Wednesday, March 02, 2011

My head's still on vacation.

Adam and I took a trip to Miami last weekend. It was a perfect 4 days of doing absolutely nothing. No alarms. Reading and swimming at the beach all day. Relaxing Dinner. Repeat. Of course, now I'm back to work. My body is here, but my head is having a little trouble focusing. I'm trying to engage, but everything feels more interesting than the work that I need to be doing.

The funny thing is, it wasn't a vacation that I needed a vacation after the vacation. I made a comment to Adam that I was totally ready to be home and get back to work. Perhaps I was looking forward to the social side of work and not the actual work part. Either way, I'm sitting at my desk struggling to focus on my projects. It's frustrating, but at the same time, I'm still so relaxed from vacation that it doesn't bother me. Sigh. I don't think I'll be victorious in this battle.

I'm also struggling with the break of schedule vacation causes. I tend to eat fairly healthy. Considering a co-worker has taken to calling me "Vegetable" because of my daily bag of vegetables I'm eating at my desk, I'd say I'm doing alright. Of course, I eat junk food and drink beer with the best of them, but overall, I'd like to think I'm pretty healthy. But on vacation, anything goes. And after, I don't want to eat healthy anymore. Or go to the gym. I just want to eat chips and be lazy. Hopefully as my head gets back in the work routine, it will follow suit for eating and running. Maybe?

Lastly, my lack of focus on work has got me thinking more about writing. Last June for 30 days of creativity I took a picture everyday and wrote a short story to go along with it (all posted here). I want to do that again in June, but I don't want to just do it one month out of the year. Ideally, it would be great to do it weekly. I know daily is just too much, but I think I can handle weekly. I loved going out and taking pictures each day and it was amazing how quickly the stories came to life with the photo inspiration. I always liked photography because I could just capture what I saw around me, but I wasn't overwhelmed by a empty roll of film, or in modern age, an empty memory card. A blank page however, frightening. I like writing, but it's hard for me to find an idea to write about. Anyway, the pairing of photography and writing worked well for me and I'm going to try to do more of it more often. We'll see how it goes. I'm sure I thought I would continue doing it after June was over (and I had recovered from my June 30th surgery). But I'm actually quite surprised that I haven't even gone back to my posterous to even re-read what I wrote. The only reason I had even thought about it was because I wanted to look at my day 9 picture because we're having a photo contest at work.

Here are the two photos I submitted for the work contest.
Title: Jumping Bean (taken in Chicago at the "Cloud Gate"- aka, "the bean")


Title: Evening Twilight (taken in NY at the "Top of the Rock")


The theme for the contest is Luck. My rationale is an "action" photo is always a lucky photo. And I was lucky to get to have that view of NY at sunset, and lucky to actually get a decent photo since my point-and-shoot camera doesn't have the best luck with night photos. Not that I have to defend my photos to anyone, but felt the need to do so now.

But, back to my 30days thoughts. I really didn't think I would abandon it all so quickly. I was consumed with my knee and recovery for most of the summer, but it's sad how fast I let it all go and didn't look back once. But enough of what I didn't do, I'm going to start now. And I think I have the perfect picture to start with.

And going full circle, I'm going to stop forcing my head to think about work and going to go home and write.

No comments: