There Goes Jupiter

Bend and stretch, reach for the sky
Stand on tippy-toes, oh so high
Bend and stretch, reach for the stars
There goes Jupiter, here comes Mars

When I began at Granite Print, about a year ago, I thought I’d be doing mostly office work. You know, filing, billing, customer correspondence—that sort of thing.

Not exactly thrilling and inspiring but the hours sounded good AND flexible. I could trike to work versus spending 60-90 minutes burning fossil fuel while crawling through Boston traffic and, BEST of all, I’d be working for my buddy Paula (AKA my fairy godsister) Oh yeah and the office has windows (unlike my last unhappy gig), adequate heat in winter/AC in summer (unlike previous nasty ass workplace) and an awesome cat (Ellie!) and dog (Lola!).

Now, a year or so down the road, what I find myself doing is prepress type stuff, layout, typesetting and a bit of design in addition to the office tasks. Mega awesome!!! Plus, I often get to work from home where I can keep an eye on The Amazing Bob, Coco and Rocco (who would otherwise be up to no good. Of course).

I’m doing and learning new things every week which is exhilarating as well as scary.

At the crusty old age of 55, I’m stretching my mind, I’m growing. Yea me. This ain’t easy though so, naturally, I unleashed my prodigious Google fu to find ways to, hopefully, smooth this road.

I found this promising looking title right off: Joan Moran: 7 Tips to Stretch Your Mind at Any Age 

Lola, at right, supervises while Ellie files

I managed to get past the initial, molto egregious HEY-get-on-this-bandwagon-now! paragraph to the list. The seven tips (e.g., commit to living your passion, practice forgiveness, eliminate negative self-talk, etc.) with their poorly written, spongy, self help-y paragraphs, weren’t particularly helpful. They had a definite EST-y whiff about them.

I moved on.

Next came About.com’s Mental Exercise: 12 Ways to Stretch Your Brain

While scientists have yet to determine how to fully prevent Alzheimer’s, they have done some research that demonstrates that keeping our brains active throughout our lives can delay symptoms.

Yeah, this is about delaying Alzheimer-y stuff through mental workouts BUT it gave me more of a solid idea on how to approach teaching myself all the new crap I need to grok. There’s attitude and outlook and then there’s the mental calisthenics that’ll ease the mountain moving ordeal of learning how to make complex shapes in Illustrator, how to seamlessly color correct a JPG, how to impose booklets so the Press Manager’s a happy bee.

I need to start with the knowledge that I AM capable of doing whatever task’s on the day’s plate and then be intellectually agile enough to find the answers, the path that’ll bring me some prepress/design joy

It would be a terrific innovation if you could get your mind to stretch a little further than the next wisecrack.
—Katherine Hepburn

Yeah, I can do that.