posted 2008/05/04 at 19:29
About a half-hour ago I finished the last of my students' portfolios from this past semester; I'm waiting a little while here to allow some people who had problems submitting things to me to get some last papers e-mailed to me, but then tomorrow afternoon I'll be submitting their grades. Contrary to what I thought earlier, I actually do get a week off before the next semester starts, and I probably need that time off right now more than ever. In addition to catching up on reading and writing and cleaning and all sorts of other things, I'm going to need time to just relax, kick my feet up and do nothing at all.
As I expected, the end of this semester was more painful for me than it was in previous semesters, and I'm not referring to having to grade all those extra portfolios here. I take a very deep interest in my students, and I try to do all that I can to enable them to succeed, not just in my class and their other classes, but in life in general. I take care of my students, and earlier this year after Dad died, well, a lot of them took care of me. I know that students coming and going is an unavoidable aspect of my job, and I'm looking forward to having a new group of students to teach here a week from Monday, but after losing Dad a couple of months ago, moving on from this group of students is kind of hard for me.
I think Heather summed it up best when she talked about how hard this Spring is for her. I commented here a week ago about how the trees in our backyard are starting to bud leaves, and Heather pointed out that it's a sign that the cycle of nature, like life, goes on. For her, as it is for me a good part of the time, it's still hard to think of life going on without Dad physically here with us. As much as I know that I'm ready to move on with life after Dad's death, and as much as I know that I have to move on, a good part of me still doesn't want to move on quite yet. I want to hold on everything, from the good of my students' support to the bad of the painful grief, because I'm familiar with it. Moving on means moving towards the unknown, and I fear that I'm not strong enough to handle the unknown quite yet. I have to move on, though. Somehow I have to move on.
Labels: dad, personal, weather
posted 2008/04/27 at 20:36
This past weekend I've just taken some time for myself and tried to decompress. For the first time since Dad's death I didn't have anything that needed immediate attention from my students, although starting Wednesday I'll have some fifty or sixty portfolios to look at and get graded by the following Monday. I also start teaching Composition I at MCCC that Monday, so over the next couple of days I'll have to look at the required textbook for that class and try to figure out some kind of lesson plan. Yesterday and today, though, I kind of took some time for myself here to relax and unwind, play some video games, do some shopping, and watch a bit of television. (Unfortunately I was out shopping during the Red Wings' game Saturday and wound up missing Darren McCarty's first fight since rejoining the Wings, guh.) I'd wanted to do some cleaning in my room, but that didn't wind up happening and I'll probably have to get to it two weeks from now.
Leaves have begun to spring up on some of the trees in our backyard, and I can't help but think of how Dad's not here to see them now. As we've been going through his stuff recently, we've unearthed a lot of the sketches and paintings he used to do back before he started his own business; I had pretty much forgotten he'd ever done them, but once I saw them I remembered, "Oh yeah, I saw those when I was a kid." He had this way of drawing leaves on trees when he worked in pen-and-ink where we just made these curlicues all over the place, and somehow it worked; I remember trying to imitate that style when I was young and failing at it. (As always, stick a writing implement in my hand and all my manual dexterity goes to crap.) I'll probably put some of his work online here on the .org soon -- I've been meaning to do an online tribute to him, but time just hasn't been on my side for that -- but it's painful to realize that twenty years ago he just stopped doing that stuff because he got so wrapped up in running his business that he cut all his fun, all his social activities, out of his life. (In case you were wondering where I got that from ... yeah.)
As I see spring turn to summer here (although we may be getting some snow overnight after hitting 80 on Friday ...), I can't help but wonder if Dad was able to appreciate the changing of the seasons. We had that lunar eclipse a few days before his death, and I can remember him and Mom taking a look at it after I pointed it out to him, but a full lunar eclipse is one of those rare, irregular occasions you kind of make a point of observing. Even coming from a family of Wiccans, I don't think we do all that much to recognize when the seasons change and all the beauty that's out there waiting to be explored. If I were to pass away suddenly, I wouldn't want it said of me that I was too wrapped up in my work and my other pursuits to be able to enjoy the simple beauty of the first green leaves budding on trees in the spring. I think I'm overdue for a trip to Wildwood or the Toledo Botanical Garden. I'll do what I can to make that trip before I start getting weighed down with portfolios.
Labels: dad, personal, weather
posted 2008/04/23 at 21:03
As much as I used to follow computing news and trends back in the 1990s, the combination of leaving the Website design business, going back to college, and losing access to Tech TV after the fire caused me to kind of withdraw from that whole scene. Later, when I stopped working for Dad's business to focus on my studies, I lost access to the computing magazines he always subscribed to. I still knew enough to build my own computer (Yggdrasil Mark I) back in 2003, but then I got into grad school and I started teaching, and of course these past couple of months my life has been turned upside down. (I promise, once the current semester ends next week and I have one last weekend of reviewing student work, I will make a strong effort to return to blogging on a regular basis, not to mention other things that fell off of the radar after Dad died.) I have to stay up on Internet stuff just because of my job (in addition to teaching and researching online I also need to know the "Internet culture" of my students to be able to communicate effectively with them), but as far as the hardware stuff goes I kind of haven't paid attention to that for a long time.
I've mentioned here for a long time that I need to start making Yggdrasil Mark II soon. However, Mom says that she wants a computer so she can do Internet stuff, and as soon as she suggested that, she also suggested that I give her Yggdrasil Mark I and she'd buy me the components for my next computer. Well, unfortunately I'm beginning to have problems with Mark I -- I think she needs a new power supply and new fans -- and I don't want to have to perform major surgery on Mark I until it's time to get it cleaned up for Mom. At the very least it is now time to start pricing things out for Mark II, and yes, I'm building another PC, so Mac loyalists are advised to save their breath trying to get me to switch.
Unfortunately, my lack of knowledge of current tech trends is really coming back to bite me in the butt now. As I did with Mark I, I'm going to use an Asus motherboard at the heart of my system, and I'll probably get a current low-end Intel model. Unfortunately, PC architecture has changed so much that I find myself lost looking at the specs for motherboards. (Right now I'm looking at the P5N-E SLI, but I may get a higher-end model depending on how much money I can save up.) I look at the specs for the motherboard and what kind of RAM and hard drives it can support, and then I look at the RAM and hard drives that are on sale, and it seems like the components have all these additional variations that I can't match to the motherboard's listed specifications. I've tried to puzzle these things out on my own, but I'm having no luck, and it's getting to the point where I've given serious consideration to having a local computer store just build a computer for me, even though I'll probably spend at least an extra $250 just on price markups and labour costs.
I could use some guidance, if any of my readers have advice on components and stuff to get (apart from "Get a Mac"). Unlike my old computers which were mostly full of bargain-basement (but reliable) parts, I actually want something "nice" here because I'm past my "all I need to do is write papers in Word and look up plain text Websites" stage of my life; I plan on doing a lot of music and 3-D stuff with this new computer, so I'll want things to be nice but not go overboard buying bleeding-edge stuff. I don't want to overclock, and I don't need to burn Blu-ray discs (I already have a DVD burner from when I was going to put a new computer together for Dad), but I'd still like to know that I can run current-generation software quickly and be able to do a fair amount of multitasking. As I said before, an Asus mobo and Intel processor are givens (the one AMD computer I owned didn't work out too well for me), but otherwise I'm fairly open to suggestions.
posted 2008/04/16 at 12:01
While we continue to inventory and appraise all of the things Dad had in his office at the time of his death, my sister found the missing piece for my old articulating keyboard drawer, the metal plate that attaches to the bottom of the desk and works as a runner for the drawer to slide in and out of. Not only do I just generally prefer articulating drawers so I can angle my keyboard to my liking, but I needed a new keyboard drawer anyway. When I put together this desk I bought from OfficeMax about eighteen months ago or so, some of the screw holes for the keyboard drawer that came with the desk were too big. Eventually the weight on that side proved too much for the other screws to handle and they ripped themselves out of the desk, so for several months there half of my keyboard drawer was attached to my desk with little more than duct tape. It took me a while before I could find the time to install the articulating drawer, and I think I put the plate on at an angle, but all in all it's been working out for me quite well.
This, however, created a new problem, because the chair I'd been using since I put this desk together -- I'd used the edge of my bed as a "chair" until then -- was too high, and it was never that comfortable. It was one of the spare, cheap office chairs Dad got for the old office, and it was hard to sit in it for long periods of time, especially since I could never get it to go down low enough to where I could use my keyboard drawer and monitor at comfortable heights. I needed a new chair, and for some reason I went back to OfficeMax even though I'd had those problems with the desk. (Although apart from the keyboard drawer issues, I admit that this desk has worked out fairly well for me.) I have to admit I didn't quite test all of the chairs out as much as I should have, but when I went in the store was empty and I kind of felt self-conscious being alone in the middle of the store sitting in chair after chair. I got what was a fairly well-padded chair, but only when I got home did I realize that the chair didn't recline, which was kind of a big issue for me. That in and of itself wouldn't have been much of an issue, but then on top of that the chair was a total pain to put together because it was impossible to attach the back to the arms without putting all my weight on the chair back to line the screw holes up. Eventually those screws worked themselves loose about a week or so after I got the chair, and now the back of the chair folds back onto the seat if you do anything more than look at it.
