As usual, my friend Tom was right. He said that he thinks I am continually processing my emotions, that basically that is what I do constantly. That is the State of Kate.
And he's right; that is what blogging is for me: a tool for processing my feelings. I sometimes feel myself getting a kind of urge to write that cannot be ignored. It's usually when there's some kind of unsolvable problem, or feeling, or issue - and then I spend 20-30 minutes writing and it's like, a great relief.
Maybe it's a relief because the act of writing means that there is a possibility - a shred of hope - that somebody might "get" what's going on inside of me? I'm not sure where it comes from. Maybe it's just a familiar habit. An ironed shirt :-)
I wrote a lengthy essay about two weeks ago about how much I dislike the phrase "processing feelings". I called it "Processing processing feelings." But it is too personal to share, somehow, even for me.
Lucky for you, I guess.
***
I have the urge to write right now. I have this very real problem of too many projects and too little time in which to do them. It's typically like that to some degree, but it's ridiculously like that right now because:
Head Lice.
Hours and hours and hours and hours...and hours. And hours.
It is so stressful for me that I have developed five (!!) total styes in both the top and bottom eyelids of both eyes. They are quite painful and I look rather ragged, like I'm not getting enough sleep. Though I am, at least quantity-wise, if not quality-wise.
Last week I had at least 5 nights in a row of terrible nightmares, many which involved me having to convince unwilling subjects to allow me to comb their hair with nit-combs, immediately upon which I found dozens of large swarming bugs all over my hands. Or dreams about bugs creating large, sticky, nasty, gooey messes all over my house. Or dreams about falling down an interminable roller coaster, backwards, upside down, sideways. Or dreams about dozens of tribal women almost chucking their helpless babies off a cliff (!!). Or dreams that I was in school again and had to learn an entire four years worth of math in about two months. I was able to sort of conquer that dream by dividing the textbook with hundreds of little sticky notes.
So this is my attempt to divide my projects with a few "sticky notes." Actually, it's me retyping what my husband and I already planned together. I was feeling so stressed about this over the weekend that I begged him to sit and plan this with me. He hates planning, so it was really kind of him to do it anyway.
Kate's Projects:
1. Apply to Grad School
2. Plan and plant Garden 2019
3. Take the GRE
4. Finish 2018 Taxes
5. Project: Friends
6. Grundbücherbuch
7. CGSI Volunteering
8. No More Lice
9. Boston Temple Painting
10. čeština
11. My genealogy blog
12. Project: exercize and get skinny again
13. Joe's wedding and other various Summer Plans
14. Kate Expectations (my 2019 poetry anthology)
15. My Temple and Family History calling
16. Cousin Book
17. Home church
18. A year of Questions in the Book of Mormon
Those are all the projects I can currently handle. Danny thinks there are too many. I could probably fill this list with many other worthy projects that I've dreamed up and even started. But this is what will have to suffice.
I put time limits on each of them. Some were harder than others, because like, "Czech" isn't really something that you can se naučit. It is also never going away. But I did give myself some specific time goals, which makes me feel better about failing to do anything whatsoever last week except listen to some songs and read some Tolkien poetry in Czech.
The problem is that Project #6 is an all-consuming beast of burden. It's like...it can consume every spare second of my time if I allow it to. It is a high-stakes, high-rewards project.
The most pathetic of them is #5. It was also hard to quantify. But Danny and I decided that we could measure it by inviting people here (or alternatively, going somewhere else) every week. That is feasible and measurable.
For Project #17, which is a forever, on-going project, we decided to focus on just making sure we are all the way caught up to where we want to be. I have been following the reading and am caught up. I think most of our children have, but perhaps not. I need to check and make sure they are given sufficient time (and prodding) to do so. Also, the past two weeks messed up our schedule because they were different. We didn't want a bunch of people here for home church while risking getting lice. They did come on Sunday, and apparently the lesson was really good. I hid in my room nursing Joey because a. he needed to be nursed and b. I needed to hide from all the people, feeling a bit overwhelmed.
