The last few weeks have been extraordinarily busy, filled with end of the year tasks and now filled with beginning of the summer tasks. Here’s this week’s schedule.

I know it’s hard to see. It’s just filled. Next week our Summer Multimedia Development Institute begins. The first week is a week of training. It’s intense and long. The week after that are the kids’ birthdays and people visiting from out of town, then there’s a week and then vacation, defense, ugh. I’m just feeling like I’m not going to get everything done. And I feel like I haven’t had time to think. There’s a discussion I was going to be involved in that now I think I should back out of. I’m just not going to have time. But it seems important at a meta level. Plus I have the defense hanging over my head and all the little nitpicky stuff that goes with that–announcing it, applying for graduation, filling out form after form, making sure the margins are exactly right. I am not a detail-oriented person (though I fooled Steve). I’ve developed strategies for trying to keep all the balls in the air, but it takes energy, both physical and mental. It’s like taking an introvert to a party and making them talk to everyone in the room. When I’m faced with a lot of these details, I start to get antsy and overwhelmed. I have to force myself to focus and just plow through some of them.

I have the weekend ahead of me, and I’ve been thinking I should shut down the computer for the weekend and get back into my own head again. I love all the ideas I get from reading blogs and articles, but I think it might do me good to go old-fashioned and jot some stuff down on paper.

Barbara chastised me a bit for quitting my project365. I found I was walking the same path every day and couldn’t find anything interesting to take pictures of. But one thing that taking pictures did for me was to get me to look around and see things a bit differently. So I think I want to return to that project and to try to see things differently again. I think it also makes me slow down and stop and think. As a writer, I used to do this all the time, but I fall out of the habit when the world starts going crazy around me.

What I’ve been thinking about for a while now is what I want to be in the world, how I want to fit, locally, globally. I think about whether a person can change and if so, how. And this is not an “I feel frustrated and so I want to do something different” kind of thinking, though it is related, I guess. I’m trying to feel situated and not situated at the same time. I resist strict categorizations. My mantra has been (stolen from the Mythbusters): I reject your reality and substitute my own. I’m not sure what I’m saying here. These are just the thoughts that have been bouncing around my head. Maybe I’ll figure all of it out by Monday. Right.