I needed a new chair, again, and I didn't know where to look. By a remarkable coincidence, I just happened to walk by the furniture department at Meijer this past week and saw that they had a budget glider for fifty dollars off. I tried the floor sample, and not only was it incredibly comfortable, but it reclined to just the right angle for me as well. I wasn't sure whether or not to buy it for a while because I wasn't sure if it was going to be the right height, but on Saturday I picked it up. (That in and of itself was troublesome because I couldn't get anyone to help me with loading the box in my cart and then into my minivan; Meijer has gone downhill in a hurry since the nearby Wal*Mart expanded and became a Wal*Mart Supercentre.) Sunday I put it together -- a difficult task because the instructions were kind of unlcear -- but not only is it super-comfortable, but it's just the right height. If I lean it all the way forward like I am now, I'm in a fairly standard typing position with my keyboard and monitor right where I like them. If I recline and pull the keyboard drawer forward, everything stays at the right height and I can take a load off while I work on here. Apart from the base of the chair being kind of big, making it hard for me to walk around it to get to my closet, this glider is absolutely perfect. (Once I have time for recreational reading again, I'm guessing that the reclined position wil be perfect for that.)
The only real problem I'm having is that the chair might be too comfortable. I'm still busy as all get-out with the items of business that came up after Dad's death (which, in turn, caused me to fall way behind in getting my students' work reviewed and returned, but I'm catching up there now), and even now that I've started drinking coffee on a regular basis again (which I don't think I've done in a decade), I run out of energy far too quickly for my liking. In that regard, I think that having such a comfortable chair to work in might be working against me here, since it's perhaps too easy for me to get comfortable and into a physical position where my body naturally turns on its "relax mode." I can't afford to relax now; I've still got too much work I need to do before things can return to normal around here, or at least what will pass for normal after Dad's death.
Labels: personal
posted 2008/04/06 at 20:57
With all of the craziness of the past couple of months I failed to note Björk getting into the press on a couple of occasions. First she went after another photographer (and this time couldn't claim she was trying to protect her son like she did the first time this happened), and then there was the incident of her chanting "Tibet" over and over at the end of her song "Declare Independence" while performing in China. I'm still not really bothering to keep close tabs on Björk or Tori Amos these days, though; in addition to just not appreciating their more recent works like I do the stuff they were making a decade ago, and just generally not having time or money to follow them like I used to, I've definitely been on a big new age kick for a few years now, probably because I'm finding it much better music to do work to. I'll still pick up the new CDs that they release, but I'm not going nuts trying to get every single released in every country like I used to do (not having Media Play to go to any longer contributes to that as well), and I've got far more in my own life to be concerned with to spend that much time following their lives.
That being said, I did pick up a couple of non-new age CDs for myself for my birthday; Low's Secret Name and Under Byen's Samme Stof Som Stof, the latter of which I'm listening to as I type this blog up. These are a couple of artists whose work I've come to enjoy through Urge Radio's Blue Room channel, which I would love a lot more than I do if they didn't seem to keep playing the same eight-hour rotation over and over again. (I hear that's a general concern with Urge Radio as a whole, though.) I'm definitely hearing a very strong Björk influence in Under Byen, and as much as I love to know that there are other big artists out there who are being influenced by Björk, it's disconcerting to know that Björk has been around long enough to start having a new generation of artists influenced by her work. Not that I mind that Björk is getting older, but that means that I'm getting older as well, and that's kind of worrisome.
On that same topic, I was looking through my Amazon.com wishlist before my birthday trying to decide on what CDs to buy for myself, and I have a number of 90s CDs up there just because I'm a fan of the decade in general when it comes to music. (Although I fell in love with Björk and Tori I still enjoy most of the stuff that came out then), and at first I was kind of happy to see that a lot of the iconic CDs I want to pick up from then were selling for ten dollars. At first I attributed this to the effects of the digital music revolution causing CD prices to be lower in general, but then I realized that the true cause of this phenomenon is simply that the CDs are so old that they're considered to be "oldies" in terms of CD pricing schemes. That really made me feel old, and the fact that I haven't really found any recent artists to get into (not counting new age artists) makes me wonder if I'm getting crotchety in my old age.
posted 2008/03/30 at 19:51
Last year I don't think I handled the earlier switch to Daylight Savings Time all that well. It definitely messed with my internal clock to have things so light out later at night than I was used to, even though at the time I really didn't have any regular commitments because I was still just looking for employment. I definitely enjoyed the extra daylight -- even though I'm definitely a night person, after a certain point the winter just becomes total drudgery to get through -- but for a couple of weeks there things didn't feel right. When the old switch day came, though, I didn't feel any ill effects then; by then I think I'd adjusted to the time change and the date change.
This year I didn't really have any difficulty at all making the adjustment. Granted, Dad dying a couple of weeks before the switch probably caused me to put my focus on other things, and that Sunday was also the last Sunday of my so-called Spring Break, but it finally felt right. In a way I guess I was almost looking forward to the change, because with everything that had gone on I felt like I needed more daylight to help get through each day. I've never really thought about the possibility that I might have Seasonal Affective Disorder because I always assumed my annual autumn depression was caused by the season triggering memories of my year at Antioch and how part of me still longs to go back there, but perhaps it is just the general weather that's affecting my mood. (Then again, given how I'm still grieving for Dad, maybe this isn't a good time to be making judgments about anything else that could be affecting my overall emotional state.)
Speaking of Antioch, they let my personal data get compromised. (Even though I stopped attending by the start of the data that was breached, my application to Antioch University Los Angeles' MFA in creative writing in 2004 means that my stuff was there for the taking.) I haven't seen or heard of any suspicious activity so far, but needless to say I'm concerned since I haven't had an experience like this before. Is there anything I need to be doing right now to make sure that I don't get slammed from this?
Labels: personal
posted 2008/03/24 at 20:29
I'm the biggest packrat I know of, but Dad was close. Whatever extra ability he had to throw things out was kind of negated by the fact that he had a thirty-year head start on collecting things. Although he lost a lot of personal stuff in the fire since he stored lots of stuff upstairs, his business stuff was safe since we still had a separate office west of here back then. That stuff came over to the house once he built the addition a few years ago, and going through all of that stuff, while simultaneously handling the hundreds of other pieces of business his death has brought up, has been quite the task. It's been painful for me to try to resume some kind of a normal diet here, because most of this past month I've needed tremendous amounts of sugar and caffeine just to stay fueled up here. (I'm not denying emotional eating is playing a large part in that as well, but I think emotional eating is kind of understandable under the circumstances.)
Just before Dad's death I had started to go through my closet because I needed to clear space for some new clothes. Rather than throw out old clothes, though, I've only put them into "retirement" in a plastic tub out in the loft closet. I honestly don't even want to do that -- even if my clothes get too ratty to wear out in public I still think they'd be good for working out in -- but I need space for new clothes. I can't bring myself to throw any of the clothes out, either, because I can still remember how I got each shirt and from whom. Just like I've been learning this past month going through Dad's stuff, every little thing we have has its own story, and as much as the memories and stories matter more than the things themselves, I can't bring myself to throw them out.
As far as clothes go, though, Mom was in charge of cleaning out Dad's closet, and after we took out the things we wanted to keep or could repurpose (we have a thing in this house about converting old sweatpants into shorts to wear around the house), she's got the rest bagged up to send to Goodwill here shortly. Granted, most of the clothes I've retired are so raggy that I doubt they'd be of much use to anyone, but this is one of those things that makes me think about my own consumption. Being a packrat is bad enough when you've got so much stuff you have to find space for, but I have to admit that I don't think enough about how me keeping all this stuff around means that other people can't get enjoyment out of it. This is a matter that deserves a lot more thought than I've been giving it recently, but I simply don't have any time to stop and think now; I've got too much to do here.
posted 2008/03/22 at 20:41
Some of my birthday gifts have still yet to arrive -- including a couple of CDs I bought for myself -- but among the things I got this past Tuesday were Gandhi's autobiography (I don't know how I didn't pick it up sooner), Dr. Strangelove (ditto), an Oh My Goddess! manga (I am way behind on those), and most importantly of all, I am finally in possession of a Guitar Hero game, namely Guitar Hero III for PS2. However, not only have I had next to no time to play Guitar Hero since getting it (between teaching and bsiness relating to Dad's death I'm still swamped here), but the bundled guitar isn't working that well. It's one of the new wireless models that runs on Bluetooth, and the receiver only picks up the guitar if I hold the guitar about six inches from the receiver and keep the guitar facing at just the right angle. It's playable this way, but it's definitely a huge pain.
