It's occurred to me recently that I've finally learned to relax. I'm not sure when it happened, but it's been really wonderful.
Since early May, I've held a job working twenty hours a week at a software engineering firm as a Marketing intern, updating old software support manuals and building video tutorials for beta licensees. It's a cake job that happens to be exceptionally interesting and apropos for my fields of interest, considering the software is built to deal with text analytics and information extraction via linguistic lexicons and grammars and all that jazz.
Still, every week, I have a four day weekend, and at just about any time in my life prior to right now, an empty agenda would have surely made my blood boil.
Of course, I wasn't planning on having this much free time. The department offered me a teaching assignment this summer, but unfortunately the course didn't run, due to insufficient enrollment. I would have loved to teach, and I was particularly delighted that I was extended the offer, and of course an additional paycheck would have been lovely -- but I'm rather enjoying my fancy-free summer.
Because the bf is very busy with tasks that are actually important, many days I'm left to amuse myself. I've bought a bike (which, by the by, has catapulted me psychologically back to the mid-90s, when in the summer, I would leave my mom's house at 9 AM with nothing but my sneakers and maybe a few dollars cash (ahhh, the luxury and freedom of independence before cellphone technology), and I would ride that bike everywhere: to friends' houses, the Corner Ice Cream shop, Tawasentha Park... the destination never mattered, really; it was fun and free and active, and somehow we'd find a clock or a phone and I'd find out what time my mom wanted me home, and everything just WAS), and a few books, and I've been working on a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of Klimt's The Tree of Life, and I've been reorganizing closets and trying out new recipes and going to yoga classes.
When we do have time to spend together, we've done a bang-up job of making it count. We've done a ton of local tourism, visiting the Naval Park, Chestnut Ridge Park, Lockport Caves, and attending the Williamsville Memorial Day Parade. Outside of our little suburban radius, we also ventured to Letchworth State Park for some unparalleled hiking and vistas, and we went out to Rochester for a fun planetarium show, some Dinosaur BBQ, and WWE Raw at Blue Cross Arena. In a couple weeks, we're visiting both of my siblings and their significant others in Washington, DC, and a couple of weeks beyond that, we're headed across the pond for a few weeks in southern Europe.
Today, for instance, we grabbed our books, got some coffee, and read while sitting by Glen Falls; then we had a quick lunch at The Irishman, where the waitresses know us as semi-regulars, and then we headed downtown to Delaware Park, where we flew kites by the rose garden and finally enjoyed a stroll around Hoyt Lake.
I am literally the happiest I have ever been, and it's not a constructed happiness, where I look around and say, "Someone loves me; this must be happiness!" I am genuinely content. While looking through some old posts, I stumbled across a question I posed to myself, a year and a half ago: Sometimes I wonder what I'll have to think about once these rites of passage are behind me.
My current self knows the answer that my former self never would have guessed. The answer is: Nothing. You can just relax.
Since early May, I've held a job working twenty hours a week at a software engineering firm as a Marketing intern, updating old software support manuals and building video tutorials for beta licensees. It's a cake job that happens to be exceptionally interesting and apropos for my fields of interest, considering the software is built to deal with text analytics and information extraction via linguistic lexicons and grammars and all that jazz.
Still, every week, I have a four day weekend, and at just about any time in my life prior to right now, an empty agenda would have surely made my blood boil.
Of course, I wasn't planning on having this much free time. The department offered me a teaching assignment this summer, but unfortunately the course didn't run, due to insufficient enrollment. I would have loved to teach, and I was particularly delighted that I was extended the offer, and of course an additional paycheck would have been lovely -- but I'm rather enjoying my fancy-free summer.
Because the bf is very busy with tasks that are actually important, many days I'm left to amuse myself. I've bought a bike (which, by the by, has catapulted me psychologically back to the mid-90s, when in the summer, I would leave my mom's house at 9 AM with nothing but my sneakers and maybe a few dollars cash (ahhh, the luxury and freedom of independence before cellphone technology), and I would ride that bike everywhere: to friends' houses, the Corner Ice Cream shop, Tawasentha Park... the destination never mattered, really; it was fun and free and active, and somehow we'd find a clock or a phone and I'd find out what time my mom wanted me home, and everything just WAS), and a few books, and I've been working on a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of Klimt's The Tree of Life, and I've been reorganizing closets and trying out new recipes and going to yoga classes.
When we do have time to spend together, we've done a bang-up job of making it count. We've done a ton of local tourism, visiting the Naval Park, Chestnut Ridge Park, Lockport Caves, and attending the Williamsville Memorial Day Parade. Outside of our little suburban radius, we also ventured to Letchworth State Park for some unparalleled hiking and vistas, and we went out to Rochester for a fun planetarium show, some Dinosaur BBQ, and WWE Raw at Blue Cross Arena. In a couple weeks, we're visiting both of my siblings and their significant others in Washington, DC, and a couple of weeks beyond that, we're headed across the pond for a few weeks in southern Europe.
Today, for instance, we grabbed our books, got some coffee, and read while sitting by Glen Falls; then we had a quick lunch at The Irishman, where the waitresses know us as semi-regulars, and then we headed downtown to Delaware Park, where we flew kites by the rose garden and finally enjoyed a stroll around Hoyt Lake.
I am literally the happiest I have ever been, and it's not a constructed happiness, where I look around and say, "Someone loves me; this must be happiness!" I am genuinely content. While looking through some old posts, I stumbled across a question I posed to myself, a year and a half ago: Sometimes I wonder what I'll have to think about once these rites of passage are behind me.
My current self knows the answer that my former self never would have guessed. The answer is: Nothing. You can just relax.
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