Rambling #2 - Life, Bricks, and Faith

"Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith." - Steve Jobs, in a commencement speech at Stanford University (2005)

Last night, I laughed. It was 1:30 am. I was laughing so hard and so loud that I thought I might wake my roommate. I haven't laughed like that in awhile and it was all because of a quote from Steve Jobs that was cited in the June 2009 issue of Real Simple.

Job search is tough. Exciting yes, but emotionally exhausting too. Right now, laughter more frequently stems from a place of frustration and sadness than from a bubbling up of happiness in my heart.

Last night was a turning point. "Ok, life, you got me. Smack in the middle of my forehead. The brick imprint is there. But I'm still standing. So now what?"

Over breakfast, the next message came through loud and clear.

I love puzzles. The highlight of any excursion through an airport is when I buy the latest puzzle book on the magazine rack. There is a puzzle called an Acrostic (although the puzzle book just calls it a Crostic). It's somewhat complicated to explain simply, but I like them because you can work on it in two directions and there is a knowledge trivia aspect too.

This morning, the Crostic solution was "I am a woman in progress. I'm just trying like everyone else. I try to take every conflict, every experience and learn from it. All I know is that I can't be anybody else and it's taken me a long time to realize that."

Hear, hear.

I am a woman in progress. I am learning. I am reinventing. I am discovering. I am laughing.

Bring on the bricks.

I could use the building materials.

Rambling #1 - Music Lives One Room Over

Roll out the red carpet and cue the trumpets in the balcony. I've joined my generation and started blogging. Woohoo!

Now, the question becomes one of "what will I blog about?" Luckily, rambling can go in any direction and still be on track.

...

I got tired of the silence inherent in a solo job search very quickly. I was sitting at my dining table (now Job Search HQ) when the revelation hit. I had not uttered a single word out loud for an entire business day. For some, this would not be a big deal. But for me? I instantly felt like I was going crazy. I opened iTunes and started running through my playlist. It worked...sort of.

I had 2.5 days of music that probably took me a couple weeks to go through since I wasn't running it 24/7. And although my work life was filled with sound again, I now had trouble focusing on the task at hand - job search. I kept switching back to see what song was going to play next, to switch to a new song I'd been thinking of, to gaze at my playlist as I considered whether a friend might like a particular song, etc. No work was getting done.

That's when I rediscovered my TV (and the radio stations that come through COX cable), my CD tower (which still contains Jagged Little Pill, the first CD I bought on my own), and my DVD player (which plays CDs too as so many DVD players do). All three live to my right on the other side of the wall. Loud enough for me to hear whatever is playing and sing along. Far enough away that I feel no need to break from my job search productivity to skip songs or change the music channel. It's just the right amount of distraction.

So, from now on, music lives one room over.