A Day in the Life

To pick up where the last post left off, I took the computer in, the technician fiddled with it for about a minute, he snapped the key back into place, and said "there you go," no charge. Would all of my problems be solved in so easy a manner. As for today's post, I think I'll try a synopsis of the day; maybe a few days of that will get the blog juices flowing again. It being the long weekend, I slept till noon. An extravagant waste, I know, but there was a point of honor at stake. See, I woke up with a mild pain in my back around 10 or so, from my uncomfortable sleeping position. Being fairly groggy, I decided I would refuse to give up my recreational sleep leisure just because my body was suggesting I should try something else. So two hours later, I won, and got up with much greater pain in my back. There's a lesson here: when you're post 30, don't pick fights with your body. Even when you win, you lose.

I then spent an hour or so working out the edits for a commentary of mine set to debut on First Person Scholar on Wednesday. For the elephant-minded in the crowd, this was the piece I decided not to do as a post for my last week of blogging attempt. The nutshell version is that it's applying fantasy literature theory to RPG videogames, and seeing what turns out. Tune in Wednesday to see. It was rather frustrating; even though the gist of the piece had been finished on Friday night (oh, I went out Sunday, okay? My social life isn't entirely deficient.), it took an hour at this point and about another hour later to convert it into the blog-ready form. Still, it's good to go now, except for a final bout through our talented copy-editor.

After the first rounds of edits, I went for a run. And this was when the second bout of body pain enters. Whenever I've gone an extended amount of time without running, my ankles basically ache constantly for the first week or two. I meant to do a half hour of jogging; I managed twenty minutes, five minutes of walking/limping with joint ache, and a final five minutes of jogging. Tomorrow, I'll either do better or be a paralysed mess.

After home and a shower, I did the dishes and prepared my later meal for the day: two burritos, toasted on whole wheat wraps, containing lettuce, tomatoes, veggie ground beef, mushrooms, and onions, with the mushrooms and unions fried in canola oil. I bagged them up, and had a banana. Later tonight, I will have a cup of ice cream.(My theory is, if I post descriptions of everything I eat, I'll end up eating more healthily out of sheer public shame.)

Then it was off to campus. I've got my three hour lecture tomorrow evening, and meetings all day, so I had to do the lion's share of the work today. Sadly, I forgot that I'd have to do that on Friday, and thus, all my books and notes were on campus. That's about a half hour walking through crowds of people actually enjoying their Monday holiday. On the plus side, I got to ignore them, as while walking, I was reading my new kindle e-book, The Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North. The starting point is basically Groundhog Day spread over a lifetime; when Harry dies, he begins his life over, with all his memories intact. It's a lot like Life After Life by Kate Aitkinson, which featured a similar protagonist, albeit a woman over a slightly earlier point in history. (Harry is just old enough to participate in WWII; the protagonist of Life After Life, is a little younger, though still young enough by the 1940s to ponder whether she should kill Hitler or not.) While Life After Life was essentially a character study, Fifteen Lives seems to be more plot-oriented, at the moment, at least. 

Anyway, once campus is reached, I find a pleasant surprise; since I taught this course last year, most of my notes I dig up on grammar are still applicable, giving me a bit of a leg up. I still need to refresh myself on the readings, so I take new notes on Orwell's essay on English Language, a Toast article on Internet Linguistics, and a John Green video. I believe in giving my students eclectic readings. That means I still have to spend some time tomorrow on the third part of the lesson, constructing a summary, but the brunt of the work is done. In celebration, I eat my dinner while listening to the latest podcast of House to Astonish. And I continue listening to the rest of it while I do the aforementioned rest of my work on my First Person Scholar article. At this point, I leave campus, and hop a bus home, getting there by 10 pm. 

It felt like I didn't do much of consequence today, but it adds up to a bit more when you type it all up. Huh. There's probably a moral in there, but I like the "don't fight your body" one better.

Later Days.