Rethinking, indeed

though I have a "full time" blog that is supposed to include all of my interests, I would like to keep this one reserved for really random musings, maybe ranting, maybe just writing things that are more literary than not.  I have now been retired for a year and a half, have taken several classes and have revamped a significant part of my house so it is less cluttered. I'm taking the spring (2016) as a sabbatical from classes to see what I can accomplish on my own without becoming depressed or a bit wooky. We shall see.

Anyway, I haven't killed this blog, just need to figure out what my focus will be.

Moral of the Story

It is actually hard to blog, write, work, etc.  I got through the class and got a good grade; I did a lot of work but certainly could have done more.  I am about to retire and writing should then be taking a more prominent part of my life.  I'll be rethinking the purpose of this little blog.

I'm starting to enjoy myself

I'm settling into the routine: things to read, things to outline, paragraphs to write and submit, comments to sift through and respond to.  The online format is less uncomfortable and in both classes I am working on projects that I am feeling very enthusiastic about.  I'm a bit concerned that I am overstepping my abilities in my html class, but that's what classes are for.  It feels very, very nice to be producing work that people look at, comment on, grade.  It's what I have been missing in my life for the past 20 years.  At work your accomplishments are rarely recognized in the same way.  You have contributed towards the goals of your supervisor and co-workers, but there is always an underlying conviction that they really aren't taking a look at what you've accomplished but they have hastily moved on to the next project.

I have to stay on top of things, because last minute panics are just as unpleasant as I remember them to be.  There are uncertainties each week: the internet goes down at home, the power goes off at work, an unexpectedly complicated doctor's visit, family "discussions",  guests, both unexpected and expected, a birthday "kidnapping" to accomplish.  Any one of these things can through me off of my schedule, so it is best to always be as caught up as possible.

Future Essay Topics

My original, rambling and half-formed thoughts:

Walking the fire trail at lunch (sounds, sights. Memorable visits....dizzy. The runner who failed. The grumpy woman. Human acknowledgment or lack of. Fear of predators. What I turn  my mind to (50% personal 50% work), transition back to work (that pretty path vs the switchbacks).  Some info about nature and relaxation.

Good multitasking and bad multitasking: good: a busy workplace, limited time of year, you initiate things to do as well as absorb things to do.  Feeling of accomplishment and rising above the tide as you walk home to BART.  Bad multitasking: on-going busy, all directed by others, often in a way that doesn't make sense, or detracts from your local mission.   Long term busy.  Start to avoid work and "play" even though there is no time. Lose sense of urgency, work hard to forget about work while gone.  Find myself forgetting important things that happened previous week. How I work on good gardening days, how I lose sense of mission if running too many errands, but how my body also needs the break.

My parents' tools (and lifestyle): photo essay, need to get mitts on pictures.

My mom and isolation.  Again, good isolation and bad isolation.  Concentrating and over-concentrating.  Self-motivation and study and how you have to then set your own limits and breaks.

Blog as personal essay.  Look exclusively for artists' blogs?  Blogs where craft blends with reflection.  Consider blended personal essays in general....comments for experts or afficionados [spell?] combined with general thoughts, or those that blurt out general thoughts in the midst of more technical stuff.  9/11 blogging/essays?  Large event mixed with personal reflection.

Look for my own postings on art and textiles.

A place to take chances....with new words, concepts I haven't quite mastered, etc.

The "clubbiness" of writing.  Namedropping style, assumed familiarity with famous dead Europeans, very off-putting to the newly educated, maybe even shuts out the modern educated.  Reeks of smokey clubhouses inhabited primarily by British upperclass males, with invisible servants scuttling about, filling their drink glasses without notice or invitation.  Where is the writing that will be directed to the educated children of those servants?  People who will bring a new edge to learning?  The stay-at-home spouse of those males?  Awakens and irritates the 99 percenter lurking in me.

The spreading of knowledge and how acquisition of knowledge has expanded.  Me and art and Pinterest.  The kids and German and guitar tablature.  Recipes. Threatened withholding of this knowledge in the future.  An old friend who is not on FB and doesn't email?  Me and my daughter and FB.  Running out of stamps.  The joys of hiding in the woods away from these distractions vs the joy of being able to jot down my thoughts here and bring them back up where ever there is internet coverage.

My actual submission for Module 2

Here are some essay topics that I have been considering:

1.  Women bloggers (or any bloggers) as personal essayists:  I was interested in Lopate's reasons why there were very few women essayists from previous centuries and I began to wonder where are today's essayists lurking, those who aren't as well known as Barbara Kingsolver and Anne Lamott.  I suspect that some of them are out there blogging their thoughts rather than publishing them in news media or book format, and I would like to discover them.  It may be difficult to find the best of these essayists, however.  I'm not sure if there is a guide to the best online personal essays. Many of the bloggers who write rambling, interesting essays seem to be in the self-help business, are not too good at examining their own failings as well as their own successes, and want to sell you their book when you visit their "About" page. I have also read some fascinating posts from bloggers who mainly blog about arts and crafts, but on occasion will devote time to talking about life or art in general.  It might take a lot of time to find these posts, however.

