It's all a mystery

'Cause I'm a man, not a boy
And there are things you can't avoid
You have to face them when you're not prepared to face them
If I could I would but you're with him now it'd do no good
I should have fought him but instead I let him
I let him take it
--- Flaming Lips, "Fight Test"

I stopped taking my Prozac, cold turkey, on my own initiative, about mid-February when I first began dating Spooky. Well-intentioned folks told me that I shouldn't, because abruptly cutting off the meds when you've only been taking them for a month can lead to even worse depression down the line. I felt so much better then that I didn't heed these pearls of wisdom. Now, though, what with all this Spooky and Baby and Babydaddy drama (and everything is a major melodramatic meltdown with this woman) and stress, I'm wondering if I did the right thing. It's not that I'm plunged into bleak despair like before, but I do ask myself if I'd be this bugged by the whole situation if I were still on the meds. Maybe I wouldn't even see any of it as a problem at all.

Oh well. Time will tell.

***

Tonight's class was Reading I. For some reason, this session seemed a bit less of a bootless waste than usual. We explored the continuing saga of teaching vocabulary. The gist of the matter is: don't just teach lists of words or memorization, but encourage active involvement in building a working vocabulary though relating words to literary and real-world experience.

To this end, we played a game much like Balderdash. Ms. P wrote four ostensibly esoteric and unusual words on the board, and the class came up with definitions. I knew two of the words; the class laughed with disbelief at one of my correct answers ("government by women" --- is that a bizarre idea to them?). Being women themselves, my classmates are very reticent about volunteering guesses as to academic questions, so it was like pulling teeth, but a few of the braver souls tried, bless 'em. And, of course, they're not (all) dumb, just conditioned to keep quiet in class unless they're absolutely sure of themselves. Naturally, a few of them had fairly solid reasons for their guesses, which were quite close. The words were: gynecocracy, stipe, ascomycete, and sesquipedalian. As to the last of these, Ms. W herself, the reading teacher, was totally unaware of the connection between "feet" and "syllables" in the its etymology.

Que fais-je dans cette galère?

***

A truism from a great indie film I watched recently, Metropolitan: "The last way to be happy is to make it your objective in life."