posted 2010/02/26 at 22:45
It would figure that after getting back to a regular blogging schedule last month, I'd go nearly the entire month this month without posting anything. Given that I need to change to a new content system for the .org now that Blogger is ending FTP support (I'm assuming I'll have to install WordPress, or rather bribe someone into installing it for me), this is doubly disturbing. My Spring Break started today, though -- as usual in Toledo, with several inches of snow on the ground and even more falling as I type this now -- and I'm hoping to use my time off here to catch up on things I've been neglecting, like cleaning my room, reading, and blogging.
I can't say too much about the events of this past month, but earlier I went to Columbus for a weekend and finally had a weekend where nearly everything went right. I'd needed a weekend like that in the worst way since Mom's medical troubles started last September, and I'd been repeatedly denied that chance. Not only did I wind up having one of the longest periods of happiness I can remember having in several years, but I grew tremendously as a person in that one weekend. I can't say that I sit here now with everything in my life hunky-dory, because it isn't. In fact, I've had a fair bit of upsetting news this month as well, but because I had that one weekend turn out so well for me, I feel much more capable of handling things than I did a month ago.
I also wrote my first screenplay earlier this month. I completed a number of short stories last month, and one of them was one I had the proverbial "good feeling" about. I bought a couple of books on screenwriting to help refresh my memory on formatting and similar issues -- I took a screenwriting class in 2003, but I hadn't attempted the format since then -- and wound up churning out a 15,000 word screenplay in eight days. All the screenplay's events fell pretty much where they're supposed to in a Hollywood screenplay, and I was surprised at how easily it came to me given that I'm not a film person by any stretch of the imagination. (I haven't been to the cinema to see a film in eight and a half years.) I hold no illusions about this screenplay becoming a smash hit, or even picking up an agent, but writing it was a tremendous experience for me, and once I've let it rest a while, I'm going to go back and edit it and see what I can do about getting an agent to see if it will sell. I'm also going to turn the screenplay into a novel, since I have a good feeling about that as well. This will mean putting off the novel I'd planned to start writing shortly, but I want to strike on this one story while I still feel on a roll with it.
It's odd for me to come here and say that I'm not depressed about things. I guess that when I feel good for a prolonged period of time, it's only natural for me to want to enjoy the good time and not spend so much time writing about it. That being said, I should work more on blogging on a more regular basis. I can't afford to let this place fall into disrepair.
posted 2010/01/02 at 21:21
Looking back at the past year, which was easily the most anemic ever in terms of how much I worked on the .org, it's clear that I've lost enthusiasm for a lot of the political stuff I've been so interested in for so long. I entered the year eager to see how Obama would handle himself at the start of his presidency, and I have to admit that I let my hopes get up after his inauguration speech, when he delivered a pretty stinging rebuke to the eight years of Dubya with the man himself sitting not twenty feet away. (I still wonder if Obama would have delivered that speech had Dick Cheney not been wheelchair-bound at the time.) From there, though, things quickly went downhill, either actively (allowing health care reform to become anything but reform), or passively (not repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" even as many of our country's best Arabic translators sit at home unable to serve their country because of entrenched homophobia). Obama was never "my guy," but I still let myself believe that he, like nearly anyone else, would lead the country in a significantly better direction. Things are better now, yes, but not significantly so by any stretch of the imagination.
As a teacher of rhetoric, keeping abreast of current news is kind of part of my job; doing so provides me with a wealth of information from which to draw potential discussion topics, and it also helps me guide my students towards paper topics that might actually interest them. All things being equal, it's one of the easier parts of my job, since I also need to stay clued in to things like college football, Taylor Swift, and (gag) the Twilight movies and books. This means catching a fair amount of television news, and also checking news Websites throughout the day, and back when I had more motivation to deal with politics, this wasn't such a problem. Recently, though, I stopped checking for Toledo news stories via Yahoo! News' Toledo portal, because it just felt like a real chore to me that didn't yield much, even with the city changing mayors recently. One of the things I've liked most about this vacation is simply that so much television news is just year-end recycled stuff instead of new stories, and I haven't had to catch Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert for a while. That last bit says something because I really like their shows, but recently I've just wished I could have that time to do something else with my life.
In the past, it's taken things that hit really close to home for me to get back into politics, like when I was at Antioch when the Republicans took over Congress in 1994, and several of my friends were arrested protesting outside of John Kasich's office. You'd think that with all the medical stuff my family has been through these past couple of years that the health care debate would do more to energize me, to get me on my soapbox, but after suffering defeat after defeat this past year, and not knowing if anything will actually ultimately get passed into law, it just seems like there's no use in it. Obama and the Democrats constantly moved themselves away from progressive principles this past year, and yet Republicans are likely to make significant gains in the upcoming November elections. Sometimes I feel like there really isn't a place for me here in America.
posted 2009/11/27 at 23:00
Yes, there will be a .journal update sometime this weekend to commemorate the .org turning nine years old earlier this month. My life has become painfully hectic since Mom went to the hospital a couple of months ago, and those of you who have been following my Twitter feed know about all of the other stuff that has popped up. I'm keeping the personal stuff close to my chest right now because I really can't talk too much about that, particularly when so much of it is ongoing. In the meantime, I kind of need to post an update here about what's gone on this past month with three members of the family.
First of all, Mom has finally been to see my sister and brother-in-law's doctor, who is a lot better than the one she'd been seeing. Unfortunately, the infection in her belly isn't going away through antibiotics alone, and she's going to need surgery so they can cut all the infected parts out of her. On Wednesday she got an appointment at a surgery clinic for the middle of next month, and while I haven't asked too many questions, I'm assuming that it's then that we'll finally find out when she'll go under the knife. As desperate as I am for Mom to get better -- she's had nearly no energy since her hospitalization -- the thought of her going under and getting sliced up is still something that really scares me. It's going to mean more time by myself in this house, and even though I can prepare for it this time, it's still not that easy to think about.
On my front, I had a bit of a relapse with my eye at the start of the month, probably induced by stress from what may have been the worst Halloween of my life. (Sorry, but I can't really go into details about that.) Since then, though, it's been getting better, even though I haven't had antibiotics to put in it for over three weeks because Giant Eagle hasn't gotten my eye gunk in. I don't know if there's a shortage of the gunk, or if Giant Eagle is just being really bad about filling the order, but whatever the case, I'd feel a lot better if I could start using it again, even if it is really gross. I'm on a steroid now to try to heal the scarring on my cornea (no small irony there), and while my vision is a bit better in that eye, it's still kind of blurry. I'm guessing that I'll wind up needing glasses at the end of this all; I'll need to ask my ophthalmologist if I qualify for Lasik or not.
Finally, there's my Aunt Jo, my mother's younger sister and only sibling. On the 15th of this month, my sister got a call saying Aunt Jo had died. More specifically, Aunt Jo had died on the 16th of last month, and this was the first that any of us had heard about it. Mom and Jo were far from close; shortly after learning about her death, Mom referred to Jo as an "enemy," and that was a term I never thought I'd hear Mom say about anyone. Emotionally this wasn't like losing Dad or my grandparents, but it was still a bit of a hit. More importantly, though, when their mother died in 2003, Jo was supposed to sell the family home in Michigan Center, Michigan (near Jackson) so she and Mom could split the money, and Jo still hadn't gotten around to doing that. Now we're having to hire a lawyer so we can try to get that situation handled, and having to come in more than a month after Jo died is, needless to say, likely to cause some serious problems. I just hope we can get those resolved soon, because having the money in hand for Mom's surgery, when the time comes, would be nice.
posted 2009/10/24 at 21:31
The medical issues this family has had over the past two years have been troublesome. I was hoping that at some point I would be able to write in detail here about Dad's death last year, but there are some outside considerations that are preventing me from saying much about what happened to him. For now, I drive past the hospital where he died (and where I was born so long ago) every time I go to and from work, and every time I see where the ambulances pull up, I can't help but remember what it was like that February day as I tailed behind the ambulance in Dad's GMC Safari, waited in the lobby and then in a waiting room for the family to arrive, and then getting the news. Those first few times I drove past the hospital it was almost unbearable, and while I've gotten better at handling my emotions as I drive by there, it's still a painful reminder of what happened to Dad.
You can imagine my terror, then, when last month Mom asked me to call an ambulance for her, and like Dad, she had to be taken out of here on a stretcher. Thankfully Mom just had a bad attack of diverticulitis, and after a week in the hospital she was able to come home. However, most of that week she was doped up on morphine to help her handle the pain in her abdomen, and she didn't even want me to come see her because she was so embarrassed about her condition. For my part, I spent a week in the house alone here, and even though I knew Mom's diverticulitis, I couldn't help but remember that a few years ago her mother recovered from a stroke at a hospital, but then at the hospital she contracted pneumonia and soon died from that. I guess that week was kind of a little test for me to see how I would handle living on my own if I were thrust into that situation, and while I took care of the things that needed taking care of around the house, emotionally I was kind of a wreck.
Things would be bad enough if we stopped there, but shortly after my trip to the emergency room with Mom, my left eye started turning red and painful. My original thought was that I'd gotten pinkeye by touching something germ-ridden in the hospital and then touching my eye, but when I went to the doctor I was told that I had a scratched cornea. The doctor said he'd call an ophthalmologist who would call me to set up an appointment, but I never got that call, so I had to search out an eye doctor on my own. This past week I had two appointments, during which I found out that I actually have an ulcer on my left cornea. Apparently my rosacea leads to my eyelids getting infected, which in turn led to the ulcer, although I'm guessing that the stress of Mom's hospitalization probably had a big hand to do with it as well. If I'd known that rosacea could lead to problems like these, I would have gotten mine treated a long time ago; on all those commercials for anti-rosacea drugs they make it sound like it's just a cosmetic problem, and to be blunt, I couldn't care less about red patches on my face. I am not a physically attractive person, I have never been one, I never will be one, and that's just fine by me. For now I've got to put very expensive eye drops and ointment into my eye several times a day, and I have a follow-up appointment next week to see how this course of treatment is working. I can only hope that I don't need to take more drastic action to get my eye fixed, because for all of my physical problems, the one thing I always had was sharp 20/20 vision, and it's kind of scary not to have that any longer.
