Tomorrow is the last day of Spring Break, with six weeks left till Summer and the calmer time of my life. When I look at it that way, the best use of my time is to rest. I look at Monday and think, “I’m not ready for the grind again.”
I’ve rested this whole week except for the day I thought I lost 3/4 of a manuscript. Luckily I found a backup that even had the corrections I had made. But that day made me cry, and I have done little work since then. I’ve written a couple times in the blog and rejected one blog post because of TMI. (And if you’ve been following, you might have noticed that it takes a lot for something to be TMI.)
My cats beg to differ.
Chloe (otherwise known as Itty Bitty Bitty Bitty Baby Baby Girl) doesn’t want me to work. She wants to use me as a piece of furniture as she stares chirps at the double monitors in the office. Girly-Girl (known as Squirrely Girl) is arguing out in the hallway, probably because Itty Bitty Bitty etc. has taken over the office. Me-Me (otherwise known as Me-Merz) is sitting near Richard with that Overly Attached Girlfriend look on her face. I’m not in the bedroom; I just KNOW. 320pooooooooooo0222222llllllllllllllllll.kkk.kq (Chloe said hi)
Ideas on the next book.
I have a next book. It’s taking shape on the outline. It involves Luke Dunstan, a 6000-year-old immortal Archetype, who finds that The Maker has taken away the Archetypes’ sole reason for existence away from them. Leah, a seventeen-year-old woman, sees visions of the oncoming civil war, and feels called to stop it despite the odds of surviving are against her. Leah feels torn between Luke, who sees her as the Avatar of the Maker, and the father of her child, Baird, a Nephilim.
It doesn’t seem to matter what religion or spirituality one belongs to — it’s difficult to believe. In oneself, in one’s deity, in one’s face, in one’s calling. Faith does not exist without the humanity involved — the struggle to believe.
We pray, we talk to ourselves, or we talk to respected elders, or do rituals. We connect to the avatars of our beliefs, even if they are a quiet place in the woods. And we ask for reassurance, for calm, for help, for confidence, and for support when we tune in. The answers do not fix our fate (for those who believe in a deterministic outcome) or the factors we can’t control (for those who feel they have more control of their fate). But they may give us hope that something better comes down the road for us. Or that our pain will lessen. Or that there’s comfort.
With a PhD and years of academic writing, I have developed a rational bent, as evidenced by the above paragraphs. (Ugh, that academic writing again!) I think people need comfort, need to know about the afterlife, need to feel there’s a sense of justice, and need to feel that there’s a force beyond themselves. I even teach that in a class.
Still, I have some irrational beliefs, embarrassingly irrational.
I believe in superstitions.
Moreover, I believe in curses.
Curses!
When a string of bad things happen to me, I decide I am being cursed. I do not know who’s cursing me — I have suspected everyone from God to the old Italian grandmother who thought I was defiling her great grandson (it was his idea to take me on a tour of the backyard on his dirt bike for what it’s worth). It doesn’t matter — it’s a curse.
People can think of curses as bad luck, a losing streak, “someone hates me up there”, terrible fates, unfair consequences, or “the devil’s trying to beat me”.
And nothing is going to get better until one breaks the curse.
How are curses broken? That depends on one’s belief system. Prayer, ritual, good luck tokens, a visit from a shaman — all are ways one breaks curses.
For me — a strange and convoluted story I’ll leave for another time — I use a ritual of burning all the bad things out of my life after writing them on a piece of paper.
To be truthful, I felt better. More importantly, from a strictly psychological view, I quit framing every minor annoyance as another terrible proof of the curse.
That may be the only result of the ritual, but hey, it works.
One Friday, in a college classroom that had seen a hundred years, Brent Oberhauser stood in front of his class, a tall and lean man in jeans and an ice-blue sweater that matched his eyes. He ran a hand across the side of his head, a habit he retained from before he’d started shaving his head against his prematurely and fast-receding hairline.
