No, seriously.
I told Daisy this fact earlier this evening, and she started laughing at me.
"For a man who always says he has so much to do all the time, now that you don't, you're bored?"
She makes a fair point. This is really the only stretch of time thus far this semester where I haven't had a ton of work on my plate, and where I've been able to actually take a breather, so to speak. Because of that, I have no pressing work to do. Also because of that, I am sitting here in my house going stir-crazy. Well, slightly, anyway.
The dishes are done. The shopping is done (for the moment). All but one of my bills (read: the bill that arrived today, my Citi card bill) are paid. The laundry has been washed and put away. The toilet has been scrubbed. The house really doesn't need to be vacuumed yet. My wardrobes for summer and fall have been switched out. The car has another week's worth of gas in it. I don't have anything to cook, for I made a big pot of soup tonight and put it in bowls for the fridge and freezer for meals. The cat box is clean. The bed is made. Coffee is in the pot. Food is in the cats' bowls.
This really is the first time where I really don't have anything pressing to do.
Well, I suppose I still have to mow the grass; however, I can't do that at midnight.
My eye is tired and sore tonight, though its vision is no better or worse. It's tired and sore because I've been awake since early this morning. You'd think I'd flip around my sleeping schedule again now that I'm off for a few extra days, but in reality? Nope. Now that I've found a groove again and am sleeping at night, I need to keep it. At least as much as I can, anyway. I've been sleeping pretty well, I suppose. Every few nights I'll have a mild nightmare, though. I'm sure I can attribute most of that to stress, however. I have been under a lot of stress as of late, as you know.
My boredom isn't caused by having everything done. I don't think it is, anyway. It's more of a general malaise, as mentioned here before. Nothing I can do for entertainment serves to make me less bored. I've watched football today. I've had my earbuds in and have probably listened to 12 hours (or more) of podcasts since I got home on Thursday. I've tried to play the few video games I have. I've tried reading for pleasure. I've tried to sleep as much as possible. It's as if none of it seems...satisfying, I suppose? I get restless, I get frustrated.
"Why not go see a movie?" Daisy asked me.
"I have a stack of movies here at home that I want to watch, but haven't yet," I said. "It's not the kind of boredom that can alleviate. I'll just get more restless."
I have the entire first season of Eastbound & Down that I purchased a while back at Walmart when Daisy was with me, in addition to at least ten movies, older and newer, that I've purchased over the course of the past year or so yet haven't watched yet. I did sit down a few nights ago to watch This Is The End in its entirety, which was hilarious and enjoyable, but for some reason I couldn't sit down and watch anything else right now. It would make me restless. I'd feel like it was a waste of time, and with my eye already aching, it would probably make me feel even more tired.
I don't know; maybe I'm just too burnt out and stressed, subconsciously, to enjoy anything right now or to be able to take my mind off of the nightmare that the rest of the semester is going to be. I'm not actively thinking about anything, mind you, but all of that stuff is in the back of my mind whether I like it or not.
Daisy informed me tonight that she got the days off from work she requested so that we could enjoy Thanksgiving together, with time spent both here and in Omaha. We've drawn up our plans so that I will have time to decompress, time to sleep, and time to grade, split between both here and there. As you know, long ago (and I do it every year) I worked time into my teaching schedule so that I could cancel classes over Thanksgiving week -- while the students here still have classes scheduled on Monday and Tuesday, I have always canceled classes on those days if I've had to teach during them. I can (usually) easily schedule my lesson plans around that week. However, this year it's different -- when Thanksgiving week is over, we come back and it's the last week of classes, then finals week. We usually have a little more of a buffer zone than that, and have much more of a buffer zone in the spring between Spring Break and the end of the semester. That speeds everything up big time once Thanksgiving is over, and I told Daisy that because of that I had to cram a lot of work into those last few weeks of class, and had to rearrange a lot of my lesson plans near the end of the semester to be able to make them work once I realized that hey, I have so little time after we come back and they still have to turn in a paper.
As it stands, unfortunately, I'm collecting papers before Thanksgiving on the 12th, 18th, and 19th, and then will be collecting workshop copies from my 101s on the 21st -- the last class day I'll teach before the holiday week. That's just the way the schedule falls. I'll have my hands full, therefore, going right into Thanksgiving week. Unless I do nothing else leading up to that week, I won't be able to have all of that stuff graded and given back to my students before the break, and I'll still have the workshop copies regardless.
"I need time, somewhere, to be able to grade this stuff," I told Daisy. "I really can't grade a lot of it, if any, in Omaha because I can't concentrate and can't get in the zone when I'm up there, which would be crucial to being able to get this done quickly and efficiently."
My zone consists of the couch in my living room with football on the TV in the background and my cigarettes and coffee on the desk in front of me. Over the past four years, this setup has become quite important to being able to power through papers one by one as the fall semester draws to a close. In Omaha, her family is there, there's no football in front of me, and I can only smoke when I go outside to do so. I also want to be able to enjoy my time in Omaha with Daisy's family, obviously, which would require not having a ton of papers hanging over my head with no idea of how or when I'd be able to grade them.
