Things I’ve Come to Understand Because of 4/16

• I love my brother-in-law as much as my brother. I’m sure I have for a long time, but I didn’t realize it consciously till 4/16.
• Feeling secure isn’t about locking all the doors. It’s about feeling I don’t have to and I’ll still be okay.
• I know what it’s like to have an asthma attack now, and I know that there are two Virginia state police officers who are the nicest men in the world. Thank you for taking care of me when I broke down with that asthma attack.
• I have learned that a poet’s words can give a community a path out of their sadness. I had no idea a poem could ever be adopted so thoroughly. Literature is a powerful thing.
• I found that I have compassion for a mass murderer. What he did was horrible, but I’m glad the Va Tech community found a place for a Hokie Stone for him in the memorial.
• I understand what it was like to want a gun. For a day, I wanted a gun, and I wanted to know how to shoot it to defend myself. [You’re all safe; the feeling passed.]
• I still feel safe on campus. At 1:30 AM Friday, I was walking around by myself. I have not let someone take that away.
• There are times when knowing that everyone in my family is physically safe isn’t enough.
• I know which people in this vast world really care about me. They IMed or emailed on 4/16 to check on me. One of them even showed up outside my office building to give me a hug on the 17th. Some of them are still checking on me. Some people still haven’t said a word. The categories of who does and doesn’t care about me have become very transparent. [edit: This was misread as indicating that I have/had a list of names. I don’t/didn’t. 5/15/07]
• That I’ll never understand and I desperately want to know why.

In Memory

Normally all these ribbons seem silly and pretentious to me. Today, this is the best I can do. I don’t have words for it.

Reading My E-mail While Chris Writes His Blog

Click To Play

Chris.tv got a little boring. Okay, sure the writing teacher in me was entertained for a while by watching him compose his blog entry on the mashups from Thursday night. Once I saw that his composing process was fairly normal however, I wandered off to do other things. This is the result. Again, even though Bwana disagrees, I must emphasize that using iMovie does not involve sacrificing kittens. Soundtrack: Download “NYC Trippin'” (mp3) from “All The Pretty Lights” by Soul Ballet 215 Music More On This Album

Pink Camo Purse

OMG!!! Gaze upon the beautiful present that I am saving up to buy for Dr. B to carry to her knitwit jamboree. It is going to match her shirt PERFECTLY!!!

A Five Things Meme

Because Dr. B has forced me to, I am completing a A Five Things Meme. My task is to name five things that help me be successful every day. Not clear to me if the dear Dr. B is going to accept the first ones that come to mind:

1. Get out of bed.
2. Find diet brown soda.
3. Take my medicine.
4. Put on clean underwear.
5. Sleep as much as possible.

Chances are that she’s not going to accept that however, and since I’m meeting her tomorrow for coffee and she will bitch-slap me, I will offer these:

1. Organize things topically—my email, my feeds, my papers, everything. If all my stuff just flowed into one giant bin, I’d spend all my time trying to figure out what mattered. Divided up into folders, I can quickly decide when I need to pay attention to things and when I can let something wait.
2. Let things go when they don’t matter—well, I try to anyway. I’m not so good at this, but when I can make it happen, it’s very helpful. For instance, I have spent years of my life with piles of bills and various receipts and documents in piles to be filed. Eventually I get them filed, but they sit there and fill me with guilt AND end up taking far too much time when I do get to filing them. About 6 months ago, I realized that all this filing was a waste of time. I very rarely needed to return to a bill or whatever. I got an 8.5 by 11 amazon box, and began just dropping bills, etc. in it. If I need the January bank statement, I know it’s in there, but chances are I won’t. Much easier. Basically, when I can, I try to figure out when doing “the perfect thing” or “the ideal thing” can be replaced with “the simplest thing” without causing any harm.
3. Set up audio alerts and rules&8212;everyone who hears my computer thinks I’m crazy, but I know by the sounds whether an email is one that I need to go read immediately, a routine email I can read later, or even spam/bounced mail that I never need to look at. It’s a sort of computer-version of caller ID, but I don’t even have to be in the same room as the computer. I just have to be able to hear it.
4. Focus on tasks—If I’m at work, I try to spend much time as possible on work tasks. I multitask with the best of them and may be working on 3 or 4 things at once, but I try to avoid doing any personal stuff in the office and I’ve been trying to do less work stuff at home.
5. Do a little bit every day—Every day, whether it’s a work day or not, I check my email, watch various work-related websites, and so forth. Keeping up with things every day helps me avoid ever having a huge pile to overcome. I use a modified Getting Things Done method to figure out what I need to take care of right away, delete what doesn’t matter, and prioritize what I’ll take care of later.

Letter Play

Thanks to metaspencer, we have this from spell with flickr

Today’s Failed Experiment

Well, today’s diet experiment didn’t come out very well. Had brussels sprouts around midday when i got hungry. Wasn’t hungry before then. then around 3 wanted a mocha, so got that. Felt full and didn’t eat anything else.

By the time I got home at 7ish, I was hungry. Went about cooking something (cabbage, whole wheat couscous, some beef stock). Suddenly I was so dizzy I thought I was going to fall down or pass out. I haven’t been that dizzy in a very, very long time, and certainly not on the very first day of a diet. I don’t know what happened. And at that point, I gave up again and ate several things that I shouldn’t have.

Why can’t I figure out a diet that I can actually manage to succeed at? Why can’t I get my head to do things properly? I hate being such a failure :(

E-ports and Lesson Revision

This week’s Inbox is out. The Ideas section was inspired by the e-portfolios statement adopted at CCCC last week. I worked in a link to Kathi’s “Postmodernism, Palimpsest, and Portfolios: Theoretical Issues in the Representation of Student Work” (link only works for 21 days). My related NCTE Inbox blog entry offers some commentary on the thinking that should be behind students’ Web-sensible e-portfolios.

Also (finally) finished revisions of the lesson plan that ties to the English Journal article that I published this month (link only gets you to a login, but hey, I’m published on paper). The lesson Many Years Later: Responding to Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool” explores the poem and then asks students to adopt the persona of a character from the poem and write about their thoughts from a modern-day perspective. Not necessarily a new idea, but a fun assignment nonetheless.

Yesterday’s Favorite Photo

Okay, I know it’s pretty much a stock photo subject, but it came out well and I like it. Tonight I’m going to try to get some building shots.

Hokie Fan in Illinois Country