Football talk

The NFL playoffs started this last weekend. “My” teams – the Vikings and the Saints, since the Steelers didn’t make the playoffs this year – don’t play until this weekend, but I love football and I’m going to miss football when it’s over for the year so I’m trying to saturate myself while I can. One of the best investments I’ve made this last year is the NFL.com Field Pass access – radio coverage for all the games, plus archives for a while.

That being said, WHAT HAPPENED THIS WEEKEND? I slept through most of the Saturday games (stupid time zone…..) but I caught the first half of the Ravens/Patriots game and where were the Patriots? They certainly weren’t in Foxborough. 24 points in the first quarter? REALLY? And then the Packers/Cardinals game – I may have to get the archived coverage of that and find out WHAT HAPPENED at the end there (it was past my bedtime so I missed the ending). Highest-scoring playoff game in history? Overtime? What?

I hope that the Vikings and the Saints both do well next weekend. I don’t care so much about the AFC this year – the Steelers missed the playoffs, and I’m a sort of fan of New England, who lost this weekend, and was hoping for good things from the Bengals, who lost this weekend, and the Colts have been nearly unstoppable so far so I’m not too worried about them. But the Vikings and the Saints both have histories of choking at horribly inconvenient times, and I really want an NFC team in the Super Bowl that I care about.

Online round-up!

There are a fair number of tabs up on my browser right now. Let’s see what I can get rid of:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/6952220/Why-were-in-the-grip-of-medieval-mania.html

Okay, let’s get one thing clear. Tudor and medieval, as periods, are not the same thing. Don’t conflate them, or the medievalists and Tudor specialists are going to kick your ass. We have studied close combat. I write about music and musicians and romances, and I have studied close combat. There is such a huge difference between the fourteenth century and the sixteenth. When I say I am studying “medieval literature”, no, I don’t mean “like Shakespeare.” They are not even close to the same thing.

Basically, this article…sucks. He seems to think that an interest in anything pre-19^th century is unusual and worth remarking on, even as he says that it’s always been popular, and even as he remarks – twice – that ancient history is just as popular (although he only refers to two writers on ancient history, and one of those two he uses twice). He also only uses two publishing events and the new V&A exhibit that are actually medieval to establish his “mania” and “obsession” with the medieval period (three if you count Wolf Hall, which is Tudor) – and completely ignores the continuing success of the Georgian and Victorian periods in literature.

Skimming this article a couple of days ago, I was annoyed. Reading it more carefully, it just makes me angry.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/simonheffer/6957419/The-true-great-20th-century-novelists-who-irked-the-Bloomsbury-snobs.html

Am I just in a bad mood? This article annoyed me as well. Of course, he put me off almost instantly by praising Joyce and deriding Lawrence. (Not denying that Lawrence had “carnal obsessions” but HELLO, Joyce was obsessed by the body to the point of nausea. At least I find it nauseating.)

He makes a fair point about the snobbery of Bloomsbury and the focus in schools on the modernist movement to the exclusion of the Bloomsbury enemies (Wells, Bennett, etc.), but is it really fair to denounce Bloomsbury for propping themselves up at the expense of others and then do that exact same thing? There must be a way for Galsworthy et al to regain some measure of respect and popularity without having to put down Bloomsbury and the other modernists first.

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2009/02/demetri-martins-palindrome-poem.html

Palindromes are awesome! I know this is from nearly a year ago, but I just heard about it recently. Also, Demetri Martin is cute and funny.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=computers-cant-show-you-the-monet-10-01-04

This is just cool, and proof, of sorts, that computers are not going to take over the world any time soon, because there is still a place for emotion and emotional response.

In which I play with books

Well, my last few posts were depressing and horrible. Or, rather, horribly depressing. Good news! I went to the doctor, I got happy pills, I got my appetite back, and I feel like I can do things again.

Like enter a short story contest.

