This has been my busiest term of school ever. I’ve got two very challenging classes, Social Psychology and Applied Data Analysis, my honors thesis, and a ten hour a week internship at Stepping Stone, a residential treatment center for adjudicated teenage boys. On top of that, I’m taking the GRE (Graduate Record Exam–a really hard test, like the SAT for getting into graduate schools) during finals week. That’s on the same day as my last final. That’s the point in my story where my classmates’ eyes bug a little. “OK, that’s crazy.”
This is too busy. I don’t like it. I like being in heavy intellectual training. I like being in this kind of shape; I can read and understand a journal article in a couple hours, for example. I enjoy being this productive, too, but I’ve gotten stressed out. About halfway through the term I started skimping on my non-intellectual stuff, to keep on top. My meditation practice is getting the squeeze–I’m rarely sitting for more than 15 minutes a day and often it’s just a token few minutes. That’s when I feel how strong my mind is going the most–when I’m sitting to meditate or lying down to sleep, this clear, powerful thinking, like a force, pushing up to the front of my head, driving my awareness and dominating my experience. I am getting enough sleep, at least. I’ve been strict with myself on that and it makes a big difference. My exercise has been getting the squeeze, though. All I do is bike, and I like biking but I also like to run, lift weights, and swim. I just can’t do them as part of my commute. I ride for transportation 30-90 minutes a day. I bike between classes. Sometimes it feels like all I do with my body is bike, sit, and sleep. Not very much walking, even. I dance, too, probably four hours a week on average. That’s gotten some squeeze, but not too much. My songwriting and music playing has gotten the squeeze. My emotional support has gotten the squeeze. I’m down to maybe one co-counseling session a week and no phone time with friends. I’m lucky to live with good friends, so I still get supportive conversations. I get almost no physical affection, though. I can’t blame that on my term–I’m just far away from my most affectionate friends and family. Danielle, Maya, Jeannie, Mom, I miss you! I miss the rest of you too. I want to be in your lives more. I want to know how you are and what you’re doing.
But not for a couple more weeks. After this post, I’m putting my head down, business only, until the term is over. I’ll start posting again in mid-December. Have a great Thanksgiving and end of fall!
Here are some photographs of my calendar I took when I first conceived of this post, a few weeks ago. They are the first six weeks of my term. I’m a little nostalgic about how much more balanced I felt in those days. (Look at all that blue, red and pink!) Here’s what you’re looking at: I kept track of what I did, as I did it. Anything that I did for at least 15 minutes at a time made it on here. (My week calendars do not look like this ahead of time–they have only firm commitments and deadlines in them, GTD-style.) The columns are days, Sunday to Saturday, from about 8 am to about 11 pm. The purple is school stuff, like classes and studying. The blue is personal stuff, like cooking, eating, cleaning, and talking with friends. Green is office work, blogging, working in the elections office, teaching dance classes or lessons. Orange is dancing. Red is meditation and co-counseling. Pink is exercise. Yellow is Suntop stuff–chores, meetings, and outings.
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
I documented my day today. It wasn’t an unusual Tuesday, but my days aren’t all like this; I have classes only three days a week and often have a dance practice or something else scheduled. Also, I only wake to an alarm a couple days a week. Still, I think this gives a sense of what I’m working on, the pace, and intensity.
7:45am—Woke to an alarm after more than 8 hours of sleep but kind of groggy and nauseous (not uncommon), and a little dehydrated. Rolled out of bed in about ten minutes. Tamed my bedhead a bit, opened my shades. It’s raining but not hard. I took a photo for the blog and I look grumpy, probably because I am grumpy.
Bedroom Window
Grumpy
Breakfast
Made my oatmeal like I usually do, with a lot of cinnamon and ginger, a big handful of raisins, and with butter and agave nectar on top. Delicious!
Said good morning to a couple early-rising housemates, Kyla and Nick.
Packed my computer bag full of school files. Also rain gear, fruit, a salad, workout gear (optimistically), my water bottle, PDA, and camera.
My Load For the Day
Rain Gear
Bike
8:35—Out the door. I bike fifteen minutes to school, mostly on a trail next to the Willamette River. It’s very pretty. The light is grey, the leaves yellow, and it’s cool, not cold.
Bike Trail 1
Bike Trail 2
Bike Trail 3
Bike Trail 4
Bike Trail 5
Willamette River
Franklin Blvd
Straub Hall
Computer Lab
8:50—Lock my bike up at Straub Hall, the psychology building on the University of Oregon campus. I go to the computer lab and start working on a homework assignment for my statistics class (called Applied Data Analysis) that’s due at 3 pm. It’s due every week at 3 pm and usually takes 12-15 hours to complete (and that’s not including the 5-9 hours of reading I have to summarize as part of it, full of sentences like “So, the regression coefficients associated with the contrast-coded categorical predictors in this model that includes their interactions with the covariate tell one about simple mean effects when and only when the covariate equals zero”). I spent 10 hours on the homework, already, over the weekend.
Karyn
9:30—I meet with Karyn, the TA for Applied Data Analysis, and grill her with questions about the homework for 40 minutes. She is very smart and patient.