When I get paid next week, I'm going to head over to Best Buy and pick up a wired guitar. In a way I can understand the huge push towards making all video game controllers wireless, but at the same time these problems I'm having with my Guitar Hero controller just seem to highlight for me the problems with wireless-only options. (This is just one of the many reasons why I'm in no rush to pick up a PS3.) In addition to the problems I have with the receiver (and given how poor my cell phone reception is at the house I'm wondering if we're in some kind of dead spot here), I don't like the thought of having to keep throwing AA batteries into the controller just to keep using it. Honestly, having a cord run from my guitar controller to my console isn't that much of a pain, especially considering how much I'll be likely to save on batteries that way. I don't like that I'm going to be stuck buying an off-brand guitar controller here, though; why can't Activision continue to sell and support their old wired models?
I only made the wireless mistake once, a long, long time ago. Back when attachments came out for the NES for plugging four controllers into the system at once, Nintendo offered two models, a wired adapter (the Four Score) and a wireless one (the Satellite). This was back when Mom was buying me most of my video game stuff, and even though the Satellite cost ten bucks more, I asked for it thinking that the ability to move the adapter around my bedroom would be a major convenience at some point. Ignoring the fact that I think I only ever had more than two people playing my NES at one point in my whole life, the Satellite went through a lot of big, expensive batteries (I think 6 C batteries) in record time. The worst part was that I continued to use the Satellite for a long time, even for single-player games, just because I thought it was convenient, but it was really just a waste of batteries. (It was also a huge pain when the Satellite ran out of power in the middle of a game and I had to frantically plug and unplug the Satellite and my controller just to pause a game down to replace the batteries.) I suppose one of the good things about being such a loner is that I don't have to worry about picking up multiplayer adapters any longer, so I don't have to deal with these problems.
Labels: personal, videogames
posted 2008/03/18 at 22:06
I'm not in the mood to give one of my long birthday posts here, just like I wasn't in the mood to do my usual pre-birthday begging for stuff off of my Amazon wishlist. Suffice it to say that my birthday booty this year was a bit bigger than usual, and I'll get the specifics later (some items are still on their way here according to my sister), but obviously the events of the past month kind of put a damper on my usual biannual willing submission to materialistic desire. I think this may have been the hardest day for me to get through since the day Dad died. I was kind of tasked with doing the usual food run for my birthday (Mancino's pizza and Dairy Queen), and of all the things Dad used to do that I've been taking over, that was the hardest one for me to do yet. Even coming back down to Ohio from work, knowing I'd be making the pizza and ice cream run, I began to get sick to my stomach. I'm not even sure that I would have had a birthday party tonight if I hadn't known that Mom and Heather and Mark kind of needed the party more than I did.
There was an incredible dual quality to today. At once, I don't think I've felt Dad's absence more than I did today -- especially when we sat down for pizza and presents -- but at the same time, his spiritual presence with me, and with the rest of us, seemed stronger than ever today. I have to keep reminding myself of the spiritual aspect of this as the days go by here, as I have to fight my urge to save everything of his (although he wasn't quite as bad of a packrat as I am, he had a thirty-year headstart on me), but some days it's harder to deal with than others, and this day was a total pain to deal with it.
I wish I could say that things will get better, but Dad's birthday would have been this Friday (yeah, there's your peak ahead to the intro for this week's Friday Five). Normally there's a lot to celebrate this week (St. Patrick's Day, the anniversary of us buying this property), but this year everything's basically been turned on its head. I keep reminding myself that things will never return to "normal" because what was "normal" before will never be again, but I'm hoping that after we get through this week that things will start to become a little easier to deal with. Right now, though, I just feel like curling up in a ball on my bed and shutting the rest of the world out.
posted 2008/03/16 at 20:25
Again, my apologies for a lack of blog entries lately. I have lots of topics on my whiteboard here for when I feel that I can resume a normal blogging schedule, but that might not be for a while because there's still so much going on here in the aftermath of Dad's death. Just as a quick update on that, I had blogged earlier that the preliminary cause of Dad's death was determined to be a stomach aneurysm, but when we got his death certificate shortly after that, the cause of death there was listed as blood clots in his lungs. Complicating matters is the fact that the coroner's report is still not done yet, even though Dad was cremated two weeks ago; this doesn't seem logical to me, but I'm guessing that this is just one of those things where I'm basing things on what I've seen on television dramas like Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and not on any real-life experience.
As a lead-in to what I'm about to say, and at the risk of sounding like I would dare to brag about something like this, when the actual medical emergency hit on the 23rd, I clicked over into Crisis Mode, that rare state I achieve where I manage to stop being absent-minded, stop screwing the small and big things up, take charge and do a damn good job of it. Just like I was the one to get the family out of the house and call 911 and all that when we had the fire here in 2001, I was the one to call 911 when we needed to, I got the paramedics and others marshalled through the house, called Heather and Mark, coordinated everything, and drove behind the ambulance that took Dad to the hospital. After we were told of his death, I likewise got the family banded together and helped everyone piece together all of the things we needed to take care of.
With the fire, though, there came a point where I could switch out of Crisis Mode, and that was fairly soon in the process. Once the family was huddled together in the van in front of our house and the fire rigs were getting the blaze under control, I could afford to relax a little, in part because the family was safe and secure (and that was all that really mattered at that point), and in part because when it came to the upper-level planning stuff, those were things that Dad had to take care of, and he was quite capable of taking care of them. This is different, though; Dad's not here, and even though Mom has to take care of the upper-level things, she needs to rely a lot on Heather and Mark and myself to take care of them. We're far enough along in the process here to know that we don't have to worry about anyone swooping in and kicking us out of the house or any of that, at least for a good long while, but at the same time there are still an awful lot of unresolved questions and a tremendous amount of business to take care of. I'm not feeling the same panic I was feeling in the hours before and after Dad's death, but at the same time it feels like I haven't really gotten out of Crisis Mode yet.
The two things that have gotten me through here are writing (for myself) and food. Writing isn't an issue here, but I've been off-diet for a while now -- I tried going back on-diet last week but my heart wasn't in it, and with both Dad's birthday and mine this week I don't think now is the right time to get back on it -- but at the same time I haven't been taking good care of myself. Granted, there are far worse things I can do to my body than eat bad foods (and don't think I haven't been tempted to do some of them), but I feel like there's an underlying problem with me still being unable to get out of Crisis Mode here. I really don't know what to do here, and in a lot of ways I'm worried about relaxing too much because, as I said, there is still a lot of work to do. Still, I don't feel that good about myself right now, and I don't know what to do to fix that.
posted 2008/02/29 at 18:40
Getting back to my normal activities is probably one of the things I need to do here in order to get healthier, so I'll do the Friday Five this week. A few weeks ago when I realized that I'd be doing a Friday Five on Leap Day, I kind of peaked ahead at Wikipedia's listing for this day to see if there was much of anything I could pull for the usual historical opener. I found some stuff that I thought I might be able to use, but I've kind of discarded it because there's only one lead I can go with here:
Today was Dad's memorial service up in Michigan. I love you, Dad, and I miss you terribly. On that note, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five.
1. How and when did you learn to swim?
I think the only real formal training I had in swimming came in second grade when we went to one of the local high schools (ironically enough the rival school to the one my sister was attending at the time). Given how often I was up at the vacation house my paternal grandparents had on Bois Blanc Island up on Lake Huron, though, and given how Mom always built small pools for me in the backyard in unused patches of her garden, though, I can't remember a time when I didn't know how to swim. I've never done it that well, and I don't think I ever will swim again for obvious reasons, but I can swim at least.
2. How and when did you learn to drive?
I first started driving school when I was 16, but I didn't get my license until I was almost 25. The driving school I went to had a deal where you paid a one-time fee, and in addition to the state-mandated number of hours you had to drive with an instructor, they offered to let you keep driving with their instructors until you were ready to pass the test. Well, I kind of used a whole lot of those hours because I really sucked at driving. Finally one day I almost ran a kid over going through the residential neighbourhood east of the school, and five minutes later I somehow had my graduation certificate. I think they just got sick of me and wanted to cut ties with me, but the incident kind of stuck in my mind for a long time there and made me too scared to drive. I got over it eventually, and these days I think I'm one of the finest drivers out there, but it was hard.
3. How and when did you learn to tie your shoelaces?
I don't remember the exact age, but I learned later than most (for all that I grew up to be so smart, I had difficulty with a lot of basic things back in the day), and I learned by practicing on a brick with holes in it through which Dad laced an extra pair of shoelaces. I can even remember the shoelaces being huge, and this absolutely hideous shade of green. (Green was Dad's favourite colour.)
