09 January 2008

Rollercoasters, List Version

The Home Front
  • Politica is off on a professional adventure. Yay her.
  • Emotions are, um, turbulent. Curious Girl and I are not getting enough sleep, and tempers were fraying last night, starting with an argument about why I am the meanest person ever because I would not let CG stay up until midnight even though Twin Friends (allegedly) got to stay up until midnight one night, ending with over 90 minutes of sobbing and screaming (not all of it CG's, I should mention).
  • Have I mentioned how much I love CG's teachers? They knew CG was off-kilter the minute we walked in. Short Teacher suggested that CG could draw a picture of what she's mad about, when she gets all mad.
  • So today, we're going to make a Feeling Box, with art supplies in it, so that we can draw mad pictures when we need to. Cross your fingers that this works. (It well might. Similar tactics have.)
  • I'm going to lunch with CG's class today. I'll have to post about my post-lunch reading series with the girls. They are a great audience.
The Office Front
  • Performance review season is always here. That stresses people out, and there are a million little questions about what to put where on the form. My university requires everything to be classified as teaching, research, or service, and that leads to a lot of fretting about whether, say, judging the student magical mystery competition is teaching or service or whether writing a short article for publication x is research or teaching. It's not easy to balance reassuring the stress with encouraging people to step back and think about how their report communicates what they did.
  • My favorite part about being department chair is helping people--it's so emotionally rewarding to have conversations helping to move toward tenure dossiers, for example. The flip side of that, though, is being a responsible chair even in situations where things are not emotionally rewarding--I'm learning strategies for not taking it personally when colleagues are doing things that don't work so well. It's hard, but important, to keep that boundary up. Thank FSM for the therapy that taught me about boundaries. They rock.
  • I cleared my desk yesterday! (But my desk at home is now piled with stuff from the bedroom, that's getting painted. Boo.)
I am now going to read and write until lunch, at home. I love Wednesdays.

3 comments:

What Now? said...

Hmm, a Feeling Box. This might be a good thing for adults to have as well! I hope that CG finds it helpful to depict what is making her mad.

S. said...

How'd the reading go?

Jane Dark said...

I like that Feeling Box.

I have to say, however, that at first read, I thought that you were suggesting that the Church of FSM had branched out into providing actual therapy, and I was both completely flabbergasted AND completely desirous of said therapy.