sorcyress | (no subject)

Accomplishments:

Work:
*The usual
*Also facilitated a focus group between my students and a woman from the EDC. That was kinda cool!
*Made a dodecahedron during NEST (and a little after). It's rainbow! (gaaaaaay)
*Survived a lockdown drill without gibbering. Which is miles better than the last one. I had my hands full of origami and no students, so that helped a lot.

Therapy:
*Did not talk about the things I meant to talk about
*Instead spent the _entire time_ talking about dance, which I feel is very en pointe
*I am incredibly proud of that pun and made it first to Austin then immediately to twitter.

Social:
*Post therapy I got dinner with Lemur! That was lovely and a lot of fun!
*Lemur gave me a trainstrans pin! This is funny because I'm still not sure I like the word trans for myself, and I'm only a trainsnerd by association.
*Post TMC meeting, I wound up chatting on the phone with Veronica for like 15-20 minutes, which was so so good. She is best!

Dance:
*TMC meeting! Whee! I cannot talk via the webex for undisclosed reasons, but Jen translated my typed comments for me.
*Wheeee Pinewoods work. I mean, fairly quiet and background, but it's happening.

Personal:
*Made significant progress on secret project DS2.0
*Made significant progress on secret project...need a code for this one. Hum. But yeah, this one too.
*I am full of aloo mattar and I am so happy about it.
**shrugs*
*Words I guess.

Self-motivation is currently at a huge fucking low. I'm pretty sure I'm officially in "Burnout" and should do some research about how one fixes that. I remember the end of last year being pretty much the same, just...done. Solidly and entirely and without any ability to do other things.

I want to catch back up with emails (neglected since Friday) and alllllll the other things in the world, but it's just really not there. Good gods, the grading alone!

Here's hoping you're more capable of Getting Things Done right now! <3

~Sor
MOOP!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Ooh, dodecahedron! What's it made out of?

Paper! I use PHiZZ units to make modular dodecahedrons when I have the time to let my hands move but don't need to be taking notes. Right now I have a messy stack of five of them on my desk at work, and most of the modules for a sixth in my clipboard.

(The five have been made over the course of the year. It takes me about 45 minutes to fold the 30 units, and then about 30 minutes to put them together. It takes longer when I'm trying to match colour patterns (you connect 3 units at a joint, and each side is of course five units, and the whole thing can be modeled as six interlocking rings...).

I should post pictures sometime.

~Sor

Yay! My boyfriend does modular origami -- knitting is my craft, but I'm a fan of his work! (Here's some that we had to leave behind in England, where they ultimately got picked up by a math educator who reverse-engineered them and turned them into a classroom activity.

Ah! Yes, those dodecahedrons are exactly it --the open spaced ones are called PHiZZ (Pentagon and Hexagon in ZigZags, iirc) units!

I've made a couple of the ring, like he's got, but I've not made one with the colours clumped like that. I really like it! I'm gonna have to copy that sometime.

~Sor

On burnout, I recently saw an article that really worked for me, unlike all prior ones on that topic. The others seem to focus on either overwork or actively hostile work environments, which haven't been factors for me as such. Instead, it breaks it down into work and environment factors. This is the part that hit home for me:

« The work that I’ve seen lead to burnout tends to be: * All-consuming * Uninteresting * Lacking visible progress indicators * Lacking a clear end date »

I now have that as a self-check list that I consult every few weeks at work, and it has helped me adjust some things to be better.

Dunno if the article addresses the factors that cause burnout for you, but I figured I'd pass it along.