Whew, Anna's almost ready for the conference in 6 hours! Whee! Gotta say it's been a stressful semester for both of us, and it's only half over. I'll be glad when it's over. I'm not even the one throwing it together!

I'm thinking of going veggie again. Right now I feel like it's the only dietary guideline that I know I can stick to, and I'm semi-educated enough about food that I know what I need and should eat...

I'm considering getting back into tai chi and yoga. While those aren't incredibly health-enhancing things physically, mentally they do provide some stability, and I did love my 'tai chi days' when I constantly had it on my mind--it was kind of neat to get off the bus or drive my beat up car down to the community college, do some tai chi, and then go back into life as a crazy student of fencing and life in general.

I'm planning on giving my room the cleaning of its life this weekend. It's part transplant from my room in Dayton, so it should be quite the undertaking. I'm also going to try to keep my nose in a book or three, and see if I either get any work caught up or see if I get any reading done.

My Aunt Geneva died. I wasn't incredibly close, but she's someone I always knew well. She was a cool lady, and my Grandma's partner in crime. She really was my Grandma's lifeline for a lot of things. I'm not even sure how she died yet, I just know that she was up there in years. I hope she went peacefully.

Gosh, leaving home for 3 years can really change things. I wonder how much has happened since I've been gone?

Oh! I picked up a flyer for a Capoeira class! Sweet!

--matt

A rant. I'm up way too late. My head tells me to work but my heart tells me not too. At least I have the luxury of time to blog...

Oh man, has not been a good few weeks.

Next week I think I'm going to get back on the running program again. At least get some kind of workout going. I have the judo bug, I think I need to make that happen soon.

I need to simplify a lot of things in my life right now anyway. I'm cleaning my room tonight, and I'm going to try to tie up all the loose ends that have been developing this week, some tonight, some tomorrow. Probably going to stay up for quite awhile because I slept for so damn long today.

I'm kind of getting depressed, I don't know why. I had a migraine today, but it's an effort not to say 'fuck it' sometimes. Still in a scrambling effort to do the right thing and be nice and simple. I did some good journal writing the other day. Need to do more. Yes, you read that right, I just wrote about writing about writing.

Anyway, I'm making a concerted effort to enjoy life a lot more. I'm trying to get good grades, but I'm kind of noticing where I place my worries. I spend a lot of time wondering what I should be doing and how things should look and what I'm deficient in blah blah blah.

What happened? I remember wandering the streets of BG during a pleasantly sunny, snow-covered day, hopping into a game store to bullshit with the owner before raiding the UCF library and then going to the community library. I walked back to campus, did some homework at the computer lab, ate some food at the cafeteria and then went back to my dorm to blast some music and do some studying when I wasn't losing to Kyle in Mario Baseball. Good times huh?

God, fuck that, how about staying up until 3, 4, 5...7am talking about how to make the biggest splash in society? How about those times when we knew that playing games and socializing and sharing ideas was more than just games and socializing? How about when we had time to do it?

Remember when we used to dream? Em just asked Anna and I something to the effect of what our dreams were. We both just kind of stirred out drinks and looked at the table, fumbling for something to say. I swear on my life I thought I'd never see that happen, but I experienced it, and it still feels awful.

So what happens when I graduate? I always considered college the rite of passage prior to the 9-5 job. I think I'm gonna enjoy teaching, but there's so much shit I have to consider outside of that.

Why do we comply with this life? I guess it's because they have what we want. Sometimes I'm a Type B staying afloat in a Type A world, and it's such a bad fit sometimes that I get a migraine just thinking about it. At what point does education truly become empowering instead of teaching us to comply? Especially at the college level? What will I tell my students?

When will we stop dismissing the so-called "counter-culture" icons? When will we stop treating a child or an adult's predilictions towards anti-conformist social responsibility as a cute phase? When will we stop breaking people instead of building them up?

When will we say we are in the business of empowering students, and mean it?

Happy Fall Break Everyone!

Tomorrow morning I'm going out to breakfast with Anna! Probably just get eggs, potatoes, and toast w/coffee. I'm wondering if I shouldn't come up with a "meal plan" for Fall Break just to make sure this is a healthy, cleansing kind of thing. Sleep is going to be weird. Hopefully not too weird. Back at mom's apartment.

It will be nice to have clean clothes. I may even run, who knows?

I also need to get my meditation cushion. I'll try not to stay up until 4:00 am, but we'll see. At any rate I need to READ goddammit!

I've been very anxious lately. Buh.

--peace
matt

health vow

It's 4:10 in the morning and I have to be at BGHS at 8:30. Gosh.

Want to take a "health vow" with me? I'll come up with some criteria next time I'm on here.

Until then, here's to not passing out.

peace,
matt

May the week of mindlessness end here

Good morning. The sunset is glorious in BG. That whole waking up early thing I mentioned previously just gained a little more credence.

The apartment is a mess. I'm going to clean it today, and get everything as spic and span as I can (as Matt can, which is to say I will stack things neatly and wipe things down and try to throw out all the trash). Then I needs to revise my lesson for Elementary Methods and prepare for Monday.

I'm forcing myself to take my workloads one day at a time. Anna and I need to have a talk about this. We started to earlier this week. Hopefully we can continue it some time.

Right now the silence in the apartment is pretty cool. I likes my solitude on occasion. I don't likes my procrastination on more than one occasion (seriously there is a deep orange cutting directly across an already brightening blue and it's making me consider skipping sleep).

I agonize over the things I have to do. Today I stared the wave of shit I have to do down and it just made me retreat into facebook and other websites. I think I need a bit of time pressure to do things, but I'm not good at putting them on myself. Something to contemplate over Fall Break.

I'm kind of sick of contemplating though. When am I going to change my life? My tendencies? When will it be by my will? By my chosen circumstances? I always wanted to resist getting caught in the rat race, in the tidal wave of Things to Do. Now I'm in that riptide for sure. Some can thrive in this environment. Somehow I've found a way to survive. I wonder sometimes if I'm the weird one, or if it's society?

Anyway, I absolutely need to get some sleep before getting to it today (Sunday). Hope your day is a good one.
Peace
matt