A return to where the ends aren't capped

Yes, I'm coming back to the place where the ends aren't capped. More than ever, I think I need a place to get this stuff out - an outlet for the things that fill up my brain. I always have so much brain chatter. It's something that has to do with my anxiety. Today is one of those days, however, when I really don't have the time to waste and a 5 minute or 10 minute ramble sounds like it could be effective. I have two huge tests tomorrow on completely different things. I'm not sure how they're going to go. I've been working toward this profession for a while, but this could put a real bend in the path: good or bad. I'm not sure. It'll really depend on how I do. I'm going to try to remember that I tend to be a good test taker and that knowing the method of taking these tests can do more than half the work for you. I just don't feel prepared on the material as much as I could. Especially the Social Studies Content. The prompt of this test is basically "know everything ever". It's kinda insane. I'm working on improving in some of the areas where I already have some vague knowledge so that I can associate knowledge I already have with that I need to know for the test. So far, I think it's going okay, but a practice test today will probably give me a clearer picture of what's going to happen tomorrow. In other news, as soon as I have studying that I must really buckle down on and my job is starting to get really work-filled (something it hasn't been in a while), I find some of the most interesting and inspiring things in the world that Id like to spend some time doing. Reading fairy tales, taking an MOOC, watching a series or two. But, of course, I shouldn't be spending this time that way. Arg - time's up.

Initial thought: Stress and needing an outlet
Time limit: 5 minutes

Teaching Us NOT to Explore

Teaching is one of those things that we do naturally. I think that in our interactions with other people we're constantly teaching them something and, even better, we're all learning. The one thing that's driving me up a wall right now is that i have a professor that I'm not sure is really teaching me a whole lot. I mean, he's trying to teach me to be a teacher, but the way that the course is going, I'm not pushed to explore that learning process. He most definitely wants to teach me, but only a strict set of guidelines and rules. There is no real push to be creative or even to discuss. Most of my discussion questions and responses have been responded to in such a way that I don't feel motivated to put the time and effort in. The problem is that it's in my nature to put the time and effort in to things like this that I am SOOO very interested in learning about. I want to be prepared the best that I can to teach. I want to be a good teacher who is aware of what the state wants and also aware of what my ideals are - what up and coming research there might be, how we can tie it in with other fields, how we can bring lots of fields of study together to create interesting and informed ways of doing and looking at things. I want to have my anthropological and philosophical lenses on when I read this stuff. And when I don't, I'm miserable. The problem is, with this class and administration, when I DO, I'm miserable.

Time: 5 minutes
Initial thought: teaching

Still designing

So here we go again. I find it funny that when I come here for my next free write, I end up writing about the same thing. I am playing around with designs right now and am swiftly increasing my bag of tricks to pull out of the paint/design programs I have. I've just started working with some textures and more layering and shadowing in a program that's not originally designed to have them at all. It's kinda nice, but at the same time a little limiting. I'm finding once again that I have designs I have and want to use, but no space for them and I'm trying to find the right background for my blog but am not really finding the thing that I want for it. I've just found a really great texture website. I'll post the link somewhere in the gadget boxes. They're pretty fantastic. I'm really hoping to get to utilize some of this stuff someday. I may never really need these skills, but I like them and I'd like to do something with them. It's kinda like my writing. I want to be able to do something with my writing, but I am aware that there is a huge difference between talent and genius. I'm not even really sure I have the talent right now, but talent can be developed and grown. I'm pretty settled with the fact that I don't have the genius part. I know several people that do. It's strange watching them do the things that one can only really think of doing without the genius that they possess. The worst part is that they often do not know they have it. Some of them do. They're the ones that make me feel the best about it. It's good to see it not being squandered. Time's up.

Initial thought: more designs
Time: 5 minutes

Where the ends aren't capped

I've been designing a new header and possibly a new background for the other website and I like what I already have, but I'm feeling a bit limited by it all. I want to have three backgrounds. I want to have options and space to use them. Right now all I have is a really awesome background that I have designed (which will probably just end up being a desktop background for my computer at some point) and the picture I took (completely awesome and encapsulating the feeling that I wanted for this blog in one go). In fact that shouldn't be in parenthesis. The fact is that I wanted to make it understood that this is about humanity - and how we live and what we do, but it's also about nature (hence the earthy salty goodness). That's me, I'm kinda earthy and salty. The picture is of Hadrian's wall. I took it while at Haltwhistle a few years ago. It's where the human meets nature and nature has taken a little bit of reclamation back. It's somewhere in between - which is kinda what humans are right? We walk this balance between the gods and the earth. We perceive that we have a space to ourselves, but we're really just all of it melded into one. I can't tear myself away from that picture enough to make a new background, so I made a header banner out of the idea instead. I think it went pretty well, but we'll see how anyone likes it (if anyone bothers to read my blog and/or comment on its design at all). I heave a sigh at the end of the night, but this is how it goes.

Initial thought: Design
Time: 5 minutes

This thing in my head

So I've got this thing stuck in my head... it's all Castor and Pollux and it pretty much has everything to do with the story I've been trying to write for the past year and a half. I'm not really sure where I'm going with it, but I've got the want to get it out - so I'm trying to go all poetry with it, but it's not really working out for me today. I wanted to post today, but I just couldn't get anything complete to come out. I started a short story memoir thing, but that didn't really get completed - the thought it needs to drive it on just isn't there yet. I also started searching for my twins connection, which actually stemmed from a search for another ekphrasis topic. I think I have one picked out - I really like it. I'm really digging the direction that I'm going with all of this. Of course it means that I'm doing that thing that authors do - retelling someone else story with different names etc, but isn't that what Greek mythology is for? I don't know. I guess I just realized that a lot of what I had down seemed to follow along the lines of a myth I didn't even know, but it could take me some interesting places if I try it out. The larger setting isn't the same at all, but I can see some interesting parallels continuing to form. At any rate, I don't have much time left and I've managed to say nothing about anything, but I'm sure I'll link back to this if I ever get my Leda poem out. We'll see how that goes. Arg! It's so frustrating when it's all up there in your head and you can't explain it to anyone else until it comes out of its own accord. Sometimes writing as a process is just maddening.

