the deep moans round with many voices

Assorted 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 finished this week's reading and quizzes for Child Psych. I have not yet posted in the discussion forum, nor have I started the essay questions; those are for the next couple-three days.

2. My copy of the English textbook arrived today! (The bookstore manager emailed me Wednesday morning to apologize and say he was shipping it to me.) Anyway, I'd found the first assigned story online through slightly nefarious googling, but now I have the surrounding commentary as well, plus all the other stories (and poems and plays?) that we'll be reading in the course. I made my initial post in the discussion forum, but have not yet responded to anyone else's posts, nor have I started the essay response to the second assigned story. I did read the story, though, so that's a start.

3. Apparently I made the Dean's list for the spring semester. I mean, it's not like it was hard? But yay, I guess.

And now I think I will go to bed, because I am wicked tired and would like to seem coherent and professional tomorrow since there might or might not be some kind of interview toward maybe me taking over Miss Cactus's job (4 days a week) and getting a new hire to take my job (3 days a week) instead of hiring a new person into the 4-day position.

1. Attended church, which was a special service with sermon and music by Samite Mulondo, the founder of Musicians for World Harmony.

2. Coffee hour cleanup.

3. Made my weekly Facebook update post.

4. Changed linens. Given the weather, I decided NOT to do the winter-to-summer swap. (I want spring back!)

( more items under the cut )

18. I seem to have forgotten to mention this in my last few 'stuff done' posts, perhaps because it hasn't been on any of my to-do lists? Well, anyway, I have been reading (in bits and pieces, between other things) the Memoirs of Lady Trent series. I ended up starting with book two, The Tropic of Serpents, because I had to order book one via interlibrary loan and I am impatient. I then moved right on to book three, The Voyage of the Basilisk, which I just finished tonight.

They are fun books! I wouldn't call them deep literature, but they are a pleasure to read -- both in terms of the characters and plots, in terms of the worldbuilding (which is genuine world-building rather than region-building, and thought-out to a degree more writers should aspire to), and in terms of the actual writing, which manages to be smoothly invisible in service of the story despite having a distinctive first-person narrative voice. That is a neat trick, and I wish I could pinpoint how Brennan pulls it off.

Anyway, I have jumped back to start book one, A Natural History of Dragons, and I expect I'll make some reasonable progress on that during slow periods at work tomorrow. :)

snowflake_challenge Day 3: Set some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private.

I have various and sundry goals for the year, but I think the biggest ones are... hmm...

Okay.

1. Starting in April, get really serious about finding and applying to full-time jobs, because my current one (though it's nice and has a reasonable hourly wage) is only part-time and therefore has no benefits. I'm keeping it for now because it meshes well with my seasonal tax-prep job, but I want something more stable going forward.

2. Finish at least three chapters of "The Guardian in Spite of Herself," because I failed miserably on that front last year (ugh, depression) and now that I'm feeling less pervasively gray, I would like to get back to more regular writing.

3. Relatedly, write something every day. This can be as little as a single sentence, but I find that I do best in life when I arrange my days (or weeks) to have reliable structures and patterns. Last year I was pretty successful at finally training myself into making daily flossing a reliable habit, so I'd like to try that with writing this year. :)

4. Also relatedly, keep up my daily to-do lists! I have used to-do lists off and on over the years, mostly when I am having particularly bad problems with depression (I always list a few gimmes, like meals, to make sure I have things I can cross off and point to as 'see, I am NOT doing nothing!' evidence), which is why I started up the habit again in 2016, but I've been trying to regularize it a little more, and plan some items a few days in advance, and it's been very helpful in creating a sense of stability when my greater life has felt too big and terrible to ever be within my control. I'd like to keep that up in good times so the habit will be in place whenever bad times roll back again. *wry*

(They always do. These past couple years were only the second time I've had long-term depression; it's been almost entirely situational, which was also the case with my first extended depressive period, so I was pretty sure it would clear up when my life got less chronically stressful. (Spoiler: I was right.) But even when I'm doing well, I still get my blue funks -- I have periodic clinical depression, which means that a few times a year, my brain chemistry randomly conks out for a few weeks -- and I like to have a well-honed set of tools for getting through them.)

5. Continue my decluttering project. I have a bunch more boxes and cupboards that need to be sorted through, and there are still a bunch more clothes I should try on and decide whether I'm ever going to wear them again. I think I'd also like to get a new computer chair, and maybe some kind of shelving unit I can use to store my spare gardening stuff instead of having it randomly stacked on my kitchen floor.

6. Figure out a way to get more physical activity into my life. It needs to be sneaky and low-key, and it needs to be easily slipped into a daily routine rather than a special-purpose event solely about exercise or flexibility. I already walk 1-3 miles a day -- this is easy, because I don't usually have a car and I have an established routine of going to take a photograph of Cascadilla Creek from the Tioga St. bridge every day that this is physically and temporally possible -- but I want to add something a little higher intensity, and maybe also something to improve flexibility since I've been getting a bit stiffer as I get older and that annoys me.

Any advice on the exercise front would be very welcome, btw! :)

I am debating whether I want to bother updating my resume tonight (and printing several copies at the library tomorrow because I have not yet gotten around to buying new ink for my stupid printer) in order to attend a job fair in Cortland tomorrow afternoon. I mean, on the one hand networking is good and it would be really sweet if I could land a full-time job. On the other hand, I am just really tired this week and I was looking forward to an afternoon chilling with Dottie on my lap while I get some solid rereading done for my Yuletide assignment -- not to mention I have only just been settling in to my current job and it feels weird to be trying to ditch it already.

Also tomorrow is meant to be very rainy and I don't like doing big go-out-and-people activities when it's raining. Rainy days are for being mellow. Job fairs are not mellow. (Useful! But about as far from mellow as I can imagine.)

Gnrgh.

I should update my resume on general principles anyway. I can decide about the job fair in the morning.