Well, yesterday was my second (of three this week) fourteen hour day.

Uuuuggggggghhhhhhh. Especially ugh as it's the start of the worst part of allergy season for me.

Today - well, today I've decided to prevent it from being a totally 14 hour day; I am going home early this afternoon. (There is an evening forum on campus I am expected to go to. It may last past 9 pm. Since I have to come back for that, I think I'm going to take a couple hours at home to do something akin to relaxing).

I did a TINY bit of knitting on the second Opal Magic sock. (I am not sure why they call the colorways "Magic." I will leave it open to your interpretation when I get around to posting a photo.)

I've come to the conclusion that people who manage to design wonderful and exciting things - who come up with new ideas that are really neat - must have jobs where they work from 9 to 5, never take work home, don't do volunteer work, and don't have a lot of outside responsibilities. (And don't have allergies).

I don't know. I feel kind of bad when I look at the stuff people have designed - some of it is "hey, I could have done that!" stuff. But when you have approximately 35 minutes a day when you're awake and your time is not otherwise accounted for...there's not a lot of designing you can do.

The thing is: it seems to me a lot of the people who design patterns (or who get book deals) get all this positive reinforcement. And to be honest? I'm jealous of them. I don't always get a lot of positive reinforcement for the stuff I do - I think I once mentioned on grant proposals, you write and write and write and follow all the guidelines and then you, most of the time, get back a letter that says either "sorry, we ran out of funding even though your proposal is kind of good" or "We don't think your proposal is that good at all, sorry." And with journal articles it's somewhat the same, except once in a while you get a reviewer who is so snarky and so much has an axe to grind that you wind up wondering why you're even in the biz. at all.

I know, part of being a grownup is that you are able to tell YOURSELF how great you are but a lot of times I do not have that capacity. In the absence of outside confirmation, I frankly do not believe I am that great. (There. I've said it.) Sometimes I think it would be nice to be around people who are either not so wrapped up in their own lives that they don't notice what anyone else is doing, or whose phasers are not permanently set on "criticize" (I don't know many people like that but I do know one or two and it's kind of exhausting).

At any rate: I've learned one of the characteristics of being a grownup is that you have to accept that what you're doing is okay to pretty good if no one says anything. Because most of the time when someone says something, it's because you've screwed up. I don't necessarily think that's right - I think people do need some positive reinforcement from time to time - but it's just the way things are.