Because of this, Daisy and I set up a plan during which I'd be able to get all of my grading done here (if in two different sessions) and would still be able to enjoy the holidays with her family. We're still working out the fine details of it, but it seems like it will go smoothly, hopefully. As you know, I've not gone anywhere or done anything for Thanksgiving since...2009, I think. I've been so wrapped up in academia since then that I have never been able to get away from the house or from my responsibilities. In 2010 I stayed home when my ex went to her parents' place. In 2011 I was single and incredibly busy. In 2012 I was swamped with even more work, and couldn't make it to Omaha then, so Daisy came down a few days early and made a dinner for us here. This year, if everything goes right, I'll actually be able to have a real family Thanksgiving again. You know, someplace other than my home, alone, with the cats.
I would also imagine that by Thanksgiving I will be twitching to get the hell out of Kansas for a few days again, as well. Daisy is already making plans for us to go back to Dave & Buster's, as we have a bunch of prize tickets from last time that we didn't use, and we may (maybe) get to do some Black Friday shopping together, either here or there. Who knows. It's going to depend heavily on what we have time and money for.
"By the way," she told me last night, "I'd like to keep Christmas small this year and focus on saving for the wedding."
"I was going to suggest the same thing," I replied. "Remember, I kept Christmas small last year. You're the one who decided to buy me a laptop."
Daisy bought me a Toshiba laptop on Black Friday last year, a laptop that does get used, though not as much as I'd like because it only has 2GB RAM -- not enough to use on a daily basis without me wanting to punch it because it takes ten minutes to load up programs and/or run webpages with heavy flash. I also can't find an operating system for it that won't bog it down terribly, so it's now had five or so different OSes on it while I shop around and see which ones I can actually use. By the way, a memory upgrade for said laptop? It's about $100 or so. Yeah. If not more. It must use some sort of weird-ass proprietary memory, or something. I haven't looked into it too deeply because of the price. Keep in mind that to max out the memory in my old Dell laptop (which is currently in my office at school) it was about $25 and required five minutes' worth of "laptop surgery," nothing more.
Conversely, last Christmas (if you remember) I made tie-dye for everyone and got a bunch of other little things here and there.
I don't know what's going on for Christmas this year. I'm going to be, technically, between jobs at that time -- between fall and spring semester -- and won't have much spare money. My car insurance comes due in December, and unless I can go in and defer or postpone my student loans somehow, I'll be paying those as well. My electric bill for October going into November should be incredibly low, since I've not had to run the AC or furnace, but I'll have to worry about that a bit more next month once it gets a lot colder and I'll have no choice but to have the furnace on. There are a thousand little things I have to take care of and pay for when I can, and as my last paycheck will come on my birthday this year, there will be a stretch between then and probably early February that I won't be getting paid. Of course, a few months later is the wedding, and I need to be saving whatever money I can to put aside some funds for that as well. Etc.
Daisy told me long ago that since this is her last Christmas at home before she's married, she's going to spend it there with her family and do family things. I am welcome to join her, of course, but usually my parents try to get me to fly home to West Virginia for Christmas. I'd love to do that again, but my parents haven't said anything about it thus far. As the semester ends fairly early, there's enough time for me to make two trips in December if it can be done; finals week ends a week before my birthday, and after that (and everything surrounding it) is over, I'm basically free and clear for a month. With job security for the spring almost completely locked down (it's never, ever a given) I am free to make some plans once finals week ends. It would be nice to fly home to visit, if possible, but I don't know if that's in the cards right now.
Today is the first day since 2003 or so when a new Pokemon game has been released and I haven't been one of the first in line to purchase it. This is mainly because it's only available on the 3DS, which I don't have (and don't want). Nintendo has released a lower, non-3D version of the system called the 2DS at the same time as the new games, but it's not available to be ordered on Amazon -- which really pisses me off. Because of that I have neither the new game or the new system. Walmart had several of the new 2DS systems behind the glass in the electronics section a few nights ago, but no prices or anything else attached to them -- simply in stock and waiting to be sold on the release date. I haven't gone back to buy either the game or the system because I really would rather not drop $200 right now that I can't exactly afford to spend. I'll give it a few weeks; it's not like I'm not going to get them eventually. I don't really play video games -- it's not like I have the time or money to spare for them most of the time -- but I do religiously follow the Pokemon series and have since I've been in high school. It is my one major nerdy vice. Roll your eyes at me all you want -- I know people much older than me who play the games in a more hardcore way than I do. Successful people, with jobs, children, and nice cars. Pokemon is universal. It's like Harry Potter.
Anyway.
It's now a little more than halfway through my time off for Fall Break, even though the two actual "break" days remain. Tomorrow, I do have seasons 4 and 5 of Trailer Park Boys arriving on my doorstep, which (I suppose) will alleviate some of the boredom I've had. I find it terribly, horribly ironic that I have several days off with nothing to do, time in which I could be immersing myself in Pokemon X/Y on its release date, and I really don't have the spare money to get it right now.
It's probably for the best, I suppose.
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