The punch line to all of this is that Mom's 64 years old, and of course I don't have health insurance because I'm still only working part-time (although I just picked up another online teaching gig), so we're having to pay for all of this ourselves. If we'd just waited a year for all of this to happen, Mom would have had Medicare, and maybe I could have gotten affordable health insurance. We're working out how to pay for this, and we probably won't need outside help to do so, but did we have to become poster children for the problems with the health care system in this country at a time like this?
posted 2009/09/24 at 21:35
Working with people around the age of eighteen years old as much as I do reminds me a lot of what I was like when I was that age. I'd say "that age" lasted a lot longer than just a year or two for me, because it feels like a lot of my personal development got put on hold after I left Antioch and didn't resume until I started going back to college six years later. For that matter, I've always said that I never really did much personal development for the nine years I spent in private school because of the way I was treated there. In a lot of ways, my undergraduate years in college felt like what I thought high school would be like for me, and graduate school felt like undergrad. I don't act my age in a lot of ways, and while in many respects I wear that as a badge of honour -- I think it gives me an edge when I'm teaching because I approach school with a mindset close to my students' -- I also can't say that I would particularly know how to act like a thirty-three year old if I had to. I can do a good caricature of the stodgy thirtysomethings I've had to deal with in my past, but acting like the real thing doesn't come easily to me.
What's bringing this to mind right now is the fact that I'm recognizing that I'm still going through a lot of the same existential crises that I see so many of my students go through. Certainly the early years of the .org were filled with a lot of that young angst and hellraising, and those of you who remember my pre-.org writing know that I actually used to be much, much worse in that regard. After I got my MA, though, and I had to concern myself with finding employment, I really tightened things up around here. I made the overall site look more elegant, I stopped swearing and giving in to hyperbole as much as I used to, and I just generally became a lot more cautious about the things I said online. Under the surface, though, I think I'm still going through a lot of the same turmoils that I went through before I graduated, and especially with all the big upheavals in my life these past two years, there's a part of me that wants to write about these upheavals in ways that, while they'd provide a moment of temporary relief, would do me much more harm in the long run because they aren't that healthy.
As I think about the .org turning nine in a few weeks here, I wonder at how much progress I've really made. I have always been incredibly lucky to be in a position where I haven't had to deal with a lot of the concerns that most people my age have to deal with, and I'm still in that position. I could still take a number of very sharp turns with my life here, and have the safety and security to know that even if I completely screw things up, I'll still have a safety net to catch me and help me get back on my feet. If Dad's death last year taught me anything, though, it is never to take anything for granted, and in spite of all the heavy stuff I've had to deal with lately, I can't help but feel that I need to take advantage of these opportunities I have before they slip away. I may be unsteady on my feet right now, but there comes a point where I have to stop focusing on regaining perfect balance, and get back to moving forward. It's scary, though, and at times like these I wish I didn't have to be so cautious about what I say here. Maybe I am "growing up" here after all.
Labels: personal
posted 2009/07/28 at 19:03
One of my new favourite places to shop online is torrid.com. Torrid is basically Hot Topic for larger women like myself, and I don't know how I didn't find out about them sooner. Granted, they make the kind of clothes I wear when I'm having a social life versus when I'm in my professional life, and I've only recently begun having a social life again, but you'd think I would have heard something about them. My one visit to their store in Toledo, about a month ago, was a real eye-opener for me; I'd like to keep going there, but unfortunately the store is in the super-mall east of here that started picking up all the youth-related violence after Southwyck Mall closed down, and I try to avoid going there. That leaves me to shop Torrid's selection online, which isn't quite the same thing (especially when it comes to clothes), but it's been fun to buy new clothes and see how they help open up parts of my personality that have been dormant for a few years.
Of course I get e-mails from Torrid, and in their most recent e-mail they proclaim that "The Grunge Look is Back." Having lived through the original grunge craze back when I was in high school, I can't call what Torrid is selling grunge -- they're basically using plaid in more modern applications -- but nonetheless it does get me thinking back to my high school days, when the popular music scene finally started producing artists whose material I liked (although I moved towards Björk and folk-rock, I did like grunge a lot). I can still remember turning on MTV during spring break of my senior year and John Norris saying that Kurt Cobain had committed suicide; I don't know if it was quite a Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin moment for my generation, but it was at least close to it.
What really bothers me, though, is that we're in the last year of the '00s here, and I really don't know how to characterize the decade. The '80s had the invasion of the synthesizers in pop music, Michael Jackson and Madonna, big hair, yuppies, and all the stuff inspired by Miami Vice. (Most of those were the reasons why I got into rap back then.) The '90s had the grunge look and the Seattle sound, Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and the relativistic morality embedded in the television and films of the decade. Coming up on the dawn of 2010 here, though, I don't really know how to characterize the music of the decade, who the two or three most important artists are, and what the fashion of the decade was. The politics and morality were certainly easy enough to catalogue, but given that I was in college for pretty much the entire decade, you'd think I'd be more capable of knowing what popular trends in music and fashion were. Given that I try to use popular culture as a way to make my teaching more accessible to students, it's even more troubling that I keep drawing blanks. Maybe I need to wait a few years to see if the culture itself helps define these things, but in the meantime I don't feel good about my inability to grasp these fundamental elements of the culture most of my students grew up in.
posted 2009/07/04 at 20:46
When I said that I wanted the Red Wings to exit the playoffs early, I should have known that the universe would take that as a sign to get the Wings all the way to game seven of the Stanley Cup Finals, and then to have them lose in a real heartbreaker. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, the universe threw a whole bunch of bad stuff at me right before then, so the Wings' loss really didn't affect me that much. That being said, between the way the NHL is going as a whole, and the Red Wings are going in particular, my enthusiasm for the Red Wings is just diminishing more and more. There was a time when I could craft my schedule around Red Wings games (and Hockey Night in Canada), but it feels like that time has passed now. My interest in sports has been diminshing a lot these past few years, but now I can barely be bothered to glance at the previous night's Tigers score.
This isn't true with just sports, either. Over the past couple of weeks I downloaded a lot of games to my Wii using the Wii Points I got for my birthday earlier this year, and I just can't seem to be bothered to play them much at all. Even the sequel to Final Fantasy IV -- which remained my favourite game ever even after I played Final Fantasy VII for a while, and the first video game to ever make me cry -- has gone mostly unplayed for several days, even though I've had next to no responsibilities over this holiday weekend, and plenty of time to play video games. The number of video games I've bought but never even put in my systems to test out is growing to truly appalling levels, and I've even gone so far as to buy games for systems I don't own yet. It feels like my buying habits have yet to catch up with the changes in my life that have seen things like sports and video games -- and yes, as much as I hate to say it, this blog -- to the wayside.
Unfortunately I can't talk too much about the changes in my life recently, but suffice it to say that for the first time since I was in school, I actually have a social life. I feel like I'm making stronger bonds with people than I have in a long time, too, and I'm getting the opportunity to figure out some things about myself that I never knew before. Given how I am about self-knowledge, you can imagine what a cool thing this is for me. I can't deny being kind of fearful, though, given how I've messed up situations like this in the past. I finally get a nice, long break from teaching after this month is over, and I'm hoping to use the next couple of months here to try to reintegrate things into my life that I've let slip for a while now. That should mean more blog entries, but it won't, for example, mean paying more attention to sports. This blog still serves as an important outlet for me and a way of connecting with people; I just don't feel that paying close attention to sports is doing me much good any longer.
Labels: hockey, personal, sports, videogames
posted 2009/05/07 at 18:30
Back when I first got a cell phone in September of 2001, I got it mainly for emergency purposes. To that end, my cell phone service has more than paid for itself, based solely on an incident in October of the following year when Dad called to tell me that my car was leaking transmission fluid, and that if I'd tried to drive it I probably would have wrecked the whole transmission. There have been other times over the years when I've had to use it for emergency purposes, although I did use it for social purposes a few times back when I was at UT. More recently I've been using it for work purposes -- although I still prefer to communicate by e-mail whenever possible -- and now I'd like to start using my phone to keep in touch with someone I've been spending a fair amount of time with lately. (Tease me about it and I'll delete your comments.)
Unfortunately, I'm once again at the point where I need to buy a new phone. I first bought a real brick of a phone from Verizon, but a couple of years later the battery contacts on the phone went out, and it kept powering down out of nowhere. I switched to Virgin Mobile after that -- they cost less to keep active -- and my first phone from them served me well, until I broke the pin in the phone where the AC adaptor hooked up, and Virgin Mobile told me that it would cost less to buy a new phone than to repair the old one. My current phone is one of their flip camera phones -- I figure having the camera feature qualifies as an "emergency" application since, for example, I could use it to snap photos if I get in a driving accident -- but now the battery just won't hold a charge, and it doesn't always detect when I plug in the AC adaptor. I've had the phone go out on me suddenly during non-emergency use, and the last thing I need is for it to die when I really need to use it.
