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-No talking for a week-

This week’s challenge is to talk as little as humanly possible for a week.  Wait, let me get all of the jokes that will instantly pop into my siblings’ and husband’s head when they hear this.  I wish I could be around for that week!  Sounds like heaven! Har har.  But seriously, I’m going to do my very best to keep my lips zipped.  This doesn’t mean I won’t respond to someone when they ask me a question or that I can’t order coffee or listen to someone talk or something.  It just means that I will not be starting any conversations, telling stories about my day, complaining, criticizing, etc.  I think it will be kind of nice and peaceful, but we’ll see how it actually turns out.  I’m going to have to remind myself keep my trap shut on the daily.  That I know. 

Dan and I watched two cartoon movies in the past two days.  I feel like I’ve been watching a lot of movie lately.  I think it’s an avoidance strategy.

The first movie was called Ponyo and is a Japanese Disney movie, but it was dubbed in English by famous Western actors like Matt Damon, Liam Neeson and Cate Blanchett.  It held our attention, but it got VERY weird.  I mean, it’s weird enough in Japanese movies that kids are respectful to teachers and the elderly are respected (what?!), but this went waaaay beyond Japanese niceties.  We’re talking about the moon coming too close to the earth, a fish turning into a girl with chicken leg hands and legs (yes, both) and then into a real girl and then back, a man that looks like a woman who lives in the sea and is married to the goddess of the sea (who is also about 50 times the size of her womanish husband), and a mom who drove like a Nascar driver with her kid in the car.  It was just craziness.  Imaginative, corny (in places), and very bizarre.  I like it, but I was also sort of scared of it.

Today, we saw Toy Story 3.  It was really good and I definitely was not confused by any fish/chicken/little girls.  I almost cried at the end and I think “they” left it wide open for a Toy Story 4, if they want to go there and I kind of hope they do.

Tomorrow is the beginning of my last official week of exams (not counting some extra revising that will be going on in a few weeks).  I’m worried about not feeling finished so instead I’m going to think about Harry Potter 7 opening in November.  Can’t November be tomorrow?

After a particularly good, long run this morning (I felt fast), I was in the mood for pancakes.  Mmm, I love some humongous pancakes after a hard run.  And, since this week I had watched a show called “Breakfast Special” on PBS, I heard of two new restaurants in the Columbus area that has some good ones.  If you didn’t see this show, you should follow that link and watched.  It was so neat!  They went all over the US and ate breakfast in Columbus, upstate New York (a place on the way to visit Uncle Ray!  I’m so there next time!), somewhere in Georgia, St. Augustine, Florida, San Francisco and (Beth, I know you already know that your town is the king of breakfast, but…) Portland!!  Of the two in Columbus, we decided to try The Best Breakfast and Sandwiches which is in this tiny plaza in the middle of nowhere Westerville.  It has diner food and is run by a nice little family.  It was really crowded (I think partly because the show aired this week) and everyone seemed a little frantic, but our waitress was super nice and speedy.  Dan got an omelette and I got chocolate chip pancakes.  Did you hear that?  Chocolate chip pancakes!  It wasn’t one of my finer moments and for the rest of my day I felt like I had eaten 14 doughnuts covered in ice cream for breakfast, but at the time, it was pretty tasty!  We’ll be back, but next time I’ll make it blueberry.

Beth, the Portland places were Tin Shed and Helsey’s.  Ever been?

P.S. Dan thinks the plural of breakfast is breakfastses.  Say it out loud.  You can’t not laugh.

This week’s challenge challenge was to do something just for fun.  This is hard for me because I have a lot of things I should be doing that could technically never end, like reading, writing, and worrying.  This means that any time I’m doing something unnecessary, I feel a little bit of guilt… like as I write this blog, or when I watch TV or when I read non-school books, etc.  I still do these things mind you, but I feel guilty.  So, doing something, an activity I guess, just for fun is highly unnecessary and requires effort and planning… therefore it is a source of even more guilt.  In the back of my mind a little voice says, Just stay home and get to bed early. If you make plans with friends, then you have to organize people, get dressed up, leave the house and then you’ll be up later than usual and you need to run tomorrow and you need to read.  Even if you don’t really need to read, you could be getting ahead.  Don’t waste your time.  Don’t be so frivolous with your time! Oh, the voice.  It’s not fun at all.

