existential lunch break

     I just got home from proctoring an exam, and I'm already hungry for lunch (since I had breakfast at 7:30 am).  Bewildered as to what I should choose to snarf and cloudy-headed from having spent an hour and 40 minutes proctoring, studying, reading and generally not being a morning person, I googled, "What should I have for lunch".  

     Apparently many people suffer from the despair of luxury and choices, as this yielded 58,500,000 results (okay, 24,100 with quotes).  On page 2 of the results, I found a post from someone who had written, "I know it's only 10 am, but I'm already thinking about lunch.  What should I have today?"  

     While I love that I'm not alone in planning meals hours in advance, and especially that I'm not alone in planning them at that very hour, it's a little weird whenever I google something I'm thinking, to see that others have thought the same thing.  The lunch thing, okay, pretty common.  But it makes me wonder how many of my other thoughts are actually "original".  I thought I was weird and crazy when I had trouble believing that I exist, but, lo and behold, "existential depression" yields 13,200 results, "I feel as if I don't exist", 898, and, the more favorable, "I feel like I don't exist", 6,960.  I feel sometimes that I've come to some great revelation (at least to myself), and then I find somebody's already written it, already said it, already thought it out.  All I have left to do is buy the t-shirt.  When I was little, I was playing my violin and realized that if I moved my left hand closer to me, down the fingerboard, I could produce the same notes on a lower string as on a higher string.  When I gleefully demonstrated this to my parents, they said, "Yes!  Very good, that's 2nd/3rd/4th position!"

     This all really helps my existential depression, doesn't it?  Well, I keep on pushing anyway, and I feel quite lively at the moment, although the spaces under my eyes feel tired and it feels as if there is cotton inside my head.  Now what am I going to eat for lunch today...?

Horribly structured post of randomness

1.  I woke up with "Honey, Honey" by ABBA stuck in my head.  It's still stuck in my head.

2.  Why does it sometimes take so much effort for people to arse themselves to do things they enjoy?  Why do people who love music dread practicing (Okay, fair enough, sometimes it's totally frustrating and I hate the way I sound and want to break my violin, and there is a certain anxiety sometimes when it's been a while since my last practice session and the only person in the same hallway plays the same instrument....)?  Why can't I get myself to go to dance classes or the gym as regularly as I might enjoy?  I love reading and can even get into a studying groove once I get started... so why is it so hard to get started?

3.  I'm having breathing problems, but I think it's just from allergies/stress/a spring cold.  I think I scared the crap out of a cashier at Walgreens when I handed over my debit card, clutching my chest with a distressed look on my face yesterday.

4.  I bought an awesome hat last night, but I don't think it goes with any of the clothes in my "spring collection".

5.  I've decided that the best season of "Buffy" for dialogue is season 3.

I like this

Dreams

Or in the words of Bruce Lee:

 I'm not in this world to live up to your expectations and you're not in this world to live up to mine.

"Ironically", I'm not coming up with any new/unique way of expressing this idea.  Oh well, I don't feel like it... and if you expect me to do it, you can suck it (just kidding).

Fuck that shit indeed.

Some thoughts

     As I stood stirring the batter to a double chocolate quick bread in my nearly luxury apartment (for it to be luxury, it would have to cost 50% more per month), a question came to my mind that has been bothering me for a while now: am I becoming or have I become too "epicurean"?  As one gets older, the opportunities (depending on situation, of course; I don't think this is true for homeless people, for example, but, then again, I wouldn't know.) become more and more for luxury and pleasure.  I've avoided the pain of getting my work done earlier (so I've put off the pain, really), the pain of re-evaluating my life and deciding whether I'm really taking the right path and instead have slipped into a near-comatose state, or an emotional cocoon, maybe.

       One of the professors at the departmental party of which I wrote earlier remarked that at least we, as first year graduate students, were not curled up in the fetal position, and that this was a good sign at this time of the second semester.  I felt temporarily relieved, but soon realized that I've been a mental fetal position for months now, and the end is nowhere near.  I have been avoiding the pain of dealing with my stress, but this tends to cause even more pain.  