Labmates
10:10—Back to work in the computer lab. Now several of my classmates are working alongside me. It’s stressful because of how involved the thinking is, and because of how many elements I have to remember and pull together, but it’s also fun, because we’re all in it together. No one else spent all weekend on it or went to see Karyn, though, so I end up doing a more helping than getting helped. It’s good—I understand things much better after I have to make a case for them. We go straight through with no breaks. Instead of my hoped-for lunch (not to mention workout) I eat the banana and apple I brought and drink a half gallon of water.
2:40pm—I email in my homework, 13 pages, 15 hours and 40 minutes long (I’ll post it for fun under ‘writing’), and ride to the local Whole-Foods clone for lunch: a chicken thigh and two bagels. I’m feeling hyped up and pretty good.
Lunch
3:00—Back to the computer lab, I eat them, along with the salad I brought, as I write a weekly update for my practicum: I’m interning 10 hours a week at a residential treatment center for adjudicated youth. I wrote about a “Responsible Decision Making” class I sat in on with them, about homophobia, and how it related to a article I’m reading, called “Prejudice as Self-Image Maintenance: Affirming the Self Through Derogating Others.” It’s about some experiments that found people (successfully) use prejudice to feel better about themselves when they are put down.
Gerlinger Hall
3:35—I ride to Gerlinger Hall, where my first class is, and finish eating while I read for my Social Psychology class (the paper I mentioned above) and swap homework war stories with another stats student.
4:00—Applied Data Analysis, taught by Dr. Holly Arrow. The lecture is on factorial ANOVAs, which is a method of analyzing data from experiments with multiple independent or quasi-independent variables. I understand most of it. It’s a graduate level class, mostly for undergrads doing honors theses, like I am. It’s really difficult and often confusing but also fun and exciting because it’s such a challenge, and because my classmates are so smart—it’s (exactly) like being in a class that consists of only the one or two other smartest and hardest-working people from all of my other classes. There’s a sense of camaraderie—we can just look at each other and shake our heads, laughing, knowing what we are all going through.
Applied Data Analysis 1
Applied Data Analysis 2
5:20—Ride down the hill to Lillis Hall. It’s dark now, and raining pretty hard. Still not cold, though. It’s been a beautiful day.
5:30—Social Psychology, taught by Sean Laurent, who is also my honors thesis advisor. He’s an entertaining lecturer and the material is all of this counterintuitive stuff about how people are (usually without knowing it) shaped by their situation. For the first time in the term I haven’t done all of the reading for a class (didn’t finish the paper I mentioned above) but it didn’t hurt me. We covered it in a hurry at the end and I have a slightly slower day tomorrow, so I can catch up. We talk first about attitude change and how emotional and intellectual persuasion work best together: Someone is more likely to quite smoking when shown a photo of a diseased lung along with information on how to quit smoking than with neither or just one of those, for example. Then we talked about research on stereotyping and how it relates to death sentences (pretty shocking stuff—worse even than I thought), prejudice, and self-esteem boosting. A classmate, Annalisa, brought a bunch of leftover Halloween candy and I eat a few gummy creatures and body parts. Not great.
Social Psychology - Class
Social Psychology - Sean
6:50—Class is over but I hang out, asking Sean a few more questions about the stereotyping research.
7:15—Ride back to Straub, go upstairs to a lab and work on my honors thesis. I finalize my new measures and manipulations, compose a modification document for the Institutional Review Board, and send it all to Sean to go over before I send it in. These are the final changes to my experiment—ideas I got from my lab when I did my project presentation a couple weeks ago. I’m strengthening the manipulation and adding a couple of measures, like one that asks how much you like your name. Did you know that how much you like your name is a reliable measure of self-esteem? During this process, I see that Patrick Johnston, an old friend of mine from high school, has friended me on Facebook. I’m pretty excited about that. He was one of my favorite people at Yucca Valley High and I haven’t talked to him in almost two decades. No time to make contact now, though.
8:50—I pack up and leave campus. It’s not raining anymore and it’s a really nice ride home. My mind is going strong, thinking, thinking, thinking. Thinking about writing this, partly.
Dinner
9:10—Make and eat a light dinner, salad and a couple cheddar-in-corn-tortilla quesadillas. (Oh, and my current supplements, calcium/magnesium/D and fish oil.) The house is dark. My housemates are either gone or sleeping already.
9:30—Begin writing this, listening to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, my favorite album of my year, so far. In my enthusiasm for the post, I forget that it’s my night to clean the kitchen, leaving it for the third time this term for Kyla to clean tomorrow. (Sorry, Kyla!)
Desk
Stretching Out Space
10:40—Time to chill out and get ready for bed: clean my teeth, stretch, meditate, go over my choreography a couple times, sing a song, and do my daily chart, journal entry, and gratitude prayer. In bed by 11:30.
