Winter Blues

Picture from livingstereo.com

I am run down and tired.  I thought having a couple of snow days would have proven to be refreshing, but I think I feel worse.  I think perhaps I have been listening to too many depressing singer/songwriter types in my music lately.  I need something fun and totally meaningless -- like Katy Perry maybe.  No offense to all of you Katy Perry fans.  Just kidding.  I tend to be drawn to singer/songwriter types.  I get a data disk full of one singer's stuff, like I've been listening to Jackson Browne for a couple days, and I listen to it until I get burned out.  I have like 50 songs on one music data disk that are all Jackson Browne.  (Did I just write "like" not once but twice?) I'm OCD about my music.  Lately, I've also listened to a lot of the old Elton John/Bernie Taupin music "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,"  "Don't Shoot Me; I'm only the Piano Player," "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboys", "Tumbleweed Connection."  etc.  I need to switch gears a little.  I don't know if my music drives me crazy or if I'd go crazy without my  music -- maybe a little of both.

When I used to write poetry a long time ago, I always wrote depressing poetry.  It was harsh and cruel, and at types cynical and desperate.  It got to the point where my wife did not like to read my stuff because it was so depressing.  For my mental health, I quit writing poetry.  I just couldn't write happy stuff.  My poetry would be hard to explain.  I didn't write poems about suicide and death all the time like some people do but my imagery was harsh and unforgiving.  I tended to be very cynical.  A lot of things have changed me to where I am not as cynical as I used to be.  Nowadays, I just get blue.

Well, on to other news.  I have parent teacher conferences tomorrow so the night class I teach won't meet.  PT conferences are from 3:30 to 7 and my class is supposed to be from 4 to 7.  Since North County is my real job, I have to go to the parent teacher conferences there.  I would rather go to my night class, not because I get a lot of vindictive parents, but because it's a lot of sitting around and getting just enough traffic from parents that I can't really focus on anything enough to get it finished.  It may not be a waste of time, but it sure seems like it.

My comp II class does meet tonight at the Fredericktown outreach campus, so I need to finish getting myself together for that class.  We are going to continue talking about research.  It is something they have to know how to do, and for some reason, it seems really hard to my students when it isn't actually.  My kids can sit down at their computers, go into the college's library page, and find all of the data bases they want to get their work done.  The rest of it is following patterns.  I think people just freak out when they hear the word research.  I kind of like researching.