New Feelings of Productivity

Today feels like a new day - figuratively speaking - of course it's literally a new day.

I woke up starting to feel better. I don't feel 100%. I'm more congested and my nose goes from stuffy to pouring in the blink of an eye, but my head feels a bit clearer and my throat is improving. I'll take it! Honestly, I can handle a sore throat and stuffiness much better than I can when my head hurts or just feels cloudy.  That's when I really shut down.

I woke up naturally at about 7:30, but I let myself have a slow roll into the morning. I laid in bed reading for a bit before I got up to shower and get moving. Coming in to Bangkok I decided to give myself a day to get comfortable in my living space with the goal of finding a work space in which I felt like I could be focused and productive within the first week. Ideally that would have happened on my first full day, but I was a bit more realistic than that. I tried my apartment first, but that worked about as well as it does at home, which is not very well at all. Then I had a few days of not feeling well so I gave myself some grace there.  Yesterday in a few short moments of feeling perky I tried to work in my apartment and in a common space on the floor with the pool and the gym.

Aside from the distractions of a comfy couch and Netflix the downfall of my apartment is that while there are two desktop-type spaces that should be great for work, they both have corresponding stools. In theory a stool would be great because it would help me maintain my posture by not giving me an option for lazing back.  I like to think that when I'm typing in my work office I sit with fairly good posture, but I know for sure that when I'm talking with students or my coworkers I list to the side and compromise my spinal alignment. Not being able to work comfortably AND having distractions are not a great combo for me, particularly when I'm not motivated to work on research to being with.  I thought the common space would work really well, but it wasn't great. I can handle heat better than a lot of people, but 85-95 degree temperature without air con or even so much a breeze wasn't working for me.  Once I got into the room I also realized that there were gorgeous leather couches and chairs with end tables and coffee tables, but there wasn't a work space that wouldn't require me to bend over or work off my lap.  There's a conference room that's across the hall from the common space and I could use that, but it is reservable so access to that room is limited.  While it had space and quite, I didn't think it was air conditioned either and who wants to be stuck in a small conference room day in and day out. I'm can't recall if it even had any windows.  Talk about depressing! 

I decided to give a coffee shop a try this morning.  There is a little shop on the first floor of my building that has a sign in the window advertising their food and beverage options as well as free wifi and co-working space.  The food and beverage options seem a bit limited, but I was willing to give it a try. I was realllly hoping it offered chai lattes. I was pleased to see that they were really popular in Australia. It seemed like every time I turned around there was a coffee shop with chai lattes, but that makes sense because Australia has a HUGE cafe culture. I had no idea they were such coffee snobs. On my walking tour in Sydney I learned that McDonald's started their McCafe branding in Australia because they knew that Australians wouldn't embrace their coffees if it wasn't cafe-esque. Anyway, sadly I have not seen any chai lattes in Thailand so far. They do, however, offer lots of different types of tea. This morning I tried a Thai tea latte. I have no idea what's in it, but it was pretty decent. I don't think I'll ever love it, but it will hold me over and give me an option of something to buy when I want to work in this space.  The cafe itself seems to be perfect for me. There's lot of natural light and there are really great work tables. I feel like I can stake a claim at a table and sit here for as long as I want without there being an issue.  Hopefully it will work out for me to come down here each more and really push through some work. 

One of the things I did this morning was set my professional and personal goals for the rest of my sabbatical.  I had way more to write down on the paper than I expected. I'm a little freaked out by it, but I need to remember that I wrote down all that I *can* pursue, not necessarily what I think I actually will pursue. Ultimately my plan has been to write a textbook, but the reality is that if I can't find a publisher who can publish the book at a reasonable price for students then I won't write the text.  The goals that I wrote down included contingency plans.  It's overwhelming if I look at it all together, but if I take one at a time, piece by piece it feels much more manageable. With respect to doing work, my goal is to work on writing and research three to four hours every day, with the minimum really being three solid hours. Initially I thought I'd set an alarm to get my day started and give myself that sort of structure every day, but I think it's best if I don't care what time I wake up. I don't need to be so rigid as getting up at 6:00 or 7:00 every morning, but I do need a work time requirement or I'll find excuses to do everything else.  If I'm tired and want to sleep late, cool - but I still need to put in my three to four hours of writing time. It's the priority. I've also decided that unless there's something really special that I want to see or do, work comes first in my day.  Once work is done for the day I can do whatever else I want whether it be sightseeing, swimming, reading, or napping. 

I also spent some of this morning setting up a financial plan for myself because after Australia I felt like I was spiraling out of control. I spent a lot of money truly vacationing in Australia and freaked myself out a bit, even though I knew to prepare myself for that before I embarked on this trip.  As many of you I'm sure know, it's a real challenge to spend hard and then roll it back pretty abruptly, even if you had a plan to do so.  Preparation for that is one thing, but putting it into practice is another. Budgeting has never been my strong suit, especially when it comes to adhering to that budget, but I'm really trying to be better at it by being realistic about my resources, my needs, my wants, and my goals. I felt really productive because instead of having that vacation mentality of "I'll deal with it when I get home," I paid my bills, ran into a few problems that I need to figure out (Spectrum - gah!, RG&E - what??) and came up with a plan for myself along with a visual aid to help me track my progress.

