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It's nearly a month old, now!
Ah well, here we go, circa early December:
( We took a 5 day trip right after Thanksgiving )
Aside from that, well, a million things.
I watched Transcendence with Grant on Saturday night, and then we had a long talk about the transference of memories and cloning, in the Dune series, and the nature of consciousness, and the meaning of life, until he was sleeping and I was up weeping and crushed under the weight of death coming for us all.
I watched The Interview with Grant on Sunday afternoon, and then went down a rabbit hole of research about North Korea and Kim Jong-Un. I didn't know and couldn't believe that he actually had private meetings with Dennis Rodman, and is obsessed with basketball in general. It's really interesting to me that he attended international schools in Switzerland for much of his youth (since there's so much of a censoring-regime-bubble around everyone in North Korea). Some of what I found seemed to indicate he is a nicer guy than his dad and grandfather were, his wife is alright, and that maybe they're making some very gradual positive changes within the strict, terrible system they inherited. He's fired a particularly hardline general, and has been quoted as making at least one statement about how the common peoples' standard of living is sad? She traveled to South Korea on a trip about "unity," when she was younger, and she does wild (by their standards) things like appear publicly in a pantsuit and carry western-style designer bags. Ooooor maybe I'm grasping at straws.
I'm somewhat ashamed of how, when reading about his human rights violations and seeing his absurd propaganda photoshoots, I can't help but think of how great it would be to see Vladimir Putin just beat the shit out of him. Putin could take him; he'd ride in shirtless on a horse, as he does, and it would be one false image vs another.
I almost never watch movies, two in a single weekend is basically unheard of, and perhaps this is part of why; I don't know how to let things go. I keep thinking about things for days (at least). We were driving home from grocery shopping yesterday and I was blurting out a steady stream of questions they never answered, in Transcendence. It is, btw, the most unfinished and underdeveloped film EVER and should have been at least a trilogy if not a cable series.
Today I went and interviewed for a job and got hired. It's a parttime, $10/hr thing that doesn't start until January, but it's assisting professors, and it will provide a good note on my CV, connections, and recommendation letters - all of which I need for grad school. I feel really good about it so far. Grant's work from home days allow for Jake and Elise continuing to be homeschooled (which would be a dealbreaker, otherwise...)
It was a group interview - a dozen women sitting around a big board room style table, with two professors (a man and a woman) asking all of us questions we'd go around and answer. I was one of only two women at the table without intentionally sculpted eyebrows, a salon hairstyle, or a manicure. I was definitely the oldest and heaviest woman in the room - both by wide margins - and even though I arrived 5 minutes early, everyone else was already sitting down quietly when I walked in.
I also seemed to be the only person who had been personally invited to be there, though, and the only one who wasn't dying of nerves. At the end of an hour of turn taking everyone was dismissed but one of the professors said, "Tina, you stay." The conversation we had afterward was pretty great and incredibly validating.
It's really interesting how honest I've been and how much that seems to be working out. They knew before I was invited to interview about my intense book, and my intense blog, and my teenage children that clearly indicate I was a teen mom. I was candid in my course evaluation about what I thought was tedious about my Research Methods course and times I was lazy because the material seemed like a chore. It's pretty obvious from the transcripts I sent in with my application that I am taking Stats II for the millionth time.
But somebody apparently waited each week for my discussion board posts, specifically, and said they "made teaching worthwhile" and were "the best part of his job." My (prompted and assigned) discussion board posts, that mentioned everything from my personal religious confusion to my forays into polyamory. And more. One of them was a long defense of why obese people shouldn't be judged as people on the basis of their obesity. A couple heavily quoted and referenced Carl Sagan. I've also linked (and APA cited) clips from Jenna Marbles, Hank Green, and Louis CK (along with many articles from Psych journals from the proxy research library).
And this has actually amounted to something. Something that could be a huge stepping stone, for me.