4. How and when did you learn to cook?
I think I made my first Chef Boyardee pizza when I was thirteen; I can remember that I forgot to grease the cookie sheet, so the pizza stuck on like crazy. After that Mom taught me various things, and I watched a lot of The Frugal Gourmet and Ciao Italia and picked up things from the cookbooks there.
5. How and when did you learn to type?
I've never learned how to type properly -- I use my right hand for nearly all the keys, and keep my left pinky resting on the keyboard to the left of the tilde -- but I had classes when I was younger. Given that I was doing computer programming when I was four years old on Dad's Sinclair ZX-80, I think typing was just one of those things I picked up before I even knew what I was doing.
Labels: dad, fridayfive, personal
posted 2008/02/28 at 20:18
My family and I wish to extend our deepest thanks to those of you who have contacted us over the past five days with your sympathies and condolences.
I wish I could say more about what happened to Dad, but at this point all I can really say is that he died at 1300 this past Saturday, and that we were told that the preliminary cause of death was believed to be an aneurysm in his stomach.
As far as how we are doing, we are doing about as well as could be expected at this point. I went right back up to teach on Monday, and I've been busying myself with writing and starting to get answers to some of the three million questions raised by Dad's death. This is going to be a very long process, and it will probably never be over, but at least it's something that's helping me keep busy. Being idle right now is probably the worst thing for me at this point.
I'll be trying to resume normal blogging activities here soon, but I may not have too much to say about Dad for a while. There is writing for others and there is writing for one's self, and right now I feel far more comfortable writing about Dad for myself than for others. That will change at some point, but I can't say when.
For now, cliché as it is, I'd like to make one request to all of you, if you are lucky enough to be in a position where you can do so: please, please tell your parents how much you love them as soon as you can. Don't assume that you'll have the chance later, because you never know just when that opportunity will disappear, and disappear forever.
Everyone take care and be well. I'll be back soon.
posted 2008/02/23 at 15:05
My father died from an aneurysm earlier today. Apologies if I don't blog here for a while, but I have more pressing issues to tend to right now.
posted 2008/02/21 at 21:22
I keep a small whiteboard next to my computer to write notes to myself on. I use the upper-left hand corner of this whiteboard to list topics that I want to blog about at some point, either when something happens with them or in cases like tonight where I feel a need to blog but don't have anything too pressing to blog about. Sometimes topics will only stay on the board for a couple of days, but sometimes they'll be on there for much longer. Usually I don't have a problem remembering why I wanted to write about a given topic, but this isn't one of those cases. Several months ago, for some reason, I wrote on my whiteboard that I wanted to blog about shoelaces. I must have had other things to blog about there for a while, because for the past few weeks I've been looking at the word "shoelaces" on my whiteboard and trying to figure out just what was so compelling about shoelaces that I felt a need to blog about them.
The closest thing I can figure out is that shoelaces played a big part in me buying a new pair of shoes last autumn. The tips of my old shoes had worn out a while ago, and there were huge holes in them that allowed water to seep directly inside. This wasn't so much of a problem after I graduated and I wasn't going out that often, but I knew that I didn't want the Michigan snow to have a way to get right to my toes, so I bought a new pair. (I think I wore my old shoes out so quickly because of the extra wear and tear caused by my dance games.) One thing that bothered me about my old shoes was that they didn't have the traditional eyelet lacing for the shoelaces; instead there were metal strips that ran along each side of the shoe along the tongue, with thin rectangular holes punched in at regular intervals, and I had to feed the shoelaces in through those. The original laces of both shoes wound up breaking on me near one of these rectangular holes, and I'm positive that the weird lacing design had something to do with that. (My new shoes have the traditional eyelets, so I shouldn't have worries there.)
For some reason, after the shoelaces on my old shoes broke, I just tied the laces back together instead of using the second pair of laces that came with the shoes. In fact, right now I have a huge collection of "second pair" laces in my closet right now, on a department store clip-hangar next to my sweatshirts. I'm not entirely sure why I would collect shoelaces like I do (get your mind out of the gutter, they're not safe to use for that), but perhaps one of these days I'll come across a really great pair of shoes and I'll be able to use up all of my extra laces when the original laces of that pair of shoes get busted. Maybe it's just that I can't bring myself to throw out things that I'll likely have next to no use for. I'm not really sure.
Labels: personal
posted 2008/02/13 at 17:04
I finally got a "good" snow day yesterday. It had been snowing pretty much since I woke up, and as the afternoon dragged on things really got a lot worse, to the point where we had a winter storm warning here in town. I kept checking MCCC's Website to see if they were going to cancel, but they kept saying that they were open. Finally, just before I was about to go out and clean off my van, I called the secretary of my department to see if things were any better up in Michigan. She said that she'd call the person who makes the decision about when to close campus and call me right back, and sure enough the campus was in the process of closing up. That saved me a lot of hellish driving and gas money, although in order to make up for the snow day the universe seemed to turn everything else against me that day, from huge mistakes I made in the stuff I was working on at home that day to the Red Wings' awful performance that evening. I should be careful what I wish for, I know.
I dislike the cold and snow enough to start with, but these past couple of winters I have been getting the absolute worst cases of winter skin I can ever remember having. The back of my right hand is almost always super-dry and covered with tiny cuts, and no amount of moisturizer seems to make things better. What makes this all the more inexplicable is that I've been spending far more time indoors than out these past couple of winters since I'm not traipsing around UT's campus all day and all. I don't know if this has something to do with my age or something related to conditions inside the house, but it has become an absolute pain to deal with here. When I stop at Kroger on the way home from work tonight, I may very well pick up a couple of medicated mositurizing lotions, just to see if they'll help any more than the moisturizers I've been using.
Looking at the forecast ahead makes me want to go kick around Punxsatawney Phil. Perhaps I got spoiled by having a couple of thaws so early in the season, but it looks like we're not going to climb above freezing for a long time now. Between the blowing and drifting snow on the roads, snow-blindness (which has always been a huge problem for me since I'm so nocturnal), the cold, the dry air and what it's doing to my hands, and everything else related to the cold and snow, I'm beginning to question the wisdom of me staying in this part of the country any longer than I absolutely have to. I enjoy the familiarity I have with the Northwest Ohio region, and I still think that there's no more beautiful land on this planet than what you'll find in the upper half of Michigan's lower peninsula, but worrying about hurricanes or earthquakes instead of freezing my you-know-what off would at least be a nice change of pace.
posted 2008/02/11 at 20:38
In a lot of the business classes I took as an undergraduate, I would constantly run into these questions on tests where the wording of the questions and answers just completely threw me off. Some of the questions were missing vital information, some of the answers weren't very specific, and a lot of them used hedge words that made it nearly impossible for me to be confident with whatever answer I chose. Given that these were in classes where I was one of over a hundred students, and given how my teachers in these classes were adjuncts who were always short and abrupt in their dealings with students, it seemed foolish to go up during a test to ask for clarification. I tried asking for clarification a couple of times when I got these questions wrong, and the answers I got back were just slightly more polite rephrasings of "that's just not the correct answer" without any guidance as to what the correct answer was.
I always suspected that these instructors were just using test questions that had been prepared for them by the textbook company, but it was only about a month ago that I actually came upon one of these "test banks" when I got one along with the textbook for the business writing class I'm teaching this semester. Maybe it's because I'm a word junkie with a knack for finding all kinds of different ways to interpret words, or maybe it's because I'm so overly cautious about everything, but I can't figure out why these questions are written with such nebulous prompts and answers. Worse yet, I'm reading these test questions right after reading the corresponding chapters in the book, and I'm making notes on what I consider to be the important, overriding themes of the chapters, and then the test bank turns around and asks questions about some obscure statistic buried in the middle of a relatively unimportant paragraph. I don't know the process through which these questions are vetted and selected, but it seems really screwed up to me.
