Image 01

emmanation

You like me! Of course, you probably don't know me very well.

Archive for the ‘tellin secrets’ Category

more of the same

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

Is it possible to cure writers block by writing something that isn’t what you started out trying to write? (Even if that thing that you write is a run on sentence that requires several seconds to parse.)

I am writing words now, so technically, yes, it does seem to be true, but the true test will come momentarily when I return to the thing I actually need to be writing.

The thing that I need to be writing has the potential to be sort of a big deal (to me) and I’m not quite ready to talk about it yet, but it’s taking up all of my time.

Oh, also? I applied for a professor job at a community college today. That I am willing to talk about, but I find myself with very little to say. I filled out an application, wrote a page about why I’d be good at the job, a page about my teaching philosophy, and then submitted the whole shebang along with my resume and transcript. It was very exciting – but it’s possible that I’m letting Community cloud my judgement. Anyway, even if Jeff Winger doesn’t show up, I think it’s a job I would both enjoy and perform well.

That is if psychic detective is completely off the table.

P.S. Our toilet is bound and determined to run, and it’s going to drive me fucking insane. In my townhouse the toilet ran but a) you could fix it by jiggling the handle and b) I always blamed it on the ghost that lived there with me, so it never really affected my life. This? This is either my fault, Crockett’s fault, or no one’s fault, and when one is faced with a running toilet, one does not simply blame no one. And the handle jiggle is completely useless. It’s very irritating.

paris

Wednesday, October 26th, 2011

When things are going badly for me (as they are right now in school), I have dreams about going to Europe.

Not daydreams of walking through Parisian streets – actual dreams in which I’m part of some group that has a trip planned.

In these dreams, I never even make it on the plane, much less all the way to Europe.

In last night’s version, I packed a bag but forgot pants, and then followed a GPS thing to the airport and ended up in Colorado Springs – more than 100 miles from DIA.

Sometimes I arrive at the airport and can’t find a place to park. Sometimes the airport is a maze.

Sometimes, I have an out of body experience where I watch everyone else milling around the gate, getting on the plane (which is always luxurious), and generally not caring where I am.

I can’t imagine what these dreams might mean.

Maybe I should just go to Paris.

pee sensor

Tuesday, October 4th, 2011

I think my pee sensor might be broken.

By pee sensor, I mean the little strip inside your bladder that they designed to emulate the little strip inside a gas tank. You know, the one that tells you when you’re full up or running on empty. (You know – ‘them’. The designers of body parts.)

What? Is that little strip not a real thing?

Ok, I see where you’re coming from. Bladders are not gas tanks. They’ve been around longer, for one thing. If anything, gas tanks were based on bladders rather than vice versa.

But still, there’s clearly something going on in there that tells you when you need to pee, right? It might just be a pressure thing, I guess. When you start to fill up, your bladder skin starts to stretch and then a ‘hey we’re stretching cause of pee’ message to your brain, and then you start to plan your next bathroom trip. I guess.

My college did not offer any courses in biology.

Not that that’s clear from what you read above.

Anyway, you know how when you’re going downhill (or uphill, depending on the design of your car), it looks like you have less gas than you have? My route to school is very very hilly, and when I’m running low, my gas light will flicker off and on the whole way there.

My bladder is clearly on an uphill slant.

I don’t have to pee, don’t have to pee, don’t have to pee…. HAVE TO PEE RIGHT NOW DEAR LORD IN PEE-PEE HEAVEN.

It’s terrible.

I wonder where they sell new pee sensors. Probably not in the automotive section of Target.

sorry about that, Brian

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

Last week my mom bought a scooter.

This scooter, to be exact.

I wanted one too…

so I took some pictures to see how I looked.

Awesome, is the answer.

When my mom was doing the actual purchasing, the woman behind the counter mentioned that she knows someone who has the same names as my mom (Catherine Rose).

My mom told her that when we were growing up, I had a friend who had a little sister whose name was also Catherine Rose. She turned to me and said, ‘you remember, Brian blah-didee-blah’s little sister?’

When I was about five, Brian blah-didee-blah lived in our neighborhood. I remember exactly three things about him.

  1. He was in Boy Scouts.
  2. He had a wooden fence in front of his house.
  3. This one time I kissed him and then his family moved away and I thought it was my fault.

Let’s revisit that last one. I kissed him (on the cheek, I think, but still – a kiss), and then they moved. Like the next week. I didn’t even see him again, that I remember.

I’m sure that his parents had been planning the move. I might have even heard about it, at some point, and forgotten. Five year old brains are not known for their fact retention, you know?

It’s just that the timing made me think that it was linked. I kissed him and then they left.

It wasn’t until the day at the scooter store that I remembered this whole thing. I apparently just decided it was my fault and moved on. Until last week, I never revisited the event as an adult, to relieve my five year old self of culpability. There was just a little part of my brain that thought that I forced an entire family out of their hometown.

So, Brian, even though I know now that it’s unlikely that my slutty five year old ways drove you away, I want to apologize for the fact that I apparently thought that they did for 25 years and failed to feel guilty about it.

I hope that new town worked out for ya.

this is it

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

I just finished my last lecture of my first year of graduate school.

I have a meeting and a … well, a nothing really – a class in which I’ve already taken the final is meeting this afternoon, and part of our grade is participation, so I do have another class but really just as a warm body. After that, though, I get to leave campus.

I am not taking any classes over the summer. I would, but none of the courses I need are offered and since I’m most likely  not going to do thesis work, thesis credits aren’t going to do me any good. Assuming I do decide to come back to school in the fall (which it’s looking like I will, because I started this grad school thing and damned if I ain’t going to finish it), I won’t have homework again until the last week of August (classes start on 8/23).

That’s 15 weeks from now.

15 weeks.

I’ll be working, of course, but for the same woman I work for now and mostly from home. I’ll be teaching some middle schoolers and presenting at a few conferences, but it won’t be anything like 8-5. I have fifteen weeks stretching out in front of me in which I am almost entirely in control of my own schedule. If I wanted to leave town for weeks on end, I could probably do so. I can’t remember the last time I had this much free time. Probably the summer before my junior year as an undergrad – the summer between my junior and senior years I was either in Turkey or working full time at the Department of Commerce all summer.

I want to be elated.

I think tomorrow I’ll be elated.

Today I’m just worn out.

I didn’t give grad school enough credit for difficulty. I mean, I knew that it would be hard, but I think that at soem point between graduating in 2002 and walking into class last August, I forgot what actual mental commitment was like. I thought that some of my work environments were challenging, but I’ve since realized that I was being intellectually lazy the entire time I was professionally employed. That’s not to say I wasn’t doing a good job – I just wasn’t learning anything. Certainly not learning in the skull stretching headache inducing way that comes from 16 weeks of constant lectures and homework.

I made it, I did. I can do another year.

Probably.

Ask me in 15 weeks.