Procrastination
Well it is 1:00 Monday morning and here I am writing my
poems why must I always procrastinate
it only leads to bad things I can’t stand it
and yet time and time again I always am here
doing my stuff last minute
I guess you can compare procrastination
to masturbation
it is awesome until you realize you
screwed yourself.
I busted out laughing in class. It’s awesome.
I’m not cool enough to post a picture in my journal, but I just posted this comic inside my classroom:
http://snafu-comics.com/
So thanks to he who posted it earlier. 😉
Cut because yes I’m squeamish about talking about female stuff. But only a little.
I realized the other day that I was reading quite a variety of books… simultaneously.
(* indicates a re-read)
Undefended Love – still slowly working my way through it. It’s a very hard read for me and I can only sometimes handle the intensity.
The Courage to Heal – also slowly working through it. I’m still trying to make progress, but it is interesting how I notice that I have only so much emotional energy on a given day so I can deal with my job or my personal shit. I think this will come to the front of the pile again when school is over.
*Walk in My Soul – I’m reading Noah one of my favorite books. It’s a neat experience because this book was one of my favorite x’s40 books growing up and I have never shared it with anyone before. I’ve also never really read to anyone before. It’s really good.
*One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – have to read along with the kidlets and make reading quizzes and study questions cause the ones I made last year were only so-so.
*I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – technically a reread, but it has been more than a decade. I’m doing this book with the kid I’m home teaching partially because he is a serious racist and I’m trying to get him to look at some of his opinions.
The Hobbit – I’ve never read this book. I’ve never wanted to. Comp and Lit picked it over Go Ask Alice. *sigh*
Freakonomics – I am really loving this book. It is awesome and amazing. I’m devouring chapters whenever I get a chance. Thank you Kevin!!
Radical Ecstasy – also slowly working my way through this one. It’s really interesting and it is inspiring me to feel like I want to be playing more even though I don’t have much time or energy. This summer, I am going to be wearing Noah out. Yay! Thank you Janet. I think you two did a marvelous job with this one. 🙂
I have also picked up and finished several Anne Rice books* in the past 3-4 weeks. 🙂
I forgot what it was like to love to read and to do it all the time. I am so happy that I got it back. Getting a degree in English killed my love of books for several years and I was worried that it would stay killed.
Today I get to go in three hours late without having to bend the rules because I am an honest and straightforward person. So screw you to all of my dishonest colleagues. (Rant maybe forthcoming on that one.)
This morning I got all of the prep work done for the next few days that has been making me nervous. Sweet.
Today, I checked the bank account and saw what would have been once upon a time a staggering amount of money. At this point it isn’t staggering, but it is certainly plenty so that my darling husband could be out of work for months before I would worry even one iota about him finding a job. My salary is enough to keep us afloat and we have a beautiful cushion for just about any “just in case.” Oh, and the only debt we have left is the mortgage and my student loans due to me masterfully managing our money and paying off a rather large amount of debt in the past six months. Go me.
Yesterday I got to see my lovely Sarah, though only briefly, and she presented me with the baby clothes she has acquired so far. The fact that I am not the only one joyfully anticipating me getting pregnant lets me feel a sense of family and attachment I wouldn’t have believed I would get. Thank you Sarah; thank you for being my family. Eight more weeks until I stop taking birth control. The days are flying by…
Including today I have 31 more days of educational opportunity remaining with my kidlets. But that includes finals and weird schedules and I don’t see any of the individual classes that many times. Really I only have 22 more days with each individual class. Eeeek! Must get through this book! But I have a good solid unit plan in front of me and I am confident that I will get through it and my babies will do well.
Life is really good.
I have been working on cleaning my desk. This is an eternal process. But today I start home teaching a kid who is at home for medical reasons. And uhhhh I have to have some paperwork for this.
Paperwork? You mean like the kind that sits on my desk randomly in piles? Like the kind that I was industrious and I cleaned up? ….
Oh.
My.
God.
It took about 15 minutes of freaking out and making a big mess but I finally found it stuck in the middle of some random binder where I take attendence. What in the motherfuck is it doing in there?!
Thank you God for not hating me today. This was almost bad. Mostly because I don’t have any other access to the kid’s address…
I am making my really neato on-top-of-everything 2nd period aide read The Hobbit with us so that she can grade the reading quizzes. 🙂 I’m making the test and we are talking about acceptable answers to the questions, but it really streamlines everything if she actually knows the book.
Did I mention that she now updates my gradebook and the school websites for parents to see? I worship this girl. I do check her work, but it takes me about 1/20th of the time to briefly check over that it would take to do the work myself.