I'm not saying that test banks don't have a place in teaching, but looking back on my own days as a student I can now see just how they contribute to the laziness of some teachers. I can now look back on the tests I took in the Introduction to Business class I was in my first full-time semester, and the test bank questions literally look exactly like my instructor's tests were formatted. The instructor (a first-time adjunct who only lasted one more semester and who was almost universally despised by his students) must have just cut out the answer row from the test bank questions, copied that for the test, then filled out the answers on a Scantron sheet without even thinking about the appropriateness or quality of the questions. (He also taught from Powerpoint presentations that were obviously created by the same textbook company.) Being on the other side of the equation now, I understand that coming up with relevant, informative classes and methods of assessing what the students have learned is a difficult process, and yes, I think test banks are useful for instructors to have. Looking back on my own education, though, it seems like a lot of the instructors I had just took the Powerpoints and the test banks provided by the textbook manufacturers, talked for an hour and a half straight twice a week, and put little, if any, thought into just what they wanted students to learn and how best to help them learn those things. How can instructors expect their students to take the time to read and learn all of these things when they won't take more time to assess their progress than just running a bunch of Scantron sheets through a machine?
posted 2008/01/31 at 20:37
Is the United States Chess Federation in trouble? (New York Times blogs)
Getting back into playing chess is one of those things that always seems to be high on my to-do list that just never gets done. All I've managed to do over these past few years is knock off a few tutorials and practice games on Xbox Chessmaster (yay no absurd security locks), and play the odd game online. I really don't like playing on television or computer screens because it just doesn't inspire the same kind of deep thinking that I can do playing on an actual chess set, but I haven't really had anyone to play chess with in real life since high school. For that matter, my physical chess set kind of poofed after the fire and wasn't in the boxes of stuff we got back from the fire people, and I haven't bothered to replace it. (Actually, I take that back: I picked up a two-dollar chess set at Kroger a few years back, but a huge corner of the board was torn off of it when I got it, even though the package the set came in was sealed tight.) Perhaps it's because of how I've been socialized to handle in-person stuff versus Internet stuff, but playing chess over the Internet just isn't something that works out too well for me.
This article kind of makes me think about how the Internet has changed the various aspects of gaming. I had a youth membership to the USCF when I was in high school, although I never played a USCF-rated game. (I didn't want to travel to the big tournaments with the rest of my chess team because I didn't want to spend any more time with them than was absolutely necessary. My love of chess only extended so far even back then.) At that time, playing in school leagues and playing in USCF tournaments was kind of a big thing because it was the only real way to get rated and to be able to position yourself against other people and have an idea of where you stood. Pretty much every online chess service I've tried has had its own ranking system, though, and that takes away a large part of the allure of the USCF and what they offer. I imagine that similar games must also be experiencing identical growing pains. I don't follow chess closely enough to understand all the other politics that may or may not be going on at the USCF, but I can't help thinking about how the Internet may be changing the face of even the most classic of games that don't absolutely require physical presence and performance.
As the networking capabilities and pure computational power of the Internet increase, games of the mind are likely to become more and more altered. Chess is one of those games where I confess to being something of a luddite; I don't want to play speed chess and bullet chess all the time on a screen that doesn't give me a real sense of dimension. I kind of miss sitting in a school library somewhere, spending two to three hours on a game, enjoying the silence in which I could contemplate my next moves. With the way modern life is evolving, silence is becoming a scarcer and scarcer luxury, and contemplation seems to be almost an anachronism. For all that computing and the Internet make so many things easier for us -- I would never give them up -- I hope that they don't spell an end to the old chess clubs and tournaments.
posted 2008/01/29 at 20:41
I have begun undertaking the calculus required to figure out just how much money I need to be making on a monthly basis to live on my own. I've had an idea of the vague numbers for quite some time -- I first made these calculations back in 2000, back when I was thinking about doing full-time Web design work -- but now I'm figuring out every last penny of how much breakfast costs, how much lunch costs, how much my gum and tissues cost, all of that. I actually quite enjoy this kind of activity; although I make my living off of teaching English and writing, I was always much more into math when I was younger, and even though I've forgotten how to do derivatives and all that high-level calculus stuff, I'm still pretty solid on my basic math. It's interesting to see how even the tiniest changes I make in my normal daily routine translate to more or less money per month, and it makes me think even more about what I really need to be living on my own.
There is one kind of disconcerting bit of knowledge I picked up yesterday, though. For the sake of figuring these numbers out, I topped my tank and then very deliberately avoided going anyplace else but MCCC and home, with the exception of one Kroger that's pretty much right off of that work-to-home drive. I managed to get six trips done before my gas gauge hit the red spot, so I filled my tank all the way back up before heading to work today. Even with a thirty-cent-per-gallon discount at Kroger's gas pumps, it still took over sixty bucks to get my tank topped again. Each trip to and from campus costs me over ten bucks, and when I'm making that trip four times a week, that money adds up very quickly.
This brings up a couple of issues. First of all, I definitely need a more fuel-efficient car, and I've always felt that I should have better transportation before I start shopping for an apartment or a condo. Most of my students are younger than what I drive to work every day, for crying out loud. Secondly, this also forces me to think about just where it is I decide to live. Moving just halfway closer to MCCC would save me close to $100 a month, and that's nothing to sneeze at. I can't live all of my life just between work and home (and let's not forget that, as much as I enjoy working at MCCC, I might not get an opportunity to work full-time there for quite some time, and may find full-time work elsewhere in the meantime), so I'll have to think about places to live in close proximity to places like Kroger and Meijer. This is not light work to figure out, and I'll probably have to keep plugging away at it for the next few weeks.
Labels: personal
posted 2008/01/27 at 21:53
As much as I still haven't gotten used to my sister and brother-in-law moving to their own apartment at the start of the year -- the quietness makes every little sound in this house seem that much louder -- I can't help but enjoy having my own bathroom now. Even though our office is up on the second floor along with my bedroom, my parents prefer to use the bathroom off of their bedroom on the first floor (in what used to be my old bedroom back before the fire). The only other time I've had a bathroom all to myself was back at the hotel while we waited for the house to be rebuilt, and since that was an unpleasant living situation all around I don't really count that. It's nice to know that I'll never have to wait to use the bathroom again while I'm here, although for some reason when my sister and brother-in-law visit they still insist on using my bathroom for themselves.
This kind of ties in to some thoughts I've been having about just how much space I need to live in comfortably. As I've said before, I'm probably going to have to get an extra bedroom in whatever place I end up living after I move out just to house all of my stuff, and as if I needed a reminder of that, I've just run out of bookshelf space again and need to go buy a new bookshelf later this week. Even though I'm still a bit away from being able to afford my own place, I've started looking through apartment listings and such, and it seems like I can't find a place that has the right amount of space for me. There's no way I could live in a studio apartment just because I have so much stuff, but all of the one-bedroom apartments I've seen so far have been kind of on the big side for my needs. Similarly, I've been looking at condominium listings (I'd still prefer to own my own place just because my father has been so insistent on that throughout my life), and there too I can only find places that are far too big for what I feel I could live comfortably in.
As much as I hate to say it, this whole thing is kind of making me think about the senselessness of living alone. As much as I value my privacy, I don't think that living by myself would be healthy for me. I think that if I didn't have someone to come home to every night -- note that I'm not saying a partner here, merely someone whether a friend or roommate or what have you -- my mental and emotional health wouldn't be quite so good. I know I've said before that I planned on remaining single for life, but to be honest I've had thoughts to the contrary in recent months, thoughts that started before I started mulling over this whole thing about moving out and living on my own. Now this seems to be driving me even more to start asking around and seeing if any of the people I've been thinking about here might possibly reciprocate my feelings towards them. (The answers will be no, I know, but I can dream, can't I?)
Labels: personal
posted 2008/01/20 at 20:51
I can't say that I've come to any solid conclusions about the choice I face over whether or not to get another degree that I've been writing about for quite some time now. The only progress I've really made, if you can call it that, is that I've decided not to apply to any schools for this coming autumn. I still feel like I'm trying to get my legs under me, particularly as I face a number of new challenges this term (my first term teaching more than one class, my first time teaching an online class, and so on). It feels like right now the best thing I can do is to give myself time to adjust to this new load and determine whether or not I like it before I decide if I'm going to make any big decisions on my life. Thus far I definitely like having so many students to teach, although keeping my two in-person classes straight requires a bit of mental juggling I haven't had to do before. (I'm teaching the same class, at the same time, in the same classroom, but on different days of the week.) Apart from the long commute to Monroe and back, which really isn't much of an issue except for the high price of gas, I don't really have any complaints so far.
Over the past couple of weeks, though, I've been thinking more and more about what my ultimate goals are if I decide to go get another degree. As much as it pains me to say this, I'm wondering how much my own ego is playing a role in all of this. I mean, most of the teachers at my private school made no secret of how they thought I'd either be dead or in prison by now, and I'd be lying if I said all those rejections to MFA schools I got back in 2004 didn't still hurt me. Yes, I love writing (although it took me a while to reclaim that love after said rejections), and getting my MFA would enable me to really hone my writing skills and be able to teach creative writing to others, to say nothing of being able to apply for tenure-track positions at four-year colleges and universities. There is definitely a part of me, though, that I've come to realize just wants to get this degree -- and maybe even more degrees after that -- to prove some people wrong. I should forget all about those people because it isn't healthy to hold on to this kind of resentment, but I can't. I'm just going now based on my conscious feelings of wanting to soothe my own ego; subconsciously the problem is like many times worse than I'm aware of.