I'm probably going to stick with Virgin Mobile for now, if for no other reason than because I have a huge bank of rollover minutes built up, and it still only costs me eighty dollars a year to maintain. However, I can't deny feeling a bit of tech envy when it comes to the phones that other carriers provide. All throughout the year I've been hearing that phones that don't have full keyboards are "so three years ago" or what have you, and I still text more than I place calls on the phone, so a full keyboard would be nice. However, Virgin Mobile only offers two phones with keyboards, and both of them only hold fifty text messages. If I'm going to get more active with texting here, then I probably need something with more storage. At the very least, though, I'd want to use up my accumulated minutes on that phone before switching to a new carrier, which makes me wonder if I shouldn't just get one of the ten-dollar phones Virgin offers to use before switching providers.
Realistically speaking, I shouldn't get one of the new super-phones, as they cost so much more to maintain, and I'd have limited use of the extended features. Still, I've been looking at T-Mobile's Android phones and experiencing a good bit of tech envy. I've seen them in use more lately, and as much as I don't necessarily all the cool features they have, I've seen them in use enough to know that they wouldn't just be toys for me; some of the applications have very useful purposes that mesh in well with my needs. Still, I would be looking at $75 a month at least for my service, when I'm not even spending a tenth of that right now on my current plan. My brain tells me that I should just stick with Virgin Mobile for now, put up with the relatively small inconveniences of having a phone that doesn't bake bread and trim my fingernails, and wait until the prices and plans for the super-phones go down. Paying my student loans off and finding a full-time teaching position in the meantime would be nice as well. Still, I can't deny there's a part of my heart that's eager to get something new and shiny and all whiz-bangy. I thought I'd moved past this phase of my life. I guess I'm feeling like a kid again in more ways than one right now.
Labels: personal
posted 2009/05/02 at 15:45
We have finally gotten to that point in this part of the country where we are seeing a substantial amount of green outside. I always seem to misremember just when to expect the leaves to start growing on the trees; I think that starts earlier than it does. Now, finally, trees are beginning to grow leaves, and the grass is turning a healthy shade of green, at least where it's being maintained. The paradox of Michigan's highways -- that the grass beside them can look so vibrant while the roads themselves are scarcely maintained at all -- never hits me harder than it does at this time of year. I'm teaching an online course this coming term, though, and I won't have classes up in Monroe until 2010 at the earliest, so if I want to ponder that paradox in person, I'll have to make a special trip to do so. With gas prices climbing back up, I doubt that's going to happen.
Right now, though, I'm kind of struck at how the trees in my backyard are blooming. In my bedroom I basically have two stations: Here at my computer, where I work, do recreational Internet stuff, and eat most of my meals; and my bed, where I sleep, write in my longhand journal, read, and play video games. From my computer here I'm looking to the northwest, and most of the trees in this direction have either not started budding leaves yet, or are doing so very slowly. From my bed I'm looking to the northeast, and there all of the trees are very much in bloom. I've noticed over the past few days that my mood seems to improve if I'm doing stuff on my bed as opposed to here at my computer workstation; I suppose that could just be because winter term is over and I finally have more "bed time" available, but I don't doubt that seeing more fresh leaves on the northeast of our property probably plays a good part in that as well.
Earlier this week, Mom brought someone over to estimate how much it would cost to remove some trees from the north of our property. We have this one huge tree in our backyard that has been dead for several years, and Mom is worried about the tree either being hit by lightning and coming down on us, or falling down on its own accord. If that were to happen, anyone on the second floor at the time would likely be crushed to death, and the tree might generate enough force to crash down into the ground floor as well. I guess I don't feel too strong of an attachment to the tree because I grew up in a room with windows facing the north and west, so I didn't see the tree that much from my room, and the tree is also very far back in the backyard, farther than I used to play when I was younger. I think Mom's also going to have smaller trees, also dead, removed from the property at the same time as the big tree is removed. As much as I know that this will make us safer, I still can't help but wish that we could keep the tree. It's the only tree I can see from both of my stations up here, and as scarily big and high as it is, I can't help but feel like the tree, in its way, watches over us. Its presence reassures me in its own way, and I don't like to think about what the view from my room will be like when it's gone.
Labels: personal
posted 2009/04/10 at 19:30
There have been some pretty big changes in my life so far this year. Part of the reason my posts here have slowed to a trickle is that I just haven't had the kind of time to devote to the .org that I've had in the past. I've still got lots of potential topics on my trusty whiteboard, but finding the time and focus to write a proper entry on them has been difficult lately. It probably doesn't help that I've been Twittering more than usual, but that's kind of unavoidable under my present conditions. I really need to post here more often -- I still view the .org as an extension of my professional career, so it reflects poorly on me when I don't keep it updated -- so I hope to remedy that soon. Too many parts of my life seem to be falling by the wayside, and I need to correct that.
As a case in point, my interest in sports seems to be dwindling to almost nothing. Normally I make a point of catching the first Tigers game of the regular season, but I really didn't feel like watching it, and then I had a dinner date pop up at the last minute. I figured that I would catch another game after that, but the only time I've been home and able to catch a game was Tuesday night, and I just didn't feel like watching past the first couple of innings. I'll probably catch a game sometime next week, but I'll be doing so more out of a sense of obligation than because I actually want to.
I don't think I need to say too much about the Pistons or the Bengals here, except that I'll catch the NFL Draft later this month, as usual, because I like watching thirty-two-sided chess matches where I have no idea what the pieces do or who the players are. The only way the Bengals were going to be interesting this year was if they'd signed Terrell Owens; I loathe his homophobia and egomania, but trying to see him and Chad Johnson, er, Chad Ocho Cinco trying to function on the same team would have too intriguing of a trainwreck to ignore.
I don't even feel that attached to hockey any longer. The Red Wings will either get knocked out in the first round, or they'll lose to San Jose in the conference finals; there's no way they can repeat as champions this year given how erratically they've been playing. It says something that even I want the Red Wings to start Ty Conklin in net instead of Chris Osgood; I love Ozzie dearly, but he just hasn't been dependable this year. If nothing else, it would give USA Hockey a chance to audition Conklin for Vancouver 2010. I'll go ahead and give my pick for the finals, as much as it hates me to say it: Sharks over Devils. Worse yet, I'll even be rooting for the Devils, if only because they have Brendan Shanahan. I don't mind if Shanny doesn't get his name on the cup again, but it'll be worth it to me if he cheap shots Claude Lemieux and takes him back out of the NHL. (I'd also love to see Shanahan knock Sean Avery's lights out if they meet in the conference playoffs.)
It's not just Red Wings hockey I've lost interest in; I really don't care to watch Hockey Night in Canada like I used to. The show used to be a staple for me, but I've missed it more times this season than I can remember, and I don't really care. I still love Don Cherry dearly, but between the new presentation, the loss of the old theme song, and my general lack of enthusiasm for sports in general, I can't bring myself to care for the show like I once did. I'm making a point of catching the final broadcast of the regular season tomorrow night, but honestly, I'm kind of hoping the Red Wings get knocked out of the playoffs early this postseason so I have an excuse to stop watching. I wouldn't have even entertained these thoughts one or two years ago, but now I just want to stop feeling so tied to the Red Wings and the NHL, so I have time for other, more important, things.
Labels: hockey, personal, sports
posted 2009/03/22 at 16:22
Although I'm not the strongest believer in numerology and related sciences, I do think that they deserve paying attention to, and that made this past week and a half so odd for me. It started with the second Friday the 13th in as many months a couple of weeks ago, then moved straight on to Pi Day (remember, I was always much better at maths than English growing up, so I still note Pi Day and Mole Day and all of those things), and then a week ago today was the Ides of March. The 16th was the anniversary of my parents buying this house, and of course St. Patrick's Day was the day after that. I turned 33 on the 18th, and then I couldn't think of anything that special about the 19th except I vaguely remember it being the birthday of an elementary school crush whose name I've long forgotten. The 20th was the equinox, and then yesterday Dad would have turned 63. I'm out of that series of days now, but it was definitely odd to have so many of those days all in a row.
My birthday itself went okay, although I had to cut short a meeting with some friends after work so I could come home for the big party; in the past, spending the birthday with non-family members usually hasn't worked out so well, so I'm making a point of having birthdays at home from now on. The birthday booty was kind of big, including several CDs, a couple of books, Wii Points (although I haven't had a chance to play on my Wii in forever) from the family, and the deluxe Pulp Fiction (I'd only ever bought the original DVD release, strange to relate), and a Barnes and Noble gift card from friends. Unfortunately, I've been so busy with other things, my book and DVD piles are both back to being absurdly large; even if I make extra time for reading here, I doubt I'll get through all the books I already own by the end of the year, and I've still got more on the way.
Although I'm not blogging as much as I used to -- something I've noticed with everyone else whose blogs I follow -- I am trying to keep my Twitter account up-to-date at the very least. (I need to put a Twitter feed on the .org, I know.) It doesn't help that I've got a social life again for the first time in about four years, and I've got all sorts of special stuff coming up. Part of me wonders if moving to tweets is part of the natural evolution of the Internet, but it's probably something I should resist, given that I'm trying to make a living, at least in part, on my writing. It's not that I don't have things I want to talk about here -- I still have a huge list of potential blog topics on my whiteboard -- but finding the time to blog these days is very, very difficult, even with a reduced teaching load this semester. Someone needs to prod me to write here more often.
posted 2009/02/03 at 20:22
I don't really advertise the fact that I keep pages on MySpace and Facebook. Yes, I put the links on the sidebar of my Website, but I don't talk about them that much because I don't have a real interest in "recruiting" new "friends" on either site. The only real reason I have accounts on them is because some of the people I've met over the years have taken to them so much that messaging them on those Websites is often the only reliable way I have of getting hold of them. I've dressed up my pages on them a bit, but that's mainly because I know that potential employers and clients might see them, and I figure it's for the best if I have something that looks nice. I've had a few strangers get hold of me through there, reconnected with people I knew long ago, and even had a number of my students friend me. (They even stay friends after they get their final grades, too, so I must be doing something right there. Either that, or they're all really lazy.)
