Many Little Things

I've not posted because I couldn't think coherently about one thing long enough to make it into something interesting.....so I have a bunch of things I've been thinking about, and I'll post some of them now and some of them tomorrow (I hope). Each paragraph is pretty much a completely separate idea, so don't worry, I'm not insane, I've just got a lot of disparate thoughts in my head right now.

One thing that I haven't been thinking about but which I saw today when hub and I were downtown, is that a knitting store in town is closing out, and they're having their selloff sale tomorrow, starting at 10:00a.m. The store has been in business for about 15 years or so, at least since the last time I lived in this city...and I used to patronize it. It's one of those places that sells a lot of acrylic though, and a lot of "old style" patterns etc. etc....sort of hasn't kept up with the times. It's too bad, but good for me for tomorrow, because I don't teach on Thursdays, just go to the kids' school to help out with the breakfast program. That will be (conveniently) finished by about 10:30a.m., so I can head downtown after that and see what they have at the little old store. What I need are needles. What I will probably get is....oh, do you think it might happen....? maybe a skein or two of yarn. Depends on what's there. Maybe some sock yarn, since I actually don't have much of that. I suppose then I'd have to knit socks. Hmph. could be worse.

Today was a snow day in the place we work, but not where we live, so our kids went to school and we got to stay home and putter, go downtown to the pub for lunch (I had one pint of local bitter, I wanted two), buy a futon for the basement so that when people come and stay with us we don't have to make a bed out of couch cushions on the livingroom floor...that kind of thing. Wednesdays are hell for me, three hours of straight talking, a half hour break for lunch where I close the door and not talk to anyone, and gulp down lunch, and then another hour of talking. Fab Former Student would say, "But you love to talk! You talk a lot! You talk all the time!" and that's true but not quite. I talk all the time when I feel like it....and often I'm not doing as much talking as I'm doing listening. Still, to do two lectures in a row and then an office hour, talk talk talk and help out needy students, and then 30 minutes before there's another hour of talk talk talk...it's very draining. We're now six weeks into the term and I'm getting used to it, but missing today? So sweet.

One thing I actually have been thinking about is betrayal, and the times that I have betrayed people. My all-time best betrayals have been committed against both BF1 and BF2; it has occurred to me that the deepest betrayals, if they're going to happen, happen to those closest to you. They happened a long time ago, under different circumstances, I could say I was a different person and all that and maybe I was. I should file this under, "Go Easy on Yourself" but there are certain things that are hard to forgive. They have certainly forgiven me (or else they're doing a good job of faking) but I still look back and think, "If only...." I don't have a formulated idea of what I want to say about all this, because it's difficult and not something I particularly want to think about. It has been weighing on me lately, however, and eventually I will come to a resolution.

Every morning I put a variety of lotions and potions upon my skin, trying to stave off the ravages of age but also because my skin is really very dry and the air is very dry and it's cold and we have forced air heat blah blah blah. So the other morning I've got one of the bottles, it's a pump thing and I pump a small amount of the stuff onto my finger, normally. This particular morning the exit hole for the creamy goo is slightly plugged, so instead of hitting the finger, it splurches past the finger and onto the window. It looks remarkably like spooge, and it's 5:50a.m. and I am hysterical. It doesn't help that rather than unplug the hole properly, I try to get more out of the bottle and that splooches onto the mirror. It's spooge city. I have not been able to get these images out of my head for days. I did clean off the window and mirror though.

I saw my dentist last week and he told me that I have a cracked tooth and I'll probably just have to suffer the pain until the tooth dies and he has to pull the thing out. Believe it or not, this was better news than I thought it would be; I don't have to have any needles or fillings redone, I don't have huge pockets around my gums where everything is deteriorating, my teeth are otherwise in good shape. He said we could try a crown but he doesn't know if that will work. We will see how much of the crown the insurance company will cover, because at $900 for something that might work? I'd just as soon let it go. This must sound defeatist, but I suffered for more than a year with another tooth that eventually had to be pulled, and if I'm talking to a guy who's absolutely giving me the straight goods, not trying to sell me the huge service, then I'll take his word for it. Besides, having been through it, I know what will happen and how it'll go down if the tooth does have to come out. I'll wait and see what the insurance people say though, because if they'll cover the whole crown, we might as well put it on there.

Just over a year ago I applied to the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the Guelph-Humber College in Toronto. I didn't get in, but I wrote up my whole portfolio in about three weeks so it's sort of no wonder. I'm also not published in the creative writing genre, so again, no wonder I didn't get in. All the same, I still want to write. When I think back to the time when I had to submit that thing, I remember especially one day driving home from work in January and thinking, "I am insane. I actually feel as though I could be insane." When I write, I use a completely different part of my brain than when I'm doing day to day thinking or science work. I have to access some subconscious stuff, and I have to play around with thinking What If? and the like. At the same time as I was doing this, I was teaching three courses and some labs, doing some single parenting, chairing a couple of committees, and rekindling an old friendship fraught with baggage with BF2. The words can't do justice to the feelings and the agony I was going through at the time. I often think of that drive home in the car, that thought that I could be insane. It occurred to me that if you use more of your brain than you're meant to use, you go too far into yourself, you can't get out. Maybe that's insanity, I don't know, but I felt like I was on the brink of that. I have the portfolio pieces, I should expand them, one at a time. They all need severe editing but I know that they were all on the way to being good examples of writing. Thing is, when you apply for a program like that, you can't apply on potential alone. The people making the decisions don't want to read past the page to imagine how much better the writer could be, they need to see that the writer is good. Would I still want to get into the program? Not really. Doing the application was proof enough to me that I can write.

I have not yet heard from the university that could be my potential employer. I have been preparing myself for the worst, even though the ad more or less described me, and only me, to a "t". Many things can happen, it's possible that they're mired in red tape, that the administration doesn't want to consider an applicant at the associate professor level, that the department can't agree on a short list, that I'm not on the short list and other candidates have already been contacted for interviews. I'm ready to not be on the short list, I just need to know so that I can get moving on making a life for myself that is outside of academics. If this job doesn't come through in other words, I am good with walking away from "it all". Walking to what I don't know, but I guess I'll figure that part out later.

Oh, and it's Valentine's Day and I don't care.

I think that's it for now.