Although I don't always show it, I am a smart person, and I've already proven myself capable of doing a tremendous number of things. As much as I try to deal with rejection and unconstructive criticism in a healthy way, there is still a part of me that hurts when I receive it or remember it. As much as I try to be humble and recognize my own place in the world, whenever I feel wronged or slighted, there is still a part of me that wants to strike back, to prove people wrong, even when I know that doing so will ultimately not do anyone any good, let alone myself. I know that I will never totally rid myself of those things, and so my decision about whether or not to go for my MFA (or, for that matter, a Ph.D in rhetoric/composition) will ultimately be based, at least in some small part, on those things. Right now, though, it feels like those things are playing a larger part in my decision-making process than they should, so it's probably for the best that I take a while longer to think things through and see if things at MCCC continue to pan out as well as they have so far.
posted 2008/01/16 at 20:53
Even though Spyder left the house along with my sister and brother-in-law at the start of the month, we still haven't moved Skooter into the house full-time. We're letting her into the house for longer and longer periods, but the house still isn't ready for her, in part because my sister and brother-in-law still haven't taken Spyder's old litterbox to their apartment. (They also haven't bothered removing one of their old 27" television sets that's currently an eyesore in the hallway outside of my room.) I'm still worried about Skooter being such a persistent leg-rubber and always getting underfoot, especially given how old my parents are now, but for now Mom has taken to walking around with tins full of pennies in her socks, so whenever she walks she makes a sound that Skooter can't stand. I was hoping that Skooter would get less hyper around the house the more we let her in, but so far that hasn't really been happening.
I don't want to lose hope about being able to move Skooter into the house, though. It's disorienting for me to be sitting here typing this right now, knowing that there isn't the chance of one of my four-legged friends walking in to rub against my legs. Skooter came to the house shortly after Rowan had her last great romp, not returning to the house for a few weeks, and I don't think that's a coincidence. I think Rowan intended for Skooter to be her replacement, and now Rowan's been gone for over eighteen months and Skooter's still not in the house. She didn't get along with Spyder at all, and now we're having even more problems getting her into the house full-time, and I can't help but feel like we keep letting down Rowan. More to the point, we don't really have a cat "keeping watch" over us now, and that doesn't feel good.
As if all of that weren't enough, we already have another cat auditioning for that role. About a week after Spyder left, we started seeing this orange tabby outside, and she's become kind of a regular fixture. Spyder was never an outdoor cat, so there couldn't be any connection there, but there is a coincidence here I can't help but think about. Our family's first cat -- at least the first one I know of (I still remember her from my youth) -- was an orange tabby named Crissy, and she's the only not-all-black cat we've ever had. Crissy left the house one day and never returned, and I can't help but wonder if this orange tabby might be one of Crissy's great-great-great-great-grandsons. We're not going to let this new orange tabby into the house -- Skooter alone is enough for us -- but as the weather gets colder over this coming weekend it's going to be harder for me to see the orange tabby out there.
Labels: personal
posted 2008/01/06 at 20:17
Okay, it's not so quiet at this particular moment because I have a Red Wings game on my television and my sister and brother-in-law just showed up for their first visit in three days, but still, it's almost eerie, and perhaps a bit cliché, just how quiet this house has gotten since the kids moved out. Perhaps I notice it more than my parents because my bedroom is next to theirs, but still, even after they've been living in their apartment for nearly a week, during the day it gets uncomfortable walking around the house. Perhaps even more than the silence, what bothers me is just how empty things feel around here. If it were just a matter of their old bedroom being empty it would be one thing, but between their stuff being out of our loft (I can access my full-size music keyboard for the first time in nearly two years now), and out of the pantry and kitchen, this house seems too big for the three of us. Granted, I need more space in my bedroom (I'm loathe to move too much out to other rooms for fear of a break-in), but for the three of us there's more space here than we know what to do with.
Last night I started looking through local apartment listings online. I'm not making enough money right now to get even the cheapest of apartments (and this month will be tough because I basically miss a bi-weekly pay period coming up here due to the way work handles adjunct pay), and ultimately I'd prefer to be able to save up enough money to put a down payment on a house rather than get an apartment. I'm rethinking that philosophy, though, as it's something my father drove into my head all my life ("you're just throwing away money when you rent an apartment since you don't own anything in the end"), but if this house seems too big with my parents living here, I can't imagine how I'd feel with a whole house to myself. Yes, I'm a packrat, but I don't have that much stuff. It's going to be a matter of weighing the financial security of having my own house versus the independence of living on my own, and it's something I'm going to have to think about for a very long time.
One bit of business that remains to be done here is to move Skooter into the house; my sister and brother-in-law took Spyder to the apartment with them, and this house isn't the same without at least one cat wandering around here. Whereas Spyder was a more docile cat, though, Skooter is rambunctious, and has a very annoying tendency to get underfoot at the worst times. This isn't such a big deal for me, but both of my parents are over 60 and not all that mobile. The last thing we need right now is for one of them to trip and fall and break something, and so I'm giving serious consideration to putting a collar with a bell on it around Skooter's neck. I hate having to collar a cat for any reason, but just as we had to put a flea collar around Skooter's neck over the summer when she got infested because it was ultimately necessary for her health, collaring and belling Skooter may be necessary for the sake of my parents' well-being. I'm not going to like doing it, but it's something that I think ultimately has to be done.
Labels: personal
posted 2008/01/01 at 19:33
Last night was the first time I can ever remember being under a winter storm warning during the changeover from year to year. In the end we only got some snow out of it, which melted before a new front dumped a few more inches on us this evening, but for a while there I was pondering what might happen if we were to lose power as midnight approached. I soon realized that the best way we'd have to monitor the switch to 2008 would be to use the clock and built-in light on my cell phone. Hardly the most elaborate of ceremonies, but then again if we lost power at midnight in the dead of winter, I'm guessing that marking the changing of years would be one of our least pressing problems. What really freaked me out, though, was that a few hours before midnight, as the storm approached, a lot of our neighbours decided to light off their fireworks then and there so as to avoid the snow later. At first I thought we might be having a thundersnow what with the sound and the sky lighting up like it was, but then I finally realized what was going on. There were still a fair number of fireworks going off at midnight, though, even with a fair amount of snow falling from the ground.
What was oddest about last night, though, was that my sister and brother-in-law retreated to their new apartment a few hours before midnight. With all of their heavy stuff moved over there, I guess it only made sense for them to start using the apartment as their home base, but perhaps I assumed they'd stay with us for the ball drop and then head back to their place. It has definitely been odd today adjusting to the two of them not being here, and more importantly their stuff not being here. I'm relishing being able to reclaim some space in this house for my own stuff -- the two of them had pretty much commandeered the loft in addition to their own bedroom -- but even with the two of them having come to visit twice today (and pick up a few leftover things), the house has a weird ghost-town quality to it now. I guess it doesn't help that I'm trying to readjust to other things as well today, such as getting back on my diet after finally vanquishing that blasted virus. Today has had kind of a surreal tone to it, and I still don't think that deep down I realize all that has changed in this house in just the past forty-eight hours.
I've only got ten days left here before I teach again, and only now am I really able to use this time as I would have liked to have used it at the start. Between all the cleaning I've been doing out in the loft and a lack of sleep from last night, though, I haven't exactly been in top form today. I don't want to say that I feel like the bug caused me to waste my vacation, but at the same time I definitely feel a need to make up for lost time here. I may have to make an early night of tonight just so I can catch up on my sleep, and hope that I can really make the most of every minute of tomorrow. I never like doing that, but it's all I can do to keep from falling asleep as I type here right now, and my bed is looking awfully inviting, too. Maybe tomorrow will be a better day.
posted 2007/12/31 at 04:04
I'm writing you now ... well, because I always do a "Famous Blue Raincoat" post every year, whether on here or someplace else. This is probably the worst year for me to be staying up to do this post, too, because not only is my schedule such that staying up this late is harder than it has ever been before (yeah, I'm getting old, thanks for asking), but in about four hours here we're going to have movers coming in to get all of the heavy stuff out of my sister and brother-in-law's room to move to their new apartment. Given that their room is right next to mine, I'm guessing that I've doomed myself to less than a full night's sleep here, and of course I don't want to sleep through the change to a new year tomorrow night even if the passage of calendar years has never really been my thing.
I haven't made any actual resolutions for the new year in some time -- I prefer to make resolutions on my birthday -- but I guess I still kind of have wishes for the upcoming year. More than the requisite health and good luck for myself and my friends and family, I'm hoping I can finally achieve some clarity regarding my job/school situation that I wrote about a month ago. I do feel good that I was entrusted with an extra class for this coming term, and I'd like to think that my prospects for finding a full-time teaching job are looking up, but I'm still dealing with nagging questions about whether I may regret not going for an additional degree (or possibly even two). I don't think that my mind and heart are still split so evenly as they were a month ago between work and more schooling, but between the time and money I'm looking at investing here, as well as my own confused wishes, I'm still hesitating to commit one way or the other. Given how the deadlines for some of the schools I've looked at are rapidly approaching, I can't afford to hesitate much longer.