2.  Walking the UC Berkeley Fire Trail at lunchtime: I could describe what it feels like to enter nature for an hour in the middle of a busy day in the office.  I see some other path users on a regular basis and have held friendly conversations with a few, have a nodding aquaintence with many and a somewhat hostile relationship with one.  I have had a couple of memorably bad walking experiences and have seen others having bad experiences (two twisted ankles).  Sometimes posters regarding recent wildcat sightings will add an interesting layer of fear to an otherwise routine walk. Often as I walk my thoughts are swirling around, concerned either with work issues or with home/personal issues.  Over the years I have encouraged myself to think 50% on each topic so I have not spent my entire walk preoccupied with the same problems.  On some lucky days I am able to set my problems aside and concentrate on the sights and smells of nature.

3.  Good multi-tasking and bad multi-tasking:  I am interested in why some days we leave a busy workplace with a deep sigh of satisfaction, the sense of a job well done, and a mental list of projects we want to start on the next day, and other times we scuttle out the door hoping to forget the frustrations of the day, amid a growing list of half-completed tasks.  In the past few years the second option has increasingly prevailed for me and many other staff members I know.  I would like to examine recent studies that have found multi-tasking to be harmful to productivity and list some work-related policies that have caused growth in the need for this practice.

 Despite this finding, I believe that by nature I am a multi-tasker.  When I am working in my garden on the weekends I constantly move towards certain goals, such as making the garden weed-free, adding levels to slopes so more things will grow well, improving the fertility of the soil.  However, my activities on any one day may include a multitude of small tasks, constantly interrupted to perform related tasks.  At the end of one of these gardening days I feel a sense of satisfaction rather than frustration.  What is the difference between these two types of multi-tasking?

It Can be Very Difficult

to convince three young adults that I live with that I am actually "in college" again.  They seem to think that privilege is reserved for them.  :-)  While I have been taking online craft classes for years, and while I have been taking 1 to 2 day intensive technology related classes at my workplace for years, I realize that I have tended to think of those things as optional....quite a few of the craft classes I have paid for and then just downloaded the lessons, being too busy at the time to actually complete most of them.  And sometimes life has interfered with the short technology classes and I have either skipped them or gone home in the midst of them, dragging along the manual and promising myself that I will learn more on my own later. Later most often never comes, as there are new classes and new interruptions in the following weeks.

Recently, with work related classes, I have grown cynical and felt that self-improvement is illusional.  You can learn new software, but you will rarely be given the opportunity to use what you have learned, and it certainly won't get you ahead in any significant way at work.  This fall I have more of a "this is the rest of your life" feeling.  Not at all dissimilar to how I once felt as a full time college student.  Back then I believed that I was defining myself by what I learned; I was in a constant quest for self-improvement and reveled in finding unexpected connections between the topics that I studied.

Now, with my current classes, I am starting to look beyond my retirement date, wondering if anything I learn now might be turned to my personal advantage at that time.  I feel like I will need to live by my wits if I expect to do anything more than barely survive on my salary.  That is both a refreshing and a terrifying feeling to have.  I make jokes to my friends that perhaps next year they will pass by me on the street as I sell the homeless peoples' newspaper, Street Spirit.  But maybe, instead, I will earn money by writing, or web designing or utilizing the topic of some future spring class that I might take.

One thing I now share with my young adults is the fear of blowing deadlines, understudying before a test, having a panic attack when our home internet system goes down.  At the same time, it's not all that bad to suffer from a bit of fear, as it reminds me that these classes have grades and consequences, yet also rewards and recognitions.  It's good to travel down that path again; it's good to make new beginnings in my academic life.

Module 2 Discussion Topic

Our instructions:

Sentence mimics: Choose five sentences from this week's essays in the Lopate book. After each sentence, write your own sentence that uses the same syntax and punctuation.
Here's an example:
How I detest the husbands of nursemaids! (Sei Shonagon, p. 26)
Mimic: How I love the smell of freshly baked bread!
Note that the original and the mimic both use the same punctuation and grammatical form ("How I …"). But their meanings are entirely different.
When you have written your sentence mimics, post them for your teammates to read. Comment on your team members' sentences.

 My practice (to be added to as I go along; in a few days I will pronounce it "done", unless this gets to become a new hobby of mine.  :-)  )

This is like MadLibs.

from Hateful Things:

• A flight of crows circle about with loud caws.
• A herd of cows wander around with fretful moos.

