...I have a ton of crap on my mind... and no time to talk about it.

I'll catch up with everyone sometime soonish...

Usually, my procrastination in life has not resulted in particularly much harm. And then there are times when my procrastination has resulted in irretrievable loss...

On the drive home tonight we passed a daycare center; it reminded me of a daycare I attended as a tot. It was in Champaign, Illinois, I think... "marble" floors, some wide stairs to the cafeteria? in the basement, gravel parking lot (playing Ring Around the Rosie), finger painting, the kid with the candy bracelet, ....

I've meant for years to write all these memories down and to ask my mom about them, to get her memories about my memories, because I have a lot of them from my early childhood.

...and then I remembered. My mother has frontal lobe dementia. She can't speak anymore. I can't ask her these things because she can't tell me about them anymore.


So now I just want to cry...

...........*.....??.............

Why do I pay these people to use a site I don't use?? ...so it's time for my quarterly post!

So let's see...

Got a B in Math Modeling, an A in Habitat and Humanity (anthropology), and I'll have an A in History and Anthropology just as soon as I complete the final paper ... which was due back in April , so I have an I(ncomplete) till I turn it in. I added a minor in City and Regional Planning, and I got a B for the introductory course I took first Summer session; I would have had an A, but, go figure, I turned in the final paper late and not in the best condition. It was a fascinating course, though! It's made me even angrier at the U.S. than I already was! And right now I'm taking Beginning Drawing and Composition and another class with the professor who taught Habitat and Humanity. This one is Art, Myth, and Nature. (He's agreed to guide me in an independent study course this Fall. Awesome!)

Classes are killing me, to say the least. And it's not so much the ADHD. The Summer schedule is insane! I'm in class from 1:15 to 8:30 at night! I'm not an early riser, so that leaves the late hours of the evening to get anything done. In short, this sucks.

The good news, however, is that TheFox and I have found and begun moving into a new -- and larger -- place! It's a crappy, little, old house, but it's bigger than the apartment we're in now, it has a huuuuge, wooded, fenced-in yard, and the neighborhood is a quiet one I'm familiar with. So, yea!! Some friends have already seen the place, but I can't wait to have folks over regularly for cookouts and whatnot. Feel free to visit anytime!

Well, anywho... I'm supposed to be working on a paper (...fuck! I can't tell you how much I hate writing) -- one, btw, that I'd nearly written over the weekend, till I described it to my professor yesterday, who informed me that my premise was incorrect, so I'm having to start over completely -- say it with me now: FUUUUUUUUCK!!

okay, toodles folks! like I always say, I'll try to be on here more often, but, y'know, school 'n' all...

Peace!
Alan

The Star Thrower

I became a victim of depression around the start of high school. One never fully recovers from such a disease -- it's a matter of the brain's basic functioning -- but by my 29th year the full-blown nature of the illness departed my brain as quickly and as mysteriously as it had arrived. After 15 years of it, though, the damage was done. Habits and thoughts were set and the circumstances of previous life dictated the circumstances of life thereafter. I quickly learned that freedom from depression did not equal freedom from my pathetic life.

In my senior year of high school, I wrote a poem which perfectly exemplified my depression and my opinion of my life. I borrowed the title from an earlier song by The Police, King of Pain. (If you care to read it, I posted it in January 2007 during a brief bout with depression.) Originally, the King of Pain was myself, but over time the term came to personify all that was bad in life, the darker side of the mysteries of life, chaos, darkness, and evil. The King of Pain was a dark god, or all of the dark gods. He could be malevolent but was not necessarily so, rather he was simply unrelenting in his purposeful destruction. And I was one of the tiny insects running willy-nilly in fear of his wrath.

Somewhere in the middle years, my first girlfriend gave me a book of hers, The Star Thrower, a posthumous collection of poems, stories, and essays by the anthropologist Loren Eiseley. I was not, however, aware of that initially.



I filled that period of my life with fantasy. I read fantasy and science fiction novels. I played Dungeons & Dragons. I accompanied my girlfriend to events by the Society for Creative Anachronism. So when she handed me that book and I saw the title with the stars on the cover, my initial belief was that it was another fantasy novel or a mythology about a powerful god who created the shooting stars... the Star Thrower.

That was not it at all. If you care to know and can stand the somewhat sappy-inspirational nature of this short film, then point your video player to the following to watch a synopsis:
http://www.starthrowerstory.com/media/star_thrower.wmv
The message of that essay is one of help and hope. The text delighted and intrigued me; and now, so many years on, here I am attempting to become an anthropologist myself.

But the initial impression has stuck with me. Somewhere along the way, the Star Thrower became the antithesis and counterpoint to the King of Pain. She is a goddess of light and hope and all that is good in the world. In fact, in the many mythologies of the world, it seems that the god or being who created the stars is always a benevolent one.



Good and Evil. Light and Darkness.

And so, having suffered enough under the careful scrutiny of the King of Pain, I began to hope and wait for the day that the Star Thrower would grace my existence. Periodically, I would think "Ah-ha! This is it! My life will be blissful from here on!" ...only to have the rug snatched out from under me again and again by my own stupidity or the vagaries of life.

