The 5 (warning: illiteration and liberal use of hyphens ahead)

'Tis the season for lists: gift lists, "he's making a list and checking it twice" lists, thank-you lists, New-Year's-Resolutions lists, food-to-eat-and-deliver-the-death-blow-to-your-already-hopelessly-shattered-last-
New-Year's-Resolution list ... you get the picture. Well - and this really should come as no surprise to you if you actually read the previous, poorly constructed sentence - I have a list of my own! It's one that I have been formulating for years - altering, cutting and adding as necessary - that has finally settled down in 4-solid tasks and one big question mark; oh, that's right my faithful followers, fair-weather friends and fearless foes, I am speaking of none other than the fun-to-write-but-rarely-actualized Life-Goals Lists (dum-da-da-dum)!! Don't be fooled - this isn't just another life-goals lists; it is long-pondered, hard-thought and realistic ... "Wait! What's that?!" you say, "a realistic life-goals lists?" That's right - no curing AIDS, winning the Nobel Peace Prize, owning the world's largest private library fantasies on this list ... anymore ...! Another difference: it's short. Condensed from approximately 100-I've-already-done-them-so-they-might-as-well-go-on-my-list tasks to 5. The idea behind this list was that I wanted to only include things that were:
1) important to me personally without the need for explanation or apology
2) quantifiable with an end-point (meaning no subjective and ongoing, "be a good person/partner/kitty mom/etc.")
3) achievable by my will, strength, motivation, etc. alone, completely independent of outside source (meaning, no prizes or "world's largest/best/biggest" allowed) but also things I have to work hard for (emotionally, physically, mentally)
4) already apart of who I am (meaning I'm not trying to become someone I'm not, but rather play to my strength and the things I already enjoy)
Additionally, I didn't want too many things on the list; if there is a limit to the number, then you really have to decide what is the most important goals for your life. So, what have I come up with? Like I said, there are 4 solid goals, and one is still up in the air - I don't want to pick life-goals willy-nilly, after all! The goals I have so far have been years in the making; I figure that the last one will come when it's time. Okay, okay! I'll end the suspense that is driving you all mad.

EMILY'S LIFE GOALS!!!!!
#1) Take a walking journey. I'm not entirely sure where this one came from - maybe my time backpacking through Eastern and Central Europe when I spent WAY more time on a bus than was really necessary or healthy! I had really wanted to walk from town to town - when they were close enough - and the few times that this did happen were some of the greatest times on the trip. You have to slow down when you walk, take in your environment, be in tune with your body, and - of course - you have lots of time to think. I also love backpacking; the strength necessary to carry 40 lbs. over 50 miles, the self-sufficiency of carrying all your necessities on your back, and the ultimate feeling of accomplishment when you're done. It's the idea of a pilgrimage without the religious fervor. This definitely plays on the "solitude" part of my life; I'm a fairly reserved person ... most of the time ... I very much like my alone time and quite, open space to think. I also love being outside; I feel the most connected to and at peace with myself, the earth and some sort of potential "other world" when I'm alone or quietly with someone in nature.

#2) Run a marathon. This is the goal that has been on my list the longest - since high school. I was on my way once, but bad knees and early mornings foiled my plans, and here I am - 3 years later and 10 pounds heavier - still dreaming the dream, eating too much junk food and drinking too much wine. Good news on this front, however: finally having medical insurance has allowed me to get my knees checked and go through physical therapy so I can run again ... $4000 for doctor's appointments, MRIs and physical therapy appointments is great motivation (and people say we don't need health care reform, like $3000 for an MRI on your knees is normal and anyone can do it - please - imagine my eye-rolling here)! So why stick with this goal through so much hardship and misplaced motivation? Bragging rights! Come on! Also, and only slightly more seriously, I just want to prove to myself that I can do it! It requires dedication, motivation, and perseverance - all things that I'm afraid I lack; I want to do it because it will be hard for me, and that seems like a good enough reason. That said, however, this goal plays on my determined - some call it hard-headedness - character. If someone, even myself, says I can't do something, or doubts that I can/will, I want nothing more than to prove them wrong, and won't stop until I do. Also, I really do like running; I don't necessarily like the preliminaries to running - shuffling, huffing and gasping really - but once I'm in shape, I love picking a country road and getting into a rhythm ... bliss.