I was hoping that this vacation would give me time to clear my head about that mess, but of course then I had to worry about clearing my head of a hundred pounds of mucus in addition to everything else. I'm only just now getting back to a resemblance of a normal life, and two weeks from today I'll be back in the classroom again. (I'll actually start teaching my online course before that, but I'm still not in the same frame of mind for that class as I am for the ones I teach in the flesh.) As I teach more and more classes here -- if I don't get a full-time position soon then I'd like to at least pick up additional classes at other nearby colleges -- figuring out my schedule becomes more and more complicated. I'm not quite at the point where I'll need to start keeping a daily calendar, but I'm getting closer, and I'm having to deal with more uncomfortable questions about just how I spend my time. Perhaps I won't be able to make these "Famous Blue Raincoat" posts for much longer.
Labels: personal, teaching, work
posted 2007/12/30 at 20:02
It is one of those unexplainable phenomena in life that Target stores always seem to carry the notebook paper lined so that it takes the least amount of writing to fill up a page; that is to say, the lines are spaced wide enough, and there's enough white space at the top and bottom of each page, so that filling a page on Target-bought paper takes less time than filling a page on notebook paper bought from another store. (Mead brand takes the least to fill, but when Target stopped carrying it about a year ago they replaced it with another brand that takes nearly as little to fill.) This was something I first started keeping track of back when I first went back to college, as of course I wanted to be able to complete in-class writing assignments as quickly as possible, and I've always passed this little factoid on to my students so they know where to buy the paper that requires the least amount of effort to fill up. (This also results in fewer students tearing sheets out of wire-bound notebooks for their assignments, thus leaving me with fewer of those annoying "jaggies" to deal with.)
Last night I went to Target to purchase more notebook paper, and it was bad enough that I had to wait in a fairly long line while Hockey Night in Canada was starting. As I usually do when I'm waiting in long lines and have a small purchase, I went through the change in my billfold to see if I could pay for the purchase in small coins instead of having to use dollar bills or quarters. (I try to save the latter for when I go to play dance games outside of the house.) However, when I got to the cashier, she triple-counted my coins and still insisted I was five cents short. I didn't have a nickel or five pennies, so I just gave her a quarter, more interested in that point in getting out of there and finishing my shopping than missing more hockey.
Right after that, though, the woman bent down to give me my Target bag with the paper in it ... and the paper wasn't there. She checked her station and I checked my person, and neither of us had it. The nearest we could figure, the person ahead of us in line must have taken my paper by mistake. The cashier called her manager over and explained the situation and asked if I could just go get another pack of paper, and he said okay. I went to get the paper, but on my way back to the front of the store I realized that the woman had never given me my receipt, so I didn't have a way of proving that I bought the paper. The manager was no longer up at the front of the store, and when I got back to the cashier she had stepped out of her station to hug someone even though she had a line at her register. I walked out of the store and nothing more happened after that, but it was uncomfortable for me to walk out without getting one last okay from one of the workers there.
It has perhaps been one of the biggest blessings of my life that I have never had to work a job in retail; I can only imagine how boring and unthankful those jobs must be, and whenever possible I try to use self-service checkouts and such so that workers don't have to deal with me any more than is absolutely necessary. (I don't want to have to deal with them either, but that's more due to my lack of sociability than anything else.) My experience at Target last night is one of those rare instances where I felt that the employee I was dealing with did not deal with me in a competent manner, and had I not been in such a rush I might have done something more to try to right each of the tiny things that went wrong there. However, after seeing that cashier go and hug someone, I can't help but think that perhaps she had something really heavy to deal with, and was understandably distracted while she was serving me. I'm sure that others might think I should have complained about her to the manager, but after watching her hug that one person on the way out, I couldn't help but think that the small amount of money and time I lost in the transaction, ultimately, really wasn't that important, and that she probably had far heavier problems to deal with than me trying to save a couple of coins and watch a bit more hockey.
posted 2007/12/27 at 21:31
Given how little most of my online friends have been updating lately, I guess I don't feel quite so bad about not posting these past few days. Of course, they're probably away on family vacations celebrating the holidays, whereas I'm still trying to shake the last of this bug off. I'm finally starting to feel like myself again, and I think I should be resuming normal activities here. I still have about two weeks of vacation, so I should have a good chunk of time here to handle the things I was hoping to handle over break, just not as much time as I would have liked. I really hope I feel well enough to start exercising again soon here, though, because I have put on a bit of weight these past couple of weeks (thanks to the combination of holiday food and going off my diet), and I want to get it off as quickly as possible.
I'm still kind of getting caught up on a lot of things, but I wanted to mention a couple of big changes in my life lately. I'm not sure if I said something about this earlier or not, but I was originally scheduled to teach two sections of composition next semester, which was going to be my first time ever teaching multiple classes in a term. Well, near the end of the semester I got an e-mail from my boss, and he asked if I could take an online section of introductory business writing. (The wait list for the online sections already offered was so big that they needed to create an extra section for the overflow.) I've never taught online before, and generally prefer to teach in the flesh where the students can interact with one another and I can help guide their conversations, and I'm definitely more at home teaching composition than business writing, but I took the assignment anyway because it's going to be a challenge for me, and, well, I like challenges. It also means more money, and it'll mean more stuff to put on my CV.
This does, however, mean that my reading load over vacation suddenly went sky-high since I have to familiarize myself with the text for the business writing class, and it's a pretty darn big one. My book pile was getting high enough to start with, and of course it only got bigger after Christmas. (I asked for clothes and books for Christmas and wound up with more clothes than books, which under the circumstances may actually be a good thing. Oh, and none of you bought me anything off of my Amazon wishlist, so expect more whining when my birthday comes up in March.) In spite of that I still went out tonight and picked up Keith Olbermann's new book, and there are still a lot of books I want to get as soon as I can. I have no idea where I'm going to find the time for all this reading, but maybe I can try to get caught up on it here before the next term starts.
The other bit of big news is that my sister and brother-in-law finally got their own apartment. They started moving things over today, and I'm guessing it will take them a few more days to get fully moved, but the house is about to get quieter, and given the antagonistic relationship I've had with them lately that's kind of a good thing. The bad part, though, is that they're taking Spyder to their apartment, and while we'll be moving Skooter into the house after that, I don't like that it'll be that much harder to see Spyder now. I'm hoping that the fact that I've already been trusted with an extra class in just my second term at MCCC means that I'll get a tenure-track position there soon, so I can start making enough money to live on my own as well.
Labels: family, personal, teaching, work
posted 2007/12/23 at 20:39
I've been sick for close to two weeks now, and it's only been in the past day or two that I've felt well enough to resume what I consider to be normal activities for me. It's almost as if my body was trying to make up for how I didn't have a serious illness for close to two years there, and shut down almost completely when this bug really hit. As it is I'm still not feeling well enough to resume exercise, and I continue to use television as a way to distract myself for how lousy I feel (thankfully there was a MythBusters marathon earlier today), but I'm no longer feeling like I was earlier when I basically had to save up my energy so I could tend to work stuff, then come back here and basically collapse either in front of my computer or, more likely, on top of my bed.
It's amazing just how out of it I continue to feel right now. I've kind of been taking things easy so that I didn't tire myself out with other things, but now I feel kind of disconnected from the world around me. For example, I haven't been following the news that closely for a couple of weeks, and I don't even have my Google Sidebar on my computer now because it was hurting my head trying to keep up with all the information on it. I recognize that this is a natural response to being sick, and that in the long run this is probably a healthy thing for me to be doing, but at the same time we're getting very close to the first primaries for the "big two" parties and I don't feel all that informed as to what's going on here. Just from the cursory glances I've gotten of the news lately, it looks like Ron Paul's come out of nowhere in terms of coverage devoted to his campaign, and once again Dennis Kucinich is getting the short end of the straw. Without being able to delve deeper into the news, though, I don't feel like I can make a good blog post about the campaign, so I'll probably need to take an afternoon here after Christmas just to get caught up on the news.
I also haven't been on instant messenger that much lately, when I'd been doing such a good job of making myself available on it once I downloaded Trillian and got it installed. Normally this wouldn't be such a big issue for me, but a couple of my friends seem to have been going through some tough times recently and it kind of stinks that I haven't been around to help them. I suppose it would help if I were better about talking on the phone, but I haven't had a landline connection in my room since we got our cable modem, and I only really use my cell phone for emergencies and business purposes. I'm kind of an insulated person to start with, but this cold just made things ten times worse for me in that regard, and just like with the news, now I find myself needing to catch up on stuff with my small circle of friends that I missed these past couple of weeks.