Bed
I crashed my bike today, pretty bad. I was on my way to Saturday Market—Eugene’s open-air, booth-vending extravaganza—from an African dance class, crossing Olive Street, and suddenly I hit the asphalt hard. My arms and stomach hurt and I was dazed. It took a minute to realize what had happened: My front wheel had fallen off. There it was, over by the curb. Six or seven people stopped to help me and stayed with me for quite a while as I caught my breath, until I could tell them convincingly that I didn’t need to go to the hospital. A couple of them had stopped driving when they saw me fall and offered me rides home. I wished that I had taken them up on it at times on my slow, painful pedal home.
The quick release for my front wheel had somehow worked itself loose and when I wheelied a little to avoid some of the puddle between the curb and the street, the wheel just fell off. I was very lucky that it was raining, so I was bundled up in rain gear—extra pants, jacket and gloves. Because of that I have bruised instead of bloody knees, elbows and hands. I’ve crashed enough to be grateful for that right away. Later, though, I realized that the real hero of the story was my helmet. It was the front of my helmet that hit the asphalt instead of my face. I could easily have broken my nose or jaw or teeth without it. At the very least I would have lost a lot of skin.
I’ve had this helmet for at least six years without testing it like this. I haven’t always worn it, either—I don’t like wearing a helmet. They make my head sweat and itch. I don’t like how they look much, either. But I’ll be wearing mine regularly from now on.
This post is a mess but I’m not going to revise it. I think it captures my day.
I’m feeling happy about politics for the first time I can remember. I don’t know the outcome of the presidential election yet, but it’s looking good. I feel differently about this election than I have about any other I’ve participated in. It’s just dawning on me. It may be that the way I’ve treated past elections has been pre-conformity masquerading as post-conformity—the pre-trans fallacy for Ken Wilber folks—meaning it’s possible that the reason I’ve never voted for a winning candidate (without a vote-trade, at least) has as much to do with my sense of being disenfranchised as with any sense of investment in the government of my country; I have always voted with consideration and integrity, and there’s always been that sense of “fuck you, you clueless idiots” towards mainstream political culture.
I’ve avoided watching any news about the campaigns. One of my professors, at the end of an evening lecture said he hoped he could get home in time to catch some of the debates and I joked, “Oh, you haven’t decided who to vote for yet?” His eyes bugged a little before he assured me he knew who he was going to vote for. That’s been my attitude toward the campaign: I already know who I’m going to vote for, so watching TV about the campaigns is just entertainment, except that it just makes me feel anxious, so it’s not even good entertainment. If I had time to devote, I’d rather volunteer.
I did go hear Obama speak on campus last spring. My family, especially my brother Ely, had gotten really excited about Obama, so I decided to go out. It was great. He was great. I didn’t get into the arena so I stood outside in the cold on the Astroturf with a bunch of other Eugene folks, crying, listening to the speech piped out. This is what I said into my journal that night: “He was a good speaker…he actually moved me. Partly it was just because I became…it just hit me how bad it’s been for the last eight years—it’s been really terrible! It’s so creepy, what’s going on. It would be better to have anybody else in there. And Obama said some stuff that I really liked, like it’s time for a Manhattan–project style sustainable energy project…and a lot more stuff that now I’m forgetting. I wish I had brought this recorder. He sounded pretty right on, for a major party candidate. He’s saying things that people could not say and get elected even four years ago.” I remember thinking ‘This guy is saying this stuff and is probably going to be the president.”
I’ve felt plenty of frustration in past elections, but never anxiety and never hope. I spent today working at the Lane County election office, mostly in the sorting room, watching thousands of ballots move through. It’s fun. There is a nice team spirit and such care taken with the process. I have no criticisms of the way votes are handled here. (Some criticisms of the voters, though. I saw some strange interpretations of the ballot, like the person who did not vote for Obama but wrote him in.) Most of the time I was a ‘runner,’ moving boxes of ballots to the sorting teams, but for a while I was sorting myself. The first box I went through was from the city I live in, Springfield, and I surreptitiously counted the votes for president. They came out three to two for McCain. I started feeling anxious. “Who are these people?” Later, at school, a professor got a call from his mother during his lecture. He took it and the news was Obama had won Pennsylvania, which had been in question. Riding home I started feeling happy and hopeful and that’s when I realized that this is a new thing for me. Maybe my attitude towards America and national politics is so embarrassed and preemptively pessimistic because I’ve never had anyone in there representing me who I liked, much less someone I could be proud of.
And I’m wanting to say something hipper. I’m feeling guilty about this. I’m so apathetic, politically. I didn’t volunteer this year, and a lot of my friends did. I don’t pay much attention to local politics—I usually just take the advice of our local progressive newspaper when it comes to the local and state races and ballot initiatives. And I suspect that paying attention to presidential races is like going to watch some Christians get eaten by lions while Rome falls—more like the heavyweight championships than…. WOOHOO! I just got the news that Obama won, from a friend calling. I feel happy. I’m smiling. I feel relieved. I’m crying. Yeah! I’m going to go hug someone. America, seven generations after the Civil War, is not racist enough to keep Barack Obama from being president! Hooray! I’m actually feeling proud… I’m proud to be associated with that man. I can, right now, imagine an America I wouldn’t be primarily ashamed or embarrassed to be part of.
Nathen's Miraculous Escape 