One of the things I do with my time is play with books. That sounds facetious. I volunteer at a charity shop (Cancer Research UK) and organize their book donations. We try not to have goods on the shop floor for more than a couple of weeks – after that, they get “culled” and go to one of the other shops in town, to get to a new customer base or something like that. So after I sort through the donations, I go through the books on the shelves, pulling the old ones. Then I price and set out new books from the donations.

It’s quite the process, really. I have so much power over these books! I decide whether they are in good enough condition to go out on the shelves (if they’re not, they get recycled in some way), or recent enough. Fiction isn’t a problem, of course, but textbooks and travel books especially – if they’re not from the 21^st century, I toss them. I tossed one today that was a guide to Windows 95. I’m assuming that no one needs a user’s guide to Windows 95 for anything other than nostalgia value. Sometimes I feel bad about some of the travel guides, especially – it can be really interesting to see the differences in tourist advice, or popular areas, or prices over the years. But there’s a point when it’s interesting and a window where it’s too recent to be interesting, too old to be relevant. That window is when I put them in the big white bag.

I have a system of sorts for the storage room, too. Most of the books we get are, of course, fiction. They go on the built in shelves on the outside wall. They’re organized by size rather than anything else, purely for ease of stacking and access. Mass-market paperbacks are on the lowest shelf, just under eye-height, then trade paperbacks (slightly bigger, with slightly harder covers), and then on the top shelf are the large paperbacks – the ones that I’ve seen now as “airport editions” and things like that. Also on the top shelf are some of the non-fiction paperbacks: history, biography, etc. Basically that wall is for anything that you – I – would check out of a library.

Hardcovers are on the other wall, kind of in the same way. Fiction in one area, non-fiction in another. And then we have the reference/specialty books. Diet books, cookbooks (so many cookbooks), gardening books, bird-watching, languages, basically anything that doesn’t fit in with the other categories. They get a shelf of their own, with cookbooks getting a stack on the shelf right by the door. (Seriously. So many cookbooks.)

Kids books are separated into the ones that can go in the 50p bin (picture books, etc.) and the ones that are more for tweens and young adults, which are priced about the same as adult books are. We got a box a couple of months ago that was stacked full to overflowing with teen-girl type books. Some of them are still in the box. I’m shifting them as quickly as I can.

I’m shifting all the books as quickly as I can, really. We have five and a half shelves on the shop floor for books – three of them usually have paperbacks of various sizes, one has hardcover, and one has miscellaneous non-fiction, with a half-shelf near toys for the tween/young adult books. We sell quite a lot of books, and cull quite a lot on a regular basis, but the storage room never seems to diminish.

And some of that is because of days like today. I walked in today and I could not enter the book storage room. We’d gotten so many donations over Christmas (the last time I was in was December 22) that there was literally nowhere else to put the books. It took me at least two hours just to get things sorted, and I was absolutely ruthless about recycling books. If there was any doubt about condition or suitability, into the white recycling bag it went. I then put something like 60 books on the shelves – and one of my fellow volunteers had already done two shelves.

There were three or four boxes full of books today, as well as the mass of bags. I think they were part of an estate sale or something like that. They were nearly all older books, with quite a lot of cookbooks and gardening books and wine-making and things like that. This was one of the times that it was difficult for me to be ruthless when throwing them out (or not), even though I knew I had to be. I kept thinking of my grandparents’ house, which was, and I’m sure is still, crammed to the rafters with books. The collection reflects so much about my grandparents: their interests, hobbies, activities, and so on. I could tell, going through these boxes, what the person who’d had this collection was like in a similar way. I could picture my grandparents’ books going through the same treatment (once the family has pulled out the ones we personally want of course) – sorting through my grandparents’ lives with only minimal consideration for the emotion and history of the books, only looking at how saleable they are. I know it’s necessary, but it’s still difficult.

More of me whining

I can’t get excited about things. I can’t care about things. I’m calling the doctor this next week. He’ll probably just tell me that it’s “part of the grieving process”, like last time. But I need something to make me care.