Initial thought: things stuck in my head
Time: 5 minutes

On poetry

So yeah, poetry. I write a lot of it. I used to write a lot of it and then there was this black hole in the middle of no writing at all, and now I'm back to poetry. My first poetry was that silly junk you write in middle and high school - pretty much all about boys and praying to God that you might actually get one. Then it changed. In my junior year I started branching out into what I still think are some deeper thoughts. It was no longer about the pubescent feelings that were rocking through me that I couldn't control. I expanded my brain and my writing skills a little bit - only to stop. I stopped. I didn't really write for most of my time in college. Once in a while, I'd start doing one of those multi-person RPG sorta things in email, but writing essentially stopped. Part of it was the depression and part of it was my completely insanely genius writer roommate who should have been published at age 20, but was too afraid to show her work to anyone, so never was. Yeah. But poetry has come back into my life. I have a friend who writes professionally and also blogs. I caught onto her blog one day and thought "Huh, I could give that a go." And here I am, writing poetry all the damn time. I have other things I want to write - a novel idea that I've been kicking around for more than a year and I'd love to learn the art of the short-story, but I'm not really hitting it home with any of those. There's something about poetry - there's a completion of thought without going too far. I truly believe that it's the short nature of poetry that allows me to actually finish it, but I've not finished the other projects, so there's no telling what it is. I guess with poetry I just complete my thought. I have it down. I'm not trying to say much more than one or two things (usually just one) and so I get to complete that thought without building an entire world about it first. Which is something else I've been doing - building a world. I'm on day 6 of the NaNoWriMo prompted "30 Days of World Building". It's going along nicely. I have a lot of it already partially figured out, so this is really just expanding my mind. Part of me wants to focus on a few particular points of that world and write an entire series of poetry on it. I could do it region by region, person by person, lesson by lesson - I've got all these ideas in my head and they're all related, but I can't get them down on paper in a way that effectively relates the massive web of culture in my head unless I write history-like essays. Which I've also done and been told that I need plot - well DUH, they're historical essays about a fictional world that I've created. They're not supposed to have a whole lot of plot of than a sequence of historical events. But that's not what happens - I have all these character developments and few plot points to hinge them on. The world building is helping me to broaden how I think about plot points, so hopefully that will help. Perhaps I should just write the poetry series. Perhaps that should just be the research. Who knows. Maybe one day I'll finish something longer than a poem.

Initial thought: Poetry
Time: 10 minutes

Frustration

It is so damn frustrating sometimes. I just don't even know where to begin. The exhaustion I'm feeling, the constant ache in my ears that hasn't ceased in two months, the feeling like it's never going to end, and even if it does, then one more struggle is on the list to combat. And on top of that there is the blogging. I have been enjoying blogging very much. It's been awesome. It's been something that helps me keep my sanity, but what the hell is the point of blogging to yourself. It's nice to get a little traffic, you know? And I've gotten a little. Very little. But the point is that every few posts I get some lovely comments from lovely readers and it all helps. Part of blogging and getting response is GIVING response. I get that. I understand. I even want to go out and give others some feed back. But this can be one of the most frustrating processes in existence and it's mostly to do with Mommy Bloggers. I like Mommy Bloggers. Really - don't get the wrong idea here, but just because someone doesn't have a baby doesn't make them less of a blogger. I feel like I go out to these website and have tried to start participating in writing memes and trying to get a few regular blogs that I write and comment on, because I enjoy them. But I have to say there is only one Mommy Blogger that I know that manages to write without making the reader feel like they have to be a Mommy Blogger to get it! Seriously - one. It's not that I don't understand. If you're a Mommy Blogger, who loves to read and write (as they all inevitably seem to) and writes some freelance for some other online or bigger blog community (as half of them inevitably seem to) etc, you've got a wealth of things to write blogs about. What your child's doing now, complaints and glorious mommy moments, the father/husband who has tender/comical/understanding moments. The list goes on and on. It's nice. But the Mommy Bloggers have banned together - they've united across the internet to form cliquish groups that some mommy bloggers wish they were a part of and would love to be entered into the circle, for even a week. And in their comments are THOUSANDS of comments from other mommy bloggers about how they understand perfectly. Here's where the really frustrating part is. After reading a handful of the dozens of responses on their blogs about how they too have gone through infertility issues, that their baby also does that strange thing with their face, that the anxieties of being a mommy are universal in mommyhood... it feels pretty lame to post something that sounds like "I've got no experience or credentials as a mommy (since I'm not one) but I feel what you're saying here..." yeah. lame. super duper lame. It's a bit disheartening. I tend to love it best when these ladies write a fiction or a memory from their pre-baby days, or when they have things to write about that don't pertain to their mommy-ness. Some of them manage to do it and it's so nice to be like "I'm a HUMAN too! We have something in common - let's share." Don't get me wrong, I do get some very lovely comments from these ladies on a rare occasion and I'm not trying to hate here. I don't hate - I don't even dislike. But it can be frustrating to be a newly wed who's not planning on having babies for another few years in the sea of Mommy Bloggers.

PS - Please don't hate on me if you're a mommy blogger. It's not personal. It's just part of a larger web of stresses that I've been dealing with. Blogging is one of my outlets, but it's starting to feel like this outlet is shorted. I'm trying to let go...

Initial thought: "Being mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!" aka frustration
Time: 15 minutes