I'm in Portland, Oregon at this very moment (having been here for 3 days now), on vacation. The last time I was on vacation--real vacation, not hosteling & cold-sandwich-in-the-rental-car-ing it across Sweden--was somewhere around 2002. I've read books, I've eaten excellent food (fleur de sel caramel macarons at Pix Patisserie, most notably), and I've done some shopping for things I can't get where I live (like many flavors of mochi and an onigiri bento box).
Even more notably: I've gotten a job. On Tuesday, I received a phone call inviting me to join the faculty at Casper College, in Casper, Wyoming. I am exhilerated, relieved, and no small bit anxious (to get there, to start, to find a house, to sell the house I have--and all of that in no particular order). It is wonderful, just now, to have that pressure of applying lifted (especially in these market conditions). I am privileged and blessed (and now I can finally hit up the optometrist again) to be in this position.
My body, however, cannot handle the lifting of stress, apparently. Today, on the drive back to my brother-in-law's place, I had a migraine kick in. I had one the day after my dissertation defense, too, and one the day I turned in my dissertation to my committee. Letting go of tension has become the difficult thing for my body, it seems, and that strikes me as remarkably backward. I'm going to try to use the remainder of my vacation doing as Yan Martel encouraged: increasing my stillness. Or at least in the effort of unitasking a little more.
To that end, I'm going to resume my reading. I'm starting Greg Ames's Buffalo Lockjaw, and I've been looking forward to sinking my teeth into Greg's book for weeks.
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