A tisket a tasket

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . May 17, 2011 . 8:04PM

Every now and then, when I feel a lot of stress or pressure, I find myself reciting old nursery rhymes in my head. Mother Goose was a favorite when I was a child and I may not be able to remember entire stories, but a phrase here and there will pop up like a jack in the box during particularly frustrating moments of the day. At a red light. When someone cuts in front of me in line. When I need to use the restroom and someone is taking their sweet time in there.

As a child, I never realized how important those little routines were to me, although the adults around me must have, being that I likely threw a fit when I didn’t have my routines on a daily basis. As a child, you only know that you want what you want and you don’t always know why. Sometimes I feel that way as an adult as well. I want what I want and I don’t know why.

Routine is still important to my well-being and I still find myself using my routine as a measure of comfort. The days that I step off of my routine I find myself feeling out of sorts and irritable and “jack and jill” and “humpty dumpty” may start running through my head as I pull in deep breaths and try to clear my mind. Today is one of those days. Exercise has become part of my daily routine and I never thought I’d say that. Today, however, I woke up still exhausted. It happens about one or two days a month that I wake up still tired enough to go straight back to bed. I’m guessing it’s a chemical flux and that it’s my body’s way of telling me to take a day to relax.

Regardless of what I want on those days, I have no choice. I’m so fatigued that my routine is out the window. I’m used to it on my chronic pain/migraine days, but on the sheer fatigue days, I cannot resolve myself because I want what I want when I want it. Spoiled and childish, to be sure, but it’s my ROUTINE. It’s what calms me. And today, I can’t have it.

Adults need heroes

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . April 26, 2011 . 10:15PM

I try to be an introspective person. Generally, because of my various professions, I’m required to be more self-aware as an aspect of my job that allows me to connect with the people I talk to on another level and propel them forward in a way that helps them in life. Usually, I can do this fairly easily and yet there are still times in my life where someone reminds me, in a jaw-dropping way, that I still have a long way to go before my self-knowledge reaches that level that Maslow called self-actualization.

Over the weekend, I received an email from one of my students that made me feel both happy and sad. I’d never violate her privacy by telling you what the email said, but the gist of the email was that I’d made a decision that helped her with her faith in educators. Vague enough? Hopefully. We often do things that we never realize in a million years that other people are watching with a close eye. These aren’t the big decisions that we agonize over, either. These are small daily decisions that we either make with the bat of our eyes or that we briefly reflect upon before going on with the day and batting it away like a fly in the summer.

The decision that increased this student’s faith? It wasn’t something that I’d spent much time considering. It was an ethical decision that didn’t feel like it was a major decision at all, really, just common decency and common sense and good teaching practice. I consider myself a role model for my son. I try to model the behavior that I want these future teachers to exhibit. Beyond that, I don’t really consider my daily actions and their consequences outside of my profession as much as I probably could.

As I continued to reflect upon this email and what it said, it occurred to me that adults need someone to look up to as we go throughout our life. That need for a hero, or someone who continues to display attributes that we covet, never really goes away. We call it other things, such as mentorship, but that need for it and the approval of that person remains, especially if there wasn’t a lot of approval and support in the childhood of the person.

I don’t think that I realized that I was old enough to have this position for anyone other than my child. I haven’t decided how I feel about it yet, but I think I’m going to continue what I’m doing. It’s working for at least one of my students and I wasn’t attempting any big superhero intervention with my students in the slightest.

How are other people viewing you in the moments where you aren’t paying attention to what you are doing? Would it change how you handle yourself in those moments?

I can’t get that song out of my head!

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . September 16, 2010 . 12:19AM

Yesterday, AJ and I were sitting on the couch and I heard him singing. He loves to sing, but rarely does it in front of people. I remember when he was in the womb and he’d bounce to certain songs when they’d come on the radio. He’d kill me if he knew I was telling you his favorite song was “Lucky” by Britney Spears. No joke. The kid would bounce like a fiend when it came on, as it was popular at the time, and you could see the outline of two little fists coming out of my stomach like little Alien movie wannabes. It was both frightening and exhilarating for me as a mother-to-be to recognize that my son had a personality even at that stage.

I’m really glad he has no idea where this blog is, nor does he read it, or he’d likely never speak to me again for telling you what I just told you.

Anyway, the boy loves music. He’ll sing in front of people when we play Rock Band but only because it’s “for the music.” I told you he has personality. When I tell people my kid is cool they don’t really believe me and they don’t really understand until they meet him and realize that he actually does seem to process things differently than other kids his age. There’s a 36-year-old hair band member in that 9-year-old body. At 3, his favorite song was by Bon Jovi.

