This Just In

Figwasp is getting married.

Declaration of Chaos Control Initiative.

This is another post that proves what I mean about this blog being truly miscellaneous in nature. Personal ruminations on my life and goals right now...

I am in the midst of a crisis of self-efficacy. By which I mean that lately I lack strategies for conquering a pervasive sense of helplessness that has negatively shaped and colored my emotional, material, and real-waking-time life. (My dreams haven't been very disturbing, which is one sign to me that it isn't too late to avoid a meltdown.) I aim to get to the bottom of this and fix it before it's out of control in the kind of ways that friends, students, employers, and potential compatriots note and remark upon.

I try to avoid the language of 'destiny' and other such tricky and anti-pragmatical hocus-pocus. However, without origins and gods and cosmological speculation, I know, nevertheless, that I have important shit to do on this earth. Period. Examples: starting a free school, traveling the world, keeping my heart free from all the captivating but worthless, mediocre shit that surrounds me, and even just sticking to the lonely path of living up to my own ideals within a capitalist-military industrialist-falling empire type of society. I know that these goals and all the others require a calm and lucid subject of their enactment--i.e., little old me.

I also know that certain psychological reflexes that I exhibit in stressful situations are counterproductive to these aims. Therefore, my immediate crisis requires some immediate attention, so that I do not become so distracted by self-involved, melancholy, and anxious introspection that I lose touch with what is important about my place in the human and material world that I desire to inhabit.

My perceived source of stress and feelings of helplessness is definitely my work--as in, the work I get paid to do, teaching developmental English courses at a community college. I am very, very new at this on several levels, despite having some previous experience teaching high school English.

First of all, since Asheville, Burnsville, and rural Nash County are all full of white people, I am experiencing what I couldn't call culture shock, but rather cultural...um...adjustment? This is one aspect of the stress that I believe is quite positive. My range of intercultural exchange has expanded dramatically in the past few months I have spent in Greensboro; in addition to my born-on-American-soil students, whose skin colors and cultures vary widely, this semester I have also taught or tutored immigrants (and refugees) from Vietnam, Korea, China, Laos, India, Pakistan, Iraq, Mexico, Cuba, Sierra Leone, Togo, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Ghana. Last week, I taught a Laotian man how to use a word processor. I help new English speakers to master subject-verb agreement. I help one really old countryfied lady to develop strategies for reading and comprehending college-level texts. I help many single mothers to conquer the systems that cannot help but to stand in opposition to their dreams of giving their children a better future. The fruit of my efforts gives people confidence in new surroundings, new opportunities...

Despite the positive and even transformative experiences on that front, I feel like I am stumbling through my classes and my preparation for them every day, just trying to hang onto all the little strings that want to unravel. Unfamiliar curricula aside, my main problem is the despair and anxiety that I feel every time a new grading project comes my way, which is an almost daily event. I manage my time poorly, at least partly because of the drudgery and complication I associate with grading piles of tests or essays. My spirit revolts against the idea that this paper in front of me can tell me anything about what a student has learned! Although I am always fair and consistent about grades, I cringe every time I am required to put a big ugly number on someone's paper, especially given all the context surrounding...ugh, all of it!

I could rail all day about why I hate grading, about how it feels like trying to read vital signs from a dead rabbit, but the point is that the anxiety that this produces creates a mental block on everything else that is important to me, like planning lessons, reading books, playing music...and all I can do is fret with furrowed brow about what I "should" be doing but cannot seem to begin. This leads to lags and snags of all sorts.

With the help of my brilliant partner--my hero of the week, or lifetime, by the way--I developed a short list of guidelines for myself which do not, and cannot, address the larger issues at work here, but may be able to help me avoid falling to bits and failing in a big way.


GENERAL GUIDELINES AND PRINCIPLES FOR DISCIPLINE AND STRESS REDUCTION:

- Leave the laptop at home. Access crackbook and blogs in the early a.m. or later in the evening, when there is no work to do because I have already done it. Use the crappy school PC's for work-related stuff.

- Plan for Monday by Friday. Anxiety-free weekends are essential.

- Habit is good. It will feel unnatural until I reap the rewards, whereupon I will sing its virtues because for example, on my way to see Melt Banana in Chapel Hill, I will have no nagging worries.

- Take care of testing center business promptly, for otherwise, it is promptly forgotten.

- Remember that the purpose is also to create more time for important things like: Going to shows; lovin' on my sweet dyspeptic creatron; playing music; following through on craft projects; cooking; passing the Praxis for ESL; reading books; WRITING; planning interesting lessons for my classes and my language exchange partner; and generally creating a better world.

- Wake the fuck up and have a healthy breakfast, drink tea, and establish bearings early so I can think clearly. Make any "official" phone calls, since it makes me seem like the kind of responsible person who wakes up early to handle shit. Write unambitious but detailed to-do lists in the morning before leaving, so that the unstructured work day doesn't turn into a mess of confused half-efforts.

