I’m going to bust out a lunch time short little ditty about Jack and Diane. No wait. I’m going bust out a short story about Tommy and Gina living on a prayer. No wait. I’m going to write about overcast days never turn me on but something about the clouds and her mixed. No wait. I’m your eyes when you must steal/I’m your pain when you can’t feel/sad but true (Yar!). No wait. Tell your man, I’m stuck on this lovely girl/Of course to me she mean all t’ world. But then she like another guy. I fall down dead she never see the tears I cry.

No. Wait.

Sorry, readers. I’ve been trading banter with teachers who are advising their students this week, and I’m feeling a bit mad with stress myself. So what’s a girl to do? Write non-sense. Create useless information. Try for humor. And that’s what we’ve been doing via email. Send the snarkcasm and wait for the laugh down the hall. Say you’re advising a student and you have no idea what to say. Channel 80s lyrics. Yes! I need someone, a person to talk to/Someone who’d care to love/Could it be you?

But then this email bomb banter got me thinking. Would I, could I possibly remember all of the lyrics to the Violent Femmes self-titled album? What else do I have to do in the car?

And oh. My. Gawd. I did. Every. Word. Haven’t listened that beauty in at least 10 years. Whenever the first iPod came into the household and I shelved the CDs. And I knew all of the words like it was yesterday.

The brain, my friends, is a strange beautifully troubling machine.

So here I am, right? I can remember the useless, the ridiculous, the mundane, the banal, the trivia. Yet I mixed up William Carlos Williams with e.e. cummings. I botched a translation of French that I know I once knew (Sorry, Lacan). I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember the title of a book I read last month. I mixed up two adult learning theorists that I wrote long (winded) papers about in graduate school.

Yet, I remember the lyrics to a beautifully juvenile band that to me meant all the world at one point. Please, please, please, you hurt me so.

I have a ton, and I mean a ton of work I need to do. Yet I type this. I go for long mountain bike rides this past weekend. I get rip roaring drunk and clean out a filing cabinet that I haven’t filed anything in the last two years. I darn a sock. I start a new knitting project.

Focus. Pocus. Hocus. Locus. Focus.

It’s just not happening. I keep pro-jing out on the dumbest stuff. Are you familiar with this term? (Thank you, Urban Dictionary).

Proj-ing Verb.

the act of creating something either alone or communally for a considerable about of time. Working on a hobby or task.

Used in a sentence: Somebody you know should be focusing on her actual work and a presentation she’s about to do yet she’s proj-ing on meaningless blog posts. Please don’t ask her about the federated wiki.

This term, sadly, is commonly used among crystal-meth addicts. (You know me, always keeping the lesson plan so high-culture). I learned “proj-ing” from a memoir written by Chrisian Hosoi, the skateboarder. He talked about proj-ing out for long stretches of time trying to recreate his fame and stardom as a professional skateboarder;turns out meth isn’t so great for your balance. And humanity in general, really.

Despite the not-so-my-forte-the saved-by-the-jesus-miracle-arc of his memoir, I totally adopted proj-ing as a verb. To describe my very anti-methey-using-entirely-home-brewed-brand-of-crazy-I-like-to-call–Me. I *should* be proj-ing on my To-Do Lists. Lists. Lists.

And quite frankly To-Do lists, you can kiss off into the air. Behind my back I can see them stare. They hurt bad but I don’t mind. They hurt me bad. They do it all the time. yeah yeah.

I hope you know, this will do down on your permanent record. Oh yeah.