The Mandula Oblongada: This Is Your Brain... On Mandy

I haven't written here in a really long time. I haven't really written in a journal anywhere in a long time. But a friend of mine suggested that I start writing again as a means to get my thoughts down. It's been such a long time that I don't know where to start, so I'll start where I am and catch the rest up later I guess.

We're still in the Covid thing.
I'm six weeks into a medical adventure and while many questions are answered, some remain unsolved.
I have started seeing a therapist for my mental health.
I'm battling anxiety for a variety of reasons.
I'm working through grief...

[Here, I pause]

I could continue listing it all out, but I don't think that's productive. I need to find a means to work through how to talk about it all. Well, write about it all. I'm looking for inspiration on that front. I'll have to go digging for daily prompts or something, I think. For now, I have a meeting.

"You're listening to KMND: Mandy Radio, where it's all Mandy, all the time. Thanks for tuning in."

The immense toll that work takes on me is catching up again. I don't know how else to explain it.

About halfway through the fall semester, I started to get rather burnt out. Nigh overwhelming exhaustion kept creeping around the edges of my existence. I suspect a similar phenomenon is happening to me now. Of course, I'm sure the time change has something to do with it. I've felt it with more intensity than I can remember ever having happened to me. I think it's that somewhere in the past several months I started to really adjust to being diurnal, but it was apparently within the confines of the hours of the day being labeled differently. I'm so exhausted this week, and it hasn't been a particularly busy week. At least, no more demanding than has been typical the last six months. I can see why my mom always had a deep appreciation for summer break, even if her vacation was in tandem with that of her children. I will so appreciate that time when it comes (even if I do spend a significant amount of it planning and preparing for next school year).

The funny part is, I'm incredibly tired right now, yet in an effort to get myself on the path to readjustment I'm staying up a bit later. In the meantime I've begun my to-do list for the weekend. So far, it has 7 separate tasks on it of varying lengths. I feel like I spend every weekend playing catch-up so that I can avoid stress the following week. So I guess it's more a matter of playing get-ahead rather than playing catch-up. It helps a lot during the subsequent week, but I'm so sick of not having a real weekend. I keep telling myself things will be different next year, and I hope I'm right about it. I fairly certain that doing work in the summer is a necessary evil in the attempt to make that a reality. I also have to remind myself that I'll be taking fewer classes next year and that will help.

I've been saying that having a spring break in the middle of April is ridiculous. After all, there will only be five weeks of school after that. But with each passing day I realize that I will so appreciate that break despite the fact that part of me would rather just tack an extra week onto summer if the short break is so near the long one. A break is a break; I should take what I can get.

Now I just have to convince myself to allow myself so respite when it's here...

You stare at the screen.
You click through the things.
You watch the TV, even a couple sad movies just to see if that will help the tears come.
You wait for the grief to come, and start to wonder if it ever will.

I've been told that "Maybe it just doesn't feel real yet."
I've been told that the "shock" will pass and things will sink in.
I've been told a lot of sympathetic words, but the tone is shallow from most mouths.

I don't know when it will happen for me, that moment of actualization.
Probably when I see my mother cry as we sort through the remnants of a life now passed, but that won't happen until summertime.

So I continue to focus on living, because that's what she would want.
Yet occasionally there are moments such as this one, where the inclination to reflect comes along.

I'm going to go stare at something else now.

Of applying for jobs, I mean. It's hard to for me to decide where to start with the description of this. So I'll just do the obvious and start from the beginning.

In about mid-May, I decided to finally take the time to fill out the job application on the APS website. Starting the process made me realize how much stuff I needed to do to have a completed application. I needed not just copies but scans of my Intern licenses, my resume, a cover letter... half of which wasn't completed. So I spent a semi-stressful week writing and polishing all that stuff. Finally got all that done and submitted along with the information required in the application itself.

So yeah, got all that done two weeks ago. Hence today I decided to look at the list of job postings on the website and see how many were still there and try to figure out why I hadn't heard anything yet. I did also get a bit of advice from someone who was recently hired for a position: she said I had to be proactive and be calling/emailing people to get their attention that I had applied. Well, first of all, more than half the positions I applied for are not listed anymore (which means they've been filled). But I did find a bunch of new postings to apply for, which is good. So I added all those to the application submission.

Now it's time for the next step. I gathered up all the necessary email addresses to write a little email note to all the people listed on the contact info at the bottom of the job postings. Now I just have to get the guts to do it. I mean, it's like twelve emails to write to people I've never met. A little nerve-racking, to say the least. Maybe the "finding the information" is enough for one day? I think I'm a little too high-strung to write professional-sounding emails right now anyhow.

Better luck tomorrow, yeah?

Keeping a paid account, that is. I mean, I just checked to see when I last made a post, and it's been nearly two years. Yet I've happily allowed LJ to charge me $18.15 a year for a paid account for I don't know how many years now. On the other hand, now that I've been reminded that LJ exists (due to the email reminder about my paid account extension) perhaps I will manage to put things here more often.