I don't write poetry anymore. And I'm not a hopeless romantic anymore. I've embraced science and bitterness.

But in the back of my mind, in those far, dreamy recesses, I've still been waiting for my Star Thrower, still waiting for the light.

I've been waiting a very long time.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

I'm going to stop here for now. I have an errand I have to run, but, more importantly, I can't give away the ending just yet. At the appointed time, I'll post the end of this tale as a comment below. It will all make sense in the end; I promise.

Peace!
Alan

First Days Back to School
(attempt #2; SG refused my first attempt from my phone... so much for "moblogging" )

Well, it's been a busy, busy couple of days, but I couldn't be happier about it. Like last semester, I had to scramble the last few days after readmittance to register for classes, but, also like last semester, my classes and instructors are quite good -- I even have a professor from last semester. Although I Iost some ground in December in learning to overcome my ADHD/LD, I'm confidant and excited about this semester; it should be a completely new experience for me.

I have appointments next week to discuss the accomodations UNC will afford me. As a result, my schedule likely will change; I might be able to take just 3 classes yet still be considered full-time. Right now, though, I'm enrolled in two anthropology courses -- 'History and Anthropology' and 'Habitat and Humanity' -- 'Math Modeling' (to fulfill a math requirement), and 'Editorial Writing' (towards a minor in Journalism, since that's the major I started with at UNC). Math is M-W-F in the morning; everything else is Tu-Th afternoons.

Okay, I'm sure that's all boring to you all, and I have a bit of homework to do; so ciao!


~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
UPDATE:
So I just checked my schedule online and discovered that my request to get in the later Math class was approved. Yea! Math at 10 instead of 9! I know, I know; it's not that much of a difference, but if you know me even a little, then you know that anything before 10am does not exist to my brain.

Totally mean to post something here... SRSLY.

...havs to waits for teh nighttime, tho' ... too much shit to do today before class tomorrow.

...*... TOMORROW!!?

...totally wasted week. I'll just have to call it vacation and pretend that I'm enjoying myself and actually meant to not get anything done.

And just because I needed a good laugh today:



...saaaaay... what's a good gift to get some friends who seem to have everything...? I really suck at the gift-giving. Mostly because of the social moral obligations and guilt I associate with it... Anywho...

Wow... My last post was two months ago, huh?

No excuse, really, but I have been busy. I'm still working to learn new skills to overcome my ADHD and reading problems. And I'm still experimenting with my prescription to determine the correct dosage; I'm taking methylphenidate now (generic Ritalin), and I think the doc' and I have pretty much figured out what works best. I'm figuring out ways to build more structure into my life, which will counteract the ADHD. Technology is a great boon for that; my phone is constantly beeping at me with reminders to do stuff. And, if TheFox hasn't already mentioned it, we've hired a professional organizer to assist us with making our apartment an uncluttered, functional, and productive space.

Finally, I just reapplied for readmission (...an awful lot of re-s there, as in I've done this so many times before ) to UNC for the Spring. I spent a day running around campus, with TheFox in tow, getting done whatever I could to help get me back into school again. Even though I had to withdraw from Fall semester and I don't know yet if I've been reaccepted for Spring, the folks at UNC are still going to let me use their facilities to improve my reading skills. And I'm probably going to buy Dragon Naturally Speaking to use at home to aid me with writing papers.

But there's a long way for me to go, of course; decades of habits can't be changed overnight. The past few days have been a good reminder of that. My next appointment with the organizer is Monday. For the past couple of weeks I was supposed to have been doing a little cleaning and cateqorization around here; I've done exactly zilch, so tonight and tomorrow will be a mad scramble of cleaning and stacking and labeling. And speaking of mad scrambles... TheFox & I were supposed to get up about 5:30 this morning in order to get out by 6:30 in order to get her to the airport for her flight at 8:30. The drive to RDU is about half an hour, longer with heavy traffic...

So last night we had a wonderful, as always, time over at schiavona & K_Rex's for Game Night and Persephoenix's send-off back to Ohio ( ). However, we stayed over waaaaaay too late for people who had to get up at 0-dark-thirty. Soooo... as one might rightly expect but as one might also justifiably fear, we overslept this morning, by TWO HOURS! Yikes!! What a crazy, scare-the-cats, yelling, mad scramble out the door it was! I won't even try to describe the drive to RDU... I got her to the airport in about 20 minutes.


Finally, in other news, a few days ago I was reading an article in The Independent Weekly and was quite surprised by it. The woman being interviewed is an ex- of mine, from back in my days at Fort Bragg. We're talking about 15 years ago. And she's from California. So I was surprised to see her picture in a local paper, and to learn that she lives here. Also surprised because she's an ex- in the bad way, as in attorneys and other authorities were involved.

This many years on, though, there's no hard feelings on my end; and I'm glad to see she seems to be doing well...

oh-tay! gotta go pretend to get some stuff done now! And, omigod, wheeeee!

peace, all! oh! P.S.-- WTF's been going on around here in my absence?? Catch me up Clif-Notes style; ain't got time to read everyone's journals...