However, several months ago I began to have ex-classmates from the private school I went to start to friend me on there, which put me in a bit of a dilemma. I have said repeatedly that I believe that school messed me up in more ways than I can count, and I still feel that way; a visit back there in 2002 for a University of Toledo commitment (on a Saturday, so I didn't see any old teachers or anything like that) was very troubling for me. The treatment I received there, from administrators, teachers, and students alike, was beyond intolerable, and I honestly believe that everyone there knew that they could get away with treating me like crap because my parents weren't as rich as the other parents, so we couldn't outlast them in a lawsuit. The wounds from back then have dulled in pain, but I doubt they will ever fully heal. Thus, hearing from so many of my old classmates from back then was not exactly comforting to me at first.
That being said, the classmates who have gotten in touch with me were not people who treated me poorly, at least not once we got to high school. They scorned me at times in high school, but, well, it was usually because I was acting like an idiot, so I deserved it. We haven't really messaged each other beyond the friend requests, but I wouldn't be opposed to talking with them over the Internet. Face-to-face encounters might be too awkward for me at this point -- I'm never going to any reunions -- but I guess that maybe now that all these years have passed (more than I care to think about), I'm finally able to put things in context, and I can do a better job of separating my feelings about the school and my time there from my feelings about them. I'm not going to make the first move to initiate conversations with any of them, but I guess now I'm not as opposed to talking with them as I once was. (Maybe one of them can get in touch with the school and tell them to stop sending me snail-mail addressed to "Mr. Sean Shannon." Better yet, maybe they can get the school to stop sending me mail, period.)
There is one thing that bothers me, though. I did a lot of really dumb things when I was there, albeit things that people my age tended to do. (At that school, though, you were never supposed to act like a kid, even when, you know, you were a kid.) Those of you who remember my Internet experiences pre-.org know that I did a lot of stupid things back then, and even in the .org days I've still managed to act like an idiot at times. I like to think that I've learned how to act better, but there are times when I wonder about that. Sometimes I think that maybe I am still the same idiot I was back then, and I've just learned to hide my mistakes better. Even if my old mistakes have been forgotten by the people I knew back then, or if those people have the decency not to bring them up, I still worry that if I ever meet up with them, I'll just make some new mistakes and things will go back to the way they were for me in my hardest years at that school. I've gotten past the point where I'll care that much about what they think of me, but if I do something like that, then I'll feel like it will be confirmation that I really haven't changed in the years that have passed, and that I'm still the same idiot I once was. That's why I'm probably going to remain passive about contacting them, at least for now.
Labels: internet, personal, toledo
posted 2009/01/16 at 20:08
My apologies for going dark on the .org for the past few weeks. By mid-December I had already become quite frazzled, and the confluence of the semester ending (and me having sixty student portfolios to grade in a very short period of time), Spookytooth's death, the holiday season, and a cold on top that all, just left me feeling out of it. The combination of emotions resulting from Spooky's death, going through Christmas without Dad for the first time, and feeling lonely since I didn't have classes to teach, put me in a position where I felt like I needed to shut down and deal with my internal issues before I started writing here again. (I did keep Twittering over my break, but Twittering and blogging are two very different animals.) In the eight years since I launched the .org I don't think I've taken an updating break longer than ten days, so perhaps I was overdue for a vacation from here.
As far as what happened in the interim, we survived the holidays somehow. I got about ten different video games, a few books, and some new cookware for the holidays; I gave Mom enough sweaters and sweatshirts to get her through the winter. (Speaking of which, aside from one sixty-degree day in December, it's been unbelievably cold, with temperatures below zero most of the past twenty-four hours.) I didn't have my car for a week, as a small, routine repair took forever thanks to the incompetence of the repair shop. I've also been buying an unbelievable number of CDs off of Amazon because they have so many classic CDs of artists whose material I crave (Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen) between five and seven dollars. I pampered myself a bit while I was sick, and now I'm trying to get back into the old routines here. I can't say that I'm feeling 100%, but at least I'm feeling better than I was four weeks ago.
The new semester started this past Monday; I'm only teaching two classes this term, but one of them is creative writing, my first time teaching the creative arts. It's a once-a-week class, so I don't want to make any assumptions based on just teaching a single class, but so far the teaching and the planning have made me think a lot about my future career, and whether I want to focus my teaching on creative writing or composition. Unfortunately, I'm moving past the point where I can really afford to take my time making these decisions, and I don't have that many people whom I can turn to for help. I'll have more to say about this later, but for now I'm just trying to get a better feel for my creative writing class and how well I think I can teach that class (and what good teaching it will do for me).
posted 2008/12/19 at 15:13
Spooky was in bad shape when my sister came to the house yesterday, so she had her husband take Spooky to the vet right away. Spooky's brain problem had gotten to the point where nothing could be done to alleviate his pain and make him better, so my mother and sister agreed that he should be put to sleep.
Needless to say, the last thing this family needed when trying to deal with our first holiday season without Dad is yet another death.
posted 2008/12/17 at 16:49
This past summer, shortly before we took Skooter to a shelter, the calico cat who had been hanging out on our property (alternately called Cali, Hobbes, Mikeneko, and Momma by the rest of us) gave birth to five kittens, who eventually joined their mother getting food on our porch. Four of the kittens eventually stopped coming here, presumably going their own way, but the fifth cat, an all-black boy, kept hanging around with both his mother and his presumed father (Lion King). When the weather got bad and the mother got pregnant again, we took the mother into Dad's old office (after getting her fixed and aborted) with the intent to eventually take her to a shelter as well. (She hasn't been that cooperative, though.) The black cat we named Spookytooth (Spooky for short), and took as our own to fill the void left by Rowan's death in 2006, Spyder moving out of the house with my sister and brother-in-law late last year, and Skooter.
Over the past couple of weeks, though, Spooky's behaviour kept getting stranger and stranger; she was losing energy, losing her appetite, and appeared to have gone blind. This past weekend we took her to the vet, where she was diagnosed with some kind of disease that affects the brain; I forget the exact name, but Mom kept calling it "FTP." (I've tried looking it up online but I haven't had much luck.) Apparently the disease could potentially take Spooky at any time, although there was the possibility that he could still lead a normal, healthy life. The disease is also communicable by other cats, so anyone in contact with other cats (namely my sister and brother-in-law) has to wash his or her hands thoroughly before leaving here. It was impossible to know how the disease would affect Spooky, but we all agreed that we would give Spooky the best life we could, and that if we couldn't relieve his pain then we would put him to sleep so he didn't have to suffer any more than he already has.
When Spooky came home from the vet on Monday, everything seemed to be okay; his energy hadn't completely recovered, but he could see again and he was eating again. However, today he had been totally lethargic as soon as anyone in the house was up. He was still responding to physical stimuli and purring, but he just didn't want to move anywhere. About a half hour ago, though, as Mom was taking Spooky to the litterbox, he began to spasm and twitch. It was momentary, and he seemed tired-but-okay after that, but he's going to the vet right now. We think he might have had a seizure, and that they'll be able to give him steroids -- like they did over the weekend -- at the vet's office to restore his energy. Needless to say, though, it's hard to avoid assuming the worst, especially after the horrible, horrible year this family has had in terms of deaths. If you all could please keep Spooky in your thoughts and prayers -- whatever you do -- over the next little while, my family would be most appreciative.
posted 2008/11/26 at 16:15
I suppose it's hard for me to think of this upcoming weekend as a "holiday" because I only teach Mondays and Wednesdays, and MCCC has class today. In a lot of ways this may be a busier weekend than usual for me because tomorrow I get to cook my very first vegetarian turkey for myself (I'd looked for them locally in past years but they always sold out before I could get one), and then Friday I'm actually going to do some Black Friday shopping against my better judgment. Mom is going up to Michigan to visit with relatives, but of course they don't like me showing up to those things, and I don't particularly feel like going anyway. As usual, Thanksgiving will also involve lots of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and waffle consumption, but I'll be toning it down this year because I gained a lot of weight during my two illnesses, and I just started back on my diet this past Sunday and I don't want to screw things up so soon.
While I was sick, I made a point of going to Kroger on the first of this month so I could grab some of the leftover Halloween candy on deep discount. Apparently I wasn't alone in this desire, because by the time I got to Kroger that afternoon, there was no Halloween candy left to buy; they were even out of candy corn, for crying out loud. (I love how candy corn is becoming to this generation what Christmas fruitcakes were to generations past, with all the tales of how no one ever really eats it and it just keeps getting passed down from generation to generation.) What bothered me more than the lack of cheap candy, though, was the fact that Kroger had already put up two whole aisles of Christmas displays. I understand that the retail Christmas season keeps coming earlier and earlier, but it feels like Kroger decided to skip Thanksgiving entirely and go straight to Christmas. I would imagine that Kroger normally makes a lot of money with Thanksgiving dinners and their accoutrements every year, so this hardly seems like a wise strategy to me. Then again, it's not like I have intimate knowledge of their sales figures.