- Read more Kozol, radical teaching journals, etc. to stay inspired.

- Keep good, healthy, convenient food around to avoid time- and money-consuming eating habits. Soups, crackers, cheese, avocado, granola, yogurt, Larabars (yum), Thai noodle packs, pre-cut veggies, popcorn, English muffins, and nuts all come to mind.


This is what I have been able to come up with so far. Intriguing, I know. But really, it's the simple stuff that ends up mattering! I don't want to embody Benjamin Franklin's rigidly scheduled automaton fetish...but one must admit that the man was successful.

I would like to know about how all you other aspiring laziness-and-despair conquerors are doing it. ¡Digame!

The Mother Lode of Awesome New-To-Me Art and Design

I hit a jackpot today in my design blog nerding routine, so what follows is just a totally self-indulgent list of links which, incidentally, you may enjoy. Some are rights-managed, but the ones that appear here are not. Be sure to check out the others, though.

Very pretty things here, including free downloads of super high-quality images like the one below.

Next, you'll want to check out Texture Lovers, found via How About Orange. Par exemplo:

Next up that I somehow found is this guy Tycho's photostream. Go see it! I love all the vintage designs and typography fetish stuff. I can't put up examples because he doesn't give permissions, but you can look. *Wink.*

Holy crap, Fiodor Sumkin. I want this stuff all over the walls of my life.

Ansel Olsen. Yum.

And last but not least, a new line of free hand-drawn fonts here, and then (whew) still more free fonts here at Font Squirrel, at least a few of which are gorgeous. These lovely decorative dingbats caught my eye.

This is Bound to be Personal in a Tacky, Not-So-Interesting Way.

Feel free to ignore this one. It may not stay up for long.

What a strange few weeks. Not that it's over or anything. We still don't know what we're doing this weekend--Athens, Georgia, or a farm outside Roanoke, Virginia? Blacksburg? Franklin, NC perhaps?

It seems like almost everyone I know is in transition and rather unavailable. I myself am moving into my new house and somewhat away from our little womb of love. Only five blocks away, sure, but it will certainly mean a change, even if I mostly sleep in the same bed where I've slept for the past four months or so. The new house is shaping up to become a radical public school teachers' affinity house.

When we went up to Asheville to try to retrieve my things the first time, we couldn't get the truck because we had both somehow forgotten (duh) to renew our expired licenses. The guys at Penske in Weaverville were really nice about letting us reschedule, which I know they didn't have to do. I felt sure that if we had been in Asheville or Greensboro, we would have gotten a self-satisfied, not-sorry-at-all "Sorry. That's Penske policy."

Foiled master plans aside, we had an interesting weekend.

My list of mini-trip highlights:

- Despite multiple potentially volatile run-ins, the only word creepy ex said to me was "No," and this was solicited by a question: "May I come in?" Furthermore, I have received no psychotic text messages since then. This is a first.
- David being perfectly supportive and making everything better.
- Being magically given a place to stay by Ms. Magical Erin, and then cuddling with her magical cat.
- When asked why he had responded to my question about a Haruki Murakami novel instead of telling me where to turn, Aaron saying, "You asked me two questions at once. I answered the more important one." Also, Aaron saying, "It's my life, isn't it?" when I tried to convince him to stay somewhere he didn't want to stay. I was flushed with affection for him right then, especially after the "Do you think I treat every woman like my girlfriend?" thing. What a rad guy.
- Hanging out at Gaining Ground Farm, where there was a booty dance party in the house (complete with several children under three) and an old-time and gypsy jazz pickin' session by the fire. Nice people.
- Seeing Ken and Ziggy at Broadway's.

Lowlights:
 
- Realizing how utterly terrified I still get when confronted with the possibility of meeting creepy ex face-to-face. I still feel spine prickles of imminent danger when he is near, or even when he might be near.
- Creepy ex not letting me into a 70's African music DJ party I really wanted to attend (hey, but at least...see above), since apparently he is somehow the bouncer? Boo. But I tried.
- Having horrible dreams about creepy ex doing terrible things to me.
- Not sleeping at all and freezing my arse off when we crawled into our tent at the aforementioned farm, and then having to spend the rest of Sunday sleeping instead of getting things done, and then being ill-prepared for class today.
- Not seeing some people, and spending too little time with others.

Just weird:

- Watching the conflict in people's faces as they try to decide whether to talk to me, seeing the embarrassment in their eyes as they fumble to make a choice: Recognize this person's humanity, with which I am very familiar, or be cowed by the inevitable wrath and "betrayal" rhetoric of someone who never gives up a grudge, and who is watching very, very closely?

People can be disappointing. I'm not sure what the difference is between a friend and an acquaintance anymore. I have been unsure for a while now who my friends are. I am inclined to think, from evidence I can gather so far, that Greensboro may be a better place to make them.

Off to sleeping and voting and renewing licenses and teaching. Hum drum dee-dum.