resurgent multichotomy

Saw this in someone’s Facebook wall today :)

I told myself (and my Twitter follower base) that I’ll try and stay upbeat this week, as apparently I’ve been tweeting about stress a lot of late. One of my students called my attention to it!

It’s been quite a challenge for me to restrain myself from ranting to twitterverse, especially with a couple of irritating stuff. To get by, I guess I must confront them head on — so the first step is to identify these “stressors”.

Here are top-of-mind answers if I ask myself the question, “what irritates/stresses you?”

• being obliged to do things I don’t enjoy and don’t believe are essential — this always ruins my work groove
• having to deal with incompetence/ineptitude — this always gets to me, instantly
• disorderliness, lack of structure, or lack of a sense of rational structure — I have little to no tolerance for these
• shameless oglers — seriously, ogling should be outlawed
• choking, or being choked, in any way — this is the worst of all

THERE! Apologies for the somewhat negative blog post, but if you’re a student/colleague/friend/relative of mine, PLEASE BEWARE. The cortisol factory in my system has been extra-active these days, so take heed.

First step is to admit! Next, to conquer.. or to attempt to do so, at the very least. :D

I’ve been straddling between exhilaration and exhaustion lately. I’ve written about the things that stress me on the previous post, so here’s a look at what I’ve been upbeat about.

* My new Nintendo 3DS! I almost forgot how much of a Nintendo fanboy I am until I went out to get this last week! Been playing Super Mario 3D Land and Pokemon Black and I have to deliberately limit myself from playing too much so I could still go attend to other stuff, haha!

* Weekend cooking adventures. Over the past few weekends, I’ve been whipping up dishes from the big kitchen at my Manila residence. The stuff I’ve made thus far include: tuna and mountain rice meatballs, sugar-free garlicky chicken longganisa, flatbread lasagna, herbed tuna spinach fettuccine, sweet and savory roast chicken, and herb-roasted liempo. For desserts, I’ve made custard bread pudding and Ferrero ice cream.

I love to cook! And the best thing about cooking in Manila (as opposed to in Eastwood) is that somebody’s there to clean the mess up after me :D

* Panel season at the Ateneo. While it does steal my leisurely Saturdays away, I’ve always welcomed paneling for student projects, as I get to meet and encounter brilliant minds both from the student groups and my co-panelists. Panel season started last Saturday with LS127 (Business Plan Strategy Implementation), and will continue weekly for Strategic Audit, ComTech Thesis, Marketing, and Opman.

* IBM’s stock price has been surging! A big portion of my forced personal savings goes to the discounted purchase of IBM shares, so its good performance at the stock market is sheer good news for me.

* I don’t want to jinx anything by writing about it further, but suffice it to say that something else is going well in my life — and just thinking about this makes me smile. Hope it goes well. :)

A multi-talented, go-getter friend of mine told me this about a year ago: “I’m starting to trim down the excess fat in my life”.

“Good for him,” I thought to myself then, but clearly not the case for me as I look at continuing to nurture the multichotomy – a set of parallel and ofttimes conflicting interests and preferential predispositions – that I’ve come to accept in me.

I took pride in the diversity and significance of my endeavors. They flourished and progressed, and at the time I felt very productive and fulfilled in every one of them.

Then there is now.

Curiously, I find myself nowhere near as equally excited as I was about everything. It’s not that interest levels have waned though, but maybe they were just too diverse and disjointed to manage simultaneously. Maybe it was just sheer exhaustion. Or maybe I had put my eggs in too many baskets. Seems this is what we proverbially refer to as being “spread too thin”.

At a certain point, my gut was telling me to jump the gun on dropping one or two of these, but then I managed to procrastinate to let things simmer down and think things through.

I now have to come to terms that there is a limit to this so-called resurgent multichotomy. Certain facets have to be set aside in order to have more focus, more engagement, more drive.

So, which ones to drop and which ones to keep? Strangely, this decision-making process seems to excite me more than the interests themselves.