Back to the future

Finally my new Moleskin calendar arrived last night! As strange as it sounds, I can't live without that little black pocketbook anymore. For the past couple of years I have had the same calendar, and my whole life is in those books. Without it, I would never make it to any appointments and could not organize my life even to the small extent that I have managed to do so lately. As the new year is drawing closer, I have been looking all over the place, have gone to pretty much every Barnes & Noble store on the island of Manhattan, and could not find the particular calendar I wanted, so finally I ordered it from Amazon.

I am craving more order in my life now. Maybe it's because I am getting older or just realizing that I am so much more efficient when things are in order. A while ago I organized my stuff in lab: put everything away in nicely ordered folders, labeled everything so now it's easy to find data from experiments I had done months ago. I cleaned my desk too, and overall, I have been feeling better about work because of the order. Those who know me well know that I am not the tidiest person and certainly not a clean-freak. There is a certain level of clean and order that I absolutely need though. Part of that is writing down everything I do in the little black book both to keep track of what I need to do and to remember what I had done.

As I started leafing through the pages of my new calendar and writing down things I already knew I had to do, I realized that January was just around the corner and how busy I was going to be. Last weekend I went to an all-day fencing seminar and took the written test to become a rated referee. Having passed the exam, the person in charge hooked me up with the East Coast college fencing league coordinator, who organizes all the competitions around here. Immediately, I was booked for 5 different tournaments along the East Coast, and with some other competitions I had already agreed to referee at, I managed to sign up for every single weekend in January and February for fencing meets. I think I should feel stressed about how I am going to have time for all this next to lab and school, but I am actually excited about going to all these competitions.

Is this strange? Am I a masochist deep down? Standing up for sometimes 8-10 hours a day, having to focus for that long, getting yelled at from all directions, people always looking for things to criticize about you... all of these are parts of being a referee. Why am I looking forward to doing this to myself? I have been fighting against this feeling ever since I stopped competing more than 3 years ago. I have been refereeing ever since, mostly in high schools in the NYC area and at college meets back at Northwestern, but never very seriously and most importantly, never admitting that I enjoyed it. However, when I went to Chicago a few weeks ago, I decided that it was time to stop fighting this feeling that has become very obvious to me by now. I miss fencing, I miss being around fencers, I miss being at competitions. When I walk into the gym in the morning of a competition, I have the feeling of belonging and familiarity, no matter where in the world I am. There is this thing called fencing that links me with all the other people in the world who do it. Of course, it also helps to be going back to the same places time after time and be recognized by people; it gives me a certain sense of importance and authority that I like.

It feels good to have stopped fighting against the pull of the fencing world, although I am a bit afraid of being sucked back and trapped in it once again like I felt I was 4 or so years ago. Hopefully I am older now and more mature and have enough experience and other responsibilities and hobbies that I will be able to keep a healthy balance in my life.