But, I was determined to thwart the voice this week and so I decided I would go out, listen to some music and dance!  I love to dance and I don’t do it enough.  I found a place in Grandview with two levels of patio and a band playing.  The best part is that it was a cover band (called SWAGG).  A cover band, to me, is awesome because I get to sing along to the songs like there was a DJ, but it’s a real band, which is a little more exciting than a DJ.  So anyway, Friday night was the night.  I invited my friend Nicole from ODE and OSU and her husband Richard.  I got dressed up while preparing myself with some pre-music (which obviously involved Summertime by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince and, hello, Gold Digger) and we met up at around 9:30.  The band played at ten, so we got some drinks and chatted for a bit.  Once the band started, we watched and listened and when the music was just right, got up to dance!  And, can you believe it, this cover band played hip hop covers!  I mean they played other things too, but how awesome is that?  Kanye, Black-Eyed Peas, and even old school Snoop!  It was good dancing music.  And the crowd at this place was just right… a few oldies, a few youngins, but mostly people our age.  Nicole and I even made some temporary girlfriends out on the dance floor!  We took a few dancing breaks to say hi to Richard and Dan and cool off on the patio.  By about 12:30, I was ready to call it a night.  Not too late and still at peak fun-ness!

I need to do this more often.  This is, after all, my last year as a twenty-something.  This challenge was one of my favorites and a huge success (nothing like trying to be patient). 

Today was a really good day.  I did some serious revising and I’m really liking the way that question 3 has shaped up.  I worked most of the morning on the porch until the heat drove me inside.  Then, this afternoon Dan and I walked to a coffee shop and finished up there.  The revising was tiring, so I didn’t make dinner, instead we rewarded ourselves with some Northstar burgers!  Yum.

Today was a much better day as far as work is concerned.  I finished the first complete draft of question 3 by noon and was able to work more on my AERA proposals and contract work with my professor.  Tomorrow, I will spend the day revising and, if there’s time, doing some extra reading.  But in the mean time, I feel like I have time to take a moment and really blog.

Yay!

I’ve been dying to share a picture of my new porch set-up that I got this weekend at Ikea in Cincinnati.  It’s been oh so lovely to eat breakfast and read out here in the morning.  In fact, I’m sitting here writing my blog this evening too.  And since my other porch chairs (and Zoe!) were stolen, I’ve been bringing them in at night, so don’t worry.

Speaking of sitting on my porch every morning and taking a moment to relax and enjoy the early morning hours, I swear I’ve been hearing what can only be described as a breathing tree.  I live on a pretty busy street, one that leads to a highway entrance ramp just a third of a mile or so down the road, which means that traffic is pretty busy our here around 7:30am, when I usually end up eating breakfast.  But, there’s also a traffic light just a little way down the road the other direction, so during the red lights, while the cars are waiting to make a break for the interstate, there’s a few minutes of peace.  In those few minutes of peace, I hear this whooshing sound that’s very soft and rhythmic.  It has the rhythm of someone breathing or ocean waves hitting the shore, but the exhale sounds like wind blowing through a tree.  At first I thought that’s what it was, just a light wind, but I’ve heard it every morning now and it has a tempo to it.  I’ve even gotten up to look up into the tree that’s just in front of my porch, but even when it’s still, I can hear the sound.  The same goes for the tree across the street in front of the Catholic school.  Then, I thought maybe it it was some contraption on the top of the school, but it just sounds too natural (?).  I don’t know, it’s a mystery for now, but either way, I kind of like it.

After listening to the breathing tree for a while this morning, I got to work at my desk.  I was very productive and finished 6 pages by noon, putting me at 21 pages and feeling really good.  As I took some time to think through what I was writing today, I also started to think how lucky I am that this is my work right now.  I’m being paid (sort of) to think, to read, to analyze, to try to make sense of a certain type of knowledge in a field I consider to be very important, education.  I felt like I was reveling in it, pausing to sift through some difficult concept, fancying myself a thinker, elbow on my knee, index finger on my chin, like Plato or Socrates (if Plato and Socrates studied learning in virtual environments ).  That is until I hit a tough spot, where I realized how little I know.  This is when I start to panic and then try to remember that it’s not about the finish line.  There is no finish line.  Enjoy the journey, I try to tell myself, think and read and write and sooner or later, something relatively coherent does come together and things work out.  There’s no rush.  This is against my adult nature (my kid nature was much more into joie de vivre), but I’m slowly getting the hang of it, of being able to do it and enjoy it.