Needless to say, this being the first holiday season without Dad is starting to get to me. It's been hard to come up with things to write about for my annual "year in review" .journal entry here because I don't really know how to describe something like this. Certainly there are a lot of bad emotions I'm feeling right now, and I can write about those, but I think that more than anything I'm just feeling a real absence right now. I don't mean just the physical absence of Dad; there's also an emotional absence to the season that I can't put into better words than that. The only thing I can think to compare it to is when your favourite player leaves, or retires from, your favourite sports team, and you try to watch the team's games after that but it just doesn't feel the same. I don't really feel like that's an apt analogy, though, because sports are just sports, and family is something infinitely more important. I don't know if the absence is necessarily painful, but it certainly isn't a good feeling, and I can tell that from now through the end of the calendar year it's only going to get worse.
posted 2008/11/11 at 21:27
As if I didn't feel old enough, today marks eight years to the day that seanshannon.org was launched. I know, launching my Website on Remeberance Day probably wasn't the wisest thing to do, but at the time I had other things on my mind. There will be a .journal entry at some point, but given how badly the past thirty-six hours have gone for me, I'm not in a mood to write it right now. (One bit of good news in all of this, though: Next semester I get to teach Introduction to Creative Writing at long last.) Needless to say, doing my usual year-in-review will be difficult for me, what with Dad's death and all. I'd say more, but I want to leave the reflection for the entry. Right now I'd just like to get back to putting my ducks back in order.
Labels: personal
posted 2008/11/09 at 13:30
On Tuesday I cast my vote for Ralph Nader quite quickly; there was no line at all at my polling place when I got there. Then again, every time I've gone there in the past I've had women who were old enough to be my grandmothers running the show; this year the poll workers couldn't have been older than twenty. I'm guessing that they were Obama supporters who volunteered to make sure that things ran smoothly there. Anyway, obviously there was no worry about Nader "spoiling" Ohio this year (although Missouri may be another matter entirely, and ironically may cost me a perfect score on my election projection last week). I was feeling really good about that vote, up until Nader used the words "Uncle Tom" in reference to Barack Obama. Not that I don't agree with the worry that Obama will put corporate interests above the interests of the American people -- that was the primary reason I couldn't vote for Obama -- but you just don't use those kinds of words, no matter what kind of an analogy you're trying to make. I'm beginning to wonder if I should have voted for Cynthia McKinney instead.
In between my two illnesses last month I had an opportunity to do some research about the Green Party and the turmoil it's been through since the 2000 election. I think I had formed some incorrect assumptions about McKinney earlier, although there is still something about her that rubs me the wrong way. In a way, I might have expected Nader's idiotic comments, given how much more I know now about his relative clumsiness and lack of concern when it comes to social issues. I'm also worried that voting for Nader isn't helping to develop a third party as much as voting for McKinney would have, but that's the same kind of tactical decision that makes many liberals and progressives vote Democratic in spite of Democrats not representing their beliefs as well as other candidates, and if I disagree with other people engaging in that kind of voting strategy then I shouldn't employ it myself. Still, after reading about the struggles of the Green Party in 2004, and being aware of some of the struggles in 2008, it makes it hard for me to want to get involved with the party directly, because it seems like I'd just be entering the middle of some huge infighting that I don't want to be involved in.
Needless to say, when the election was called for Obama I did a fair bit of crying. Since then I've been watching videos of people's reactions to the call on YouTube, and for a while there they were causing me to cry as well. At first I thought this was simply because I was sad that Dad didn't quite live long enough to see an African-American elected president, but after some thought I believe there's something else at work here. I've always been interested in fighting for equality -- in high school the only club I was involved in all four years was the African-American Club -- and during my college years I did a lot of work for GLBT rights. I don't think I expected that we would elect an African-American president in my lifetime, and now that we have, I guess it fills me with hope that even now, in the wake of Proposition 8's passage in California and a Republican party that appears to think that the reason they lost so much ground this year was that they weren't being nasty enough, there is more reason to believe that we can change more minds and enact more laws to ensure the fair treatment of GLBT people.
I'm not even sure that the election has sunk in for me yet. I made sure to watch Obama's press conference Friday afternoon, and even after watching that, and reading all of these news stories about his plans these past few days, there is still a small disconnect there. Even though I was certain he was going to win the election long ago, there is still some awe and disbelief at the thought that this man is going to be my president in a little over two months. I don't think that he is going to transform the nation in quite the way that his strongest believers think he will, and no president will stop this coming year from being a hard one in terms of our economy and employment, but there's little doubt in my mind that he's going to be a lot better than Dubya was. It's also gratifying to see the reaction from other countries to our election; I don't think I've seen that many non-Americans waving out country's flag since the aftermath of the 09.11 attacks.
Of course, all of this does bring up one interesting point. In 2012 I'll be thirty-six years old, and thus finally constitutionally eligible to run for president. Who wants to start my exploratory committee?
Labels: greenparty, personal, politics
posted 2008/09/09 at 20:33
I had a streak going for a few years there of visiting a new state every year. In 2005 I crossed into Kentucky for the first time (for about three minutes after I got lost in downtown Cincinnati), then in 2006 I had my big thirtieth birthday trip to North Carolina (where I also visited West Virginia for the first time). Last year I went to Indiana just to say I'd been to Indiana, and back then I realized that I'm now closer to Canada than any other state. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this streak is going to continue this year; I don't have any pressing need to go to another state, and to be honest I don't have a desire to go visit another state just for the sake of being able to say that I did so. It doesn't help that gas is so expensive right now, either. I'm sure that I'll have more opportunities for travel next summer, but for now I've got enough going on here at the house and at work to keep me busy.
If I were going to go anyplace right now, though, it would be to Yellow Springs to visit Antioch College. Ever since I stopped going there, when September comes around I have memories of the good times I had there, and a strong desire to go back down. I get depressed easily, and my memories of Antioch this time every year might just be masking Seasonal Affective Disorder, but that doesn't stop me from wondering just how going down there and looking at the old buildings would affect me. Of course, if I do go down there then I'd only be able to look at the buildings, because the college was closed this summer due to a myriad of reasons, something that continues to leave a bitter taste in my mouth.
Depending on how things go as Antioch's Board of Trustees and the Alumni Association go -- a debate that is, quite frankly, making my head spin -- the college should reopen in 2012 or possibly earlier. I have to say, if there is any opening for an English teacher when the college reopens, I'm going to swoop down on it as hard as I can. Even though my time at Antioch wasn't without its flaws -- it taught me how and why to get angry about things, but I didn't learn how to properly channel my anger for several more years -- that was the one place where I felt comfortable and at home. This country and this world is a sadder place without Antioch educating students, and so help me, if I get the chance to contribute to that education, I'm going to pounce on that opportunity with all that I have.
posted 2008/09/02 at 18:18
Tomorrow I begin teaching at MCCC again; I've got three sections of composition this term, all on Mondays and Wednesdays, and all at the satellite campus. I won't be driving that much, and I'll have lots of days off, but I've never taught more than one class in a day before and now I have three to deal with. This should be an interesting challenge for me, especially since I'll be teaching MCCC's Composition I as a fifteen-week course for the first time ever. Even though all of my classes fall in a five-hour window, I am concerned that I may begin to run out of energy near the end. Still, if I want to teach full-time then I need to be able to handle three classes in a day, so this will be yet another trial for me as I work towards full-time employment. I've been spending today putting the final touches on my handouts and getting the course Websites designed, and as usual I'm feeling a bit of nervousness about how tomorrow will go. It would be a bad sign if I wasn't nervous, though; if I'm nervous then I'm on my toes, and more able to adapt the classes to my students' needs.
If there was a theme to this month or so of time off from work, it was catching up on things. Over the past couple of years I had bought a lot of books and DVDs that I had never gotten around to watching, which I kept in separate piles to go through at some point. The time for doing that never seemed to come, though, so I forced myself to work through those piles as much as I could. I finished the pile of DVDs this past Saturday, and although I couldn't get the book pile finished (there was just too much stuff there), I've got it down to five books, two of which I'm in the middle of right now. (The Scarlet Letter and Gandhi's autobiography if you care.) I'm glad to have those admittedly small weights off of my shoulders, and I'm hoping that this will allow me to focus on other things here, but I must admit that now I'm kind of eager to get some more DVDs to watch and books to read. (I won't be able to do that soon, though, since I won't be getting paid again until the middle of the month.)
In addition to those things, I also got back on track with a couple of things that I'd neglected after Dad's death, namely playing piano and playing DDR. I'll save the DDR details for my diet and dance game log as always, but it's felt good to get back to music after so long of an absence. I'm building my repertoire of other people's songs back up right now, and I'm hoping to get back to composing in a couple of weeks. One of the reasons I wanted to get a new computer was so I could run new composing software; I spent about $500 on composing software in my late teens, but the company that made the software went out of business long ago and my old software wouldn't even run on Windows XP, let alone Vista. I'm not sure where I'll find time for songwriting once I'm back in the groove of teaching, but I've done a pretty good of managing my time this break. I only hope that I can continue to do such a good job as I go back to teaching in the coming weeks.
Labels: personal, teaching, work
posted 2008/08/11 at 20:08
A couple of weeks ago we dropped Skooter off at the Humane Society. It had been our hope to incorporate her into the house after Dad's death, but she was proving too difficult to get along with her. She wouldn't use her litterboxes, she kept getting underfoot, and she just never got along with Mom. I didn't like doing this, but I agreed that it was for the best. This means that, for the first time in over twenty years, there is not a cat living under this roof. (I'll count Spyder being with us at the hotel as "under this roof" during the post-fire period.) It's definitely an uncomfortable feeling to know that I don't have a cat to scratch whenever I'm feeling down.
