a rare thing. Most of the time I greet good things with smiles and gladness, but not twitchy excitement. So that's pretty cool.
I even felt better after class, like my joints are moving smoother after a return to the exercise. I'm starting to get more engaged with people, at least at the dojo, to open up and talk about myself more...I'm trying not to hide things so much, because in reality there's very little that needs to be hidden. So I hung out after class and talking about spirituality and how aikido is fitting into my life with Sensei and a couple other students, and talked to Jeff about my life and listened to him talk about his--like friends. Kinda cool.
I'm not sure if it was a good day, as such; but it wasn't bad, and ended well, so that's an improvement.