I should make a tag for the "I'm alive" posts
I make far too many of them.
Saw Scott Pilgrim - LOVED it. I think it actually improves on the comics, TBH, because you can't get confused about which characters are which and it condenses all the pointless and tedious bits out and leaves behind, as my dad put it, "Five gallons of fun in a one gallon jug." Envy was still a bit pointless, but oh well. Wallace Wells, who was already my favorite character from the books, remained so and stole the entire movie in the process. :D
I'm studying for the GRE, have scheduled to take it next Monday, and find myself despairing utterly of my ability to do math. Not to do mid- to higher-level math, in terms of memorizing loads of facts and functions, but my ability to multiply anything that falls outside a times table of 12 x 12, max. And some of the things inside that times table as well. I never retained math well, so by the time I had gotten to things like trig and precal I only had room in my active consciousness for the newest things I had learned. I was hermetically sealed to my calculator, even typing in things like 5 x 6 or 2 x 4 when I came across them, because it took all of my faculties just to remember what the hell I was doing in any given complex (to me) problem. Just because I made straight As did not mean I was good at math. It meant I was good at making straight As. Much like doing well on the GRE means you're good at taking the GRE - nothing else. I'm going to do some practice math sections of the test tomorrow, and I can tell you now that there will be no factoring, probability or things raised to powers greater than 2 answered correctly, if at all.
I'm saving some practice verbal sections to do afterwards to make me feel better. In a list of 300 "common uncommon words" seen on the GRE, I didn't know 8.
I've been giving all this consideration to doing something in a scientific field for my next stab at academia, and then I remember that my brain is like this. I have a great respect for numbers and for the people to whom they have meaning and who give them meaning through their work. They mean nothing to me. I haven't written anything in a long time, and I miss the words.
Today is move-in day at the W and it feels a bit like someone's punched a puppy in the face that I'm not there.
I think it's entirely possible that I have summer seasonal affective disorder. I recognize that I tend towards excess anxiety, but it is only between late September and early June that I feel functionally able to control it, reassure myself of my own confidence and abilities, and generally incite a better mood in myself no matter how many stressful things are hanging over my head. Sometimes I feel like the trolls in Discworld, who have brains made up of thousands of tiny silicon traceries in stone, and the colder they are, the faster their brains work. A troll in warm weather is the dumb, lumbering brute usually depicted in fantasy. I feel like that now - I feel like that every summer. Dumb, huge, clumsy brutishness undercut with a destabilizing and uncontrollable panic, an anxiety that chokes me like Darth Vader if I don't spend nearly all of my will and energy constantly working to contain it. I assign myself a few tasks and chip away at them slowly, moving as little as possible for fear of disrupting the fragile binding ritual in my head that keeps the panic at bay. It's not just the heat, it's not just the light - it has to be both, but it's a hell of a lot of both. The quote from the woman at the end of that article is so accurate I can't believe it's only a coincidence that we both feel this way. It feels like the summer is attacking me - shining right through me like the radiation from a nuclear explosion - erasing me and leaving behind an ash shadow.
I cry a hell of a lot more in summer than I do in winter. I sleep a lot more just because being awake means I have to fight again. I spend a lot more time agonizing over things that will always, always make me anxious, because I am an anxious person (and I hate that, and I can't control it with any amount of applied reason, believe me, I have tried), but it is only in the summer that those anxieties actually become crippling. I just don't do things that I know I should, and can, do - because I'm waiting for something. And I'll know it when I feel it: an inexplicable crispness in the air, even if the air is still hot. I'll know the dumb groggy weight is about to be lifted, the undercurrent of panic is about to recede to whatever underground water table it leaches up from. I'll know the fight is worth fighting again, and I'll be able to do things. I think there is a reason beyond NaNoWriMo that October through January have always been my most productive writing months.