There have been some other important developments in my life here, but I'll get to those in another post; right now I must play catch-up with yet other things. Gee, I thought things would slow down once I was on vacation here. Silly me.
Labels: internet, personal, politics
posted 2007/12/02 at 18:02
Although I've always had a fairly strong non-comfortist streak, for about a couple of years after I first started going to private school, I really worked hard at trying to fit in and gain acceptance with the "cool" crowd in my class. I begged and whined at my parents until they got me the $40 shirts everyone else was wearing to school, I refused to wear anything my parents bought from K-Mart (which was the family's primary outfitter at the time), I got heavily into rap music during its first real mainstream surge, and started growing my hair out. I failed at gaining acceptance, of course, and eventually reverted to my old ways of acting and dressing (although I still wear my hair long), before finally finding communities at Antioch, online, and (on-and-off at) UT that accepted and appreciated me for who I am. I think it was only later, though, years after I stopped trying to gain my peers' acceptance at that private school, that I actually learned the whole thing about not presenting a false image to others and being true to yourself and all of that stuff.
To this day, though, I don't think it's a lesson that has taken root. As a case in point, I've been doing most of my entertainment shopping online ever since Media Play went out of business a couple of years ago; given where I do most of that shopping, I'll take this opportunity to remind you all that if you, too, want to shop at the Internet's top retailer, use this link to Amazon.com when making your purchases and I'll get a little extra store credit to help me buy stuff. Better still, you could buy me something off of my Amazon.com wishlist. (I'm shameless, I know.) Anyway, as much as I love shopping at Amazon, I shop at other retailers when I can find a better deal or when they can get something to me faster than Amazon can. One of those retailers is Barnes and Noble, and I get frequent e-mails from them about special offers and such; I'm not in their membership club yet, but I probably should be given that I'll probably save more money than the membership costs. (I don't like going to their bricks-and-mortar store in Toledo because it's across the street from our huge mall and the traffic out there is horrible, particularly in the heavy shopping season, but I still try to make it out there every month or two.)
This past week, in one of their e-mails, Barnes and Noble was advertising a collection of four Hemingway novels in one tome for just over ten bucks. (When I went to the Barnes and Noble Website, though, it was selling for less than nine.) Strange as it may seem, I've never read Hemingway before, even though I have a general sense that he's one of those authors whom I should have read long ago, if not for the benefit of my own writing then just for the rich images he paints with his words. Eventually I also received a coupon for 15% off of any item, so I applied that discount to The Power of Myth (which was already selling cheaper there on Amazon, and I needed to buy so I could stop borrowing my sister's copy all the time), and between that and the Hemingway collection I got a good order and qualified for free shipping. The order should arrive here, I hope, by the middle of the week.
Here's the thing, though: in addition to shopping at Barnes and Noble, the Hemingway collection comes from Barnes and Noble's own printing press. As much as I know that Barnes and Noble probably has a snooty reputation among the general public, within academic circles they're actually seen as kind of pedestrian. There just seems to be this general comtempt for Barnes and Noble, not just for being the huge nasty national chain choking out all the good local bookstores (although Borders was the reason Toledo's great independent bookstore, Thackeray's, shuttered a few years ago), but also for being a kind of faux source of intelligence. There's this dark cloud hanging over my head from all my years of higher education that seems to be saying to me that if I were really educated that I wouldn't be shopping somewhere as "common" as Barnes and Noble, let alone buying books from their own press.
Just to be clear about this from the start, no one needs to tell me just how silly this kind of thinking is. I'm well aware of it, and I wish I understood why I was letting this kind of thinking cloud my judgment. Hemingway novels are Hemingway novels no matter who prints them, and I'll be getting the same great content I would have gotten if I'd purchased the books separately, from different presses, and at greater expense, from another publisher. If I lose esteem in the eyes of some of my academic colleagues because I shop at Barnes and Noble, then the real problem is with my colleagues, not me. At the same time, though, as nonsensical as it sounds, I kind of hesitated to place my order for the Hemingway collection at first, and looking back now I feel kind of dumb for having done so. Perhaps all those years ago I did stop giving in to peer pressure to maintain a certain kind of image from my classmates, but I can't help but wonder now if perhaps that kind of poor thinking is manifesting itself again in this pressure I feel about shopping at Barnes and Noble. Maybe I didn't learn my lesson back then as well as I thought I had.
posted 2007/11/22 at 21:01
The depression I've been suffering from these past few days has only been getting worse. I even skipped half of my usual waffles-and-Mystery Science Theatre 3000 Thanksgiving tradition today, just eating the waffles and generally moping around the house. Things have gotten bad enough that I notice myself slipping back into some of the old, destructive behaviours I thought I'd gotten over in recent years. I suppose things aren't so bad right now because I can distract myself with the Red Wings game on my television right now, and I was playing video games earlier to take my mind off of my problems, but when the hockey game is over tonight I have a feeling that I'm going to slip right back into a very deep funk.
There are far too many contributing factors to this recent bad spell for me, but one of the underlying themes that has come up is a kind of juvenile sense of not being rewarded for doing the right things. When I was very young I was always getting into all kinds of trouble, and I frequently acted out and misbehaved as a way of getting attention. Threads of that behaviour trailed well into my adult life, and I wouldn't be honest if I said I've totally eradicated them, but as I've grown older I've put in more and more of an effort to be a better person. In addition to just the overriding theme of acting in good conscience, I try to have that spirit carry through to all the small things in life I do like adhere to all the rules of the road when I'm driving, holding doors open for people wherever I go, and the like.
Unfortunately, and I don't know if this really is happening more or if I'm just noticing it more because I'm in such a bad mood right now (probably a little of both), but more than ever it just seems like being the good person is costing me. Everywhere I look, it seems like the people who break the rules, who act selfishly, who don't care who or what they hurt by acting in their own self-interest, are getting what they want, while I keep getting the short end of the stick. I know that this sounds childish, and I know that being the better person is supposed to be its own reward and all of that, but at times like this it just seems hopeless to keep trying.
I know that I can't be the only one out there right now who is feeling like this, so in keeping with the theme of the holiday, I would just like to say, to all of the rest of you out there who always try to act for the greater good, who follow all the rules even when they work to your detriment, who make every effort not to give in to selfish, destructive thinking (even though you may not always succeed in doing so) ... to you, I say thank you. Perhaps I may not have directly benefited from your kindnesses, but I'd like to think the act of being kind and responsible helps the world, intangibly, as a whole. I appreciate the efforts you put in to make the world a better place, and I can only hope that others are appreciative of my efforts as well.
Labels: depression, personal
posted 2007/11/14 at 21:29
Although the eleventh of this month is notable for me personally because it was the day I launched this Website seven years ago, it's also painful for me because five years ago on that date, I made the biggest mistake of my life. I turned my back on the best friend I've ever had in my entire life at the moment when she needed me the most, and nearly every day since then I have cursed myself for having done what I did. Some days it feels like I'm getting better about it -- I know full well how harmful it is for me to keep living in the past like that -- but I can think of no other reason for the deep depression I've been in lately than this rather unhappy anniversary. Too often in these past five years, whenever I feel like I might be on the verge of real happiness, it seems like the bad karma I built up from that one mistake comes back to bite me in the butt real hard. I'm not so sure that I believe in curses, but I've certainly become a lot less skeptical of them these past five years.
It was only in the past few months that I came to realize why I did what I did back then. It didn't take me long after the incident for me to realize that, as much as I tried to block the feelings out in my conscious mind, I was deeply in love with my friend. That much was fairly clear, but it's only been recently that I've realized that more than just being afraid of my feelings towards her, I have a fear of being loved by others in general. I finally realized what a tremendous responsibility it is to be loved, and how it was a responsibility that I didn't feel ready to handle. Yes, back when I was still in college I had my share of crushes and fixations, but none of them ever got to the point where I had to start thinking about what it would mean to be loved by someone else. (Just to clarify, I have no fear of being loved by other members of my family because I just don't feel there's the same responsibility there.)
These past few weeks, I've been thinking about this a lot. Perhaps I'm doing so because a couple of old friends I can't deny having feelings for suddenly showed back up in my life recently; perhaps I'm doing so because I continue to edge ever-closer to leaving here and living on my own and I worry about feeling even lonelier than I do now. I want to be more open to the possibilities of love, but after I've been through so much disappointment these past five years, that comes very, very hard to me. Don't quote me the whole "better to have loved and lost" thing; that's one line you don't have to tell someone with two degrees in English, thank you very much. Still, I can't help but feel that I'm in a very fragile state right now (for this and other reasons), and I can't help but worry that if I make any kind of move to bring that kind of love back into my life I'll just wind up hurt again. I already have a hard enough time dealing with regret; I don't need more bad decisions on my part to look back on like the one I made a little over five years ago.
Labels: depression, personal
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