[M]etabrain [E]ntry [L]og - Braindump of the Mel. Seek coherency and relevance at your own risk.

I don’t actually get excited by children, it turns out.

Sadness: I’m going to have to let my IEEE membership lapse because it’s Just Too Darn Expensive. Of course, as soon as that happens, I think of all these things I want to do that stuff like journal access is incredibly useful for. Well, when I find something I’m blocked on due to lack of membership, and find that I have discretionary income to spend on that sort of thing, then… golly, I’ll be back with a vengeance.

My friends are right; I’m bad at relaxing and don’t know what to do when I don’t have too many things to do. In fact, I can’t not have too many things to do; when I feel idle, a swarm of low-priority tasks comes and buzzes around my head, and it’s uncomfortable because I can’t get to anything important in that state. These two months of forced semi-idleness are good for me if only to force me to learn how to deal with that sort of state in ways other than running away towards being governed by urgent impending deadline panic doom.

Down to 319 unread emails, which means I cleared out half of them today. Fistpump!

Wow, being sick has made my mind much more scattered than usual. I’m still sleeping a lot and it feels like a struggle to pick up long streams of coherent thought. Must hone powers of concentration. However, I am getting faster at typing with Dvorak. The biggest timesink for it is when my hands vibrate back and forth between layouts and I have to keep on saying “No, not qwerty, not qwerty.”

One thing that I’ve been finding lately is that I… don’t actually get excited about children. I mean, I get excited, but only the normal excited. Not the deep “this pulls me from an unconscious stupor into productivity” excited. That, apparently, is reserved for universities. I am ridiculously – it’s like a trigger I can’t stop – ridiculously excited by engineering education at the undergrad and up levels. Inasmuch as educating younger children relates to that (and it relates a lot!), I adore it completely. But it’s always about reaching uni students through having them do something for the younger ones, or tapping uni students to help younger ones, or somesuch.

This is problematic when your primary projects are centered on an audience you just don’t get all that excited about. I feel strange writing this, as if my declaration of love for education at the university level is somehow a betrayal of the projects I work on that focus on younger kids, K-12, even K-8. (It’s not that I don’t like kids that age, or don’t want to work on things for them! I do! It’s just that – it’s like… I enjoy gum, I like a good lollipop, they’re great, but fudge is in this whole other nirvana of sweetness entirely.

I don’t even know what that means. I don’t know what about universities attract me so much. That you get more students in there by choice rather than rote? That you have great minds from many disciplines in one place? That you can do both survey courses and in-depth, multi-year research studies on a subject? I don’t want to go back to academia now; I want to work in industry, but keep some sort of academic ties. Argh. Not being coherent tonight. Stupid sick tired brain….

Maybe it means that instead of just looking at doing community facilitation for my next job, I should also be looking for university outreach potential/positions. (Yeah, but I actually want to do engineering, so that in a way that’ll force me to get my hands dirty and greasy…)

Maybe it means that I should go to sleep. That… seems like a prudent plan. I think I’ll go for that one. Sleep.