Graduation is on Wednesday. My housemates’ parents are coming. I have a couple of people coming, but all along – most of this year – I just haven’t cared that much about graduation. I know my achievements from this year. I checked my transcript today (again) and, yes, my dissertation was the highest mark that I got all year. And I’m graduating with merit. Yay me. But the ceremony itself? It’s for other people. It’s for parents, it’s for families. It’s a ceremony marking the conclusion of a year that most people have spent two or three months moving on from. And I’ve had two. I had my high school graduation and I had my BA graduation. It’s not that I don’t care about the MA – I do, I’m quite proud of it, and I miss the work terribly. And I have people coming to mark the occasion, and I’m excited to see the people that I haven’t seen in weeks who are coming for it (everyone I know, except one, is graduating at the same ceremony). But I don’t actually care about walking across the stage and receiving my certificate. I don’t care about the ceremony.

I do have quite a lot of free time, but I have low energy and low motivation so all the projects that I have on my list never quite get done. And then I feel guilty because, if I want to be a writer, I need to write. But I end up watching old TV shows and rereading books that aren’t very good (and ignoring the books that I haven’t read yet) and writing falls by the wayside. It’s an excuse, but I can’t seem to break out of it. When I do get around to doing something productive, like applying for more jobs or something, it always takes about five times longer than I want it to (because I have no energy and get distracted easily

Maybe I just need this time of apathy, to recharge. I don’t have the money to let it go on too long – and it’s affecting my teaching to the point where I’m REALLY not going to have any money because I’ll no longer have a job, hence the need to go to the doctor – but I need to stop with the self-imposed guilt. The stuff that needs to get done will get done. Eventually the other stuff will, too. But the first step is to get myself mentally healthy again.

Yeah, just more of me whining

I seem to be at yet another career crossroads. I have been teaching part-time at a school, covering some classes for a teacher who's been ill long-term. I am getting incredibly bored. Some of this has to do with the timetable - it's very sporadic, but just enough that I can't really find another part-time job. Some of it has to do with my general mood - I am incredibly apathetic right now, and it's hard to tell which is causing which. Some of it has to do with the fact that teaching kind of feels like a "been there, done that" - and that worries me. I know I am a good, caring teacher. I'm just no longer sure that I should be.

I have started to take steps to get past it. I still have the employment problem that I don't have a teaching qualification (so, if I stay in teaching, I would either have to stay at private schools or get one, which is the current Plan) but I don't have experience in anything else. I have applied for a couple of internships at my postgraduate university that should help expand my experience and CV. The thing is, though, the school may still need me. It's still very nebulous whether the teacher that I'm covering will be coming back full-time at all, I learned today. I don't want to abandon a school that needs me; I don't want to abandon a job even if it's not ideal when I don't have anything else in the pipeline. But I can't keep going in this limbo - coming in and essentially being at school full-time or nearly full-time when I'm only teaching 1-3 lessons per day [I have been getting to school at 8:30 or so every day, and leaving at 1:30 ish except for days when I need to be there until 4]. If I'm going to stay, I need a more....consolidated timetable. Or a fuller one.

I have to do something to get past this apathy. I have any number of projects bouncing around my head, but I do not have the motivation or energy to work on them, even when I give myself deadlines. I just can't seem to care, and that's not going to help the job search or the productivity at all. I spend my time doing the things that should be done in 'coffee break' times (like, say, blogging. Or checking Google Reader), and not doing the things that I should be taking a break from. And then it's nearly 10 or 11, and because I'm either exhausted or the alarm's going off at 6, I still don't do them. Something needs to change. I need to get my drive back. I need to pull out of this incipient depression (after several days of being relatively okay, I woke up crying again this morning). I need help.

The devil is in the details

The school where I'm temporarily working is having an inspection this week. Everyone's very worried about it. Sometimes I think I should probably be worried about it too, but I just can't make myself care. For one thing, an inspection is supposed to see how things normally run, so there's not really anything different I can do. For another thing, I don't have any administrative responsibilities that they'll be checking. For a third thing, no matter what the outcome of the inspection, I am not really going to be affected. For a fourth thing, I still have the "I'm new" excuse.

