Potpourri 2

                What’s on my mind? You may regret asking that one…

                I am at the point of the semester where I am starting to feel the weight of finals beginning to press down. This, in addition to the cooling and darkening days, tends to make this a pretty miserable time of year. This then drains my energy and makes schoolwork harder, connecting back to the beginning in a loop of anxiety and miserable moods. I get through it with no problems, but I wonder if I will always be able to cope with the looming deadlines. I am impressed with the students that have families and children while being enrolled full time. I know that I would not be able to juggle all of that and still dedicate the proper amount time each needs, because I absolutely must have my decompression time.

                Everyone has their own ways of blowing off steam, and I am pretty stubborn about having time to do mine. I have, on several occasions, irked friends and family by refusing invites and cancelling plans because I am not properly relaxed from the work or school that dominate my time. It’s not that I dislike going out and being around a lot of people, but it is rarely relaxing and is as energy consuming as working. I will go through anti-social phases where all I want to do is read horror novels or play Japanese Role-playing games straight through a weekend. I am a bit of a jerk about it sometimes, because I know that when I get my slack time it makes my work and social interactions better.

                My chill out time has been spectacular this weekend, as I have watched two Doctor Who serials from the 60’s that were considered lost forever. It is really odd to think of a time before home video of T.V. shows, but as this was the stuff of science fiction in the 60’s, many of the older episodes of DW were lost or destroyed. The two that were found came from a station in Nigeria that had rebroadcast the show when it was still a British colony. A stack of film cans, sitting in a storeroom for 45 years, were discovered and released on iTunes last weekend. It is strange to think that the film copy was the only one for decades and now there are thousands of digital copies all over the world in a matter of days. I love thinking about stuff like that, but it makes my head hurt a bit tonight…

Gary Lindeburg