disjointed and random and etc

I’m sitting here loading songs from my seventy gazillion CDs onto iTunes to put on my beloved iPod, and since my severe-attention-deficit-disorder-producing job has made me unable to just sit and do one thing at a time, I’ll write a long overdue entry. Which will certainly be disjointed and incomprehensible since I’m doing something else at the same time. I can’t even do three things at a time anymore without thinking there’s GOT to be something ELSE I can be doing as well. Which would be fine if I could actually do four things at once without screwing every single one of them up.

And this would be easier if A) I could get used to the fact that I have plenty of space on the iPod, even the mini one, and I don’t really have to debate over every single song on every single CD I own about whether I love it enough to let it take up all that room, and B) I actually knew the names of the songs on the CDs I’ve listened to for the last, oh, FIFTEEN YEARS so I didn’t have to scroll down playing bits of each song on each CD to see what it is. So that I can start debating over whether I really have room or not for it. I mean, I’ve got… *GASP* 435 songs on there now! It’s nearly HALF FULL! I’m going to RUN OUT OF ROOM!!!

The scary thing is that I really DO have about a thousand more CDs to pick through. How did we get so many CDs?? I guess this is why we never have any money. So far I haven’t downloaded anything, either. Other than some free things from Amazon. I found that I liked a couple of things from Bright Eyes, and also – of all things – the Drive By Truckers. And to my delight I found three songs by the Austin Lounge Lizards. Who I know because of their bizarre banjo-strumming bluegrass version of Brain Damage. (Which, in case anyone out there is like me and never knows the name of anything, is on Dark Side of the Moon – “The lunatic is on the grass/ the lunatic is on the grass/ remembering days of daisy chains and laughs/ got to keep the loonies on the path” or something like that. The bluegrass version is hysterical. So is “Paint Me On Velvet”, about a guy who has been done wrong. “So paint me on velvet/ and do not disguise/ the bright silver teardrop/ that you brought to my eyes/ hang me out by the roadside/ for the whole world to see/ Jesus and Elvis, the Confederate flag/ and Willie and me.”

I’m pretty certain they did a takeoff on “I’ve Got Friends In Low Places,” that country song from a number of years ago. It was about Jeffery Dalmer and called “I’ve Got Friends in Crawl Spaces”. In keeping with not being able to do one thing at a time, I’m trying to find it on Amazon, but can’t seem to spot it. They do have some great titles, though – “Jesus Loves Me, But He Can’t Stand You”. “That Godforsaken Hellhole I Call Home”. “Do Not Go To Tennessee”. “Gingrich the Newt.” “Life is Hard, But Hardest When You’re Dumb.” “Bonfire of the Inanities.”

Well. Anyway.

In News Of The Hopeless, my latest favorite sad tale from work is the woman who misspelled her own first name on her licensure application. And it wasn’t a hard first name. Patricia. She spelled it Patrica. In nice neat exceedingly legible print. I thought, oh, her name just has an odd (and annoying) spelling. So I checked her transcripts and a letter she sent, which both had it spelled “PatricIa.” I mean, really. I’ve seen people misspelling their towns before (the most recent was a guy who spelled Pilot Mountain Piolot Mountain), and I’ve also seen them misspell the name of their own college more than once, but their FIRST NAME??? Not really what you want to catch future teachers doing. I’m a terrible speller, but at least I can spell my name. Usually.

Oh, and our New Position has finally been posted. Something weird is going on, though. I’m getting the distinct feeling that the Distance Education office is out to hijack our new person. We are getting some funding for this job from that budget because all the new programs they are constantly conjuring up cause more work for our office – more students, more certification-only programs, more licensure paperwork. So Dr. Airhead had me allude to Distance Ed in the job description which I of course had to write up. That was lots of fun, since thanks to all the bizarre politics in our office nobody is willing to let the new person take over one whole thing. Like ALL of licensure or ALL of student teaching, or ALL of the filekeeping. So apparently we will continue to each do three or four specific distinct jobs, except now three of us will be splitting up three or four distinct jobs into three pieces each. Which I guess is better than two of us doing it.

ANYHOW, I wrote the description with wording like “will assist with maintaining files for undergraduates, licensure-only, and lateral entry students, including distance education students”. What it’s ended up saying, in every instance that mentions distance education, someone has changed “including” to “especially. Which is quite a change. Several of the distance ed people have been hovering around suspiciously, too. So I’m wondering what’s going on. Whatever it is, I’m SURE it’s not good.

Oh, well. It’s Friday night and I really shouldn’t be thinking about work. I really should be packing – I’m making yet another trip to Asheville for the weekend. My father is doing better, but is still having to use oxygen occasionally. The doctors seem to think it’s no big deal, and he’s using it way less than he was, so he says – but it’s worrying. So I need to go check it out. Like there’s much I can do. I can give my brother and sister-in-law a break for a couple of days – I think they’ve been cooking for them and may still be spending the night down there. So I better go see if I can’t get things together enough to get gone before noon tomorrow.