current mood:
currently listening to: mic Jenkins -rain
currently reading: autobiography of my dead brother
shespawn & I were talking about the importance of recreational writing so I thought about meandering over here and here I am.
I guess I can start with updates of life in general. I have to say, it feels difficult & lonely to write just for the sake of writing these days. writing on an academic level gives me a focus and motivation that i don't get when writing for fun. I've tried several times to start a few things here and there, it just doesn't give me the same sense of purpose i once had. & that makes me sad as fuck.
so ... i'm on summer break rn, but in the fall i'll be attending my third semester of grad school. after that i'll only have one semester left & i'll have my master's in applied communication. i'd like to go for my phd, but i'm mostly interested in rhetorical criticism & iupui doesn't offer a program with that focus. however, they do offer a health communication program on the doctorate level & i am thinking that could be a great opportunity for applying rhetorical criticism from a medical standpoint, which is hugely important. especially when i think about working towards changing the rhetoric of drug addiction & how violence is perpetuated. so we shall see.
i hella excited bc i'll be teaching my first class in fall too. its an intro level public speaking course, and it's what I've been working toward as an ultimate goal for the past four years of my undergraduate career. eventually i'd like to teach a course on intersectionality, but that'll probs take a phd to swing so there's some hashtag goals to aspire towards i suppose.
speaking of hashtag goals, snookms & i have decided that instead of just buying another house once we become financially secure enough to get a bigger house, that we want to build an a frame cabin somewhere up north. i'd like to make it as self sufficient as possible and work at helping homeless communities achieve this as well for parties interested, but i may be biting off more than i can chew with that so i'll just have to take it a step at a time i guess. this has been the driving force for both snookms & i when the days grow dark w stress & other bullshit problems that surface bc LIFE. it's been a good way to keep us stringing along considering we STILL live in a two bedroom 1 bath after all these years & our three adult children have shared a room together and have yet to experience having their own room.
i mean, i'm thankful for all that we have learned in living in such close quarters w one another, like, so many survival skills regarding bathroom glitches & shit, but i feel like it might have some damaging implications on the kids. i feel bad about that. but i am always terrified that if we try to settle our life into something more expensive then we run an even greater danger of losing the house & becoming homeless the way my family & i did growing up. living in an emergency shelter was sometimes way more stressful than not having my own room. i guess i am being rather extreme and paranoid, but it's a lot easier for snookms & i to come up with the mortgage payment we have now when we are in a financial bind as opposed to how difficult it would be to come up with a grand for a 3 or four bedroom house payment, you feel me?
building an a frame, according to the research I've done on it, is a wise choice for more than just the monetary benefits. i guess the pitch of the roof, because its angles are so sharp, make for a more durable roof in harsh winters since the snow won't accumulate, and heating & cooling becomes less problematic during more extreme temperatures in summer & winter months. also says that it's smart on space bc you can get more out of the square footage due to the way it's built. but it also talks about the angles making it difficult to put anything against a wall. i feel like since snookms is a construction wizard and is always thinking outside of the box when it comes to building stuff that he can come up with some pretty awesome solutions to that, so i'm all for it.
i'm guesstimating that within the next two years we can start working towards this goal, because after i get my master's i'll be able to teach as many classes as i want, and i'll be getting paid more per course i teach, which will be a good opportunity to start saving on a massive scale. and i'll have a helluva lot more free time on my hands to help snookms with the building since i will be slowing down academically once i get my master's. i'll still be taking courses, but at a much slower pace than i currently am.
right now i'm taking three courses a semester and working part time in the women's studies office so having down time for anything is a huge challenge. i'm wondering how things will pan out for next semester since i'll only be working three hours a week instead of 15 with the whole teaching gig. i'm also wondering if I'm going to love it as much as i assumed i would all these years dreaming of becoming a prof. not that i'll yet have prof status, but still, it's a step in that direction, which is what I've wanted to do for so long now. i'm nervous as heck, i don't want to cross boundaries with students just for the sake of trying to inspire them to be their personal best, but i don't wanna be a boring ass instructor either. i really hope i can pull it off.
last Friday i went to an interview for a graduate assistant position for the research department of mentoring. i went mostly for the experience of interviewing bc i SUCK at face to face interactions, but once i got out of the interview i was like DAMN I'D REALLY LIKE TO HAVE THIS JOB. i'd basically be gathering data from grad students that are new to iupui to see what improvements can be made to the programs available there. i'd be doing research on more of a quantitative scale, which intimidates me sort of bc qualitative is where it's at for me, but the ladies that interviewed me said they'd walk me through the software that performs the necessary analyses for number crunching. and they said they'd show me how to do the whole survey monkey/qualtrics(?) thing, so it's all good.
i just recently found out that I've been approved to stay on as administrative support for the women's studies program, at least through the summer, but fall is still in question since there are a bunch of downgrades that are happing in the school of liberal arts with employment and everything else. before i had found out that i would be able to stay on through summer, i had applied for the graduate position to help supplement income at home for the short amount of time there would be between now & the start of fall semester, but when the director of WOST told me i was approved for more time i thought, well i guess i don't need to worry about this other job. but the director, who is also my academic advisor and a professor for at least one of my classes every semester bc i adore her so much, said that i should at least go to the interview for the face to face experience since she knows it's such a struggle for me. and i'm glad i went to say the least. if only i could be employed for both programs!
last Friday snookms had an apt w a neurologist and was put on klonopin for his night terrors and tremors he's had for the past 10 years. a few weeks ago he punched me in my sleep and i had a black eye from it so he decided enough was enough and sought help for the situation. the dr. said it's all anxiety related, & i'm like, 97% sure it's from all the traumatic shit he dealt with as a kid living with his abusive alcoholic dad and living in extreme poverty for the better half of his childhood. also having undiagnosed ocd didn't make (and still doesn't!) the situation any easier. i'm pretty sure snookms has ptsd, but he is having a hard time swallowing that pill bc there's this notion that it's a condition only war veterans can get. but i was like, nah, i was diagnosed w it, and you can even get it from going to a funeral one time when you're a little kid and getting freaked out from seeing a dead body. not that i was diagnosed w it bc of that, but my therapist had shared w me all the different ways it can manifest & i was shook to say the least. i'm hoping w snookms seeing this new dr. that they will work towards some therapeutic solutions that aren't just medicinally based, bc behavioral diagnostics can work mad wonders.
well it's late and mike jr is ready to start playing breath of the wild, so i better hit publish & start pulling up the walkthrough websites that show us how to get the master sword once he beats this next divine beast boss. wish us luck!