#3) Earn a doctoral degree: this one almost didn't make the cut - I just wasn't sure if I wanted it enough to make it an honest life goal, and I simply wasn't sure what I wanted to get it in - nothing seemed particularly practical if I wasn't planning to teach university. What finally made up my mind with this one, however, was my interest in geology ... hang in there, I promise this relates ... So, I recently decided/discovered that I'm interested in geology - chemical geology and paleontology specifically - and, if I had it all to do again, I would have gone to school for that rather than art (ha! yes, yours truly was truly an art major in college ... weren't my parents supposed to dissuade me from art school?!). Then I decided that, after I'm done getting my masters in Public Policy, I'll just start over and get a B.S. in Geology ... which in the end really just reminded me how much I love school. I really, really love going to school; it doesn't matter to me if getting a doctorate makes me a better job candidate or not, I want the degree because I want the degree - because I'm going to be in school anyway, so why not have the highest degree to show for it. I guess this plays to my super-clique thirst for knowledge. I love learning new things, I love the process of it and the outcome; I love talking about new things I've learned and getting different perspectives to help draw my own conclusions. I just really enjoy school, and once I sat down and really thought about it, this goal was a no-brainer.

#4) Complete a genealogical chart of my matriarchal line. My dad does genealogy, so I have grown up with the stories of my family, but - because the women got married and changed their names, essentially dropping off the family tree at that point - they were almost always the stories of men. I generally believe in the idea of a "family unconsciousness" - think collective unconscious combined with "the sins of the father" kind of idea, but not necessarily only sins. I like to think that we all carry the experiences/ideas/understandings of our ancestors, and have come to some interesting conclusions based on the stories of the men in my family, but half of my familial unconscious is missing because I don't know the stories of my maternal ancestors. I need to know those stories; I need to know where that part of me comes from and how it affects who I am; I need to give voice to their stories to help me understand my own. This goal is best described as my "spiritual" goal. The connection through time and exploring ideas of who you are and what has made you that way seems to me to fit into the "spiritual" category; also, that's just the way I feel about it when I think of this goal ... it feels spiritual to me, and that is that.

#5) Unknown. As I said, I'm not sure what this goal will be yet, but I feel strongly there needs to be five, and the other goals took some time to come to, so I'm not rushing the process. I will let it come as it will.

So - where to go from here. I've taken little steps towards several of them - well, all of them really. I'm not entirely sure how it will play out, but the reason I have decided to blog about it is because it's time I stop thinking about them and actually start realizing them. I have ideas of where I'm going to start - need to look at some logistical things before I reveal my next step - but never-fear, I will blog about them all the way!!

Okay, now it's your turn. Given the 4 guidelines I've set out for myself (review: important to you personally, quantitative (no, "I want to be a good person/parent/partner" allowed, as nice of a goal as that is), achievable by your own strength (independent of outside sources), and part of who you already are), what are your top-five life goals?

New Intentions; or, Self Discovery and Spiritual Revelation in a Hair Salon

<----- Hey look!  I have followers!  

Employment Stats:

Employment status: still not

Number of jobs applied for: 11

Number of interviews: 2

Number of jobs offered and declined: 1 (not a good sign when someone asks about religion and politics and if you're crazy in an interview)

Number of jobs I was really hoping I wouldn't get offered because I was going to have to accept but was ridiculously disappointed when I wasn't offered it: 1 

Now for the main entertainment! (Warning: it is long, and I ramble for awhile, and don't really make my point until the end, so feel free to skip the top if you want!)

I don't spend a lot of time in hair salons.  I get my hair trimmed - at best - every 6 months (although I have gone longer than a year ... they had to take a lot off at that point!)  My hair is stick straight - not a hint of a wave or the beginnings of a curl in sight - and, especially now that I'm unemployed, rarely leave the house and have no one in particular to impress, I pretty much let it do whatever it bloody wants to do.  This does not go over well with whatever hair stylist I've managed to get an appointment with that day:

"What do you want done today?"

"Just trim it."

"How much?"

"As little as possible but as much as necessary make it all healthy and glowy."

"Glowy?"

"Yeah, you know, that fabulous, 'I just got my hair done and now it's better than yours' look."

Looking skeptically at the ends of my hair pinched between her fingers, "Um, it's pretty damaged.  I'm going to have to take at least an inch off."

"Totally fine."

"Don't you want to do something else with it?  I could do layers or something," she says, starting to get excited looking at the blank canvas that is my head.

"No.  Just trim it."

"With your hair so straight [read: so lifeless, limp, boring ...] some layers could really add some body."

"Would that require me to do something with it?"

"Not a lot, but it would look really nice if you did ..." - a poorly disguised admonishment. 

"No."