Noah and I have been seeing a therapist for a few weeks and I honestly have some mixed feelings about how it is going. I think that what we are looking for is some new tricks in how to handle things and I’m not sure we are getting our money’s worth. Last night turned into a big argument in fact. It’s awesome when someone says something and then says, “I didn’t say that” in a patronizing voice. That’s a good way to have me be instantly furious. I was fairly seething. Noah could tell how angry I was. I’m pretty sure that anyone with half a brain could tell. Her reaction was… interesting. She is big on somatic work so she tried to abruptly change the tone and way things were going by breaking the flow and telling me to make physical motions so that I could “establish boundaries.” Well, I told her no, that I was going to establish my boundaries by not doing what she told me to do. That seemed to throw her. She gave the plattitudes about how conflict is good, but I don’t think she really believes it…
But what really rocked for me was that Noah totally defended me. That rocked.
Ok, I had a kid plagiarise hard core. The whole first page of his paper is blatantly not his work. I spent a while freaking out because I *hate* dealing with this kind of thing.
I asked the kid to stay in during break and said, “So… what is your favorite work by D.H. Lawrence? Kate Millett?” because he had referenced them in the first page. He said he didn’t know who they were. I asked him where he did his research then and he said, “Oh! Wikipedia! I wanted to make sure I wrote a good background on the literary criticism before I got into this book.” *face palm* I explained to him that large scale quoting of other work is plagiarism and illegal and that he has to fail this assignment. He nodded and just said ok.
I can’t give him a zero. He’s an idiot, but it doesn’t look like he meant to be doing something bad. I’ll give him a 50% and call his mother to explain.
Called mom. She understands and is being very supportive. Yay!
Not a good day. Not a good day at all. I’m having anxiety attacks and freaking out. I can point at specific things and say, “See–that’s why I am feeling this way” but it isn’t entirely true. Yes, I feel like this because of those things, but it is my interpretation of those things that creates the problem.
I want to be cryptic and I want to get this shit off my chest before kids get here so I can maybe calm down. I’m sorry baby, I don’t think privacy is going to win this time.
I’m still freaking out because of the scene that went so badly for me in December. I still feel edgy and scared and disturbed. I still don’t want to have sex much. I feel unsafe. But my beloved baby doesn’t feel these same things because he didn’t have the same experience. I don’t say that as a slam or negative statement about him–just as a statement of truth with no judgment. The trouble comes in because I don’t want to have sex. He does. Having ridiculous amounts of sex has been one of the big pillars of our relationship. So uhhhh now we are having a hard time because I don’t feel safe enough to do it and yet he still has the same libido he has always had. I feel pressured and like I am failing to live up to the basics of our relationship. Mostly due to the fact that I am pathetic, insecure, and stupid we aren’t doing the open relationship thing right now so he doesn’t have any other outlet either. This is a problem because I feel like I am not willing to meet his needs and I am keeping him from getting them met elsewhere. This very much feels like the whole situations becomes “all my fault.” It doesn’t help that we have this whole brutal honesty thing. I know he isn’t happy and I feel terribly guilty and awful.
Noah gets upset with me because I can take things he says and twist them just a little bit and use them to beat myself up for a long time. There is a lot right now I am doing that with. I’m having a hard time really believing that he should be with me given that I am failing to a)meet his needs b)allow him to get his needs met elsewhere. I feel like he is suffering because I am crazy and stupid and that isn’t fair to him.
I started thinking at some point this morning that I should just start completely shutting ‘me’ down and just do it. I realized years ago that I am just a hair and a bad day away from being multiple. I am very good at putting on a completely different personality in order to get through various things. I’ve done this since I was a little kid but I have always fought very hard to keep the different personas highly conscious of one another so I am not a real multiple. If I stopped fighting so hard I could easily disassociate completely though. It has certainly happened. I kind of feel like it might be better/easier if I just started doing that. I know that it would be a new and exciting kind of psychological damage and I shouldn’t be seeking new damage in the course of trying to deal with old shit but it feels right now like I am so broken that there is no point in trying to be anything else anyway.
I want to cut. I want to cut so bad I can barely breathe. I would almost like to retreat to the relative comfort/hiding place of being suicidal but I am just functional enough to know that it isn’t an option. I wish it was. Somewhere along the way of fixing my shit I realized that suicide is entirely selfish and I am just functional enough to know how much it would hurt many people for me to do it. I kind of with I didn’t realize it because sometimes I feel like I am drowning under the weight of having to suck it up for the sake of other people.
I don’t know how to be the partner Noah deserves right now. I feel so awful and pathetic and terrible. I hate that I *feel* like he would be better off if I completely disappeared so he could find someone better. I hate that intellectually I know that would destroy him and he would probably never feel safe enough to really look if I did something like that. I would give just about anything to not hurt right now.
The bell rings in three minutes. No more time for me to be stupid and self absorbed.
