As you can tell by the lack of blogging, this semester has been insane, and it's not even half over (or is it? I don't really know). I feel like the entire month of February has been a blur. I even quit one of my jobs (the one that wasn't social work related) and still haven't been able to slow down. How is that fair?
Well, okay, I did slow down last Tuesday. The day after Valentine's Day. It was my first day off from both school and work in three weeks, and I went to bed at 9:30 Valentine's Day night, with no alarm set and my phone off. Slept like a rock until 1pm Tuesday.
I've also implemented a regular two-hour nap until my schedule. I find I'm much more efficient this way. Means I'm up late into the night some nights, but that was happening anyway-- at least this way it's more productive.
One of my professors this semester is a scary man. A good teacher, but he likes to employ intimidation tactics, which I do not respond well to. Confession time: I do not like it when people yell. It shuts me down. He also makes strange pop culture references: among them Rodney Dangerfield, Star Trek, and Aretha Franklin. I have a more complete list somewhere.
Said scary man assigned me a term paper about a far scarier man: Adolf Hitler. That is what has consumed my every spare moment for the past two weeks. It's kind of taken over my brain. Did you know that Hitler had a dog named Blondi, whom he killed before killing himself? Did you know that he had a sister named Paula, who was alive until 1960? She changed her name and laid pretty low in her waning years... can't say I blame her.
I used to be under the impression that Hitler was a wannabe artist turned politician, but it seems he was really more like both, in perpetuity. He could have been an architect if he'd been willing to go back and finish high school, but he was stubborn. And only an artist could have crafted the public image and propaganda that he did.
I knew I had been working on the paper for too long when I began to feel sorry for Hitler and his world falling apart. I watched the movie Downfall Saturday night, as a means of closure. Yes, that's the movie where Hitler screams at his men in a scene that has been recaptioned and youtubed over and over again. It was a pretty fascinating movie, and evoked sympathy for many of the people involved-- people who started out as honest folk trying to make an honest living, and ended up deeply entrenched in something far more horrific than they could imagine. A lot of Hitler's closest cohorts didn't even know the conditions of the concentration camps. Hitler made sure of that. In fact, he himself never once set foot on a concentration camp's grounds. It would have damaged his carefully crafted reputation.
So, that's how my last two weeks have gone. My humanity may have suffered a bit. People look at you REALLY strangely when you read a biography of Hitler in public. Especially in Pep Boys, where they were unable to fix my driver's side door. So, I continue to climb out the passenger side.
