Doing much better today!…

Doing much better today! Yesterday, I played the Sims for a while, constructing a new house, which somehow made me feel far less frustrated by the whole house-hunt thing. The Sims lead much more difficult lives than I do -- I tried to build them a place as big as our current apartment (roughly 1200 sq. ft.), and it was so expensive that they didn't even get a real floor for many many turns -- they had to walk around on grass, which made them very unhappy, poor things. We have these five priorities:

  • lots of space
  • close commute
  • interesting/safe neighborhood
  • gardening options
  • pretty building
...in roughly that order, and it's darn difficult to actually get all of those within our price range. Cities are expensive. We saw a great loft space yesterday, pretty cheap, but all its huge bank of windows overlook the highway, making the space very loud and unattractive. Would be very tough to resell, I think.

The bulk of today is writing (finished revising Ch. 11 this morning, going to try to do Ch. 12 this afternoon). Then I think we're going to look at one more place this evening, a huge unfinished loft space (3000 sq. ft.), which may not have enough light due to other buildings nearby -- if that one doesn't seem feasible, we may just table the whole house hunt for a year, until we have a better idea if I'll actually be getting a tenure-track job at Roosevelt (which would mean a raise), or until we see what the book sales look like. Maybe going up in price will help some with balancing those priorities above. The whole thing has been stressing me out, and I think between planning Kriti and finishing this draft on deadline, I may have used up all my extra stress allocation.

One of the interesting things Karina said when she called last night to cheer me up was that even large *good* changes, like selling a book to a major publisher, or getting a good job, can cause intense stress -- the brain registers it as change, and the brain tends to think change is bad, in and of itself. Seems a bit goofy to me, but I suppose it makes a certain sense.

What do you guys think? When you have major good things happen, does that feel stressful to you?

2 thoughts on “Doing much better today!…”

  1. Well, she wasn’t just spouting her experience, but common theory. It agrees with my experience, that things that are on the net positive – new relationships, jobs, etc. – can also require a lot of attention and energy in a way that’s physically and mentally exhausting. It all depends on the particulars: I think some changes are uniformly good and not particularly stressful. A new dress…

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