Due to the pathologizing of infancy and my ongoing medication regimen (now discontinued), the first three months were more difficult than the usual crazy-making difficulty. I got little accomplished until finals week of Fall Quarter, then took a second quarter of leave to wrap up my incompletes from Winter and Spring. I did manage to audit my composition pedagogy class, so I am nominally ready to teach in Spring. I think I may try to make an appointment close to the end of the quarter or so to review all the aspects of the class with someone in the writing office, so as not to be flying utterly blind.
Over halfway through this quarter, though, all I've accomplished is lining up my Spring teaching schedule and filing my seminar requests for the next quarter. And getting a former co-worker from my publishing job (who now also bears the title of Grandma) to review my shortest papers from last year for completing some coursework.
The other graduate student here has his own papers, teaching and research to manage, plus a raiding schedule in WoW. Oh, and his daily instances. Sometimes it takes a few tries to complete that daily heroic. During this time, I have my darling son... the whole time. This can be as short as half an hour, or if queues are long, and the luck is bad, 5+ hours. I can't really shower, cook, or do much else, though reading is theoretically possible. But not much notetaking. And there's the question of neglecting my son's needs for stimulation and development, which also distracts me.
I'm frittering the weeks away without meaning to... I hope I can get myself together to actually complete my work and start back with no failures. So, so tired of trying to pull this off, and I'm sure it doesn't help that I'm once again questioning whether this is the right path for me. Or that there is so much riding on it still. The latest conversations with my mom have me sticking it out for the MA and then re-evaluating, considering options like journalism (science & health, particularly), given that I can't be arsed to read more than a few pages at a time on Piers Plowman, Langland, and Franciscan theology in the 14th century, but I can devour non-fiction works on the state of childbirth-specific reproductive rights in the US, the nature of hoarding, a challenge to USDA orthodoxy on healthy diet components and macronutrients, the relationships between climate, volcanic, and/or seismic events and human history, etc. I'm currently reading about the neuroscience of attention and memory, particularly as it relates to the difficulties in navigating the demand for multitasking with the same fundamental brain that tackled agriculture ~12,000-14,000 years ago or so.
Then again, mebbe I just wanna knit something other than a baby hat. That'd be nice, too.
