Hindsight is a Bummer

Bummer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Well, I can't sleep.  As usual.  I was thinking about the next paper (last project, yay!), which is a very short essay to go with my portfolio.  For some reason (and no, that's not an invitation for everyone to analyze me), I have trouble writing anything at all complimentary about myself or anything I've done.  I'm supposed to be evaluating three of the projects:  the research proposal, the definitions essay, and the research paper (this one, I don't even want to think about, much less write about).  Now that I look at the proposal, which I wrote 12 weeks ago, I think it looks pretty bad.  I didn't have any grammar errors or anything like that, but my ideas seem kind of half-baked, considering what I actually did for the other projects.  It looked a lot better back when I wrote it.

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Ice Cream Headache: Why is the freezer empty NOW?

It's the picture of Italian ice-cream in a shop of Rome, Italy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I lost the file of the stuff I wrote in class, so I'm further behind than I should be.  Portfolios are due next Wednesday, and the hard copy of my blog postings has to be in it.  The dog died last Saturday, Rebbie had a trailer land on her foot (don't ask) and she's going for xrays today, I feel a cold coming on, and my hair seems to be in permanent bedhead mode (and not in a cute, sexy way, either).  To top it all off, there is no ice cream in the freezer.  This is pretty much things went at the end of last semester and every semester when I was in high school.  Why?  Why?!!

I have no idea.

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Did you ever have one of those days?

Doc, age 3.  He's very suspicious of cameras 

As I've mentioned before, I have trouble sleeping, and it's worse when I'm under a lot of stress.  I always picture a hamster on an exercise wheel in my brain, running at top speed, worrying about everything on earth.  I can't stop the hamster.  Anyway, we just found out a few days ago that my sister Rebbie's dog has cancer of the spleen, and his spleen could rupture at any time now.  He's 12 years old, which is beyond the lifespan of his breed (Great Pyrenees), but he hasn't been acting strange, and his fur has been hiding the fact that he's lost a lot of weight (down to 82 from 122!).  So, we're all pretty down about that.  It'll be worse on Saturday, when he goes to the vet for the last time.  

It's hard to keep on track with all my courses when stuff like that is happening.  Yesterday in class, the prof had us write 5 blog posts in class (we're in a computer lab), and I'm having trouble accessing the file.  I feel like an idiot now.  I didn't post them from the lab because I wanted to do it on my own computer so that I could run Zemanta for pictures and article suggestions.

The one piece of good news is that the due date on the research paper has been pushed back to next Monday instead of tomorrow.  Or maybe it's not good news, since that just gives me more time to worry about it.

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Writing about War is Hell

The "Heroic Age" roster of the Avengers. Cover art for Avengers vol. 4, #12.1, by Bryan Hitch. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Can't sleep again.  I was just flipping through channels on tv, stopped for a minute on Troy (about the only movie that I thought I could scan), and heard Hector telling his men about his warrior code, which reminded me that I'm still 5 posts behind.

I had a scheduled conference yesterday with the prof to talk about how she wants me to revise my research paper draft.  She gave me some ideas about how to fix the wording of my thesis, and told me to quote both my sources and the film a lot more.  Luckily, she thought the scenes I chose from AAoU (I'm kind of tired of typing out Avengers:  Age of Ultron.  Hey, I just did it again) worked, so I don't have to start anything over.  It's going to be a lot of work.

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I've Got a Thesis!

Regions of the brain affected by PTSD and stress. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yes!  I'm still playing around with exactly how to word it-- probably will be doing that right up until I turn it in-- but the idea is pretty clear to me, and I can see the development of the pattern in the films from Iron Man right through to Avengers:  Age of Ultron.  I was having trouble narrowing it down for the longest time.  It basically has to do with what happens when one person (Iron Man) is not adhering to the same code as the rest of the unit.  The actions he takes set him apart from the rest of the team, cause the threat he was trying to prevent, and create resentment.  Of course, there are other factors as well:  it's evident from the character's appearance in other films that he is having significant difficulties that constitute an almost textbook case of post-traumatic stress disorder, for one thing.  For another, his self-image is not that of a warrior; he isn't part of the culture.  He has a line in the first Avengers film, "we are not soldiers," that bears that out.  He's a loner in many ways and is used to working on his own, with his own rules and no oversight. 
The irony here is that the most important long-term benefit of a warrior code is that it helps prevent the worst effects of PTSD--if he would accept the same values that the others do, he would be able to find support in being part of the group and probably suffer a lot less.

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A Great Book, Finally

I know I said I'd post this a few hours after my last post, but it turned into almost a month.  And, no, I haven't been stalling.  I just forgot!  With all my coursework and getting my research paper draft going, this was the last thing on my mind.

Today is the second anniversary of my mother's death.  I woke up thinking about her, partly because I had a dream about her, in which she told me to "get cracking on that homework."  Since I'm just about up to date on everything else, I figured that this was my subconscious telling me I was missing something.  That was when I realized that I hadn't been posting.  So, here goes.

The book that has helped me the most with my paper is The Code of the Warrior:  Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present, by Shannon E. French, who is a philosophy professor at the U.S. Naval Academy.  Since she works in a military setting, it was probably only natural that she would want to write about this topic, and she obviously had access to plenty of current and former "warriors" to flesh out the research she did on warriors of the past.  One of the things that helped me is that it seems that the people (virtually all men) she consulted or quoted seemed to be able to detail the codes that governed their behaviors as members of the military, which fit what I saw in Avengers:  Age of Ultron.  I'll talk more about that in my next post.

Anyway, it's a terrific read; I couldn't put it down.  Check it out. 

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