pedablogical

Movies: Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Miles, am I going crazy? Don’t spare me. I’ve got to know.

No, you’re not. Even these days, it isn’t as easy to go crazy as you might think. But you don’t have to be losing your mind to need psychiatric help.

—Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
Republic Pictures

For Web: Scrapbooking meets blogging – Lifehacker

Scrapbooking meets blogging – Lifehacker—intriguing…

Do you ever sit down to write something and find that you can’t figure out anything to say that even begins to sound useful? I have been trying to write this entry for over an hour. I deleted it twice. This is at least the third try, and yet I still can’t seem to figure out what I mean to say. I only know that I want to say something. Sure I could report the events of the day. I did this and that, and I didn’t have the energy to do these other things.

It’s almost as if my head is empty of anything other than flat statements that just seem incredibly stupid. I write them and then I delete them. It doesn’t actually accomplish much in the way to writing.

I don’t know why I feel compelled to write an entry right now anyway. That is a lot of the problem I am sure. I’m not even sure what I want to write about; yet I need to write something. I have things that I need to say, but somehow I can’t say them or I’m not allowed to say them. I have to keep quiet. And as a result, somehow I’m stuck. Would it help if I said everything? Not really. It would only make things worse I expect.

I’m just stuck in the same little pattern. Over and over. Get up tired, go dressed, go to work, work and work and work, drive home, turn on the basement light because I need to deal with the laundry, walk up the steps into the kitchen, realize I’m too tired to clean or cook, sit in front of the computer unable to write, realize I don’t really have anyone to talk to anyway, walk out to the kitchen, prepare junk to eat because I’m too tired to invest in cooking, look down the open basement door and feel guilty about the laundry, look at the kitchen and feel guilty about the dirty dishes, go back to the computer, eat and feel guilty and sick because I’m eating bad food, search the Web for diet options, stare at the computer some more, realize I’m too tired to do anything like exercise and too overwhelmed to eat the right things, randomly search around for things that I don’t find, stare at the computer some more, eventually give up and go to bed, sleep restlessly, turn off the alarm clock three times because I’m too tired, start over.

Stuck. Stuck and overwhelmed by the inertia it would take to fix any of it. So I just sit here. Wishing and feeling guilty.

In a spot of boredom, I was playing with camera settings, and figured out how to do close-ups. They appear to be more fuzzy than the already fuzzy regular versions, but I was entertained by the ability nonetheless.

The silly camera has face tracking, and I didn’t realize that it was keeping me from doing close-ups and whatnot till about 15 minutes ago.

None of this is helping me solve my problems, and I think the only reason that I am posting this picture is really that it’s so close that you can’t really tell the details of my portly reality.

Someone said today that from the back, my hair looked like it should be in a shampoo commercial. Why can’t I be a Barbie everywhere damn it?

Today was another day. I still don’t know what I’m going to do about Lubbock, but I do know that I need to figure it out. I just feel so brainless. I want all the wrong things, and they’re not even things that I have a chance of getting; but I guess that isn’t really getting us anywhere.

I thought about trying to guess out what my requirements were for Lubbock. Maybe that would be more helpful than that list of to-do’s that I created.

• must have a/c or will die
• need to have cold water and/or the CF diet soda (ice chest? frig? something)
• must have a bed that I can pile up properly so that I don’t cough all night

I guess those are the most important things really. The rest is mostly things that I would like. The sticking points are money and location. The dorm is probably closer to the folks I would want to see, and it’s cheaper. But the dorm is least likely to fit those three needs. I don’t know what to do. I know that I will need more hotel rooms, since it’s a 2-day drive each way. I know that it’s pricey when you add up all the money. And I left out the privacy issues. Communal showers are not my thing. Really they’re fairly impossible for me given how much I hate myself.

Everything that I really need points to the hotel. The things that I want point to the dorm. Hell.

I should just give up. I’m useless at conferences anyway. stupid me.

Another weekend passes. I’ve done some more reading of Norma Fox Mazer’s What I Believe; but I still haven’t quite finished it yet. I actually started it weeks ago, but put it down because it was depressing. It still is, so I’m not sure why I chose past tense there. It has no connection to what I normally read. No computer or technology connection. I had Lisa get it from the library for me because it looked like it might help with the “This I believe” sort of lesson plan that we need for the site. I knew back then that it didn’t fit; but I hate to not finish a book unless there’s a really very good reason.

Maybe it was the style that kept me reading the book. The School Library Journal review on Amazon does compare it Sonya Sones’s What My Mother Doesn’t Know (2001) and Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Don’t You Dare Read This, Mrs. Dunphrey (1996), both of which I have read; so maybe it’s not that strange that I’m reading it. But I wonder how much of it was the content and emotion. The protagonist, Vicki, struggles to deal with the fallout of her father’s lost job and his depression, the family’s related move into a small apartment, and their ongoing financial issues.