I think I need a medium with more space for loquaciousness. I keep meaning to spend more time writing in my paper journal, but I'm not getting that done. It takes too much time (I can't write fast enough to keep up with my thoughts), and for some reason people are invasive about the idea of someone writing in a notebook. However, I now have this fancy new laptop and homework that requires I use said laptop on a regular basis. Perhaps between the two things pointing me toward my big screen of clearly defined pixels and fast new processor, I will have the impetus to use this thing. Not to mention, I realize I miss it. I doubt many people read such things anymore, and that's all right. I will prefer this website's makeup to the other selections out there indefinitely. I suspect part of that is that I have no desire to explore such things anymore, and the other part is the fact that I've kept this damn LJ for nigh on a decade. Why change now!

After 8 years with the same password and no security issues regarding this journal, the folks at LJ finally decided to let me know that they thought my password was too easy. I find this hilarious. Of course, recognizing that they were correct in their assessment, I have changed my password to something a little more challenging. Hooray protocols. Now it will be slightly more difficult for some asshat to hack my livejournal.

Now as long as no one hacks the keychain in my browser...

I have no idea why I saved this next bit; perhaps because I liked the poem. It's a photocopy out of a book. I have no idea what book, but I'm assuming it's an anthology of some sort. This poem apparently appears on page 27 (as denoted in the upper right hand corner of my copy).

( Proletarian in Abstract Light )



As an aside... formatting this to make it appear as it does on my photocopy caused me to learn a new-to-me html tag in order to make indentation happen. Neat!

The first of the things I'm sharing is both silly, and exciting. It's mostly for lotuschild03, because we talked about this once. I think yayforninjas would probably be entertained as well. God only knows where I got the photocopy of these, but it was probably from a Spanish class I took in junior high school. I wish I was savvy enough to know how to get the sort of font this paper has, because it makes it all the more entertaining to look at, but alas.

I think maybe you're getting close to guessing what this is all about, aren't ya? Oh, and I'm putting it all behind a cut because it's long. Also, I'm copying the spelling exactly as it appears on the page, because some of it is... wrong but funny to me.

( Canciones para la clase de español )




Tee hee.

"This News Update brought to you by Spanish Folk Songs®. You're listening to KMND: Mandy Radio, where it's 'All Mandy, All the Time.' Thanks for tuning in."

So here I am. In an effort to get myself writing my rhetoric paper that is due in less than 48 hours, I'm going to spew some stuff here. This is somewhat inspired by a similar effort I noticed from sjester, who is apparently working on a philosophy of mind paper. Unlike her, who is distracted by weird boss/schedule issues, I'm not distracted.

I've come up with a decent outline of my paper--Ok, organization--but can't manage to start writing it. I think I need to do a bit more on that front. I had thought my efforts thus far were sufficient for making the whole thing just start to come together on its own, but it looks like that's not going to happen for the moment. Luckily I have all night tonight and tomorrow to work on this. Ideally of course, I'll get this paper mostly finished so I can work on the Poetics anthology project for most of tomorrow. I really want to get everything done by Saturday night/morning so I can go to Nick's birthday party stress free.

I am surprisingly unstressed at the moment, however. Mostly I'm just stuck and need to make myself do stuff. Truth is, I'm incredibly excited to finally be on the home stretch with all this stuff. I can totally pull this off. Then I get to go back to reading lots of fluffy novels and packing stuff and cleaning the house. Ya know, all those wonderful things I've been fantasizing about for the last month that I haven't allowed myself to do in the interest of time management with the homeworks.

Oh yeah. Tonight was the last class meeting for the poetics class. While I enjoyed the experience (learning a lot about stuff I don't know and all that), I'm definitely happy that's over with. There were certain aspects of that course that made it pretty difficult. I think my biggest beef with the whole thing was the extreme delay the prof had with getting us feedback for papers. I mean, geez, I understand the guy is having a busy semester trying to get tenure and all, but does that really mean it should take 2 months to give back 8 5-page essays from people. In his defense though, I think I'm just frustrated about that because it was feedback I definitely could've used on the subsequent essay project we had to turn in to him. As a result, my grade on the third assignment was not what I had hoped. I guess I have trouble writing theses that aren't somewhat general. After all, isn't specification what the rest of the essay is supposed to be for? Maybe this is why I'm not going into poetry criticism/theory/analysis. Ah well; if I can manage to pull a B+ out of the class I'll be happy. Naturally, an A- would be much better, but I doubt I'll manage to impress him to an amazing enough degree with the final project to bump my grade back up there. We'll see. I may end up shocked, and as long as it's in a positive way I'm cool with it.

Well then... I believe now is the time on sprockets when we dance.

"This News Update brought to you by Sprockets®. You're listening to KMND: Mandy Radio, where it's 'All Mandy, All the Time.' This is your brain on Mandy. Thanks for tuning in."

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Well... it'd be a good thing I'm already pretty nocturnal, since the sun would be gone and all. Talk about changing the world: we'd be living in a much less gore, much more bore version of Pitch Black where the sun doesn't come up again several days later (i.e. never). I felt compelled to answer this on the basis of such an oversight in concepts... did the person who submitted this question forget that the major construct of time was the thing that is the basis for life on this planet?