This isn't to say that we're without cats, though. A couple of months ago a calico cat started coming by the food bowl on our front porch; Mom calls her Cali, Heather and Mark call her Hobbes, and I call her Mikeneko. Then, about a month ago, we had a bunch of kittens at our food bowl, and Mikeneko looked a whole lot thinner. (The presumptive father, who we've taken to calling Lion King, also pops around every once in a while.) She had two grey-and-white, one black, one orange, and one black-and-white kittens, although for the past few weeks only one of the grey-and-whites and the orange have been showing up here; we think they're the female kittens, and that Lion King took the males off and taught them how to hunt. Eventually we'd like to get them all to the Humane Society, but for now they're kind of filling in the hole left by Skooter's departure, even if we can't go out and scratch them.
This house will not be cat-less for long, though. It's been generally agreed that once Heather and Mark's apartment contract expires at the end of the year, they will move into Dad's old office. We still have to move out a lot of stuff from out of there, but it should provide Heather and Mark with all the space they need. More importantly, not only will they return with Skooter, but a few weeks ago they adopted a tiny black kitten. Her original name was Punkin, but this past weekend Heather renamed her Wavy Gravy. My sister has never done LSD in her life; I assume she's just doing it because she's such a big fan of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream (and because the kitten loves beef gravy).
On one last unrelated note, that lovely black glider I bought at Meijer a couple of months ago turned out to be a bust. First the back went out on me, so I couldn't recline it without going completely horizontal, and then it became very, very hard to turn. Finally the base just gave out on me, and I've had to go back to using the old cheap OfficeMax office chairs Dad bought some fifteen years ago or so. I wish Dad were here to look at the chair, because to my eye it looks like they used very thin metal and only used shoddy spot welds on it, instead of fully welding the pieces together. I certainly won't be buying another one of those chairs from Meijer, and I don't know if I'll be able to find another small, comfortable glider like that one. Maybe I'm just going to be stuck with this uncomfortable office chair for a while.
Labels: personal
posted 2008/07/23 at 14:51
Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am not a morning person. As much as I enjoy going out to the parks and botanical gardens this time of year and marveling at the trees and flowers and the way the sun pokes through all the leaves creating wonderful kaleidoscopes of light, there is only so much sun I can take. Back before I went back to college, it seemed as if I could only work on my creative pursuits in the darkest part of night. Then again, maybe that had less to do with light than it did the fact that my backyard abuts Toledo's busiest highway loop. Anyway, although that has changed -- I attribute this to the fact that Dad never bothered to put blinds or drapes on my bedroom window -- I still prefer to be a late riser, and there are still certain activities that I find I can do better at certain times of day.
This is the main reason why this semester has been so hard on me. I have a very small class this term, filled with incredibly brilliant writers who I barely even need to teach; I can just give them a bit of guidance and turn them loose, and shortly thereafter get back a lot of top-quality writing. Combined with the fact that I'm teaching on the satellite campus, and thus saving about $30 a week on gas from when I was teaching on the main campus, and you would think that this would be an absolutely wonderful time for me. Unfortunately this class I'm teaching is also meeting very early in the afternoon. I have no problem getting up before noon -- heck, I'm only getting up about forty-five minutes earlier than my usual wake-up time -- but I'm having to cram an awful lot of activities into a very short span of time every morning before I teach. Combine that with the fact that I still have to stay up late at night to take care of other responsibilities, and I've felt totally out of whack for the past month or so. I can't get as much sleep as I need, it's been impossible to stick to a diet because my energy levels just won't stay stable, and I seem to go from long periods of cramming a million activities in a few minutes to long periods with nothing to do.
I didn't come here to blog about my schedule, though. (Although I do think this explains why my blogging has been so sporadic lately.) No, I came to talk to you about BBC America.
See, my sister and her husband moved out of the house on the first of this year, into their own apartment northeast of here. Less than two months later Dad died, and were it not for the fact that Heather and Mark are tied in to a twelve-month lease at the apartment, they probably would have moved right back in me and Mom. Heather's been over here on weekdays while Mark's at work, though, to help with cleaning and just to keep Mom company. In the fifty or so days Heather was a stay-at-home housewife (er, apartmentwife), she spent a lot of time watching television, and one of the shows she got hooked on was the BBC show How Clean is Your House?, a show where two British ladies go around to the dirtiest homes in all the United Kingdom, document how dirty and filthy and germ-ridden the houses are, and then clean the houses up with the help of the owners and a team of cleaners. It's the kind of reality television you'd expect the British to come up with, and I can see the appeal of the show, although it's definitely not the kind of show I would make a point of watching. Unfortunately I don't have a choice in the matter, as Mom and Heather insist on watching the show every day.
Normally I could avoid this just like I avoid everything else I don't like in this house, by shutting myself up in my room and working on things here at my computer while I blast some tunes to drown out the audio from the downstairs television. Unfortunately, BBC America, sadists that they are, decided to put on How Clean is Your House? starting at noon. On a day when I don't teach (or I teach in the evening), that's about when I'm having breakfast downstairs; this term that's when I have to grab a quick lunch before I dash off to the satellite campus. Our kitchen opens full-on to our living room, and the television faces directly into the kitchen. It's impossible to open the refrigerator or plug in the toaster without getting an eyeful of a refrigerator with more culture in it than a PBS mini-series, or a bathroom so grimy that not even Jigsaw would be cruel enough to chain anyone up in it. Needless to say, catching an eyeful of these images while I'm trying to eat my Cheerios does not make me very cheery-o.
I would like to just blame my sister for this; after all, I think the only reason she watches this show is because it gives her an excuse not to clean our house as thoroughly as it should be because, hey, at least it's not as bad as the ones on television. However, I have to wonder exactly what cleaning fumes the programmers at BBC America had under their noses when they decided to put this show on at noon. Noon being the start of the lunch hour is part of our American DNA; even in this day and age, the plurality of full-time jobs are from eight in the morning to five in the afternoon, with a lunch hour break starting right at noon. I know that the British tend to take their lunches, er, dinners closer to one or two in the PM, but BBC America isn't just BBC programming on an American channel. If they're going to take the time to bleep out all of the curse words our tender American ears just can't stand to hear coming out of the telly, and if they're going to produce a dumbed-down newscast to compete with our American dumbed-down newscasts, you would think that they'd at least take the time to research our culinary habits and take a few minutes to think through the fact that we don't like to see cockroach nests and caked-on human waste when we're trying to eat our bloody lunches!
I'd really appreciate it if someone could present me some other reason why BBC America would schedule this show during lunchtime, other than that they're deliberately trying to make us nauseous. Until then, I may need How Clean is Your House? to come across the pond and come to my house, to clean up all the vomit in and around my toilet caused by watching their show.
Labels: personal, teaching, television, work
posted 2008/07/17 at 20:13
Just wanted to drop a quick note here to say that I am still here. A combination of a busier-than-usual schedule (even by post-Dad's death standards) and depression has left me not only with no time to blog, but barely any time to sleep, either. I've been operating under a serious sleep deficit for four straight days now, and I still have a lot of work to do here at the house tonight and tomorrow before I can finally get some rest. Normal blogging activities should resume tomorrow, I hope.
Labels: personal
posted 2008/07/11 at 15:19
... or, as it's known around here, my sister's birthday. No Friday Five this week because it's about dreams and I don't remember too many of mine. (The ones I do remember are mostly unfit for public consumption, anyway.)
Labels: personal
posted 2008/07/09 at 23:50
This past weekend I picked up a CD/DVD rack from Best Buy. Mind you, I haven't exactly been buying that many CDs or DVDs (or even video games) lately, but I have bought so many books that I needed to repurpose one of my DVD towers for books. I put the storage rack together over the weekend, and it was a huge hassle because the directions weren't all that clear; I had to put several of the supports on three different times before I got them assembled in the correct order. It was only after I got the storage rack put together that the real fun began, though, because I had to move my big heavy bookcase about six feet to make room for the new storage rack. This required unloading the whole bookcase first, moving all the books into my sister and brother-in-law's old bedroom, and then moving the bookcase and loading it right back up. After that, I was finally able to move the new rack in here and get it fully loaded up, something I didn't manage to finish until late this afternoon. I had some more rearranging to do after that, and I still have a large pile on unsorted papers and other items in front of my television, but for now I finally have all my media organized the way I want it, and I have room for it to grow once more.
My big bookcase, which had been behind me at my workstation here, is now just off to my right, and I literally had less than an inch of space to fit it in between the wall and the windowsill, but it's here now. The shelves, particularly the top ones, are starting to sag, and I know that I've probably got twice as much weight on those shelves than what they're rated for, but I still want to keep this bookcase if I possibly can. Not only is it a good fit, but it's made by Sauder, and Sauder is one of the few local companies that produces stuff that I like. (I don't know if Sauder products are marketed outside of the Toledo area, but they make good-quality, inexpensive furniture and storage solutions.) I'm starting to have so many "big" books, though, that I may eventually need to buy a second big bookcase to house them, and I don't have the space for a second bookcase in this room. I could always put an extra bookcase in the loft or the vacant bedroom, but I don't feel comfortable having my books and other stuff in another room like that.
The other big development that came from this most recent rearrangement of my stuff is that I've finally given up on finding spare plastic cases for my old Nintendo games, and I'm just shelving the cartridges by themselves. (I have a small "library" of manuals in the new storage unit.) I had tried forever to find those old clear plastic cases like they used to put the games in at video rental places, because I thought they looked good and did a better job of protecting games than the sleeves Nintendo packaged the games in. Let's face facts, though; what kind of luck was I going to have trying to find standard-issue plastic cases for NES games in 2008? Finding these empty cases was hardly my life's work for the past few years, but it was something I kept trying every so often for the past several years. Rather than continuing to fight that battle, I just took the games out of the plastic cases, and now they're by themselves on my new storage rack (and taking up a lot less space, too). I guess now I just need to find someone else desperate for these old plastic cases and see how much money I can get for them.
