Thoughts de Jour

Today was a day of accomplishments. Not major ones, but things that I've been putting off for a while.

1. a thank you note. this is my worst downfall. I take forever with this sort of thing but I do get around to it.

2. a doctor's appointment (for myself). Obviously I get around to this here and there as all I seem to do lately is write checks out to Fairview Clinic or Hospital. I'm sure they're thrilled to hear the news, more money for them rolling in, constantly AND FOREVER.

3. organization of every book shelf in the house (6 in all, big ones). This took a while.

4. organization of the kids' art bin. (which led to )

5. the finding of the pattern for my pitfall screen grab cross stitch which I someday plan to put on etsy and sell.

no laundry, but hey, I don't work again until Thursday so I'll get to that eventually. Not working=not a good thing right now. Every person at my Starbucks is in danger of losing their healthcare from all this labor-cutting (in addition to having their paychecks basically hacked in half). This is frustrating.

A few other things: my dreams are crazy. Last night I had one that involved me putting some liquid free base crack into my mouth and then somehow allowing Beebins to find it and get into it as well. I have a sneaking suspicion that this all came from a creepy expose article about Amy Winehouse that I read yesterday along with my inner secret paranoia that I'm destined to be an unfit mother (or RABBIT MOTHER as my family likes to call them) for having so many kids.

Unpleasant.

Also. I got rid of a few old film books today when I organized, ones I hadn't picked up since being in school at the U. This got me thinking of how things were in my life then, the year 2003, right around the time the war started.

My brain was exploding then from everything I was reading and learning. I would have class every day, pretty much all day long, with seventeen upper division credits. At St. Scholastica everyone took 18, so this didn't seem to be that big a deal to me, but at the U no one usually took more than 12 or 13. Maybe this is why I flaked out at St. Skanks. oh the money I could have saved. . . .

Every day I would read film theory, foreign film theory (french was the worst, the longest, and the most difficult to understand), film history, cultural studies, comparative literature, American history, and media/literary connections to Goethe's Faust (a fun little 2 credit-er). I would do the crossword puzzle every day and damn near finish it. I would read the newspaper every day and get paranoid about the war. I went to class with people who thought film, art, and literature were the most important things in the world. I went a good two years strong (with the exception of being at work at northwest) without encountering a single republican, let alone a conservative one. I guess that's to be expected when you're in a liberal arts program. I would stress out about how Matt and I were going to pay our $1100 to the government for income tax when we had exactly zero dollars and Matt had no job. Despite the war and our being super broke, it was still a fun time in my life and I remember fondly a lot of those days. I loved my classes, loved my professors to the point of having almost perfect attendance in every one. I made the dean's list every semester which required at least a 3.65 GPA. I lived for caffeine and free food. I walked a mile in each direction, some days in minus 20 degree temperatures just to go to class. I look back on all this now and wonder how I made myself do it; I was a pretty poor student before then. I guess I just had to wait until I found something I could really do and enjoy.

Kudos to Gary Reynolds at MCTC for showing me the way. Had I not randomly taken his film class in the year 2000 I may still have been a phone slave at Northwest, getting screamed at and threatened multiple times each day. Funny how things work out, isn't it?