I digress, I digress. I have no idea why anyone reads this blog because all I do is digress. I’ve turned into my 80-something grandmother.

So, AJ loves music. Yes, that was like 4 paragraphs ago. Get off my lawn. I heard him humming on the couch. Wait, that’s not true. It wasn’t just humming. It was full out song. “She’ll be coming round the mountain when she commmmmmmmmmmes, when she comes. She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes.” I’m sure they learned the whole song. This was the part that was stuck in his head, though. For an hour I heard this until finally I looked at him, made sure he saw me, gave him my most charming grin and sang loudly, “She’ll be coming round the mountain, she’ll be coming round the mountain, she’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes!”

He couldn’t stop laughing. The giggles overtook him, then me. We laughed loud and long together. He gasped at me, “Ma-Ma-Mama, I couldn’t help it! It just got stuck in my head and wouldn’t go away!” We sang it a couple more times and laughed louder and longer. We often sing together in the car. Lately it’s been songs from Glee. Yesterday it was songs from elementary school.

Now if I can just get the theme song for Veronica Mars out of my own head, I’ll be set.

Burnin’ down the house

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . September 4, 2010 . 7:03PM

It’s never been a huge secret that I don’t know how to cook. Those that have been my friend or family know that I routinely burn things as simple as soup and popcorn. And yes, I stand beside the microwave while the popcorn is popping and count the pops in my head. It still burns. I also kill plants. It’s amazing to me that I’ve been able to keep my animals alive, let alone my child.

So, a couple weeks ago, I was on a frozen pizza kick. I’d been home more frequently than usual and thanks to Netflix and their amazing instant streaming capabilities, I’ve been watching a lot more television than I normally would. I preheated my oven, stuck in the pizza and waited my 11 minutes.

…

…

At which time smoke started rolling from the oven, the smoke detector started bleating like an angry sheep and my dogs started howling like I’d stuck them all with needles. I’m certain the look on my face was not only sheer panic but also an incredible what the heck is happening to me when I realized that there was literally nothing I could do to stop the noise. It was 99 degrees outside so opening the windows meant undoing what the air conditioning had spent all day doing.

So, I did what any normal person would do. I searched for the batteries, which I couldn’t find. Then, I flapped doors in the house like an angry chicken until, 25 minutes later, the unhappy smoke detector quieted its banshee yell. Then I scraped the black off the bottom of the pizza and got down to business.

I mentioned this to the other adult that lives in my house who laughed and didn’t bother to mention that I could stop the angry noise by holding the button down for two seconds.

Fast forward to the next day where, lo and behold, it was pizza for lunch again! I’d made sure that the pizza stone was clean and ready to go. The oven was clean and there was no way the alarm was going to go off again. I was all ready for a good pizza. No black!

The oven hadn’t even hit 375 when the alarm started shrieking. The dogs started howling. I was a deer in headlights.

I ran into the kitchen and the oven was smoking. I have 9-foot ceilings so my 5’10″ self had to stand on a chair to reach the detector. I twisted and twisted the detector to try to find the batteries at which point the detector sparked and fizzled. Apparently, when they are wired into the ceiling they don’t like to be twisted. When I did this, all the lights in the left quadrant of the house went off.

Well…I stopped the smoke detector. Luckily it was just a broken circuit and the smoke detector is replaceable.

And hey, the pizza came out perfectly.

Someday I’ll learn how to cook. Or maybe just stick with the microwave. But not for popcorn.

Summer : A time for rest and reflection

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . August 25, 2010 . 6:41PM

Some of you, and you know who you are, have been complaining that I haven’t been around.

My bad.

There was a time I wrote in my blog every day. This past summer, however, was a time for me to spend discovering who I have become as an adult and if I am satisfied with myself at the present moment or if I am ready to move forward and become more. Part of my job, that has become a part of who I am, is the ability to assess myself and use that assessment for self-reflection and introspection. It’s constant and consuming and can be overwhelming in both the best and the worst of ways.

Part of writing a blog is understanding and knowing the proper balance of how much to share with people and how much to keep sacred. This summer was pretty sacred for me out of requirement, necessity and propriety. The good news in all of this is that I feel like I have a better understanding of who I am and where I am going. One of the first things I learned in my undergraduate psychology Motivation course was that humans are motivated the most by Fear and Love and if you can combine the two there are few things humans won’t do.

It has been the summer of fear and love and confusion and growth.

I am me, which is more than enough, and I am content with the change and growth that are occurring even when it is scary.

It’s good to be back.