That's pretty fucking awesome.
Ah well, here we go, circa early December:
( We took a 5 day trip right after Thanksgiving )
Aside from that, well, a million things.
I watched Transcendence with Grant on Saturday night, and then we had a long talk about the transference of memories and cloning, in the Dune series, and the nature of consciousness, and the meaning of life, until he was sleeping and I was up weeping and crushed under the weight of death coming for us all.
I watched The Interview with Grant on Sunday afternoon, and then went down a rabbit hole of research about North Korea and Kim Jong-Un. I didn't know and couldn't believe that he actually had private meetings with Dennis Rodman, and is obsessed with basketball in general. It's really interesting to me that he attended international schools in Switzerland for much of his youth (since there's so much of a censoring-regime-bubble around everyone in North Korea). Some of what I found seemed to indicate he is a nicer guy than his dad and grandfather were, his wife is alright, and that maybe they're making some very gradual positive changes within the strict, terrible system they inherited. He's fired a particularly hardline general, and has been quoted as making at least one statement about how the common peoples' standard of living is sad? She traveled to South Korea on a trip about "unity," when she was younger, and she does wild (by their standards) things like appear publicly in a pantsuit and carry western-style designer bags. Ooooor maybe I'm grasping at straws.
I'm somewhat ashamed of how, when reading about his human rights violations and seeing his absurd propaganda photoshoots, I can't help but think of how great it would be to see Vladimir Putin just beat the shit out of him. Putin could take him; he'd ride in shirtless on a horse, as he does, and it would be one false image vs another.
I almost never watch movies, two in a single weekend is basically unheard of, and perhaps this is part of why; I don't know how to let things go. I keep thinking about things for days (at least). We were driving home from grocery shopping yesterday and I was blurting out a steady stream of questions they never answered, in Transcendence. It is, btw, the most unfinished and underdeveloped film EVER and should have been at least a trilogy if not a cable series.
Today I went and interviewed for a job and got hired. It's a parttime, $10/hr thing that doesn't start until January, but it's assisting professors, and it will provide a good note on my CV, connections, and recommendation letters - all of which I need for grad school. I feel really good about it so far. Grant's work from home days allow for Jake and Elise continuing to be homeschooled (which would be a dealbreaker, otherwise...)
It was a group interview - a dozen women sitting around a big board room style table, with two professors (a man and a woman) asking all of us questions we'd go around and answer. I was one of only two women at the table without intentionally sculpted eyebrows, a salon hairstyle, or a manicure. I was definitely the oldest and heaviest woman in the room - both by wide margins - and even though I arrived 5 minutes early, everyone else was already sitting down quietly when I walked in.
I also seemed to be the only person who had been personally invited to be there, though, and the only one who wasn't dying of nerves. At the end of an hour of turn taking everyone was dismissed but one of the professors said, "Tina, you stay." The conversation we had afterward was pretty great and incredibly validating.
It's really interesting how honest I've been and how much that seems to be working out. They knew before I was invited to interview about my intense book, and my intense blog, and my teenage children that clearly indicate I was a teen mom. I was candid in my course evaluation about what I thought was tedious about my Research Methods course and times I was lazy because the material seemed like a chore. It's pretty obvious from the transcripts I sent in with my application that I am taking Stats II for the millionth time.
But somebody apparently waited each week for my discussion board posts, specifically, and said they "made teaching worthwhile" and were "the best part of his job." My (prompted and assigned) discussion board posts, that mentioned everything from my personal religious confusion to my forays into polyamory. And more. One of them was a long defense of why obese people shouldn't be judged as people on the basis of their obesity. A couple heavily quoted and referenced Carl Sagan. I've also linked (and APA cited) clips from Jenna Marbles, Hank Green, and Louis CK (along with many articles from Psych journals from the proxy research library).
And this has actually amounted to something. Something that could be a huge stepping stone, for me.
That's pretty fucking awesome.