"I could just do a few long ones in the back ..."

"No."

Big sigh as she realizes that I am every hair stylists' nightmare - someone with halfway decent hair that refuses to do anything interesting with it, "Okay then.  Where do you normally part it?"

"Oh, you know, wherever it feels like it ... usually here-ish (indicated by a waving of the hand in the general direction of my head)."

Needless to say, I don't have a cosy, gossipy relationship with my hair stylists like you see in the even-on-my-worst-day-my-life-is-still-better-than-yours-could-ever-be type movies and TV shows aimed at women my age.  Salons are not sacred grounds to me, they aren't ever particularly liked grounds!  So it was in this frame of mind, while chanting my salon-mantra "don't let them talk you into layers; don't let them talk to you into layers," that I made the bi-yearly trek to a salon last week.

I was early - of course, a tried-and-true tactic to keep my defenses up and will strong.  I was escorted to the back couches with the water that I asked for even though I what really wanted was the tea that she'd offered.  My stylist-of-the-day would be Grae, an apprentice - a status that made her MUCH cheaper (score!) but also slower, which made my showing my 15 minutes early even more unnecessary.  I pursued the selection of magazines and picked up a thick one that actually ended up being a book rather than a magazine and settled in for a long wait.  I was a little wary about the book which is, as it ends up, produced by the salon itself and has "MUST READ!!" scrawled in black Sharpie across the bottom.  "It's a salon book," I told myself, "what could it possibly tell you that you would have the least bit interest in?"  I almost gave in and put it back, but looking again at the magazines didn't give much more hope in the "interest" department - hair magazines made for people who actually style their hair and popular magazines about celebrities love lives and prison sentences ... all of which I'd already read at the physical therapist's office.  The salon book it is.

The book ended up being about creating harmony in your life.  Pretty cool - I'm good with harmony.  The first section talked about external environments and things we choose to put in our bodies: food, chemicals, etc. (I don't think that the quarter I swallowed as a kid because I didn't have pockets to put my video-game money in would've made their list of "healthy" things to put in your body ... just a guess).  So I'm reading along about what my personality types says about what kind of food I should eat - it's definitely not a science as evidenced by the "cheese" and "dairy products" which is just cruelly ironic to a person who can barely be in the same room with dairy products without throwing up and getting a migraine, and I'm really not sure what eating dairy products is supposed to say about your personality anyway ... like I said, not a science - when I got to section two - rituals.

Now, let me explain a couple of things before I go on.  I have been a runner most of my life.  I am one of those crazy people who really enjoys a nice long run (when I'm in shape, which - let me tell ya - I'm totally not right now!).  I love the connection you feel with your body, the rhythm of your stride and heart beat, the solitude.  On a not-all-together-unrelated note, I'm also a fairly spiritual person.  I'm not religious in any sense of word, and in fact have to try hard to not be anti-religion - a battle I seem to be loosing right now.  I do, however, really enjoy ritual and the idea of spirituality much for the same reasons I enjoy running ... connection, rhythm and solitude.  Both running and spiritual practice have been huge parts of my life until recently.  I stopped running because of bad knees (which are getting better with physical therapy!) and stopped any sort of spiritual practice when I started my last job both because of time issues and because the introspection necessary for spiritual practice was much too difficult while doing the kind of work I was doing.  

Back to the book:  I turned to page to section two about ritual and what is listed as the two most important rituals for creating harmony in your life?  Physical exercise and spiritual practice.  So there I was, still waiting for my hair stylist, reading about the importance of exercise and spirituality ("Almost everyone, even those of us who are not religious, have some sort of spiritual belief and ritual - whatever yours is, do it!" according to the book) and it hit me - I have had one of the most difficult years of my life, first with my job and now with my lack of job, and I have spent this incredibly difficult year almost completely devoid of physical and spiritual work.  Maybe that's where my harmony went.  I almost started to cry - tears were welling in my eyes and about to break free - but that would have totally scared the high school boy sitting next to me waiting for his massage appointment - which, really, seems pretty creepy, right? - so I pretended to have something in my eye - pulling out my little mirror and everything.  By the time I was done with the something-in-my-eye charade, it was my turn with the apprentice.  

I put down the "MUST READ!!" book and ended up leaving the appointment with lots of long-ish layers and my hair two-inches shorter than it really should have been, but also (here comes the gushy part) with a new intention.  If I get back to the things that are important to me and practice both physical and spiritual ritual maybe this next year can be lived with more harmony and grace than the last one was.  I'm willing to try.