Please Check Brains at the Door

Being stuck at work with the impending move looming in the near future has left me in limbo. This cubicle farm of an office is now my purgatory.  In addition, being stuck here all day is incredibly frustrating: all I want to do is get a move on (literally). My focus is split down the middle between work and moving to Denver. I want to start cleaning and packing the house and get rid of old clothes and sell off unused furniture, but I can't just yet because there is still some precautionary money to be made and saved. Thus, I marinate patiently in my thoughts of a city a mile high in the air, mountains of fluffy snow even higher, and an unfamiliar, albeit friendly, cityscape waiting to be explored and enjoyed. On the bright side, however, I have had lots of time to make to-do lists and think about what I want out of the next few months.

The first step toward the model life I've deemed more suitable for purveying my happiness is taking the GRE for graduate school acceptance. Initially, I had no idea what the GRE is or on what material it will test me. Turns out, it's pretty casual stuff. The GRE is comprised of data interpretation, verbal aptitude, algebraic math, and variations on each of the aforementioned. I've been focusing on the math portion so far. This may beg the question "why would someone who uses math almost every day need to prepare for a rudimentary exam?" But holy crap; I am amazed at how much I've forgotten.

All of the sudden I feel as if I'm on an episode of "Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?"

(Probably not.)

Granted, everything is coming back pretty quickly, I just would not have been prepared at all if I had been hit with something like a quadratic equation and asked to factor it out. So I'm trying to get through all the math topics so I can get on with the verbal stuff. Maybe I'll take up reading the dictionary while I half-assedly complete my work projects... 

Even though I am here and I do not really want to be, I will not sink so low as to cause my peers and superiors to question my performance. But I know where my mind is and it is, unfortunately, not at work. Yet through forcing myself to drive here every day while a carrot named Denver hangs from a stick in front of my beloved Subie, I have realized that focus is an incredibly hard thing to master and maintain. Yet I've also learned that you have to be focused on something that you care about, something you love, something you actually want in order to truly access your potential as a happy human being. So no more doing things for a decent paycheck for me. No more taking the first job that comes along because it's a safe bet. No more forcing myself to act like I'm happy in front of my boss. While I won't be making any sudden changes that aren't financially and socially responsible, I will, however, be funneling all of my focus into things I truly love. And that is why we're moving.