Some people are aware that I have back problems, but I generally try not to whine too much about the situation. Today I don’t want to whine, I want to lie on the floor and sob. It hurts. It hurts so much I keep seeing flashes of white light through my field of vision. I keep having low level spasms. My kids don’t really seem to notice and that is for the best.
But I notice. And I’m taking enough Ibuprofen to make my stomach hurt. Tonight, Vicodin even though it will make me want to throw up. That feeling is better than this pain.
No wonder my students think I am weird. This is the grammar test. (On the actual paper I give credit to the author but my footnotes and stuff don’t transfer to lj well.)
And not even for me. I have had three kids come to me to pour their hearts out and ask for help/advice/wisdom. I’m being as gentle as I am capable and taking them to people with more authority when it is a good thing. It means it has been a day for lots of personal disclosure, “You don’t know what foster care is like!” “Well honey… actually, I do.” “You don’t know what it is like to be the only white kid in a neighborhood and have lots of people want to beat you up.” “Well honey…. actually, I do.” Then there is the kid where his parents have told him he is getting thrown out on his 18th birthday so he is trying to determine his options for getting out of high school early so he can get a job. I understand that situation too. *sigh*
It’s one of those days when I feel like despite how difficult my job is–I am where I am supposed to be. Not many people have had my experiences and I’m glad that I can help the kids.
Disneyland was good. Spending time with my baby is fantabulous. Tired. Busy. The next few weeks are going to be killer. I’m going to beg grading assistance on 4/29. It’s going to be frightning by then. I can do it, but I’m going to barely sleep for the next two weeks. Between grading and planning… I feel like I’m drowning. But! On the bright side, this is the last hard core push for the whole year. 🙂
Kurt Vonnegut died tonight.
Way much to get done. And I’m losing track of it. And I’ve been losing paper lists so…
The Washington Post pulled a stunt where they had a world famous virtuoso violinist plat at a Metro station in DC. I’m rather horrified by the results.
“In the book of Death of a Salesman by Authir Millar was about a family that lived a typical life. Now with Authur Miller writing this play he wanted to show his point in the book to show how criticism works and the different ethnics. In all the world and years that we the people have been through this was formed to make a point out about how criticism reflects. When you pick up a book and read the first couple of pages you will only buy it if you seem interested in it. The writer wants you to see his/her art of the text. The interesting part of the text is that it’s a game, you have the cards in your hand and the book is the deck. If you play the cards right you can see how the text is written It’s a pick and guess game that would make the book work your mind. If you read over the text you’ll miss all the hints and interpretation of the book. My point is in this, is that in every book has to have text. In ever text there is art formed to explain what the author has benn through or what he/she wants to happen. Everyone has a unique life stye; this could lead to “misreading” or changing how the book is empathized. With everything that is happening in the book, it can effect on how the text is plotted out in the book.”
A real life introduction to a criticism paper for my class. This is by far the worst one I have seen so far. It could get worse. heh (Typos and not ever spelling the author’s name correctly… that’s all her.)
I am finally getting around to grading the big scary criticism essays the kids wrote. (This is the only assignment this year that I have slacked on. The kids are shocked, but actually pretty cool about the fact that I haven’t done it. heh) Each paper is taking about 8 minutes to grade. There are ~100 papers. This means it will take over 13 hours of grading. Holy crudmonkeys Batman. *sigh* I have done 6 papers so far. I started with my cruddy class on purpose (6th period just doesn’t have very many strong students… I don’t know why…) so that things would improve steadily as I go through grading. I have one B-, a couple of C’s and a D so far. Ugh. This is expected, but not cheerful. I’ve been grading for a while this morning. I’m trying to grade 5-10 then take a break, then come back. It doesn’t help that I have massive amounts of house cleaning I want to do and I would much rather be just cleaning. *sigh*
The problem is: I put a lot of comments on each essay. They worked hard on these papers and I belive they deserve to understand what they are doing well and what they are doing poorly. But see, all of my teacher training has told me that a lot of comments are BAD because they freak out the kids and they don’t read them or care anyway. But I still think that they deserve to know how they are doing, Damnit. So I will comment. And I will give them 5 minutes at the end of class to go over the comments and ask questions if they need to.
The last time I did a big hard push on grading I had Erik and Noah help me and we sat around drinking alcohol and making catty comments. That was awesome. 🙂 I wish that these essays could be treated the same way… Maybe we can do that again for the next batch of writers workshop stories. 🙂 Those are less formal and it’s ok for those math/science boys to help grade those ones. I don’t trust them with literary criticism. 😉
I made a joke last night about the perks I get from being married that was a bit off color and didn’t fully flatter my baby. Really though, the best perk is that anytime he wakes up at all he instantly rolls over so he can grab me like a teddy bear and pull me in close to snuggle. And I am going to get to experience that for decades. I win.