Labels: books, dvds, personal, toledo, videogames
posted 2008/07/07 at 16:35
Two of Dad's loves were architecture and cars. One of the ways he put himself through college was to buy old cars that were being sold for a pittance, then fix them up and sell them for a big profit. You don't want to know how many times I had to hear his speech about how the car companies are evil for making their cars impossible to fix on your own. (It's not that I don't agree with him, but after hearing the same speech umpteen times you get kind of sick of it, you know?) Although Dad's delineation work didn't require him to have strong knowledge of architecture, it surely helped, and Dad did redesign the house after the fire. His ability to identify makes and models of old cars was awe-inspiring, and his knowledge of architecture was expansive to say the least. (I wish I'd had the opportunity to take him on a drive to and from MCCC's main campus, because he would have gotten a huge kick out of all the old barns I pass along the way.)
These past couple of days I've had a couple of experiences that kind of tied in to those things. Yesterday I finally went out to see The Shops at Fallen Timbers, a new "Lifestyle Centre" development along the same lines of Levis Commons. Back when I first went to Levis Commons I thought it was a unique new development; it's only been in the past month or so when I've gotten into researching mall history (spurred on by the recent closing of Southwyck I blogged about earlier) that I've come to realize that these developments are more common than I believed them to be, and that they're being built at a fairly high rate these days. At first Fallen Timbers struck me as a larger version of Levis Commons (I wanted to check out the Barnes and Noble at Fallen Timbers since it's about three times the size of the one I normally go to), but the buildings at Fallen Timbers look, well, kind of bland. The main buildings at Levis Commons are built with Victorian architecture in mind -- something I just happened to pick up from Dad, who only went to Levis Commons once and declared it was "too good for Toledo" -- and I think that's one of the main reasons I go down there as often as I do, even though I don't care much for the shops there. Fallen Timbers has shops that are more useful for me, but it's not the kind of place where I could just walk around looking at the buildings for a while. I suppose I'll go back to Fallen Timbers once there's a good special at Barnes and Noble, and maybe then I'll look around a bit more.
On the car front, as I was driving home from teaching this afternoon, I noticed a very rundown car idling next to me at a stoplight. Rundown cars in this part of town are a fairly common sight, but then I noticed that the car in question was a Dodge Neon. It really struck me at that point that, even though I couldn't care less about cars (as long as mine get me to where I need to be and then back home), I was looking at a car that couldn't have been more than fourteen years old, and I thought to myself, "Wow, that car looks really old." (Keep in mind that I drove a 1985 Toyota Camry through college.) Honestly, I don't see how I could have known that the Neon was an old car -- perhaps the dings and dents on the side were throwing me off -- but it's hard for me to accept that a car made in 1994 was old because, damn it, that's the year I turned eighteen, and I can't be that old. Yes, I am that old, I know, but I still don't get how I could think of that car as being old. If you asked me to name the differences in design between a car that was made fifteen years ago and a car that was made last year, I wouldn't be able to come up with a single thing to say. (At least with my Camry it had that boxy first-cars-from-Japan look to it.) Still, I don't need more reminders of just how old I am, and I guess now I can't escape them even when I'm driving.
posted 2008/07/03 at 21:37
I joke, here and with my students and elsewhere, that I'm not the kind of person who gets invited to parties. Some days it's a joke, and some days it hurts. Tonight is one of those nights when it hurts, and hurts bad.
I actually got invited to a party tonight. Without going into too many details, it would have been a good place to meet some new friends who shared a common interest. Unfortunately, my efforts to find someone to go with were met with failure, and even after I'd resigned myself to not going earlier this week, my efforts to give my ticket to the party to a friend resulted in said friend freaking out before I could even broach the subject. I must be one of the few people on this planet whose insecurity and nervousness comes through loud and clear even on her instant messages. I hemmed and hawed all day about going by myself, but in the end I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I made some of the necessary preparations if I was going to go -- I took my second shower of the day a couple of hours ago and had my clothes picked out if I went -- but as usual I overthought things, and when I found Jeff teaching Mom how to play Texas Hold 'Em downstairs I kind of let that distract me until it became too late to go to the party.
I can give you a lot of very valid reasons why I didn't feel comfortable going to this party. For one thing, there was going to be wine there, and I just do not get along with people who get drunk. The neighbourhood where the party is being held is also not exactly a neighbourhood I felt comfortable walking in, and I would have had to walk a long distance between the party and the closest spot I could park my car at. (I must say that the neighbourhood isn't all that bad; a combination of being a child of the 'burbs and going to that private school for so long has really warped my perceptions.) I wouldn't have known that many of the people there, and because this was the first party of its kind held at this place, I didn't know if things could arise later with drugs or the police coming because we were making too much noise or anything like that. All of these were red flags that signaled to me that I shouldn't go, and taken all together, I think it made sense for me not to go.
That being said, I can't help but feel that what really happened here was that I chickened out. Unless we're talking about quilting parties or Scrabble parties or things like that, the alcohol and the drugs and all of that are always going to be concerns. Granted, the fact that there wasn't a previous "baseline" party to judge things off of was a cause for concern -- I know people who went to the party and I can always ask them how things went later -- but it wasn't like I would have been forced to stay there all night if I started getting uncomfortable. Then again, tomorrow being a holiday and all, I would assume that the risk of drunk drivers being out there tonight is greater than it would be on a normal night. There are times when my compulsion to think things through to the nth degree results in some keen insights, but this is one instance where I think it's just caused me to become even more neurotic than I usually am.
I have things I can do at the house tonight. I'm finally finding the time to read and write that has eluded me so well since Dad died, and although progress in those areas is slow, it's coming. I also need to move some bookshelves around here and make some space for my growing collections of books and video games and DVDs. I have the feeling, though, that all night tonight I won't be able to help but think about what I might be doing if I was at that party.
Labels: personal
posted 2008/06/23 at 16:24
My first "summer" course ended this past Thursday, and after grading a bunch of portfolios I got to go right back to teaching the exact same course again a second time. I love teaching dearly, but I signed up for these classes back before Dad died, and I'm beginning to worry that I need a break soon to help me recharge and take care of a number of things I've been neglecting these past few months. I only have a dozen students in this class, though, so maybe my workload won't be quite as great as it has been lately. My commute is a whole lot easier as well, since I'm teaching at MCCC's satellite campus just across the Ohio/Michigan border; in addition to saving time, I estimate I'll be able to save at least $15 a week on gas as well. The class also ends on July 31, meaning that unless I pick up an extra course in the autumn, I'll have the entire month of August to myself, so I do have that to look forward to.
Still, unlike all of my other classes at MCCC which were in the evenings, this is an early afternoon course. Normally I'd be driving up to campus at this time of day, not already home and decompressing. When I first signed up for this class I didn't think that getting up earlier would be that much of a hassle, but I forgot just how much my body tends to gravitate towards the dark hours when we're this close to the solstice. I've always been a bit of a night person, and although I've gotten better at doing things in daylight, there's still a part of me that nurtures the darkness and wants to be awake for those late, late hours. I go back to teaching evenings in the fall, though, so unless I pick up another course, I only have to worry about waking early these next six weeks. I still get thrown off when I leave the house and the sun is in the eastern sky, though, just because I'm so unused to going out of the house that early in the day.
I should probably take advantage of this current schedule to go and do some photography after class one of these days. I've been meaning to get to Wildwood to take more photos here for a while, although I have a stronger urge to hit the Toledo Botanical Garden at the present moment. (I've been using my previous photos from there as desktop wallpaper on my new computer, which probably explains why.) I'd go out and work out in the garage now if my dance pads weren't messed up. I just hope that my body can get used to this new schedule, because it is definitely throwing me off right now to have the sun still be so high in the sky after work. At least I can count on the sun being there. (RIP George Carlin.)
Labels: personal, teaching, weather, work
posted 2008/06/17 at 21:31
In addition to having a few bird feeders in front of our front deck here at the house, we also tend to keep a bowl full of food -- various seeds and leftovers we humans don't want to eat -- on our porch itself. Birds, squirrels, raccoons, and even the odd cat come by and keep us company, and in addition to making things more active around here, it helps us to feel better. Only rarely do we have stray dogs in the neighbourhood, especially after the police went around to the dog owners around here and told them that the leash laws were about to be enforced a lot more strictly than they were before. Even when the dogs do come, they don't tend to care for the food we put out there, and we can usually scare them away quite easily because they're rather timid.
Imagine how we felt yesterday, then, when not one but two huge black rottweilers -- easily as big as I am -- came bounding up to our front deck and started eating from our animal bowl. They had no collars or tags on them, and no amount of yelling at them or banging on the glass door separating the house from the porch would make them go away. They weren't barking or looking mean at all, but to have two dogs of that size suddenly pop up on our deck was more than a little disconcerting. We called our local police, and they said that they would send someone down as soon as they could to look into the matter. Given how quickly the first officer showed up, I'm guessing he probably left the station just as soon as Mom got done calling him.
However, that wasn't quick enough. Mom went back towards the door to yell at the dogs some more to get them to disperse, at which point one of the dogs raised up on his hind legs and used his front paws to claw loudly on the front window. At this point Mom screamed bloody murder, and I can't blame her in the slightest because I probably would have done the same thing. If this house hadn't been rebuilt a few years back, the dog probably could have pushed through the glass just by his weight alone, and even if the dogs were friendly we still would have had the issue of all that broken glass getting on Mom. Eventually the police officer called the county dog warden, who came by and took both dogs away, but not before I'd done a fair bit of screaming myself to try to get the dogs to leave.
