Hooky on the Bus

By means of celebration, I am playing hooky while on the bus, going (as fast as I can) from class at CU to my home in Westminster. Normally this time is part of my homework time – I usually edit the very engaging PhD dissertation of my fantastic friend Melissa unless I have some pressing homework which I will have no other time to complete. Point being, this is an hour I spend on obligation, and writing a blog entry is a luxury.

But it’s a luxury I’ve earned.

I just finished presenting my term project for my graduate Linguistic Phonetics class. I stayed up until midnight last night finishing it and had to take meds to get unconscious afterwards, so I am exhausted this morning – which amusingly enough ended up being a good thing, because I was too tired for my autonomic nervous system to trigger the uncontrollable trembling that always accompanies public speaking for me. Translation: I was rather involuntarily relaxed, and I spoke a bit slower. That was a good thing because this was the most ludicrously convoluted system of sound conjugations of any language assigned to students; having finally finished it, I feel it a bit of a complement to have been chosen for this particular presentation. There were about 10 phonological rules, many of which only applied if certain other rules applied, many of which undid (or redid) the action of the rule before... in order to explain it I obviously had to understand it with no human to explain the complexities to me, just a book whose sentences I read again, again, again. I wrote tables of examples for each rule, explanations for each change in each word in each sequence… The fact that this paragraph has become tediously boring is undeniable proof that my fellow students must have been as fatigued as I was by the end. I’m done, though, and I’m certain I did as well on it as I could. It feels like June.

This last week I have not gone to my job, rather only attended classes and done homework every day. I planned to do this as a means of spending as much time as possible with our new puppy, but it ended up being a lifesaver in an unanticipated manner – I had fallen quite behind in homework in the darkness of a brief but incapacitating depression, and I was utterly overwhelmed (and terrified by it) a week ago, but now I feel like I can do it again – perhaps even to the caliber of which I am proud. I need to develop strategies to maintain functionality when the force of fear and sadness derails my ability to think; there is an amazing professor in my department who used her work as a haven from the emotional devastation of her husband’s death, who immersed herself in her intellect to minimalize the inescapable constancy of sorrow, and her example gives me hope I did not think existed.

Real Life and Practice Kids

That last post was, unsurprisingly, nearly a month ago. Life resumed with the furious pace to which I am now somewhat resigned -- I'm taking lots of classes, working a lot, and having a hard time dealing with my Mom's advancing Parkinsons Disease. I've spent a good deal of time unable to function myself, just wandering around trying not to cry, involuntarily composing poetry full of roses and books about dying. Distraction, frequently in the form of a hot tub under the stars, has become a very valuable commodity.
We are considering a new addition to the family whose presence is certainly quite the engaging distraction -- no, not a kid, but another practice one. She doesn't have a name -- we've gone through a number and haven't found the right one yet. She's a mini Aussie like Tuck is but she's bigger -- or she's certainly going to be -- and she's called a black tri, whereas he's a blue merle. We have until Friday to decide whether or not she's our dog waiting for us to find her. It's mostly Tucker who is the problem -- he doesn't quite realize that we're doing this so he can have a friend. He seems to see her in a much more characteristically brotherly way -- as competition. He'll always be my first baby... and the idea of investing countless hours of training in another one is utterly daunting!