Grief is weird and never-ending.

I was standing in front of the Jewish cooking section of my mom’s cookbook collection. The Jewish holiday season snuck up on me as usual, I’m excited for it and dreading it in equal measure.

I picked through a couple of books to flip through and carried them up to my apartment, thinking about how the grieving process is so weird in its ebbs and flows, never-ending. There are dates that I will obviously miss her - the day she passed, her birthday, my birthday. The wedding anniversary shared between my husband and I, and my parents, February 9th.

Then holidays like Rosh Hashanah will come up and I’ll be missing the days when she’d call me and say “it’s Rosh Hashanah, the work day is done, come over for a glass of wine, cheese, and apples.” Or on Halloween when she’d text me saying, “I know you’re going out, but can you stop by so I can see your costume?”

Grief is like a little thread that dances through everything, stitching together timelines, sitting just below the surface of everyday life. It’s there in the good and there in the bad and there in the monotonous.

Life Lately

Lately I’ve been spending more time reading and drawing.

When I was in undergrad and hoping to change my area of study from biology to illustration and design, I took the advice (so many gave me this advice) that I can always maintain creative hobbies and stay in the sciences professionally. Sometimes I kind of regret taking that advice, I firmly believe the sciences can be embraced as a hobby as well - especially some natural sciences. Regardless, I feel like it’s been really challenging to make enough time for my creative hobbies over the years.

For the couple of years I’ve been trying to prioritize making time for things like drawing, crochet, painting, and writing. Even if I can only make time for some doodles, making and taking that time is important.

For the last few months I’ve entirely cut out working overtime in the lab and it’s given me so much more time to do the things I actually enjoy. I’ve been drawing more, I’m re-learning how to use Photoshop and learning how to use Illustrator and Figma. I’m building on my current functional-beginner level in web design languages like HTML and CSS (I like to think that I’m not a true beginner, but I still need to look things up all the time, I like to consider myself functional-beginner because I still need to look things up all the time).

I’ve been reading two books at any given time - usually one self-help or educational and one fiction/non-fiction/novel for entertainment - and I’m actually finishing them again.

I really want to keep this going and I hope that I can build on it. While I’d still love to change my career, these lifestyle changes are feeling pretty good for the time being. I’m excited to learn about the things that I enjoy most in my free time.

Change in Perspective

The other day I was talking with a friend about the early days of YouTube and social media. I was mentally yoinked back to the days of Tumblr (back when tumblarity was still a thing) and, before that, LiveJournal (the original, where I would spill my guts and share all about my day as a 13-16 year old complete with the perfect emoji to indicate my “mood”). It honestly left me wishing for that kind of real-time “journaling”-like blogging again.

Maybe with less TMI details, but something to look back on and reflect where I was compared to where I am.

Lately, life has felt super up-in-the-air. I wish that I could slow down for more than a weekend here and there. I wish it were possible to take some kind of a gap year (or even half-year!) to figure things out, like some do either before or after college. Alas, the bills, responsibilities, and need for health insurance are very different in your mid-30s than your early 20s.

I’ve been fully rejected for both my dream job and all lower-level positions that may help me someday reach my dream job and I’m burnt out from applying. At this point I just want to find a whole new career, one that might suit my life and interests a bit better, but I don’t know what that might be anymore.

We’ve essentially abandoned our home search - not only because everything is beyond anything we could possibly afford, but even while looking at homes beyond our means, they’re not the style we’re interested in. Our old little apartment suits us fine for now though, and we can still afford it.

So many of the homes for sale around us have been renovated in the same cookie-cutter way, either with additions or full demo-remodels that have extended the cute bungalows that once were to the very edge of the property. There’s nothing wrong with this kind of home if it’s what you want, but it isn’t what we want and it isn’t our style. Sometimes I worry that my ideal home will cease to exist, that they’ll all be changed instead of restored, if I don’t hurry up and find it.

I’ve been trying to focus on all of the good I have around me… I’m honestly grateful for the apartment we have, in its prime location with rent control. We can’t own it, but we enjoy it immensely. While I wouldn’t say that I’m happy with my job right now, I am happy with my health insurance and I’ve been trying to make the most of the time I do have off. I’ve tried over the past year to spend as much time as possible outdoors, going for more hikes, walks at the beach, and trips to the lake in the Adirondacks.

I’m grateful for my family, my cats, and our new superstar pup named Paco who came into our lives just when we needed him the most.

Shifting focus like this really does help me amidst a world of feeling lost. Indulging in simple pleasures like an amazing candle or splurging on the nicer bottle of wine instead of the cheaper option can make the day-to-day feel special as well, as material and superficial as that may sound.

Clean Your Fridge

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but clean up your refrigerator. Not the inside – though if that needs a scrub down, by all means – but the outside. We had wedding invitations, thank you notes, grocery lists, and recipes strewn across our refrigerator for so long, it didn’t only need a pare-down, but a full cleaning. I’m talking Clorox and Magic Erasers to clean up the inevitable grease and grime that seems omnipresent in a well-used kitchen.

Save-the-dates and postcards went into a keepsake box and old receipts were thrown away. One quick swipe revealed how bright-white that door was supposed to be, and wow, it feels great to see it now!

Because we had so many layers of memorabilia and ephemera, we didn’t notice how gosh dang dirty the refrigerator door had become.

There’s breathing room between favorite magnets (linked here) and keepsake items and more room to make words and notes with our magnetic Scrabble tiles (link to similar but slightly different).

So as silly as it may sounds, if you need to, clean up your refrigerator.