     I wanted to put dried cherries in my quick bread, but had none.  I am in pain for not having them, but do not want to take the effort to get to a store to buy dried cherries, which would seem to be too much of a luxury in the first place (going to a store in order to buy a product that I really do not need).  This last thought is tangled up in a back-and-forth debate of what is pleasure and what is pain.  I don't even know which is which anymore.  If I've even briefly contemplated checking myself into some nice institution where I would get to draw pictures all day (in my mind, such places exist!).  When I think about it, though, I know I would get bored and restless in such a place, and that an "institution" really isn't the right place for me; we all have our ups and downs, and I am no exception.  I also have to deal with the fact that I am absolutely petrified of complete happiness.  Any threat of it makes me draw further into my cocoon, waiting it out until the threat is eliminated.

     In order to survive in sanity, we need both pleasure and pain.  Maybe staying in school is a pain sometimes, but it balances out all the happy moments I get teaching (most of the time), hanging out with friends, and drawing the occasional picture, dancing, doing music or ice skating.  If I were independently wealthy or in a sanitarium all day, I would go crazy.  I guess this really is sounding quite like epicureanism, but, of course, I can't say that I subscribe completely to that belief system (I want to be unique, remember?!).  I don't think that seeking out "simple pleasures" is the only thing guiding me, though, and I'd like to think that I have certain moral standards that lead me through my life choices.

     So here's to partial happiness, toward the end of a very long semester.

Three layers

     I made three-layer brownies for the departmental end-of-the-year party yesterday. They weren't fully set at the beginning of the party, which prompted the department head and host to ask me at least twice, "Now WHAT are these?"

The finished product, before settling

Three layers

Finally cut and settled, the leftovers are sitting in my kitchen.

     They are good, though, if I do say so myself, and, unfortunately for my waistline, the leftovers are currently sitting on top of my stove. At least I went to kickboxing yesterday, where Jessica, Leslie and I found regular instructor Lesa back in business and seemingly happy out about her return from vacation ("Now I know what a beginner feels like!" she lamented as she effortlessly demonstrated an ab exercise, anyway.).

     Today, I need to finish grading a test, an Internet activity, workbook pages and a second draft of a composition, all of which was turned in to me this last week. Although I only have eight students, I feel I have a bit of a right to complain, since I have to work on my own schoolwork and apparently my pedagogical efforts were fruitless in some cases.

     Take, for instance, that I spent several days explaining and going over the subjunctive, and made a special handout for my students that separated expressions that introduce the subjunctive and those that introduce the indicative, so that they would have all the expressions together (I even made headings detailing what kinds of expressions they were (e.g. expressions of emotion and impersonal expressions) and added a section on how to avoid the subjunctive, reiterated from the textbook, at the end of the handout) and so that they could use it as a study guide for these expressions. I also explicitly told them several times, "Remember, you have to memorize these expressions AND the endings/stems for the subjunctive!" They nodded dutifully as you do at a teacher whether you know what's going on or not, and I figured they would have the sense to take the tools I had given them and study for the exam.

     So why did I get sentences like this: "Je voudrais que proteger les droits civils", "ils veut que preservent l'environnement" and "Il est importante que soit un citoyens bons et recylcé"?

     What?

     Okay, I've picked some of the worst sentences to illustrate my point, and it is clear that these students don't understand things they should have learned in 101, or whatever they took as a beginning French course, and I really did get some other good sentences in the subjunctive (e.g. "Il faut que vous votiez pour moi. Il est essentiel que nous recyclions plus souvent que maintenant")throughout the course of the exam. It's just hard to read some sentences that are barely comprehensible in handwriting that is barely legible.

     I'm also trying to work on my various papers, chopping away at them little-by-little.

     Since my culture paper is intended to discuss the arguments between the ramistes (Rameau fans) and the lullystes (Lully fans) as to what is "French" (vs. Italian) and whether using the words "classique" vs. "baroque" is actually a "political usage" in comparing French to Italian music/styles (yeah, I don't know what I'm talking about.), I'm looking at an Italian text to see if the Italians have a different account of the story. So far, I've found unhelpful quotes such as, "Durante tutto il secolo XVIII l'estetica francese e l'estetica italiana non cessano di fronteggiarsi". Well, duh.

     Back to the grind, I guess.