Students, heads bowed, wrote rapidly in examination books, answering questions about Medieval and Renaissance European history. History, Brent considered as he proctored the exam, wasn’t just about what happened, but what one had learned from what happened. More than once, he wondered what he had learned from his twenty-nine years thus far. He’d think about that later, when his obligations were over and before he settled down for the night. First, he would need to go to the office to pick up a couple books, then drive into Denver to work his barista shift at the Book Nook. If he timed it right, he could have a cup of espresso Romano before work.
The exam proceeded uneventfully, with students silently scribbling, and he wished his students a happy holiday as they wandered off one by one toward winter break. He gathered up the exams and walked briskly down a hallway with its dark wood and stark white walls, dodging students who waited for the next exam. He passed the statuesque Renee Porterfield, also a PhD candidate, who wished him a happy holiday in her rush down the hall in the other direction. Soon, Brent stood in his cubicle in the small grad students’ office, putting books into his worn leather messenger bag in which he’d already stuffed the last of the exams for the semester. One book he packed to help him double-check the last-minute corrections his dissertation committee requested after he defended two weeks before; the other book was a history of Father Christmas he had written a few years earlier and published on Amazon, and it was that volume that caused him much frustration at the moment.
Brent pulled on his fleece-lined denim jacket and slung the messenger bag over his shoulder. Father Christmas, he thought as he turned off the lights of the office on his way out. Survival of old pagan customs. Symbol of English Christmas. Topic of endless Victorian postcards. But which Father Christmas?
His cell phone rang. He checked the readout to find out who his caller was, and he answered the call. “Kris.” He felt his cheeks flame. “I don’t know if I can do it.”
The pleasant voice on the other side spoke calmly. “Brent, you wrote the book. You understand Father Christmas better than anyone else in — in the world, perhaps.”
That was the rub. Brent’s medieval reenactment group had lost their Father Christmas when Kris Kriegel moved to Missouri to be with his true love. Kris, the former Father Christmas, had decided that Brent should take over as Father Christmas for the Yule Ball.
It was two weeks till the Yule Ball, and Brent didn’t know how he could fit in Kris’s boots.
“You can do it,” Kris repeated. “I have a sense about you.”
“A sense,” Brent echoed.
“Yes. I’ve been playing Father Christmas long enough that I get a sense of who would be good at playing him. And that’s you, Brent. I can’t explain it. Trust me.”
“But I’m not you. They’re used to you.”
“I can’t come back and do it. Marcia’s going to have that baby any minute.”
“Oh, yeah.” Brent seized upon the change in conversation. “How’s she doing?”
“Fine. She thinks she’s huge, but that’s the way pregnancies happen. She’s healthy, and our daughter Noelle should show up right on time. Whenever that is.” Kris chuckled. “I’m doing Santa gigs with my phone at hand in case she goes into labor.”
Ten minutes later, after closing the call, Brent didn’t feel any better about playing the spirit of Christmas for the medieval reenactment group that hosted the Yule Ball, of which he’d been a member for ten years. I am not Kris. Brent grimaced. I am not Father Christmas.
What I’m learning in therapy
I’ve been going to therapy online to get over the uncomfortable feeling that I don’t know who I am now that I’m successfully getting treated medically for bipolar. I’ve had this nagging feeling for years.
What I have learned so far:
I have good boundaries. But I have boundaries around my boundaries
I believe (or have been led to believe) that my inner child is a monster
I have walled off inner child from rest of me.
I don’t quite believe all of this. I believe it’s more nuanced, as if the inner child isn’t so much walled away but quarantined. I have a sense of myself as inner child but I don’t trust it. It’s probably right to not blindly trust its judgment, but I treat it as if it were my bipolar tendencies.
I hate it when I get songs stuck in my head. Today it was “She’ll be Coming ‘Round the Mountain ” — the burlesque version that Daniel Radcliffe tweaks his way through in the show “Miracle Workers”, complete with honky-tonk piano. I loved the scene, but I don’t know that I want the song in my head ad nauseum.
