Bearshorty's musings

I meant to finish Equiano papers but I need to do the Feudalism and Crusades and Gender lecture for my “Sex, Power and Identity” class. Last night I rummaged through my old files to find an undergraduate paper I wrote on Women on Crusades. I didn’t have a digital copy (we used disks then, and I did not yet have my own laptop – I used school computers. So when I got a laptop, not everything was saved to it.)

Had a lecture and midterm review in one class and lecture in another and we had enough time so I could show them Terry Jones’ Crusades segment. I asked them to watch it and analyze it in terms of gender. As I watched I made a list of ten things on it – no women in paintings for the most part, for example, typical experience is portrayed as a knight, etc – they could one get the most obvious one. Really, students? I told them in no uncertain terms that if they do a movie for extra credit they can’t just summarize.

After my lecture on Byzantium I showed the “Crusades” video – the Terry Jones one – to my classes. I do love that series. I day I must embroider “knight had no teddy bears” somewhere. I gave this series to Bear’s Dad one Christmas a few years ago but his parents, for some weird reason, found the whole thing either too liberal or disrespectful of religion or something, which baffles me. At least I get to amuse myself while showing the a bit to students. We are doing Crusades next week.

As I was watching “Crusades” video it connected in my brain that Karen Armstrong, the theology expect, one of the talking heads is the same Karen Armstrong whose chapter “Does God Have a Future” I taught a few years ago in one of my writing classes. I even gave her book to Bear for Christmas one year.

I have so many students asking for extension I forgot how regular classes work. In the writing classes most have to turn in their work on time since there is so much writing.

So I was feeling really really tired by 5pm, even as I went for a walk and I couldn’t figure out why. Finally, as I was sitting here on my computer it occurred to me that my heart is being extra irregular today and my palpitations and PVCs (premature ventricular contractions) are having lots of fun. I’ve had these for almost three years now but for the last year and even longer now they have settled down. I still have them, but I just don’t pay attention to them and they don’t usually cause any big symptoms. But today I have to keep myself from feeling my pulse or getting nervous since I’m having bigeminy, which is a PVCs every other beat. There is nothing I can do about them (I don’t take beta blockers because they just mask it, not get rid of it and I’m used to it and a lot of people actually have this). I have this irrational fear that bigeminy will move into vtac but I know that is irrational. So I’m feeling tired. It has been a stressful semester. I will so need a vacation. And I need to stop paying attention to what my heart is doing – they are just so loud right now, I feel it every time. It feels like my heart is pausing for a bit, although I know it is just beating early and then catching up.

“Three Musketeers” trailer looks wrong. I like the actors but the whole explosions, 3D, ridiculous action is not my kind of adaptation for this. I do like that D’Artagnan is very young since he is 18 in the book but otherwise I just want to roll my eyes. Granted my favorite adaptation of this book is a musical but that is what I grew up on. I read all the books (including the all the sequels) when I was very young, maybe ten and I re-read the first book when I was 25. I have fond memories of it – I demand a decent adaptation.

“Mother and Child” I watched this movie today. It was nice. I could tell most plot twists in advance but it was still a good movie about women and motherhood.