I decided that for Project #3 (which is really a big part of Project #1) I really just need to schedule the date for my test. I think I'll take it in July. Hopefully that gives me enough time for a retake if I need it.
Project #1 is due by September. I guess the real deadline is October, but I want to be early.
The April Projects are as follows:
Projects to FINISH in April, in order of "deadline" (or desired timeline):
Get rid of the bleeping bleepity bleep bleep bleeping lice
Taxes
Sign up for the GRE
Projects to Work On in April:
Home Church: get caught up by General Conference
Czech: By the end of the month finish A4.7
Grundbücherbuch: finish my revisions through Chapter 10 (I am in Chapter 7 right now, each chapter is 15-20 pages. It is long and tedious)
CGSI:
Blog: write 1-2 posts on my Czech gen blog
Cousin book: create the plan for how to attack this problem
A Year of Questions in the Book of Mormon: answer 35 questions. I am currently 7 behind. I talked about them at length with Danny, but have not written them up yet.
Those are the main things for me to work on this month.
And now I can cross one off, because while writing this stupid blog post, I realized that I should just go ahead and sign myself up for the GRE. So I did! July 20th, 8 am.
So now I have about three and a half months to get 4-6 years of math shoved back into my head. I feel really...well...I feel...
The other day one of my friends, who is also studying for the GRE, asked a question about the definition of a noun. To me, this seems completely insane. How can you get through life without knowing what nouns are!? But then, I realized that is probably how people feel about most of this math that I've forgotten. The fact that negative numbers multiplied by positive numbers make a negative number is very similarly basic.
I think I can probably knock the dumb taxes off the list tonight. There is literally only one form left to find and submit...
***
The problem with making a list of things I ought to be doing is that it inevitably turns into me wanting to rebel and wasting time with low-stakes, medium-rewards projects. For example, rather than do anything on this list yesterday, I actually just spent most of my built-in forced-free time while nursing the baby just trying to re-figure out some genealogy research I did on my mom's side of the family in 2014.
I basically got caught up to where I had been in 2014, and rewrote it all so it will take much shorter to get there the next time.
In a very summed up version: my ancestors converted to the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints while in England. The mom died, the dad immigrated with 8 sons (or following some of them, it's not really clear yet). They came via a slightly less conventional route, via New Orleans and later St. Louis.
They were there during the cholera epidemic of 1851.
My ancestor's son Daniel (also my ancestor...) married a woman, had a baby (my direct line ancestor, Susan) and then the wife/mother died in St. Louis. He remarried the sister of the guy who wrote a really famous hymn. They went to Utah. Daniel divorced wife #2, seems to have become disillusioned with the church, and immigrated to California. Susan was raised by her grandparents. She married at age 17 (NOT in polygamy). She had such a lonely childhood that she decided to have 9 kids. Her dad, Daniel, remarried, had twins, and then died before he ever saw Susan again, which is pretty sad.
The grandparents who raised Susan were Charles (the original immigrant, father of Daniel) and Elizabeth Freeman, a woman who he married in St. Louis. Her entire family had been wiped out by the cholera epidemic of 1851.
But we don't know who the heck her family is. Like, where did she come from? Who were her parents? Who was her first husband? Who were her children? Really important, burning genealogical questions. Really low priority in my life, but really tempting to try to solve and think about.
Hey, we will be in St. Louis in June, so...
So it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack to look for a woman named Eliza who is married to John Johnson. Sigh.
***
My baby is teething and extra grouchy. It is really cold and windy outside. I went to a really tragic funeral on Saturday. My dad lost his job. My brother in law is trying to get a job, too. My sister lost a tooth. My other sister broke up with her boyfriend, the father of my nephew Max. My friend has some really hard family problems. I worry about this book ruining my friendship. Etc.
None of those things are remotely as stressful to me as the lice! Weird.
And though there are some logical reasons for being stressed, depressed, anxious, grouchy - I feel remarkably *happy* and *cheerful*. I have had only one panic attack in the past month and a half (and it was the impetus for sitting down to plan this stuff with Danny). I have not had any migraines. The inside Kate is very happy and content, regardless of the exterior State of the Kate.
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