The rest of my day is going to be spent looking at what I want to do while I'm in Thailand, both directly in Bangkok and beyond.  If I can get it sorted out I also need to try to get my visa extended so I can stay in the country beyond a month. I'm not sure that I'll try to stay in Bangkok; I think I'd like to see more of the country - the islands for sure - but I need to have a plan beyond my time in this apartment. A few friends have suggested that they might come visit me too and if I hope for that to happen at all, I need a longer vision for where I'm spending my time and what I'm doing than I currently have.

I'd like to wrap up now by thanking everyone who checked to see if I was ok in light of the shooting at the shopping mall in Korat. So many world events happen that we don't know about or pay attention to in the States, but the news of the shooting in the mall here in Thailand reached many of you. I also fully recognize that keeping up with where I am in the world and what I'm doing is not a priority for, well, pretty much anyone.  I appreciate everyone who was concerned about me and looking to see if I was safe. I am! Thanks for checking in!

Blogging About Blogging

I don't know how professional travel bloggers do it.  By the end of my days exploring a new city I'm exhausted and it's really hard for me to even think about summarizing what I experienced for others.  And I don't think I even do that much most days. I'm not the sort of traveler that needs to squeeze every once of possibility out of each day.  Usually I pick one or two things I really want to do and then I ramble throughout the rest of the day and frankly, strategize around meals. As much of an external processor that I am I need time to sit with my experiences and thoughts in order to be able to honestly reflect on what I did that day and how it compares to other places I've traveled.  I have ZERO desire to do a travel blog where I list out the minutia of traveling between cities and navigating must do hot spots in each place. I admire people who can do that because I think those types of blogs help future travelers immensely. I don't have the brain for holding those details and as much as this is challenging for me to carve out time to do and for me to consider what I think is worth writing about, I think writing a more information-based blog in the style of a guide book would feel so incredibly tedious. I'd have absolutely no motivation to do that any day of the week.

It's not as easy for to me to write a somewhat detailed reflection on this page as it is for me to post a photo on Instagram and write a quick blurb that may or may not express much of anything. I think it's worth it for me to do this though, even if few people read it. I don't keep a journal regularly, but this blog gives me the chance to do what I think a lot of people do with their personal journals - I can go back and relive these moments later with some details that I've forgotten about over time. I've actually already done it a couple times on this trip looking back at some things from Vietnam and South America. I find myself often reading with a big goofy grin on my face because I am flooded with memories of feelings, not just memories of what I saw and did. Plus, how am I supposed to summarize these eight months when I go back and inevitably asked, "so how was it??" There's going to be no way to succinctly answer that. At least I can give a short answer and then say, "If you really want to know more we can either have a longer chat or I can just pass this blog link along to you." LOL Even as I write that, that seems pretentious as fuck. LOL I can't imagine actually saying that to someone, but it would provide a better perspective on how everything way instead of a summary of everything together.

I'm rambling a bit because I'm tired, but my point is that I think this is worth it, but it's wicked hard to make myself sit down at night and knock out a post. It's even harder to get myself up early to do it in the morning instead. I fully recognize that I still haven't finished posting about Sydney. I am trying to wrap my head around how I can possibly summarize the magic of the 14 days of the Australian Open. And time hasn't stopped so I've been in Kuala Lumpur for two days already, have one more full day, and then I'm off to Bangkok.  I thought I'd be a little more on top of it, but it is what it is.

One aspect of doing this that I critically underestimated was the time it takes me to organize my photos. According to my Iphone I have 1,415 photos and videos from this trip currently on my phone. Those are the ones I haven't written anything about. I have already deleted some off after I transferred them to my external hard drive and to Google Photos. I'm really proud of myself because unlike with other trips I've taken I'm labeling each photo and organizing them systematically before I transfer them over. This means that I don't have to go back and do it later and I'm doing it while it's fresh in my head. I can tell you that I definitely didn't do this with most of my other photos. I didn't do it at all with ANY of my photos from South America three years ago and that's a major problem because I can't even find many of them. I think I know where they are, but I'm going to have to work to organize them. Hopefully I can remember where most were taken. Some will have been automatically labeled from my Iphone, but I took a lot on a digital camera that didn't GPS label the photo location. That organization is part of a personal project for this sabbatical once I'm a little more settled and not acting like a tourist constantly.

I don't really know how to end this post, and as I've been writing I've been thinking about how for every trip I've blogged about there's probably been a post like this one - a "here's why I haven't posted in a while and why I'm so behind."  I know that I've had some trips where I haven't even finished posting about the trip at all. I got so far behind that when I got back to the states I just stopped.  My plan is to keep working on it, but for now it is what it is.