Afternoon with Deacon & Gwen.

Today, I went to my daughter's house to be with the two children while she went to the hospital for a procedure.

A video posted by Lisa Bickmore (@megastore) on Apr 17, 2015 at 5:17pm PDT

Gwen is in Deacon's bed & would like to play a minute. #gwenlife

A video posted by Lisa Bickmore (@megastore) on Apr 17, 2015 at 3:53pm PDT

A photo posted by Lisa Bickmore (@megastore) on Apr 17, 2015 at 4:08pm PDT

I had a great time. Gwen and I decided to have Hello Kitty temporary tattoos. Well, actually, I brought them--they were leftover from Valentine's day. I recorded the above for, you know, posterity.

I worried a little about my daughter, although everything went fine. On the way home, I let myself cry a little because, you know, you wish only happiness and health forever for your children, and these things are not always--ever, really--totally in your hands. Or in your hands at all.

Well, this is something to cry about forever. So I did, and then the historian and I went and got Thai food and now I have written this blog post, and this poem. I hope to sleep until I wake up (recurrent Friday wish) and to get a pile of grading done tomorrow. And see a movie, because, you know, the weekend. And movies. They go together.

In seven days I will be flying.

Here are things that must be done before I go to Ireland:

1. spiffing up some curriculum
2. unfathomable extents of grading
3. a bit of writing

That list doesn't sound so bad, except for the 'unfathomable extents' portion. It has dimension, depth, and incompletion. The grading is the big silent accusatory hulk in the corner of my preparations to leave.

"Don't worry about finishing things," a friend advised me, when I said I was worried about finishing things before I left. "Just don't."

Okay. I think I'll do that.

But in the meantime, while I should be grading,  I have also

• made reservations for hotels in Dublin and Sligo
• begun well-embroidered dreaming about what we might do whilst there:

Garavogue River, in Sligo Town

Sligo Abbey

on inishmurray island

inishmurray island

toward inishmurray island

And that's really better, honestly, than freaking out about the things I have to do on my short and yet nonetheless daunting list.

Ergo, a poem.

My little box of worries.

Dr. Write posted this article today on Facebook, about a strategy for managing worry. Ad Kerkhof, a clinical psychologist who works in suicide prevention, makes the case that while you can't not worry--worries, after all, "relate to real and practical problems in your life, so you cannot rid yourself of them altogether"--you can limit and manage the timeframe in which you worry:

Excellent advice, from Dr. Kerkhof.

Last night, when I was ostensibly working on 80% of a full night's sleep and instead found myself awake at 5 a.m. when, really, nothing good actually ever happens, since it's too early to bang around and make breakfast and it's too cold to go outside and so there's nothing to do but worry, I found myself--are you ready for it?--worrying. About this and that. Of course, since I had to wake up in time to make my 8 a.m. meeting, I might as well be extra and extraneously and superfluously alert, two hours too early.

In the article also suggests another strategy: "If you find yourself awake in the middle of the night worrying, with thoughts whirling round repeatedly in your head... this is where imagery comes in useful...Imagine there's a box under your bed. This is your worry box. As soon as you spot thoughts that are worries, imagine taking those individual worries, putting them into the box and closing the lid. They are then to remain in the box under the bed until you decide to get them out again."

Magnificent 1/12 scale Witch/Wizard's Apothecary, on Etsy, aka
My Worry Box.

This is the box that I imagine will be adequate to contain all the things I worry about, such as whether I will have enough time, in the procrastinated hour that I have allotted myself, to finish responding to student work; what I will wear; whether I am a nice enough, a good enough person; if I have prepared adequately; whether I will remember to bring my lunch; whether there are enough cut up carrots for the carrot portion of the lunch I hope to remember to bring; whether I am taking good enough care of the people I love; why, when it seems so dark in the evening, it is so difficult to want to do and accomplish anything but staying warm. Also, I'm a little worried that My Worry Box won't fit under My Bed.

