I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to success. Mostly, it’s been centered around deciding what to do with my jewelry busiess. When I started selling my work, the only real goal I ever set for it was that it be self-supporting. Really, that’s the most I expect as a hobbyist without much time to promote my work, and it would make me deliriously happy if making jewelry paid for itself. (It’s not a cheap hobby.)
It’s led me to think about how I define success in general for myself, and I realized something interesting. I consider my current situation successful if I’m able to completely support myself without any handouts from anyone. If I can pay a little extra toward student loans or savings, then I’m really doing well. I’ve never really made it out of that “college survivial” definition of success (which could be a good thing as I’m looking to go back to grad school next year).
I’ve wondered if perhaps I’m limiting myself in my definition of success, but then I consider how I handle things. I’ve never settled for just squeaking by. I aim for being able to pay off my loans more quickly, for being able to sock away a good sum in my savings each month.
It’s a low baseline, but the feelings of happiness and security created when I surpass it make me feel so much better about myself, so I don’t think I’d ever want to change it!
Inspired by David Lozano’s post on being your own support.
Posted by Rebecca as Personal development at 7:39 AM EDT
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I am, for unknown reasons, overly interested in archaeology. Not quite enough to be a true amateur (although I wouldn’t say no if someone offered me the opportunity to be a volunteer on a dig), but I love reading archaeology blogs and watching archaeology-themed shows and movies.
My passion, if you haven’t noticed, is teaching. You ask me to teach something, I’ll do the research, put together a lesson, and teach it! Over the past year, my interests have moved from informal education toward instructional design. I’m still reading everything I can get my hands on in my spare time.
My love for teaching and interest in archaeology intersect in an odd way- e-learning has instructional objects (often referred to as artifacts). The usefulness of these artifacts is still being debated far and wide, the assumption being that once an artifact has been used, it can’t easily be repurposed to be used elsewhere.
Somehow, in reading a recent debate on this very topic, I started wondering if a learning artifact can have provenance the way an archaeological artifact can. Does the point of origination matter on these learning artifacts? Can it be repurposed so much that its purpose evolves into something completely different?
I’m finding a lot of overlap in my areas of interest, but this might be one of the more interesting, and it definitely could use some exploration!
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:06 AM EDT
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Happy Mother’s Day to any mothers who might be reading this! Hopefully, my mother received her gift and card from me already. I had the best time picking out her card. It is next to impossible to find a Mother’s Day card from single biological child to maternal parental unit in this area. But if you want one to send to your ex- mother-in-law, you have a choice of roughly ten to fifteen! I wish I was kidding!
This seems like the perfect topic to talk about today, too, because my mother has expressed a wish for me to get over myself and work on getting my writing published.
I’ve really struggled with this idea. I’ve always written. Mom will tell you this. I was a fabulous writer in middle school and high school. I’m sure my mother received more than one concerned note that, while I was doing brilliantly in most of my classes, I was always writing stories instead of taking notes. In my conservative college prep school, I’m sure that was tantamount to paving the road to hell.
As an adult, I still write. You can see that I maintain a number of blogs. I also write short stories, novels, and fan fictions (which I’m embarrassed to admit are mine strictly because of the fandom, which I actually like). I’d never try to claim I’m actually a writer, though. I’m too busy hiding behind my shyness and my fear of being fake.
The other day, I was reading through my aggregator (that practice gets me into more trouble!), and discovered that perhaps I am a writer after all. A self-published one, but a writer nonetheless.
It’s very odd to think that I could seriously tell someone that I’m a writer, and not have to qualify it as a hobby or anything. The directors and teachers always tell the writing students in the center that I’m one, anyway. Perhaps I ought not to turn several shades of red and backpedal from it any more.
That would probably make my mom very happy!
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 7:54 AM EDT
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We’ve been having all kinds of router problems at home this week, so I’ve spent the better part of the week becoming better acquainted with the local library (which has an unfortunately sterile feeling to it…not entirely dissimilar from the main Seattle library, actually).
When I don’t have access to the internet, the first thing I do is start making a list of everything I can work on that doesn’t require the internet. For the most part, this is not a big deal. I can generally glean two or three days of offline activities to work on. This is largely due, in part, that I started realizing I couldn’t leave my entire life online.
Where I used to keep everything in a couple of very specific places online for portability, I now just take the laptop with me and use some tools I can use even when the web is down, and I thought I’d share some of them.
The tools in this list are ones that I use daily:
Mozilla Calendar- If I have internet access, then I have Firefox and Calendar running together, but if the internet isn’t working, then I can still access my calendar. One of my favorite bits about this tool is that you can create different calendars, and then toggle which ones you want to look at. You cna also organize your to-do list to be grouped with a specific calendar. This has proven to be a wonderful thing!
EverNote- Mozilla Calendar doesn’t have a note section, but that’s all right. I’m kind of turning my EverNote into a Rebecca encyclopaedia. Every to-do list, every idea, every project, everything I need to access quickly. I just have to keep it organized and not let it get out of hand! I would be utterly lost without EverNote!
RoughDraft and OpenOffice- It’s genrrally a good bet that I’ll have one or the other during the day. I use RoughDraft for all of my writing because I’m in love with the pad feature. I use OpenOffice for all of my editing because it’s easier to use, and will save things into a .doc format (which most people seem to prefer so far).
Trillian- If I’m on my computer and my computer is online, Trillian is open. I’ve discovered that if people can’t find me on Trillian, I suddenly find my phone ringing off the hook. It’s sad but true.
Winamp- I don’t work well in silence, and now that I’m on a laptop with a working CD drive, I have all of my CDs on here so I can just listen to them. It’s pretty nice, actually, even if I tend to spend most of my time these days listening to either anime soundtracks (like I am at the moment) or voice actors who also sing.
We all have our favorites we can’t live without, and now you know mine!
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:02 AM EDT
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