Another Scorcher

Summer has arrived... for a few days anyway. This super hot, super cold, super hot, super windy thing is KILLING me! WTF? Somebody hide the celestial remote so whoever is flipping weather channels will stop already!

I took all my recent whiny posts down in hopes I'll get past all this stuff better. Yesterday I alternated between feeling drugged (allergy meds + heat = zombie) and feeling desperately depressed. It's hot, I have a shitload of work to do, and I can't make my mind hold still to get it done. So today, in hopes of getting off to a better start, I got up super early and started watering the lawn. Now I'm doing laundry and I'm going to clean the fishtank. I thought perhaps getting a bunch of housework accomplished might get my mood to where it needs to be to do brain work.

I have to write a longish paper for social psych using a film or a novel to illustrate one of the areas we've covered. Been having a terrible time choosing one, but I think I'll go rent Gone With the Wind today and see about using it to exemplify all the different kinds of 'love.' It's my belief that the word love is utterly useless in terms of actually defining anything meaningful. It's great for lay use, but when you start trying to understand human behavior the word falls flat. There's attachment that we develop for caregivers and others; infatuation during new romances; deep and abiding trust; long term companionship; respect; reverence; worship; patriotism; devotion to principles; empathy for conspecifics; empathy for other species; loyalty; social expectancy; dependency and on and on ad nauseum. How on earth does one word, love, even begin to capture that? I think nearly all of those themes are covered somewhere in the movie, so I'll just make a list of my terms and then take notes of examples under each one. I have three more weeks to do the paper, so this should give me a good start and not overreach my mental capacity today. I started with the idea of using the novel,Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler, and then I was going to use Fiddler on the Roof for the same theme, but neither is as comprehensive, so I'm going for the overused classic because I'm too lazy to find something else.

There! Just writing that gave me a nice, simple task to do, and it's a pleasant one, too! Add to that collecting 5 more articles for my lit review and I think I have a doable list.

Lalalalala! Off to have a productive Sunday. I wish you all the same (or a fun one if you're not doing school stuff)

Slippage

Oh wow... my back is in a bad way. Working with the difficult client I mentioned in my last post I managed to hurt my back somehow. No clue how, I just discovered when I tried to stand up from sitting there all morning that my lower back twinged and I could barely stand up straight. It was better yesterday morning but bad again by afternoon. Now this morning I was just washing and cutting up fruit for a salad when WHAM, the muscles on both sides of my lower spine, just above my butt, spasmed and I nearly dropped to the floor. Again, no warning and no clue why. It's happened twice more so that now I'm scared to move; scared to breathe. The residual ache is climbing up the right side of my back to my shoulder. WTF? Is this more of that 'getting old' shit or did I actually injure myself somehow? The living room is a mess (where my desk lives) but I'm scared to even reach down and pick up the wastebasket for fear I'll never walk again. Just what I need to add to my litany of grad school woes. Hmph!

Then what is it with this weather, anyway? Looking at my Twitter I see I was whining about being cold, then melting and now it's windy and cold yet again. Weird stuff, that!

Ok, so that's it for the pissing and moaning (as long as my back doesn't spasm again). I'm off to scare up a set of assignments and homework for my syllabus, which will be complete after today... yea! The next big assignment is to create a teaching portfolio. Seeing as I have never really taught that will really just be a CV. I have a small project to do, too, but then the class will be over after the 7th week and we'll have three weeks free. Kewl!

We're going on a field trip in my social psych class in a few weeks. We'll be joining in a fire ceremony with the Chumach tribe on their reservation. Can't wait for that one; it should be fascinating!

Been having fun playing with the D-KEFS and will give my first official administration this Friday (I hope, my prof forgot to schedule the client last week) so I'm nervous about that. Will have to miss the faculty meeting where I usually serve on the student steering committee, but oh well. I'm learning how to let stuff go.

Tidbit of the week: the Guinness Book of World Records for the bird with the largest vocabulary goes to Puck, a little blue Budgie (parakeet) at 1,728 words!

http://birdwithmostwords.com/

For a good read go to the link at the bottom for more info and read what his keeper wrote about his anecdotes and his development. She chose his name well...