I’m not sure why I’ve given to read of folks with depression and other woes. Misery loves company I guess. Sometimes I wonder if there are any truly real books though. There must always be some knowledge born of the woe, some lesson learned in the process of facing so many challenges. Reality, however, can often be cruel and mean for no reason whatsoever and with no related lessons other than that the world is a harsh place. So I’m sure that no matter what the many challenges that the protagonist faces in What I Believe, things will turn out. They always turn out it seems, even when real life rarely does.

This morning felt like a summer morning in Houghton. Almost chilly, but clearly going to get warmer. Things chirping and blooming. Lawn mowers whirring.

Can you be homesick for some place you didn’t live?

Daily Shoulds Continued

So I realized that there were several things that I left out. For Lubbock, I need to know distances as well, walking distances. My messy body complicates everything.

And I’m supposed to be writing up all the blog drafts that I’ve saved over the last ten days or so. Lots of clippings and whatnot that I need to comment on, or have written partial comments on. I really need to get that finished before they’re all irrelevant.

There’s a ton of reading that I need to do as well.

Maybe that’s it. It takes care of the things that I knew were missing anyway.

I continued work on a blogging overview that I’m doing for a couple of lesson plans.

My eating is all mixed up. I can’t seem to find the right combination of things to eat. That pizza last night tore through my system, and then today, I stupidly ate lettuce. I seem to eat far too much of just about everything that I can eat, perhaps because at least it doesn’t make me sick. My system is just a mess, and I’m puzzled. Maybe it’s the soda. I have slid back into the habit of drinking soda. Maybe that’s the beginning of the problem. I’m a little lost to be honest. I half think I’m going to have to reset by eating cheerios again, and then slowly add things. And the other half of me says to just eat everything and deal with the consequences when they come. Not really the best way to deal with reality. I’m just too disorganized it seems.

Daily Shoulds

There comes a point where doing everything is just too blooming overwhelming. There’s so much that you should be doing that you can’t even figure out what all it is that you are so anxious about not getting done. So in this confused mood, I decided to go about making a list of it all. Not the work minutia. That stuff has its own special list in a circa notebook. Just some of the rest of it.

• figure out Lubbock
  • research the details on the dorm—there seems to be no Internet access. Presumably there is a phone; so in theory there would be dial-up. Can I survive dial-up? Is there A/C? You don’t want to see me w/o A/C. Is there an elevator? With my back and knees, there’s no way I can drag things up the stairs. What would I do about cold water/soda? Is an ice chest a realistic option? Any details on the, um, facilities? I have privacy issues.
  • research the details on the hotel(s), which generally amounts to many of the same questions, highlighted by the key question: Can I possibly afford this? Is all the fun stuff going to happen in the dorm, like ISU? Thus is the hotel going to be the unhip place to be?
  • research the driving details—how long does this drive take again? Can I manage the vast emptiness by myself?
  • work magic with my check books to try to figure out money issues.
  • figure out when exactly I am going to create my presentation. And can I possibily sound intelligent? I haven’t written anything but lesson plans in a very long time.
  • work on my little mac (and pray) so that I can write during sessions if I do end up in Lubbock.
• write that book manuscript before I am beaten and fired.
• clean the filth that is my kitchen.
• clean up the basement.
• create two Flash interactives.
• deal with the mounds of laundry that need to be put away.
• bury the mounds of clothes that don’t fit.
• figure out my eating, because right now I am a whale.
• find some way to make this burping, acid, bloaty horror stop.
• make a sign that says, ‘no matter how tempting, never eat pizza or tomato sauce of any kind again.’ I don’t know what I was thinking, but the horror of the pizza I ate tonight wasn’t worth it. Why couldn’t I be ill when I eat all the wrong things so that I could turn into a Barbie?
• schedule a hair cut.
• write some EconEdLink lesson plans to pay for all this nonsense.
• get some lawn work taken care of, because it’s an unpolished jungle out there.
• clean out the garage, which is also an unpolished disaster. Be sure to put new plastic on those windows too.
• figure out how to pay to get the stuff that needs painted on this house all painted.
• figure out why I’m not getting any of this stuff done.

:( One day maybe I’ll have my act together. Instead, I can’t seem to do anything but be overwhelmed by it all. I’m sure that i’ve left out dozens of things too :( I’m such a nonsensical disaster.

For Mac: iAlertU – Lifehacker

Download of the Day: iAlertU – Lifehacker—for that one day when I finally manage to purchase a new Mac.