Greetings, Internet! I hope everyone’s staying as safe and sane as can be. This week, my advisor approved my dissertation chapter outline (the chapter writing shall commence soon!), I posted another original song, and I finally took my camera out of the box! Daily summaries below!

Day Three Hundred and Thirty (2/5/21)

• Emailed my outline to my advisor, so we shall see what he says! Of course, as soon as I emailed him, I found an article that would’ve been perfect to include in the outline. Bah.
• My student roster is finalized. Wahoo!
• Today is my designated music day, and so there was much audio recording. I took an original I wasn’t too happy with and revamped most of it. If all goes well, it’ll be the next thing I post to my channel, so yay!
• Binged “Clone Wars.” Almost halfway through season four.
• Currently feeling: Somehow it’s already close to midnight and I feel like I needed to get more things done. Oh boy. I sense there may be more nights like this in my near future.
• Currently looping: Hoping it’s not a copout to say I was looping my own recording because I needed to see what needed to be rerecorded before mixing. But you’ll hear it soon!

Day Three Hundred and Thirty-One (2/6/21)

• Did the FES cycle.
• Started writing a mini-lecture for the course I’m TA-ing. I’m about two-thirds done with the text. Then I had to take a break because there were lots of words on the page and I kept yawning.
• Audio mixed an original that I’m much happier with than when I first recorded it months ago.
• Currently feeling: So tired. So busy. So unlikely to get more than six hours of sleep. But also, when have I ever taken advantage of going to bed at a reasonable hour?
• Currently looping: The Decemberists’ “The Wanting Comes in Waves / Repaid” live. Shara Nova is all of my singing goals.

Day Three Hundred and Thirty-Two (2/7/21)

• My advisor has given the okay for my chapter outline. And now the real work begins.
• Recorded the video for an original this week! And then listened to other people I’m YouTube friends with who have also posted original songs in the past couple of days. They both had music videos. Then I started to feel totally inferior. Well, so much for a serious music hobby when teenagers have more thoughtful things to say than I have and better video recording skills.
• Did this week’s reading for the course I’m TA-ing, and watched one of the lectures. I need to watch the other lectures tomorrow.
• My apartment is kind of cold. I had to wear a snuggie while I worked today. A snuggie.
• So it turns out my apartment was two degrees colder than what I normally set the thermostat at. And I hadn’t realized this for…maybe a few weeks. That explains a lot.
• Currently feeling: Yeah, I don’t think I have time to shoot legit music videos this semester. I’m just going to have to rely on my multi-screen videos and spend more time on the audio.
• Currently looping: Ramin Djawadi’s “The Long Night Pt. 1” from the “Game of Thrones” soundtrack, season eight. It’s been getting me through some reading.

Day Three Hundred and Thirty-Three (2/8/21)

• Did the FES cycle. Watched a lecture on Galen and the Hippocratic corpus.
• My mother’s here! She brought butternut squash muffins ^_^
• Teaching meeting! Then emailed my precepts.
• My mother baked double chocolate chip almond cookies. We call them “happy cookies,” because it’s impossible to be sad while you’re eating them. My apartment smells amazing.
• Relistened to “Jackass.” I need to re-record this now that I have better audio equipment. Let’s just tack that onto the fifty other things I have planned for the next two weeks. On second thought, that can probably wait until May.
• Currently feeling: I have a game plan for work that needs to get done this week. We shall see if I adhere to the plan.
• Currently looping: Norah Jones’ “Don’t Know Why.”

Day Three Hundred and Thirty-Four (2/9/21)

• Cookies are now a part of a well-rounded breakfast. Prove me wrong.
• I finally took my camera out of the box! Still haven’t set it up. Maybe tomorrow. Or the next day. I really need to check it to make sure it works. Oh, and I have to get a cord so I can hook it up to my laptop. Speaking of which, all this video recording has depleted the space on my laptop. I need to delete a bunch of files. Well, I need to put a bunch of files on a flash drive and then delete the files from my hard drive.
• Finished writing the text for my mini-lecture. Now to reread the text and create slides.
• Precept! I’m still trying to ease into it, but I’m still awkward AF. Literally lost my train of thought mid-sentence and admitted to doing so. D’oh.
• Currently feeling: I’ll get better at this precepting thing eventually. I’ll just keep telling myself that until it happens. I keep thinking back to the TFs I really liked, and I don’t really think I had any bad TFs (oh, except one, but I’ve forgotten his teaching style completely). But I also basically stuck to medieval history courses in undergrad, and I knew/really liked all the medieval grad students, so I looked forward to section anyway.
• Currently looping: Florence + The Machine’s “Rabbit Heart (Raise it Up).” “I must become a lion-hearted girl” all right.

Day Three Hundred and Thirty-Five (2/10/21)

• It sounded like someone was running a jackhammer a mile away from my building at around 1:30am. What the dickens?
• FES cycle.
• Office hours! A student actually came!
• Did some work on the powerpoint for my mini-lecture. Starting to think I need to cut some material, because I just keep name dropping people like Gregory of Tours and expecting people to know who I’m talking about. Or I guess when I first mention the person, I can have a slide that explains the background briefly. Unsure.
• Continuing to run out of space on my laptop. Egad.
• Precept! I need to get better at taking what the students say and distilling it into a decent summary.
• Finished season four of “Clone Wars.”
• Currently feeling: Oh my gosh, where did the day go? At some point earlier today, I thought about getting work done, but I hadn’t eaten lunch and so I decided to eat something. I lost thirty minutes of work time, but it would’ve been a work time full of hunger pangs, so I feel like I made the right decision. And I spent the time while eating to think about how to attack the work more efficiently, so there was that.
• Currently looping: Fiona Apple’s “Werewolf” from Live from Here. So good. That line, “We’re like a wishing well and a bolt of electricity.” Brilliant.

Day Three Hundred and Thirty-Six (2/11/21)

• Posted my original song, “Dear Prince Charming.” It’s cheesy and it’s mine. And it tells the world that I have standards. Also I have two comments now saying that it reminds them of early T-Swift, and that warms my heart.
• Lots of course-related things today, mostly to do with corresponding with students on the course site.
• Lots of emails that had nothing to do with course things.
• Almost halfway through season five of “Clone Wars.”
• Finished reading the book that my realtor wrote. There’s a lot in there I can’t relate to (her idea of a vacation sounds like a logistical nightmare to me), but at some point she wrote about the effects of a “friend divorce,” and it resonated with me. Don’t get me wrong, if I sense a friendship has soured and it’s been less than a year, I’m likely to be the friend ghoster. But if over seven years have gone by? Yeah, I will threaten to run people over with my chair on your behalf. And if the friendship ends, I will be utterly distraught.
• Therapy! Minor breakthroughs.
• Currently feeling: Today was a bit of a lazy Thursday (relatively speaking), but it’s all good. It’s nice to have a day to get work done without an adrenaline rush.
• Currently looping: Christina Perri’s “A Thousand Years (Lullaby).”

Thanks so much for reading! Stay safe, wear a mask, and Happy Lunar New Year!