After being hit by an invisible ton of bricks around 6pm, I once again found myself unable to start studying tonight. Oh well, at least I'll get a blogpost out.
Work was busy today in all sorts of ways. Meetings and deadlines is nothing new. I also had a lot of draining social (work-related :)) interactions, where several people were pulling my attention in three different directions. I had made some new exciting hypotheses for my grant proposal (which will hopefully be approved in the next few days!) and spent time discussing them with co-workers.
Although I love interacting with people at work, I also find it very tiring. Yet somehow I still complain about not having enough of it (see my previous post). Go figure.
But I digress.
What I really wanted to post about is a strange mental image I've been getting recently after a stressful and tiring day. As I'm thinking of ways to relax and switch gears, I persistently get an image of me sitting on the stair steps and... smoking! Smoking! I never smoked! Never wanted to. Plus smoking actually excites sympathetic system, not soothes it, so why, why would my subconsciousness offer me this image?
Just for fun, I tried to look for reasons why I get such a strong association for smoking relieving high stress. Lo and behold, it is from my childhood!
My Dad had a very-very stressful job, which became even more so during post-Soviet-Union-collapse times, when many were losing jobs, salaries were low or not paid for months on end, and there was not much food to buy whether you had money or not. My Dad used to come home after 12-13 hour workday and simply collapse on the couch and sleep for an hour. He slept no matter the noise. Then he'd get up and help me with my physics homework... I never knew how hard it must have been for him until a couple of years ago when he confessed that his lowest time of all was when his (and Mom's) monthly pay was worth about 4 pounds of strawberries. Try feed a family of four with that! They never once mentioned it back then. I never knew!
I digress again... So my Dad never smoked inside of our apartment and especially in my presence. Over many years I have glimpsed him smoking only a few times. And in all of those memories he sat on a step in our garden, looking serene, relaxed, happy. I'm sure it wasn't so much smoking (which he does a lot more at work) but being in our garden, surrounded by home-grown fruits and vegetables which could support us through the winter, away from work worries and confinement of an apartment.
Oh, I miss my Dad now.
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