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!
I forgot to talk about one of my other hobbies yesterday, or rather, I neglected to talk about my other hobby/volunteer work. I do moulage, otherwise known as casualty simulation. In short, I make people look injured for emergency disaster training.
This isn’t a hobby I can share casually, because, actually, I did a pretty good job. The pictures creep people out.
My favorite story on the realism of my work is going into work after our big disaster training weekend (I’m a professor) and getting the rumor that one of my “victims” was sent to the hospital for a simulation, and they started hooking up an IV on him. He had to stop them from doing so. I mentioned this to another class, and his girlfriend corroborated it.
None of this is real
Moulage requires a certain amount of art and science. The science comes in studying injuries — knowing how they’re inflicted, what they look like on the body, how they change over time. The art comes from recreating them in grease paint, fake blood, wax, and latex.
Examples (warning: do not go below this point if you are upset by these pictures)
I’ve just discovered Tik Tok — not surprising because the demographics don’t skew toward Boomer. Tik Tok is strange: filled with amateur vignettes from funny to bizarre to serious, none more than a minute long, it feels a lot like late night television, viewed in a dark room, with lots of infomercials and public service announcements.
The metaphor held when I realized that most of the hits to my posts happened at night. So Tik Tok is an entire community of people watching late night television, and this is what unites them.
My foray into filming
My reason for going into Tik Tok was to film promos for my book, The Kringle Conspiracy. I had been advised that promotion should only be 1/4 of one’s output, so I’ve had to film funny pieces in-between. And I’m falling in love with Tik Tok, it turns out.
I generally film myself on my computer or, when I can get my husband in on things, he films me on the iPhone. Then I edit using a silly little video editor named Crazy Video Editor. I use this, even though it’s a little buggy, because it allows me to put in thought balloons and other effects. I would like a program with even more features to let me be even sillier, but I haven’t found it yet.
I try to film every day — a quick minute or so followed by a few minutes of editing. My films are not hi-def or expertly filmed (there are some limits to the front-facing camera in a computer and inexpert lighting), but they’re fun and that’s what I’m going for.
I have had modest success. In less than a week I have 235 followers and some comments.
Words Like Me 