Maybe It's the "Pornosonic."

I have 2 papers to write that have to be submitted by Friday. If it was a warm summer day and I was working on the patio table outside, I could crank them out in a couple of hours. I smoke, I type, I look things up, I'm enriched with Vitamin D and am a happy clam. One might think the planes, trains and automobiles (literally) and living in a townhouse community would be distracting; instead, it's this weird phenomenon where I can zone, point and shoot for the win.

In my room, however, I'm HORRIBLY distracted. It's a rainy, dank late October night. My room's not all that interesting and my desk is strewn with the 5,687 things I need to attend to. Everything is laid out to write the first paper. Except my brain. It's like I get acute ADD attacks in here. And it doesn't help that this stupid mixed mood episode hasn't left. I'm manic inasmuch as I can write. I could also eat more gummy vitamin supplements. I could wipe the fingerprints off the screen of my cell phone again. I could laugh at more shit on Pinterest or send Guy a suggestively sarcastic someecard that he won't check in his email for a month, by which time I might not be mad at him anymore. I'm depressed inasmuch as I have zero motivation to actually work, malaise towards life in general and am in a kinda crappy mood and feel like downing like a whole bottle of Ambien (which I won't, just making a point).

What could possibly, however, be distracting me more is having the background music be "Pornosonic: Unreleased 70's Porno Music." It's absolutely incredible, one of those "love-at-first-listen" albums that is so fucking funkariffic that if I EVER actually HAD sex again, I'd put it on in the background and laugh hysterically with whatever Guy is fortunate enough to sleep with me, especially if he's over 50 and gets the irony of it . All this whacka-whacka-wuh-wuh guitar with hot bass licks and funky horn section action, OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD!

But I digress.

While Dr. Monotone is an extremely nice man and a good professor, listening to his lectures for 3 hours DRAINS me. Animate yourself, for God's sake! Engage me! Engage any of us! My small group activity was a clusterfuck at the end of class when the 3 of us tried to reorganize about 90 tiny sheets of paper of personal characteristics into one pile again with 3 specific sheets on the top, after we'd mixed them all up. It was fantastic.

One paper is for Dr. Monotone, incorporating a career development theory into the diverse and completely confusing (to me) employment history of Meg, my study subject. She's worked at the same company since graduating college, but has done several different things, all of which are science-ey and befuddling and she's like super smart. I'm supposed to make recommendations to assist her in the future of her career process. All I can think of off the top of my head is "Your eye makeup is impeccable. Rock it, girl!"

The career counseling theories class is twisting me about. It's causing me to pause and wonder if being a psychologist is honest-to-Christ really what I want to do, when all these tests being administered to me churn out results that I should be an English professor or a paid-type-of-writer (the world is raft with jobs like that, right?). There's always the burgeoning world of online counseling, which my academic advisor was recently certified to provide. You have to be a licensed counselor, of course, but it's a big buck churner you can do WHILE you chain smoke on your patio or just Skype with clients. Like I said before, I would love to be a therapist, but I'd also love to teach writing. (So yeah, PS, fuck you--all of you who think I'm a shitty writer in the first place.)

This crossed my path today, and I completely want to put it on my therapy appointment cards in my practice:

Stop it!

The second paper is for Assessments and Appraisals and involves simultaneously the easiest and the most difficult case study subject imaginable: me. Using indices and personality inventory instruments to dissect a middle-aged woman with Bipolar II Disorder, mixed moods, rapid and ultradian cycling, generalized anxiety disorder and PTSD is kind of fucking hard, but he said we could write about ourselves if we didn't self-identify. So I'm writing about myself in the third person. Yay, I get to give MYSELF a pseudonym for a change! Maybe it'd be less pressure-cooking if I picked only one of my mental illnesses so's not to confuse the professor any more than I'll probably confuse myself.

I'm kind of deadline-driven. There's a reasonable chance that one paper will be written tomorrow night and the other Friday morning, seeing as it's already 9:11 pm and I have to be up at 6am to get ready for my research methods class, which is actually turning out to be super fun now that we're into qualitative research. Ah, crap. I'm supposed to have my research paper "question" nailed down by tomorrow morning. All I have now is a jumbled idea about why there isn't more enrichment opportunity and advanced, challenging work, or a resource assistant in more junior high schools for gifted children (like Luke). There seems to be plenty of extra help and attention for students who struggle, and I just think the scale's a bit unbalanced. Meh, I'll nail it down to a simpler thought on my morning commute (*unless I'm asleep*).