I don't feel too bad about being up at 3 a.m. right now to write this, because if it were 3 p.m. I would be seriously considering joining my cat who likes to hide behind the toilet in the back bathroom.
just waiting,
-rave
Saw Scott Pilgrim - LOVED it. I think it actually improves on the comics, TBH, because you can't get confused about which characters are which and it condenses all the pointless and tedious bits out and leaves behind, as my dad put it, "Five gallons of fun in a one gallon jug." Envy was still a bit pointless, but oh well. Wallace Wells, who was already my favorite character from the books, remained so and stole the entire movie in the process. :D
I'm studying for the GRE, have scheduled to take it next Monday, and find myself despairing utterly of my ability to do math. Not to do mid- to higher-level math, in terms of memorizing loads of facts and functions, but my ability to multiply anything that falls outside a times table of 12 x 12, max. And some of the things inside that times table as well. I never retained math well, so by the time I had gotten to things like trig and precal I only had room in my active consciousness for the newest things I had learned. I was hermetically sealed to my calculator, even typing in things like 5 x 6 or 2 x 4 when I came across them, because it took all of my faculties just to remember what the hell I was doing in any given complex (to me) problem. Just because I made straight As did not mean I was good at math. It meant I was good at making straight As. Much like doing well on the GRE means you're good at taking the GRE - nothing else. I'm going to do some practice math sections of the test tomorrow, and I can tell you now that there will be no factoring, probability or things raised to powers greater than 2 answered correctly, if at all.
I'm saving some practice verbal sections to do afterwards to make me feel better. In a list of 300 "common uncommon words" seen on the GRE, I didn't know 8.
I've been giving all this consideration to doing something in a scientific field for my next stab at academia, and then I remember that my brain is like this. I have a great respect for numbers and for the people to whom they have meaning and who give them meaning through their work. They mean nothing to me. I haven't written anything in a long time, and I miss the words.
Today is move-in day at the W and it feels a bit like someone's punched a puppy in the face that I'm not there.
I think it's entirely possible that I have summer seasonal affective disorder. I recognize that I tend towards excess anxiety, but it is only between late September and early June that I feel functionally able to control it, reassure myself of my own confidence and abilities, and generally incite a better mood in myself no matter how many stressful things are hanging over my head. Sometimes I feel like the trolls in Discworld, who have brains made up of thousands of tiny silicon traceries in stone, and the colder they are, the faster their brains work. A troll in warm weather is the dumb, lumbering brute usually depicted in fantasy. I feel like that now - I feel like that every summer. Dumb, huge, clumsy brutishness undercut with a destabilizing and uncontrollable panic, an anxiety that chokes me like Darth Vader if I don't spend nearly all of my will and energy constantly working to contain it. I assign myself a few tasks and chip away at them slowly, moving as little as possible for fear of disrupting the fragile binding ritual in my head that keeps the panic at bay. It's not just the heat, it's not just the light - it has to be both, but it's a hell of a lot of both. The quote from the woman at the end of that article is so accurate I can't believe it's only a coincidence that we both feel this way. It feels like the summer is attacking me - shining right through me like the radiation from a nuclear explosion - erasing me and leaving behind an ash shadow.
I cry a hell of a lot more in summer than I do in winter. I sleep a lot more just because being awake means I have to fight again. I spend a lot more time agonizing over things that will always, always make me anxious, because I am an anxious person (and I hate that, and I can't control it with any amount of applied reason, believe me, I have tried), but it is only in the summer that those anxieties actually become crippling. I just don't do things that I know I should, and can, do - because I'm waiting for something. And I'll know it when I feel it: an inexplicable crispness in the air, even if the air is still hot. I'll know the dumb groggy weight is about to be lifted, the undercurrent of panic is about to recede to whatever underground water table it leaches up from. I'll know the fight is worth fighting again, and I'll be able to do things. I think there is a reason beyond NaNoWriMo that October through January have always been my most productive writing months.
I don't feel too bad about being up at 3 a.m. right now to write this, because if it were 3 p.m. I would be seriously considering joining my cat who likes to hide behind the toilet in the back bathroom.
just waiting,
-rave