On Passing

I’m still pinching myself. I can’t believe I’ve had time to watch a movie in peace. And attend a dinner party (somewhat in my honor!). And I don’t feel completely frazzled. In fact, I woke up earlier than usual this morning, and while I still felt like I’d recently been flattened by a Mac Truck, I had energy to get out of bed and start thinking about all the things I could do with my day. I even did some of them.

To stop being coy: I passed the PMP exam. On my first try. I keep looking at my certificate to confirm it, because a few days before the test I saw a stat that 50% of first-time takers fail. It made me feel like I was facing Gandalf in my evil twin form and I Would Not Pass. (For fun, and thinking there would have been someone clever to have figured out a clever play on that LOTR scene, I searched for “You Shall Pass”… and pretty much only saw images of failure… Except for the Multipass version, which still makes me laugh. Or maybe the Oods were in my favor.) The test was as painful as anticipated (I described the process of choosing answers to one colleague as “interpretive guessing”), but when this week’s image floated by my Facebook stream courtesy The Smart Witch, it reminded me that as hard as it was, it closed out a difficult chapter.

Hubs and I were talking about it in the aftermath and realized that pretty much, for the past 10 years, one or the other of us has been up to our eyeballs in some kind of ridiculous study program. This is the first time in ages we don’t have to put off doing things we want to do in favor of things we have to do. The amazing thing is, it didn’t take much to stir my creative embers, despite how tired I still am. We watched “Lucy” last night (the first in a huge backlog of shows and movies we’ve put off for 3 years, since I began my MBA). It’s smart in the obscure way I love, and figured out how to carry a fascinating scifi story on the back of intense action. As I tried to shut off my thoughts about the movie to go to sleep, it occurred to me that my one problem with the story was the mindset that using more than the 10% of the brain would effectively lead to becoming a sociopath. Aside from the 10% myth already having been debunked many times, it seems to me that being so in touch with the pain of being in your body, feeling the effect of gravity and the pull of the planet as it spins through space, and remembering the thousand kisses rained on your face by loving parents would instead have the effect of inducing radical pacifism. More along the lines of what the Stargate shows described as “ascending“. Between that thought and a study I read about recently that indicates a significant minority of women have Y chromosomes floating through their blood streams, I bounced right to thoughts about a follow-on story to Dementional.

Of course, I owe my readers the ending to the Red Slaves trilogy first, but it was encouraging that my creative muscles haven’t completely atrophied from lack of consistent use.

So I ended Round 2 having completed the major goal I’d shoved off… I think it’s actually been the past two Rounds of ROW80 the PMP has been on my list. I seem to have mastered the stay-at-home date night thing, and we’ve gotten really good about walking. In the past week, we walked 14.4 miles across every day of the week–despite severe storms that meant we got wet some nights, or had to go short in between showers. I completed the writers’ workshop. On the other hand, I only posted one book review, and completely blew past my revision and writing plan. Those will carry over to the next round, then.

It was also fitting that hubs forwarded Nietzsche’s wish that his followers SUFFER this week: We’ve been through a pile of difficulties in recent years. I hope that means we will be accordingly able to embrace the joys that come with having survived the tough stuff and gotten to a point where these credentials might show us a decent pay-off. ROW80 Round 2 having officially ended this past Thursday, and the next one not starting until July 6, I won’t share a link to that cohort this week. But I will be thinking about what my goals are for the next round. And about how I’ll be flexing my creative muscles in the near future. Check back next week to see what I come up with.