Writing. Right.

Oh yeah, this whole writing everyday thing... well one day into it and I missed a day. Whoops.

It's a-right though, I'm fine with that; are you?

But here I am today, to say: I am going to sleep.

I am tired. Very tired. And as much as I thought I had already learned the value of a good night's sleep, someone out there must think I have more to learn, as I have had a week full of fitful sleeps (or non-sleeps). I've had hard times falling asleep; hard times waking up in the morning. I've been waking up at all random hours of the night, and not waking up when I'm supposed to.

And it truly wreaks havoc on me. I'm balking at the thought of exercise, and just about drowned myself in tears a few minutes ago; my emotions are all strung out, and all I want to do is eat. Huh, that gives me a thought - my torpidness and the fit of crying I just had may actually be due to elevated sugar levels in my body in combination with sleep-deprivation. I also just realized that the description of myself that I'm giving also describes a four year old (except for that torpidness part.) Great. I am currently functioning as a four year old - without naptime.

Ah, but that fit of crying also may have had a lot to do with trying to fit a large wooden table through a tight doorway all by myself. Note to self - don't ever try that again: you'll regret it, as will the door.

I have to be thankful, though. At least I have a place to sleep, and a heater that keeps me warm (even if it does make sounds that would wake the dead). I hope those who don't have such things have found shelter for tonight; it's bitterly cold.

Well, tonight's a new night, and I may just end up having a good sleep, loud clanky heaters and all. A good night to all, and to all a good night.

New Year's Resolution - Let's hope it doesn't get pixel-y...

Here's finally something about those New Year's goals that I think I mentioned a while back.....

Let's try looking at just one for now. Last night, actually, as I was blogging, blogging, blogging, it occurred to me that this could be a good practice to undertake more intentionally. I figure I'll try to write a little something everyday - if that proves to be too unrealistic, then I'll cut back to once a week or so.

Why would I make regular blogging a goal of mine? Well, I think that just getting into the habit of writing will be good for me... I remember a creative writing class I took in high school - the teacher prescribed an exercise we all had to do: write. Write anything, write nonsense, write something. Just sit down and write for a set amount of time, like 5-10 minutes or so; don't let your pen stop moving. And since I frequently get myself into fixes by procrastinating from doing assignments because they are JUST SO PAINFUL TO WRITE, engaging in a practice that promotes ease of writing is a simple "Heck yes!"

So that's it for today! Gonna be writing more. That's goal one. For now.

8

Woot! My blog post count is now up to 8!! Well, 9, after this one.

Now, if only I could get that many hours of sleep a night....

Wednesday

We talked about perceptions of the self tonight in my class..... my one class of the semester that I am taking. One class. One time a week. Three hours. Not so bad. Last semester - sometimes it seemed bad. But move it over to middle-of-the-week-day, and somehow that extra-buffer-space-acting-Tuesday makes all the difference. Ahhhhh, Tuesday.

Not to mention that the chairs in the new classroom don't resemble the bottom half of a plastic kiddie slide.

So, we talked about different theories on the idea of the "self" and the "person" today. One thinker, Michelle Rosaldo, challenged the dualistic thinking of Western culture and said, really, that the distinction isn't really so distinct as we might think - between the public persona and the inner self. In her observations of the Ilongot peoples of Indonesia she saw that for them, the heart and the actions of a person flow as one - they are not separate. These people also don't have the same ideas about anger as the Freudian-soaked repression theories of Western culture. Ilongots feel anger, but can stop this anger when payment is made by the offender. One such way they would deal with their anger and move on from it was taking heads from other villages. Yeah, people heads.

The other thinker, Hollan, argued against the "cultural model" as being completely true to what everyone in a culture experiences, or views themself. There are degrees, within a culture, of how much like the typical cultural idea of self one has taken on. We Westerners are, perhaps, not so austerely Western as we might think

Bible study also started up again this week. We looked at 1 Peter 1 and it talked about holiness and about inheritance, about the corruptible and incorruptible, and about salvation. I wonder what the Ilongots would think about it.... they did, after all, in large number convert to Christianity. They were drawn to it as a way to deal with anger and fill the hole left in their cultural ways once head hunting was out-lawed.....

I'm glad I've never felt the need to head-hunt - although the idea that head-hunting or receiving payment can immediately turn off anger seems almost like a too-good-to-be-true fix-all for anger issues - but am still pondering what my own experience of the self is, what I consider my "self" to be, and how that fits into the larger picture of my culture and my own experiences. I think that a life of action that flows out of the heart smacks a good deal of integrity... at least from the limited, culturally-biased viewpoint of my own self.....