My schedule is all out of whack. Do I have schedule? I don’t think so. Routine? Sleeping pattern? Whatever it is, it’s messed up, which really stinks because I start my additional duties at work tonight. In addition to my job as a medical language specialist editor, I am also performing quality assurance (QA) and something about document delivery such-and-such.
Every hour, I tell everyone how many jobs there are, how many people are working, and the TAT (turnaround time) for those jobs. I have not done this job before and I am scared spitless. I’ve been QA’ing for a few years but not on my current platform and I think I oversee 58 or 59 accounts now on this platform, which isn’t as intuitive as the other one. Why did I say I would take this on? Companies usually love me because I’m strictly third shift, but I’ve been having trouble sleeping this week, and I got up at 8 a.m. yesterday and have training sometime after 8 a.m. today.
My literary theory professor is a stickler for the rubric (he’s the one who gave me an initial F) and I am one who never looks at the rubrics because they confuse me so that’s been fun. I submitted this week’s assignment yesterday and had to add things to it and resubmit because I forgot something that was on the rubric 🙄😒.
For my poetry workshop, we have weekly journals and I think I may have gotten too comfortable with this week’s journal. I didn’t mask at all while typing it up and I think it’s pretty obvious. But it’s a journal and that, to me, implies that it is more relaxed and casual than academic papers. We had to break up a poem that was in paragraph form without knowing how the author broke it up and explain our process/reasoning. I’ve not read that poem before and didn’t look it up since we were told not to so I don’t know how accurate I was. I will find out next week, I guess. I will paste my erratic “reflection” on breaking up said poem below. I’m not posting the poem because I don’t know who wrote it and can’t give credit.
Reflection
Okay. I don’t know what I am doing, which is why I am taking poetry classes. I never really think about much when a poem comes to me; I just need to get it down as quickly as possible before it flies out of my head, which is a very real possibility for someone with AuDHD. (I wrote a poem about that.) I was taken aback when it was asked in The Poet’s Companion if I could write a poem in 20 minutes and the assumptive answer was, “probably not.” Why not? When I think of something, I sit down and write or Click Clack Moo it out. I think I lost my point somewhere.
Right – reflection. I’m a rhymer, so I haven’t had to worry much about line breaks. I started playing around with free verse during my Studies in Poetry class last year and I’ve discovered I don’t know squat about line breaks. Like poems, they just come to me, but I don’t know if they are “right.” Who decides that, anyway? One would think the poet ought to know since it is their work but literaries can be rather pretentious about that kind of stuff.
Lately, I’ve been experimenting with one-word lines for emphasis, which is why I chose to break up the names in the above poem – “Kadesha./Shaniqua./This is the voice/Of Antoine./Darryl./Shaquille.” I would have given LaTonya and Antoine their own lines, but I read that you’re not supposed to end a line with prepositions or articles (but you can start lines with them). I would say that is an unwritten rule, but it was written somewhere by someone, obviously, because that is how I read it.
I’ve been reading Rupi Kaur’s books, and that girl is crazy with her line breaks and indentations! I really wanted to break up, “This is not a small voice you here.” but since this person started and ended the poem with that sentence, I figured they meant for it to be on one line. I first thought of “This is not/A small voice you hear” or “This is/Not a small voice you hear.” I do notice that I tended to start lines with verbs in the above poem. “Running over waters/Navigating the hallways of our schools/Spilling out on the corners of our cities.” Is that a thing? Poetry readers love to come up with terms and forms; I’m guessing there is a name for that.
I threw some dashes in there, too. Emily Dickinson really liked using those and everyone seems to like her stuff for some reason. Did you know she told her sister to burn all her notebooks and journals? Can you imagine betraying your own sibling like that? I find that appalling. Sadly, I am all over the place, and I don’t know what I am doing, so I hope what I learn sticks and can be applied to my writing going forward. Did I even manage to answer what was asked of me?
So, there is an unmedicated ADHD answer to a simple question 😂😂. It seems I went off the deep end more than a few times there. Gah.
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