This is not all of the worries, especially not the list-y ones, the long-term projects that I fret about finishing. I think I need a damn big box with lots of little cubbyholes to contain them, especially at five a.m., especially when I'm on the couch with the dog, thinking about the day to come which will be endurable but only just, because (another worry to put in the box) I'm getting a worryingly small amount of sleep.

11:49 p.m., time for fretting.

Today I slept in until 8:30, which seemed like, I don't know, noon or something. No one else was up except Bruiser. Bruiser likes to get up with the earliest riser because he hopes to go outside and help get the newspaper from the driveway. When I'm the earliest, it's iffy as to the paper fetching. I usually check the news online.


In case you would like a few more mundane details from my day:

• oatmeal
• three comments on this blog, but more than 200 page views (I find the tracking of page views to be absurdly gratifying, don't ask me why, and I don't find it a particularly attractive form of delight on my part, which is why, of course, I am sharing it with you on my BLOGGGGGGG.).
• walk, interrupted by yappy dog on the loose. WHY.
• lunch (almond butter on toast + orange)
• re-make video for class (new content necessitates remade video WHY).
• son and I go to see Django Unchained (so much more of a film than all my fussing about seeing it seemed to acknowledge).
• come home. eat leftover Indian food.
• grade.

Which brings me to the fretting part. The grading, certainly, which seems cruelly early in the semester, but that is the nature of online teaching, deal with it LISA for the love.

I am facilitating a series of digital storytelling workshops which I am afraid are going to yield no digital stories or storytellers. This has an extra sauce of worry on it--more so than my usual workshops to which 2.9 people come--because I said I would do it as a part of my DFL. That's Distinguished Faculty Lecture to you, would you like an invitation? Because I need to make a list of invitees, and also confirm the title which, I don't know where they got the title they have right now, but maybe they should just go ahead and use it? Because I don't know WHAT I'm talking about in that lecture.

Right. DFL. Digital stories. I would like to use snippets of other people's stories in my lecture about narrative as a form of thought (maybe). So I'm worried.

But there you go. I'm going to go to bed and worry there, because I've done what I can do for tonight, and that's that.

That is THAT. The worry and the fret can just go to hell.

Ch-ch-ch-china.

Running son is taking off to Beijing tomorrow. He's been home just over two months, and off he goes again. Who thinks going off to Beijing for five months, after having been home for just over two months, sounds like a grand adventure? Raise your hands!

That's right, it is a grand adventure. Full of Mandarin and noodles and a foreign land, and right now, after midnight, we, the people, are both trepidatious and really excited about it.

If I were a 21-year-old and I were going off to Beijing to learn to read, write, speak, and understand Mandarin even more than I already did, I would have the following as my priorities:

1. Do not get kidnapped.

2. Do not have my money or credit cards stolen.

3. Do not get lost or have anything patently unsafe (aka, "dangerous") happen to me.

4. Blog religiously and truthfully about the safe (aka, "not dangerous") and wonderful things happening to me. Post many pictures of myself, safe and sound, in China.

5. Call home and e-mail at sufficient frequency that my mom wouldn't freak.

Yes, that's certainly what I would do. But that's me.

tags: China, adventure, safe

Got my mind on my money and my money on my mind.

In other words, I can't stop

• trying to figure out what the economic situation actually is,
• trying to figure out exactly how worried I should be about
  
• myself and the historian,
• my children,
• my mom and dad,
• my siblings,
• my bff, and
  
• how this will affect the election, as well as
  
• how on earth whoever wins the election will deal with all of it.

I made a new iGoogle page with a bunch of news and aggregators links. However: this way lies madness and obsessive page refreshing, so I also sorted through a bunch of possessions that it was time to get rid of (I think I could do this monthly, frankly), then made some excellent whole wheat bread and a good dinner, which we shared with singing son and his wife. What else is there to do?

This may shed a little light on the situation: