Mama Mema

Let’s see…Mya tagged me, but then she deleted the post where she tagged me, so what to do? I’m going to go ahead because I’ve been enjoying this particular meme on others’ blogs.

What were you doing five years ago?
1. Living in Alice Springs, Australia
2. Enjoying the cooler weather—May/June is the beginning of winter
3. Doing lots of printmaking and a little pottery
4. Getting ready to visit the states and go to my sisters wedding
5. Thinking about having a baby

What are five things on your to-do list for today (not in any particular order)?
1. Call Qantas to see if I buy miles that would count as “activity” that would delay the expiration date on miles I already have, so I don’t feel pressured to try to fit a trip to Australia into my summer!
2. Make flight reservations to visit my friend in Maine.
3. Revise a horrendously overlong essay for my thesis.
4. Feed our temporary cat
5. Do things around the house like cook and clean and bring in the garbage bin etc.

What are five snacks you enjoy?
1. Beans—I’m really into beans lately, especially garbanzo, cannelini, and pinto.
2. Pastes made out of beans, like hummous, refried beans, or white bean dip with sun-dried tomato.
3. Crusty grainy bread dipped in good olive oil seasoned with pepper and salt.
4. Avocados
5. Cookie dough


What five things would you do if you were a billionaire?
1. Hire a really good team to help me develop my dynamic ridesharing idea for Los Angeles.
2. Fund the development of a cancer center in the U.S. that could run programs based on the Gawler Foundation in Australia.
3. Buy land for a kibbutz/collective farm where my smart/crafty/green/organic farmer type friends could make a community and let me live there.
4. Pay our school loans.
5. Hire a financial planner


What are five of your bad habits?
1. I peel my nails when I should trim them
2. I allow tasks to expand beyond their natural lifespan
3. I am occasionally passive agressive
4. I obsess before I express
5. I put off small tasks so that what was merely tedious becomes overwhelming.


What are five places where you have lived?
1. Indiana--various
2. Chicago, IL
3. Los Angeles, CA
4. Alice Springs, AU
5. Tallahassee, FL


What are five jobs you’ve had?
1. Giftwrapper at department store
2. Assistant in a prop-rental house
3. Freelance production assistant/coordinator/producer
4. Coordinator for Mattel Toys
5. Office Manager for Music video house run by agitated people who left pieces of foil lying around.
6. Teaching Assistant.


Which five people do you want to tag?
1. Danielle—I don’t recall you doing this one yet.
2. Susie Lee—you probably won’t read this, but maybe Danielle will tell you…
3. If you read this blog and haven’t already done this meme, I pick you! And if you are a reader I don’t know or whose blog I don’t know about—feel free to leave me a comment, private or public and let me know—I’ll come check it out. Or if you don’t have a blog and just want to answer in the comment box, that’s cool too.
4. Mya--give it a shot--maybe it'll stick this time:)

The Final Countdown

One week from today, I shall turn in my thesis.

I'm still working away, but am sorry to say I am losing steam. It's the same as the feeling I get when I go jogging (not that often anymore) and decide to sprint a section. I set a "finish line" like a tree or a light post or something and set off at a fair clip. As I come into sight of the finish line however, I drop my pace as I approach. I accomplish the endurance aspect but then sacrifice speed, figuring it doesn't really matter. Thus with my thesis. I am mentally and emotionally exhausted of it...probably from the overlong hours earlier on. For weeks I was so obsessed I could barely hold a coherent conversation, I waited for stop signs to turn green. Now I am too drained to obsess. This is the moment for a final sprint, but I fear all I have left is the will to slog it out.

It's possible this is a better strategy, as I sometimes have a tendency to try to accomplish big things in a little amount of time, and that can backfire. Maybe a week out is the right time to transitions one's thinking from "good" to "good enough."

great idea...25 years too late

Print your own Monopoly money!

My sister and brother and I used to play Monopoly, and often ran short on money. We remedied the problem with replacement bills that looked okay--straight edges, nice handwriting, not the same as the pretty colored cash, but you could pay the rent. Then, we had some crappy ass bills, cut to the wrong size, on lined paper with scrawley handwriting. The money was good, but somehow you never felt good with this money. When the banker wanted to rile a sibling, he or she (usually she since my brother was four years younger) would pull some crappy money from under the pile to pay when you passed go. The go-passer would try to argue for some better bills, and dischord would ensue.

We called the crappiest bills "Rotties" (because they were rotten,get it?). We called the better home made bills "Semi-rotties." The money that came with the set we called "good money."

Because of course I'd remember that

Signed onto my USC user account today for the first time so I could register for orientation. Here were the instructions for choosing a password:

You must now select a secure password for your account. When you choose a password, keep in mind that it should be something you can easily remember but others would be unlikely to guess.

All passwords must conform to the following rules:

* Passwords must be 7 or 8 characters long.

* Each password must contain at least one uppercase letter, at least one lowercase letter, and at least one character that is a number or a special character (e.g. !@^&*()-+).

* A password may not be a word in any language, a combination of words, or a word preceded or followed by a digit or special character.

I know I should be terrified about identity theft, but really, I'm worried about identity loss...The day my computer tanks and I lose my cheat sheet of 6000 slightly different and non-sensical passwords, I'm screwed. (Attention any enterprising computer/identity thieves, the document is password protected with a 35 digit code comprised of only vowels and foreign accent marks, so don't even try it.)

Hmmm...now what can I easily remember that doesn't resemble a word or combination of words, has "special symbols" and one capital letter.

I know!

2Btiou$

Oh, shit, that's actually a word in Klingon.

I'll keep working on it.

Dug in Deep

Thesis countdown, 11 days.

I'm dug in deep to the piece I'm working on...my essay's a mess, but the topic is fascinating to me. It has to do with the meaning and the additional connotation that are carried by the word "survivor." How there is a sense not just that a survivor happens to survive, but that perhaps he or she has some innate qualities which contribute to that survival...
I've found that a number of books have been written on the subject...The Survival Personality, Al Siebert, Survival Psychology by John Leach and Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales...

And of course, since it's a cancer thesis, everything leads back to cancer...In the essay I explore the pros and cons of applying survivor "submeaning" ie. that there is a "survivor personality" to cancer...i.e. Lance Armstrong's statement "not a cancer victim, but a cancer survivor, hell bent on living strong." And of course I discovered there is a whole different discussion about "cancer survivor" in the cancer community...So I've also been plowing through a number of articles in medical journals and trying to research cancer survivors.

Last night I set the writing aside and picked up Lance Armstrong's memoir, It's Not About the Bike. He wrote it really soon after his cancer...only three years, I guess when you're a celebrity you have to strike while the iron's hot. Occasionally he'd say something and I wondered what his take would be now, I don't know if I mean past the cancer, or just life years. We're about the same age--he would have been 28 or 29 when he wrote the book and I guess I could feel that a little bit,...but still it well written (he had a co-writer)and interesting...riveting actually, I read in all in one sitting, which means I finished at about 3AM. And it made me interested in biking, which I have never paid much attention too.

I've been panicking over this essay all weekend because it's way overdue but just talked to my thesis advisor, and it turns out she's on a deadline too and actually won't be able to read until tomorrow afternoon...so with all that time bought, I'm going to go pick up another book reference I've been waiting on interlibrary loan...and maybe I'll go wild and hit the gym. woo hoo!

California Gets it Right!

Thanks to my friend and fellow blogger V, who posted this article to her blog: State Supreme Court says same-sex couples have right to marry

This is news that makes me happy and even a little proud (as if I had anything to do with it) that I will soon once again be calling myself a Californian!

It is also news I would not have know about for another week, as in the throes of thesis woes I have completely quit following world events except for reading Newsweek. I just found out about the aid debacle in Burma yesterday when the magazine arrived in my mailbox. In these final weeks of my thesis I don't even click on any links on the MSN homepage. Part of me feels guilty about being such a non-participant in world events, but the other part of me can't help but notice it makes very little difference to anyone in Burma or the Obama campaign if I don't have the up-to-the-minute scoop. The biggest difference is just that I look dumb and uninformed which is a) arguably just an ego thing anyway; and b) kind of irrelevant since I can't go out or talk to anyone until I've finished this $%*&*$* thesis anyway.

Another item that arrived in my mailbox (can you tell how media deplete my life is right now), is the latest don't-you-want-to-renew-your-subscription-? letter from Poets and Writers. On the outside of the envelope it says, in a pretty calligraphic font, "My head says give up...but my heart says no..."

It literally made me laugh out loud as I thought...wow, am I really the target audience for this, the unrecognized writer who perseveres in the face of rejection to submit to every publication and contest provided to her in Poets and Writers?

And then I thought, oh...maybe that's the publisher talking about how his/her heart says no, they won't give up on me yet, they'll send just one more reminder letter.

Either way, it makes me cringe a little.

Back to the grind...

But way to go Cali with that respecting human rights thing!

Be Here Now

Saturday, I woke in the early morning hours. It suddenly came crashing upon me that I have three weeks to finish my entire thesis, and although I'm hoping ot use some of my recent research for other things, I've essentially spent the LAST three weeks on ONE ESSAY that still isn't finished.

I also contemplated news that the writing program at USC where I was hoping to apply for a lectureship cannot accept my application if I am in the screenwriting department, moreover, the director wrote, they believe they already have enough people for fall and won't be hiring extras in any case. Which means that the gender studies position is currently the only egg in my basket for funding/insurance. I would have chosen it over a writing lectureship, so I will be ecstatic if it comes through, but they have 22 applicants for 4 positions, and if it doesn't work out, I will need to decide whether to try to go to USC anyway (more loans!) or start looking for other employment...

When I finally drifted off I had a variation of dreams I have had in the past, where somehow I end up in the back seat of a car that starts rolling, and I can't reach the brakes. Sometimes I try to reach the steering wheel and steer as the car rolls faster. In this dream I could see the car and house dead ahead at the bottom of the hill, and was trying to decide whether I could dive over the seat and try to hit the brake with my hand before the car reached the bottom, or if in attempting to do that at a fast rolling speed I would break my neck and so I should just brace and let the crash bring me to a stop. I decided on the latter and woke up on impact, with pounding heart and a huge surge of adrenalyn coursing through my body.

I googled my dream and found other questions regarding similar on answers.com. Here was the top explanation:

Cars signify our means of moving forward in life. Our ideas, and goals and how we achieve them. The fact that you are in the back seat shows that you feel certain events in your life are out of your control right now. Ask yourself why you have taken the 'back seat' in your own life, and who is driving if anybody.

An Uncertain Life

Life plans

Paul and I are house sitting May 20-June 10.

My new thesis defense date might be June 12.

We are moving to Los Angeles at the end of June unless we need more time and decide to go in mid-July.

I'll start school in August unless I don't find any funding in which case I may have to find something else to do entirely.

My parents might visit in May.

Our friend Eric may visit at any moment or never.

I am definitely going to Maine to see my friend Barbara before we move, before or after my defense and before or after my parents visit.

And this just in...My 103 thousand frequent-flyer miles on Qantas will expire on June 30.

So I (we?) MIGHT BE GOING TO AUSTRALIA in July/August????

If you are in Australia and have thoughts about when a good time to come see YOU might be...let us know!