I think this is part of why I’m having trouble writing journal articles right now.  I have gathered so much data and read so much literature and theory and it just hasn’t melded into something coherent yet, at least not as coherent as I would like.  It still feels like a jumble in my mind.  I have glimpses of coherence and I try to grab them and nail them down as fast as I can, but they are fleeting and often when I go back to reread them, I don’t think they are coherent anymore.  And so I walk away for a bit, return and struggle, and walk away again.  I just read a paper that Dr. Nespor wrote suggesting that keeping a research journal would help.  Of course, my head went straight to a blog, so I think I may start one, or start posting more of my thoughts here.  We’ll see.

I read a lot this afternoon, still searching the literature for question 3, trying to be sure that I’m covering all aspects of the topic thoroughly (enough).  In this one edited volume I was perusing, each chapter started with a pertinent quote.  They weren’t by famous academics or anything, just quotes that were relevant to the chapter from someone in that field.  And I really started wondering if someday someone would take a little snippet of what I had written and find it juicy enough to put at the beginning of their chapter.  Wouldn’t that be exciting?  A few lines of my own words, centered on the page and sounding oh so poignant, followed by my name in italics.  Sounds lovely.  Now, if I can just get something published…

Today was blah.  I worked all day long and could only manage 4.5 pages.  Then, I had to work on another AERA proposal in the evening.  I’ve been working for around 12 hours and I’m tired.  Hopefully tomorrow is better.

So begins week 3 of the exam process.  I had a really productive day today (I thank the rain).  I finished 10.5 pages, but it really took it out of me and I am exhausted.  I guess it didn’t help that Dan got some last minute tickets to a free screening of Inception, but we couldn’t pass it up!  It was a good flick!  Night!

-Do something just for fun-

This week’s challenge is to do something just for fun.  As I’ve gotten a little older and more “serious,” I seem to only want to do things that have a purpose.  For example, taking a walk for exercise instead of for enjoyment or reading only for school instead of for fun, etc.  So, this week I’m going to try to think of something that I want to do just for kicks.  There should be no real logical reason to do it, and it should somehow be what I would normally consider a “waste of time.”  An enjoyable waste of time.  Maybe going out with friends?  Maybe putzing around a park?  Who knows?

Who’s with me?!

This week’s challenge was to find new (interesting, inspiring) music and listen to it everyday for a week (and sing along).  I finally settled in on Ray Lamontagne’s Gossip in the Grain.  I got quite a few recommendations from people (thanks everyone!) and I spent Monday evening on iTunes listening to snippets of as many as I could before deciding that Ray Lamontagne was the kind of mellow I was in the mood for.  That, and he had a song titled, “Be here now.”  I think that tipped the scales for me a bit.

Here’s how I got to know and love Ray.  Tuesday and Wednesday he played in the background while I worked on my exams.  Then Thursday when I had finished work for the day, I sat at Barnes and Noble and just listened while looking up the lyrics for each of the songs and reading them as he sang.  I like to know lyrics.  It makes me feel like I know the music better.  Then, Friday I played him as I did some more reading for exams, singing along as much as I could remember (which started to distract me from my reading… ).  Saturday and Sunday there was no listening, but I feel like I got to know some new music and that was the point.  My favorite song on the album is, I think, “Winter Birds.”  So lovely.  I was even motivated enough to look up where he was touring.  He’s not touring anywhere near Ohio this summer, but he is touring with David Gray.  Sigh.  Here’s my favorite lyric from this album (and from the song “Be here now”):

Don’t let your mind get weary and confused
Your will be still, don’t try
Don’t let your heart get heavy child
Inside you there’s a strength that lies

Appropriate for this exam process, no?