Any episode like this, in and of itself, would have been difficult to deal with. What made this one all the worse for me, though, was that as Mom started screaming, all I could think about was her having a heart attack or seizure or something like that. I probably would have thought about that stuff no matter what, but for a few seconds there -- and like the old cliché goes, they seemed like an eternity -- I was thinking about the possibility of losing Mom less than four months after I lost Dad. I harbour no illusions of Mom living to be 100 or anything close to that, and I know that I will never fully "get over" Dad's death, but I need Mom more than ever now, and if I were to lose her I don't know what I would do. The next time there's a dog on the loose, no matter how big or small, cute or scary, I'm calling the cops, because I don't want to have to deal with another situation like that ever again.
Labels: personal
posted 2008/06/09 at 21:31
I can't say that I've been all that pleased with all the airplay that Bill O'Reilly's meltdown on Inside Edition has gotten these past few weeks. Granted, I don't care for O'Reilly much at all, and I won't deny feeling a touch of the old schadenfreude when I saw the video the first few times. The video got really old in a hurry for me, though, and the more I see other people harp on it over and over -- Keith Olbermann is the most famous of these people, but I'm even thinking about liberal bloggers here -- the more I lose my taste for it. You can only tell a joke so many times in a given time frame before people stop laughing and start rolling their eyes whenever someone starts to tell the setup, and in a similar fashion you can only show that video so many times before O'Reilly dropping those f-bombs and blowing his stack gets banal and blasé.
Those of you who remember the pre-.org days doubtlessly remember me doing similar stuff online back in the day. Yes, I'm actually empathisizing with Bill O'Reilly here; it isn't the first time I've done so, and it likely won't be the last. We all have episodes like that, but some of us happen to do it in a more public, amusing, and downright stupid fashion. Doing it on the Internet is the worst of all because it's so easy for someone to make a permanent record of it; it's only been in the past few years that I've really come to understand how everything I do online can and will come back to haunt me. I'm assuming that people in front of television cameras should similarly run under the assumption that anything they do in front of the camera, whether or not the little red light is on, could find its way out into the world later. At least I would assume so today in our satellite and digital recording era; back in 1989, though, I have to assume that not as much was being recorded due to the costs of professional videotape and archiving and all of that. Regardless, I think Bill O'Reilly had an expectation of privacy there that kind of got screwed over, and regardless of how amusing or vulgar or just plain wrong his Inside Edition meltdown was, to be making such a big deal out of it nearly two decades later strikes me as, well, kind of missing the point. Shouldn't people who dislike O'Reilly be spending their time constructing solid arguments against his positions, not laughing over him shouting at his camera crew from nineteen years ago?
Episodes like this really make you double back on your own steps to make sure that you're not doing anything that could come back to haunt you later. I mean, I like to think that I blog openly, but there's lots of stuff I want to say on here that I don't say because I'm worried it could be used against me later. (Hence my relative silence about Dad's death, at least for now.) I've been using Twitter for several weeks now, though, and that's just adding another layer of coverage about me, by me, that is part of a permanent record about my life and the things I'm doing. Now that Apple's incorporating GPS into the next generation of iPhone (and I have to admit, between the new features and the lower price, Apple's actually impressed me), soon we'll even be creating records of the places we've been on a minute-to-minute, metre-to-metre basis. Orwell wrote about the perils of Big Brother watching over us all, but now we're doing Big Brother's work for him. I don't think I've wanted to go on a vacation into the wilderness of Michigan more than I do at this exact moment.
Labels: personal, television
posted 2008/05/25 at 20:09
Southwyck mall to close June 30 (toledoblade.com)
It's amazing how every little detail of something like Dad's death seemed to add just that much more pain to the ordeal. When I was young, Dad always took me out to a bunch of places on Saturday morning and afternoon, as soon as my morning cartoons ended. He called it "Adventures," and in retrospect he was probably doing Mom a favour by getting me out of the house for a while, but I probably did more bonding with Dad during Adventures than I did with anything else we did together. We'd get lunch together, go to the arcade together, and see a lot of stores at the mall. When I say mall here, though, I'm not referring to Southwyck; I'm referring to Franklin Park Mall, the mall closest to our house, and the only major mall still left in Toledo. (Mind you, it's now called "Westfield Shoppingtowne Franklin Park Mall" and barely bares any resemblance to the mall I remember as a kid. To me, that mall died a long time ago.)
My first memory of going to a mall, though, is going to Southwyck. There are a few things I remember about going to Southwyck as a child. First of all, they had a lot of small water fountains throughout the mall, all of which had different coloured lights in the fall that projected up and made all the water these soft, translucent colours that I thought were some of the prettiest things I'd ever seen. Secondly, in the middle of the mall -- it was one of those malls with several "spokes" full of stores around a central location -- they had the only full-size merry-go-round I've ever ridden on (the miniature merry-go-round they used to have in front of K-Mart doesn't count), and a kind of small pit that sloped gently and seemed, to my young mind, like a natural performing venue, a theatre-in-the-round sort of thing. Third, Southwyck had the first "arcade" I ever went to, a place called Old Towne that had the kind of machines that you used to associate with arcades before the Pac-Man era.
I can only remember going there a few times when I was young, but I went there a lot when I was a teenager. The mall's a fairly short walk from the private school I went to for fourth through twelfth grades, and since I usually stayed after school to use the computer lab (the only computers we had at home at that point were old TRS-80s), if I had some extra time before my parents got off of work to come pick me up, I'd walk over to Southwyck. Old Towne was long gone by that point, but our local arcade chain, Red Baron, had set up shop there, and I was in the middle of my Street Fighter II phase around this time, so I played that an awful lot. My first post-high school crush worked at the Waldenbooks over there as well, so that just gave me more reason to go over.
Southwyck has been ailing for a long, long time, and there had been a lot of talk about doing something new with the property for a long time. A few years ago a developer opened a new shopping complex down in Perrysburg called Levis Commons that, surprisingly, is a pretty awesome place. (Aside from the Books-A-Million and East of Chicago over there, the stores are painfully upscale, though.) The thing is, Southwyck is not in a very good part of town, and even if they raze Southwyck down to the ground and construct something truly grand in its place, that's not going to change that it's surrounded by a lot of low-end businesses in crumbling buildings on moldering streets. I'm fairly certain that someone will try to do something to "fix up" that part of town -- we're in about the tenth attempt to "revitalize" downtown Toledo in my lifetime -- but Southwyck shuttering feels to me like the one true note of confirmation that this part of Toledo is now dead.
Labels: personal, toledo, videogames
posted 2008/05/14 at 17:09
I started teaching again this past Monday. I'm in the same classroom I was in last semester, starting class at the same time. It's a different class (Composition I versus Composition II last term), it goes for two and a half hours instead of one and a half, and I see the same students all week. (However, I do have Wednesdays off.) I was hoping that the week off between classes would give me time to recharge, but I think all it realy managed to do was to make me feel lonelier. On Friday I did have a pizza with Lara when she stopped by on her way up to Michigan, and that was the first time I'd really had the chance to hang out with friends I knew since last December. As it is, my social calendar is still pretty blank, and even though I have some ideas about how to go about fixing that, between still being busy taking care of things that popped up after Dad's death and my general nervousness, it's been hard to act on any of those ideas.
Several years ago when I went through my last period of deep suicidal thoughts (back before my counselor at UT finally straightened me out), I had this recurring dream. I was in an apartment by myself, sitting at one of those really cheap white-and-pine dinette sets you always see on sale at Big Lots, and I was holding onto a revolver. Even though I've never touched a handgun in my life, I can still remember just how heavy the gun felt in my hand. The suicide implication there was obvious, but I think the other obvious thing from that nightmare was that it was happening after both my parents had died, since I was on my own like that. Although I haven't had anything approaching suicidal thoughts since Dad died, I am still having this dream pop up every now and again, probably because I've now lost one parent, and I have to think about losing Mom in a way that I've never thought about before.
Having some kind of circle of friends locally to hang out with would probably help me a lot, but again, I'm just not that comfortable doing that right now, in part because I'm so busy and in part because I'm so fearful because of all the disasters there have been in the past when I've tried to make friends. I also have to admit that I'm questioning my own motivations for wanting friends, because I think that in addition to companionship, I may also be looking for people to foist responsibilities on. I was kind of already doing this before Dad died, because seeing him and Mom, and Mark and Heather, made me wish that I had a lover, someone for me to shower affection on, and even though I had a few people in mind as potential partners, I didn't do anything about it because, in addition to general fears, I was worried that I was just looking to fill a hole in my own life, and that for the person I tried to partner with I'd be too interested in filling that hole in my life that I wouldn't be focused enough on filling the holes in that person's life. Now that Dad's dead and I've had to take on so many more responsibilities, I'm worried that I may be longing for a partner even more just so I have someone to share those responsibilities with.
As it is, other things developed with two of the people I'd been thinking about talking to (I never even got the chance to talk to them) that kind of made serious relationships with them impossible. There's only one other person I think I'd be comfortable partnering with right now, and not only do I think that she'd rather not entertain that idea just on general principle, but she also seems to be at a period in her life where she would rather be single. I can't say as I blame her for that, because for a long time there I appreciated the freedoms that being single gave me. However, now I seem to be longing for companionship, and the worst part is that I'm not even sure that I'm longing for it for the right reasons. If I can't trust my own intentions, how can I possibly expect anyone else to?
Labels: personal
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