Still not productive, I guess.

I still haven't figured out what the fuck I'm doing with this space.  My son is on the verge of walking, and intermittently alters his general sleep schedule, most recently last week.  My husband is busy doing all the things he needs to do to get himself a solid teaching position somewhere we can stand to live (I hope).  I'm failing to keep up on dishes, laundry, or vacuuming, and I'm currently worrying that my son will find a currently-lost push pin somewhere in this office-playroom, which he will inevitably eat.

Barely reading.  Did get a Kindle.  Reading sporadically on that.  Learning how to wear my son out for optimal sleep.  Getting sick of cooking.  Getting sick of dishes.  Getting sick of feeling utterly tapped out on the decision fuel.  Also getting sick of bug bites.  It's late October, mosquitoes.  Take a hint, already.

Productivity: Still for suckers!

I did actually finish something:  All my recent bargain hardcover acquisitions from Amazon on The Problems of Modern Psychiatry and Psychopharmacology.  It only took me roughly 3 months to finish four books.  Granted, I also polished off, um, some other book, I think, maybe, or at least started the Frozen Earth one by the UCSD emeritus professor of earth science.  And I perused several knitting books (seriously, because how on earth do you otherwise find the techniques most relevant to your current ad hoc project? you don't just flip through--you examine!).

I started in on 3-4 fantasy novels, and stalled on them all, not because they were bad, but because my narrative follow-through is still lacking.

I have managed to level a third character to 80, and get a second to 84.  Getting across the finish line with the latter will be a bit of a struggle, even though my husband is done with his latest frenzied campaign to catch up on his dissertation work (revising a program for the experiments he should be running any day now).  The kiddo, he crawls, and as such, he requires more focused attention.  Shitty pregnancy + early delivery + way too much time to, from or at NICU + ZOMG baybee in the home = child-proofing, not so much.  The real ad hoc business is our collective effort to avert our son's unwitting forays into clear danger or other bad things (like getting into the dirty diapers).  This means slacking any more creatively than Mah Johng Titans or logging on briefly to fiddle with crafting shit in WoW is beyond me much of the day.  On top of this, he's in full separation anxiety mode, so that only my husband or I can hold him without tears pouring forth, unless we are calm, focused, and within an arm's length on the same piece of furniture.

Eventually, I hope to live in a home where we can have a room dedicated to our son or children in general, and give him/them free rein to move around while I can sit, supervising with a book in hand.  I know, I can only dream, because it won't happen.  I'll figure some work-around, somehow.  In the mean time, well, I'm obviously stealing some time, or I wouldn't have finished anything.

Productivity is for suckers.

In the past couple months, I've done a lot of mom-time, a fair bit of cooking, insufficient amounts of laundry, a little social branching-out, and, um, World of Warcraft.  Again.

Shortly after the latest expansion was released, I managed to get my main leveled from 80 to 85.  Then I was back at the fruitless pursuit of grade-completion.  Once I left grad school, I briefly returned to the WoW, but it was short-lived against the onslaught of Real World Issues:  My husband still had to complete a major paper himself, he was teaching two nights a week, doing research with his advisor one morning a week while working on programming at least 10-15 hours a week at home, and as a result, raiding with long-time friends three nights a week for about 8.5 hours total (which, with the workload, I fully understood and supported, albeit a little resentfully).  On top of that, we spent a month in potential massive debt limbo, wondering whether we'd be left holding the bag for $126k in NICU bills for our son (we weren't, mostly because we had a witness in the hospital financial services dept. who heard a CSR confirm our coverage for well more than that).

Once my husband finished his paper, returning to good standing with his department, I suddenly felt much less stress, enabling me to handle a live game environment while watching the kiddo, rather than endless rounds of *cough* Mahjong Titans.  I also got a new computer, since my previous one had a rather disheartening tendency towards restart roulette and general start-up anxiety.  I have yet to install Civ IV or Civ V on here, and I confess that I've burned out a little on endless imperialism, but, you know, there's only so much flower-picking, ore-mining, mob-killing, daily questing, etc. that I can stand.  Of course, I could install Oblivion, or try actually completing the Longest Journey (so that I can play the sequel), or even try Mass Effect/ME2, as my husband has recommended.

Well, maybe I'll do it once I get my mage to 85.  Or my dk and warlock there.  Possibly also the shadow priest.  And then there's the druid (trying balance ftw!), and the elemental shaman (two, actually)....

It. Never. Ends.

I am no longer a grad student.

A week ago, I withdrew from my program and dropped my incomplete classes from last year.  And it was good.  Every time I sat at my computer, attempting to write a paper, my brain turned to mush.  I'd try to force it, resulting in word salad incoherence, and high-school level English oversimplifications, gross generalizations, unfounded claims,and a general sense of impossibility.  I attribute this to my own ambivalence about the direction I'd taken in academia (literature), compounded by a stressful pregnancy (itself exacerbated by the financial and bureaucratic pressures it spawned wrt my grad program), a premature baby who spent 5 weeks in the NICU, the continued adjustments following his arrival home, the decision to stay in school for spring because of the fellowship (despite my complete unfitness for school, not enrolling could have required repayment for the first two quarters, something I forgot until today), and the sheer weight of 3 short papers, one 10 pp. paper, two 20 pp. paper, and a paper for which I would have needed a 10-15 pp. draft, followed by a 20-25 pp. final, only to be further expanded and refined into a master's thesis.

And I still had primary care of my baby, though my husband and my mother did help to varying degrees, as well as primary cooking duty, food shopping, and laundry-sorting/planning.

Just recounting that exhausted me.  If it were just ambivalence, a less-complicated pregnancy and a full-term baby, it would still be hard, but the whole miserable process (and so much of that misery was related to grad school in one way or another) tainted the work, whether it was Richardson, Langland, Milton, English Renaissance sonnets or prosody.  All of it just brought back the grinding pain, the sense of mentally and emotionally drowning, that dreadful oppressive duty...

I came close to completing two of them.  Of the six, two.

I'm not sure what I'm doing with this blog.  Mommy blog?  Not like there aren't a ton of those in the world.  Book blog?  Have one started over on WordPress.  Health blog?  At least that would be unique in my plethora of online venue-presences, and yet there's so many of them, too.  I'm not catholic enough in my gaming to do that sort of writing, and not productive enough to feel justified in creating a knitting blog.  I can't stay engaged in following politics without getting fatigued with rage and frustration, and there's so many people who do it better with experientially qualified insight anyhow.  Everybody and their mother does damned near anything online, which, in addition to squelching the last sense of uniqueness from most people, it also taints creativity in certain ways by enforcing sameness.  I may not believe that the world is "flat," but I do believe that the internet flattens things.  I feel like a Luddite more and more each day.  Maybe I'll make a neo-Luddite blog.

That's probably something I can get behind.  Bitch about one more thing that's diminishing our souls, day by day.  Or reflect on the chasm between some activity we consider normal or mundane, and the reality in the not-too-distant past.  Add in the ills of society and its individuals... I would probably need to do research.  Make one post a week, well-researched.  That's all.  It would be a start.

Oh, yeah, this thing.

After the last post, my pregnancy kept being complex and difficult, culminating in a surgical delivery at 33 weeks, with a beautiful baby boy being born in late summer/early September, then spending 35 days in the NICU before coming home with us.

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.