Usually the songs that get stuck in my head are catchy, popular songs. Pop music. For example, “Baby Shark”. That was in my head for weeks like a parasite, and I was contemplating Ivermectin to get that earworm out. (It is not recommended to use Ivermectin for earworms or COVID-19, as its only use in humans is for tropical roundworms). I guess this is why they’re called earworms.
Getting the song out of my head
I have a system for getting earworms out of my brain, and it’s pretty foolproof, at least temporarily. I blast a song which isn’t inane, which isn’t pop, which isn’t going to stick in my head for very long because it’s not easy to the ears. My favorites:
Photo by Miguel u00c1. Padriu00f1u00e1n on Pexels.com
Nine Inch Nails, “Head Like a Hole”
Mike Oldfield, “Tubular Bells” (Exorcist edition)
The Hu, pretty much anything
Yes, “Starship Trooper”
Anything classical
The purpose of these songs is to first, get me grooving. Second, drive out the earworm. Third, dissipate instead of getting stuck in my head like an alternative earworm. Because they’re so complex, they don’t get stuck like pop songs do. And then I have my brain back.
I spent the last couple days on hiatus because of some heavy duty editing I have had to do on my back catalog. Sooner or later I will publish them if it’s the last thing I do! Still have some to edit.
I will write something new. Maybe a short story. Maybe a novel. I need to write something new or else I’ll go crazy.
One month until the school year starts. That means the rhythm of my life completely changes from working at home to working in my office and in classrooms. This fall I have three face-to-face days with students and two days working from home.
I have my course sites for fall ready, which means my classes are all organized. They’re all in a easy-to-use form for students after some tweaking. I should be ready.
But there’s that transition.
The hardest part for me when it comes to preparing for fall is the transition. I don’t transition well (which makes me think of a diagnosis of ADHD, but I have never been diagnosed). I groove in whatever mode I’m in, but getting into that mode is difficult. So going from very flexible time to giving six lectures a week and sitting office hours will be a bit difficult.
The good thing about fall semester
One of the things that gets me through transitions is ritual. There’s enough ritual built into the beginning of the semester — greeting of students, Convocation, the faculty-staff picnic. Rituals make transitions easier by giving a celebration and a clear demarcation to it.
We missed the rituals last year, and that made everything harder for me. We canceled the picnic. I only met with half my students at any given time. I conducted office hours via Zoom. I had no real transition and it added to my stress level and sense of isolation.
This fall should be a real transition to the school year. I will clean my office to welcome students. I will go to the faculty-staff picnic and cheer on football season and meet with my whole classes and say hello to my fellow faculty members in the hallway. I will once again have a transition with rituals to make the change in routine easier — or, at least, celebratory.
It’s been one of those summers, the ones where I want to accomplish big things, but. I can’t quite seem to wake up. I have no ideas to play with. I get no inspiration. I want to do something, but … meh.
Breaking out of the doldrums
The first thing I do to break out of the doldrums is get up, sit upright, start doing things. Like writing this blog, which has taken me three tries to write. Drink coffee. Contemplate something to break out of my routine.
Contemplating ways to get out of the house, away from the same walls, out into the open.
Some romance writers turned me on to Tik Tok, where they told me I could use it to make connections for future book sales. I’m not so sure about that, but I decided to try anyhow.
So far, I have posted 23 Tik Tok videos of various visual quality (I’m struggling with the lighting thing) and on various topics, with cats and coffee winning out over books.
I feel like a boomer.
I have so many questions about Tik Tok:
How can I use a ring light without the big glare in my glasses? Furthermore, why a ring light? Wouldn’t a work light work? Or a spotlight? Or a traffic light?
How do I duet?
Why can’t I do a true portrait-oriented clip on my computer? Instead it crams the landscape video into a portrait frame with lots of black area at top and bottom.
What, really, is the purpose of Tik Tok?
Editing software. What is the best editing software? I use Crazy Video Maker 2 on my computer.
For you
If any of you use Tik Tok, please submit advice of any sorts as to how to use it better. This Boomer needs your help!
Words Like Me 