meltdown somewhat averted

It's mainly 2 things that are making me crazy:

1. A lot of the things I do, and that I value, there's no check-box in this process to show that I've done them. As I said earlier: a lot of the things I value don't HAVE value in this process, and that makes me nuts, because....it makes me feel like I shouldn't have been doing those things, and yet I know that's wrong, and it turns into a big ball of cognitive dissonance, which I just don't deal well with. There's nowhere to list the students you advise, formally or informally. There's nowhere that shows a lot of the volunteer work - I suspect my service in AAUW will count for little, for example. The time I spend out in the field - like I did for my late-day class today, where I share all kinds of natural history stuff like plant identifications, which the students seem to enjoy, doesn't really count anywhere.

In a way, it's kind of analogous to the "world vs. Kingdom" problem that's talked about in Christianity. That one of the most poisonous things the "world" does to us is it convinces us that the things that are truly valuable are actually without merit, and gives us things of false value and holds them up as avatars. (see: "Snooki.") And it's horribly easy to get sucked into that idea that because something is or is not valued by the "world," that that is the be-all and end-all of what is valuable.

One of my colleagues keeps telling me that this is a game I just have to play. I'm not good at these kinds of games because I tend to take them too seriously. (I will admit to - and this is a risky thing to do because you can hurt yourself - breaking the bad CD, the one that was claiming to have corrupted files, in half with my bare hands in a rage this afternoon.)

2. The CD-writer on my computer is, I think, busted. That, or the "wizard" that is supplied with the Windows interface is malevolent. Both CDs I tried came out messed up, and in different ways. (This is the first time I've ever tried saving anything on my office machine to CD. We all use flashdrives, which seem less breakable and easier, in my department.) I don't know. As much as I loathe spending more money on this project I think at this point the best route to go is to put the stuff on a flash drive, drive down to Computer Services, and hire them to put it on a CD-ROM for me. I'll just eat beans and rice more often, or something. Or continue to wear the same old worn overcoat this winter. (My granddad did that. But that was because he used his spare money to buy books)

One last thing, for those who know a bit more about CD-ROMs than I do: is there a difference between CD-R and CD-RW disks? I vaguely remember, back in the pre-flashdrive days, someone saying that saving to one model was better and easier and surer than the other. (CD-RWs are what we had on hand). I suppose I could go by CD-Rs if I knew they were better...but again, I tend to be suspicious of enterprises that require too many new tools.

(Hrm. Looking around a bit online, I wonder if my office computer (it's a slightly older model) could have a CD-R drive, rather than the newer RW drive, and it's a disk incompatibility issue.)

I don't know, a lot of that stuff is far enough out of my welkin that I can't always diagnose problems, and I can't always figure out the right way to do it, so my default reaction is "I screwed it up somehow"


The other thing that bothers me is how much this has taken over my life. When I'm not working on the packet, I'm thinking about the packet...wondering where some of the materials I don't have are, trying to compose the letter-of-application in my head. The truly frustrating thing is I'm having a hard time escaping it on my "downtime" - when I'm knitting, I think of it. Worse, when I try to sleep, I think of it. I've spent several nights lying awake for a long time thinking about what I have to do next, what I haven't done yet. (I can foresee obsessing about the not-being-able-to-get-the-files-on-a-CD tonight). I'm not good at "decoupling" my home life from my work life, and when something frustrates me in my work life, it colors everything else.