I keep running across tiny little things that I have no experience with. Like yesterday, when I told my class to finish our activity for homework, they told me about "homework timetables" and that they're not supposed to have English homework on Mondays or they'd get overloaded. These are the sorts of things that it is good to know. They are also the sorts of things that, if you are used to the system that uses them, you don't think to mention. They are so automatic to the way you work that it doesn't even occur that it's not done or done differently in other places.

I just know that something is Not Right in my life. I believe very strongly that your body/mind/soul tells you when something's wrong and, while nothing seems Wrong right now, something's Not Right either. I need to do something to get back to where I'm 'supposed' to be - the career path where I feel comfortable - not complacent, but comfortable. At least I've stopped crying in the shower every morning - but that doesn't mean that whatever was bringing it on has been solved, just that my mind/body/soul has shut down from dealing with it. Hence the apathy, I suppose.

One clue to this Not Right-ness was Monday afternoon. I felt fine at school, developed a headache on the way home, was home by 2....and was asleep by 2:15. I woke up sometime after 4:30, still with a headache, and was groggy and headachy the rest of the night. The temperature in our house doesn't help, either - our gas bill was higher than we were expecting and higher than we want, so we're trying to conserve. This, of course, means that we do things like bake more and keep the electricity use high, but whatever. We'll get through it somehow.


I think I'm getting burned out from education. Not from me learning - I still want to do a PhD at some point - but just from being in the education bubble. I am quite bored and apathetic right now about being a teacher. While for some people that may make them stricter, for me it lets my classes kind of run amok, which then doesn't do anything to increase my enthusiasm. I want to do something else for a while: it will help me clarify, one way or another, my desire to be a teacher. I still have the problem of have experience in education but qualifications for other things, but I'm working on that. Back to the soul-destroying job hunt I go, I suppose.

Are you ready for some football?

I know I mention this frequently in the fall, but on Sundays it’s one of the only things I think about: I miss football. I splurged on myself a few weeks ago and got the season pass for NFL.com’s “Field Pass” – live and archived radio coverage for the rest of the season. It’s totally worth it. I don’t have to rely on questionable streaming sites, and if I miss a game, I can listen to it at any point during the week. (I haven’t, yet, because there haven’t been any ‘can’t-miss’ games that I’ve missed. But I could if I wanted to.)

One of the complaints that people who don’t like American football have is that the play stops so often, usually for commercials and whatnot. It’s an argument that I agree with, but that doesn’t affect my enjoyment of the game. Part of it, for me, is that commercials have become such a part of the ‘football experience’ that I don’t even notice them when I’m watching a game live or listening to, say, B102.7 and Coyote coverage. Field Pass, though, doesn’t usually include the commercials – the Chargers station did a week ago, but most of them don’t. Most of the stations play music, an oddly familiar classical set that I can’t quite place, during the ad breaks. And there are a LOT of ad breaks. I knew there were a lot of ad breaks, but as long as there were ads – as long as there was speech and noise filling the airtime – I didn’t really notice them. When it’s music, especially music that isn’t intuitively football music, it’s really really obvious how much time of a football game is spent not playing football.

Also, dear NFL: can you PLEASE stop scheduling all the games that I want to follow (Pittsburgh, Minnesota, New Orleans, and Indianapolis are the main ones) at the exact same time? You have four game time slots throughout the weekend: early Sunday afternoon, late Sunday afternoon, Sunday night, and Monday night. There is no reason that all of the teams that I follow need to be playing at the exact same time. You are not making this easy for me. I’m not even complaining about the Sunday night and Monday night time slots because I know that my inability to listen live to those games is my own fault for living in this time zone. But seriously. Spread the games out on Sunday. Please. The way things are now, I have four games to keep track of in the early timeslot, and none that I really care about in the late one. Is the overloading of the early timeslot really necessary?