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this, that, and the other thing
Jul. 20th, 2018 10:18 pmAssorted things, in no particular order:
1. I'm doing my best to annotate "Death of a Salesman" as I go along, and I have come to a realization of why I intensely dislike Willy Loman: he is Donald Trump. Or rather, a version of Donald Trump without the leg up of a millionaire father and with enough inchoate wisps of conscience to make him realize his life is a mess and there's something wrong with his beliefs. But the defensive reaction to anything that threatens to burst his carefully manipulated dreamworld, the mistreatment of his wife, the way he raises his kids with no functional moral center... Yeah. Trump.
If we have to write an essay on this play next week, that is 100% going to be my thesis.
2. Tomorrow New Hire and I will staff the rental office alone all day -- which is the normal pattern for Saturdays, but I am meant to be training her as we go. Except it's a little hard to train someone when there aren't tasks to do, and I have no idea whether there'll be enough stuff to keep even one person busy. And I am so bad at unstructured interactions. *hands* Well, I guess if all else fails I can have her make photocopies of floor plans in preparation for the fall apartment tour flood, while I sort through the apartment photos I've been taking and upload any relevant ones to our website. (And also update the Craigslist ads, since I let that slide today.)
3. This week we have TWO writing projects for Child Psych, which I guess is meant to be equivalent to a final exam. There's the usual short essay assignment, and then we have a third paper-annotation-related project -- namely, relate a personal experience and connect it to the theory or topic we wrote about in the second paper-annotation assignment. Which in my case would be the sources/origins/causes of childhood aggression. And I... don't know that my personal experiences are especially relevant?
I was a very violent child -- physically violent, not emotionally violent -- but it was entirely reactive violence, mostly because I didn't start to develop a functional circuit-breaker on the annoyance/upset-to-anger-to-violence chain until I was ten or eleven, and it took until I was fourteen before I'd say I had myself under control (rather than repressed like a pressure-cooker). And that's not what's generally meant by aggression, because I wasn't trying to make other people do anything except leave me alone. I didn't have much experience as a victim of aggression, because most people quickly learn that bullying a girl who will slam hardcover books into your face or kick you in the crotch if you bother her is not a great life choice. *sheepish* Additionally, I never really grokked the popularity game and was lucky to have a handful of close friends who also didn't care much about it, so I didn't suffer much relational aggression either.
Well, I have a few more days to figure out an angle of attack. (haha)
4. My squash are sprouting!!!
5. I have been taking photographs of a dead bird over the past several days, as a sort of study in decomposition and decay. It's really cool and gross, and I am frankly astonished that nobody has tried to scoop the corpse off the sidewalk yet.
6. I've finished my tax update continuing education requirements, so now it's just Federal tax law and ethics, and one of my tax update credits carries over to count as a tax law credit. So. 4 down, 14 to go!
I also sent in my application to Not the IRS last night. I don't expect to hear back until mid-August at least, but I'm a good employee so I fully expect to be rehired for another year. (Seasonal jobs are so logistically ridiculous...)
And that's all I can think of at the moment.
1. I'm doing my best to annotate "Death of a Salesman" as I go along, and I have come to a realization of why I intensely dislike Willy Loman: he is Donald Trump. Or rather, a version of Donald Trump without the leg up of a millionaire father and with enough inchoate wisps of conscience to make him realize his life is a mess and there's something wrong with his beliefs. But the defensive reaction to anything that threatens to burst his carefully manipulated dreamworld, the mistreatment of his wife, the way he raises his kids with no functional moral center... Yeah. Trump.
If we have to write an essay on this play next week, that is 100% going to be my thesis.
2. Tomorrow New Hire and I will staff the rental office alone all day -- which is the normal pattern for Saturdays, but I am meant to be training her as we go. Except it's a little hard to train someone when there aren't tasks to do, and I have no idea whether there'll be enough stuff to keep even one person busy. And I am so bad at unstructured interactions. *hands* Well, I guess if all else fails I can have her make photocopies of floor plans in preparation for the fall apartment tour flood, while I sort through the apartment photos I've been taking and upload any relevant ones to our website. (And also update the Craigslist ads, since I let that slide today.)
3. This week we have TWO writing projects for Child Psych, which I guess is meant to be equivalent to a final exam. There's the usual short essay assignment, and then we have a third paper-annotation-related project -- namely, relate a personal experience and connect it to the theory or topic we wrote about in the second paper-annotation assignment. Which in my case would be the sources/origins/causes of childhood aggression. And I... don't know that my personal experiences are especially relevant?
I was a very violent child -- physically violent, not emotionally violent -- but it was entirely reactive violence, mostly because I didn't start to develop a functional circuit-breaker on the annoyance/upset-to-anger-to-violence chain until I was ten or eleven, and it took until I was fourteen before I'd say I had myself under control (rather than repressed like a pressure-cooker). And that's not what's generally meant by aggression, because I wasn't trying to make other people do anything except leave me alone. I didn't have much experience as a victim of aggression, because most people quickly learn that bullying a girl who will slam hardcover books into your face or kick you in the crotch if you bother her is not a great life choice. *sheepish* Additionally, I never really grokked the popularity game and was lucky to have a handful of close friends who also didn't care much about it, so I didn't suffer much relational aggression either.
Well, I have a few more days to figure out an angle of attack. (haha)
4. My squash are sprouting!!!
5. I have been taking photographs of a dead bird over the past several days, as a sort of study in decomposition and decay. It's really cool and gross, and I am frankly astonished that nobody has tried to scoop the corpse off the sidewalk yet.
6. I've finished my tax update continuing education requirements, so now it's just Federal tax law and ethics, and one of my tax update credits carries over to count as a tax law credit. So. 4 down, 14 to go!
I also sent in my application to Not the IRS last night. I don't expect to hear back until mid-August at least, but I'm a good employee so I fully expect to be rehired for another year. (Seasonal jobs are so logistically ridiculous...)
And that's all I can think of at the moment.