• One is just about to be told some interesting piece of news when a baby starts crying.
• One is just about to absorb several difficult bits of information when a phone starts ringing.

• Very hateful is a mouse that scurries all over the place.
• Extremely amusing is a cat that runs all around the house.

from In Bed:

• Migraine is something more than the fancy of a neurotic imagination.
• Happiness is considerably more than the fulfillment of a long-held desire.

• Once an attack is under way, however, no drug touches it.
• After an argument has begun, unfortunately, no reasoning prevents it.

Coping with Online Learning

So, like many people, computers are integral to my life....I use them at work, I use them for play and communicatation with long lost classmates and looking up obscure facts that 30 years ago would have involved a trip to the library.  Two days ago our home internet went down and I started hyperventilating about where I was in my assignments, what I still had to turn in, etc.

I thought I had been very careful to print out the module sections, and started referring to my hardcopies to keep up with my assignments, but realized that the print feature doesn't actually work for me: each section prints out exactly one page of text and then calls it a day.  I had printed out a bunch of first pages to use and in most cases I was missing most of the information.  Once I realized this, I went to work, opened up each section of the module, selected all the text and images and pasted them onto a simple text reader.  After I had all of the sections added to the text reader I printed that out and at last had a full copy of the text.

But I am alarmed at how essential the internet was to my progress in the class, and how it took only one system failure for everything to grind to a halt.  On the home front, it meant that two college careers and one part-time class schedule were in jeopardy.  In fact, we don't have any all night cafes in our neighborhood, and we would be in miserable shape to go to school and work the next day if we stayed out somewhere to finish our studies.  Not to mention the expense of the coffee and the calories of the morning buns needed to justify our lurking in a coffee shop for hours.  Learning is essential in our household, but it makes us extremely vulnerable to any failures of technology.

Another reason I signed up  for two online only classes was that I am curious about how online instruction really works.  Years ago my son signed up for a homeschooling online program.  He failed miserably, partly because none of the software he was provided with actually worked as planned.  Teachers switched office hours at will, programs wouldn't open up as needed, and once they did, neither of us could figure out how to negotiate them to get to actual, meaty, factual text.  I felt a flash of recognition when I first opened up Angel-learning for the system tutorial: I think this is a newer, much improved, version of the system he was using to homeschool.  I made sure to open and use the tutorial over and over; I made sure it worked on my home system, and I log into my classes off and on during the day to make sure I feel at ease with the program.  So far so good, until the internet failed me.  But still I feel quite uneasy.

Here is my problem: I'm very worried that I am forgetting some deadline, some detail of what to turn in, some reading requirements, etc. etc.  I am constantly fighting visual confusion and wondering if I have overlooked a crucial part of my assignment.  What also alarms me is that I realize that I have taken to fast skimming of text and have a difficult time going back over it to see where I am actually supposed to produce something.  Printing off sections, now that I have learned not to lose any of it, helps, but even then the assignments seem scattered throughout the text and I am left with vague impressions that something still needs doing, but I can no longer find the instructions.  Is it just me, or do other online learners have these issues too?  How do you manage your assignment details and feel secure that you have completed all of your required work?  So far, for Module 1, I have read all of the texts, completed the optional essay writing tests, posted my introduction (and soon this mini-essay), and I am working on my 4 page essay on how the author of my choice approaches his subject and his audience.  I have some memory of a journal option, but have lost that reference, so am no longer sure of what I should be doing in that regard.  (I am starting a blog with my reflections on the writing process).  I didn't make it to Monday office hours because work turned crazy busy for the last half hour. Is there anything else I've missed, folks? 

Here's hoping my internet connection remains in good health long enough for me to submit my essay and not have to resort to late night coffee and pastries!

And a parenthetical note after the colored rocks: Once I got to work and reviewed my Module 1 instructions yet again I found what I was looking for, a one page summary of what I needed to do for that Module.  Now I have my direction and my measurement of what still needs to be completed and I just need to deal successfully with my writer's block.

Understanding interactive web pages requires a person to form a visual structure in their head that matches the organizational structure of the website.  You need to have some sort of sense of where information is located, that you need to click on the button on the top right hand side in order to get to the examples, where you then need to scroll down to the middle to get to your current assignment, etc. etc.  Without that visual understanding, I am lost.  I used to have an office mate who couldn't get a visual picture of the folder structure of her computer.  She would wander around in the wrong folder, trying to find her lost document and would often cry out in frustration, "why is it DOING this?" It's not just a generational thing, either.  I have seen my kids, who are definitely brought up in the computer generation, searching and not finding the resources they need in their school's interactive website.  Hours can be wasted searching for what is needed, and often they miss out on needed resources and opportunities because they can't find the link to what they need.

So, I am on the right track when I poke through the course website over and over, as this is what will help me, in the long run, fully visualize the structure of information and prevent me from losing essential information.