Tuesday Update

Spring semester: day sixty-six

Everything has calmed down after this weekend's tornado outbreak, it seems, and slowly life in Kansas is returning to normal. The main tornado that hit Wichita (because there were smaller ones) was confirmed to be an EF3, and it caused over $300 million in damage, some of it catastrophic damage -- but no reported fatalities, and only minor injuries. Some sections of the city won't have power restored to them until at least Thursday, though. In retrospect, everything could have been a lot worse. I have been in contact with friends and family back home, so everyone knows I'm okay and that nothing happened here in Newton, so that's a plus. Most of my family members who know I'm out here (well, those who care, anyhow) were worried, so I made sure to let everyone know I was okay.

The final list of readers for Thursday's poetry reading is set, and the editor for our school's literary journal is going to be the emcee. I work with him on a regular basis, as I am the journal's nonfiction editor. Should be a fun reading. Should be a fun day, actually. I'm looking forward to it, especially because (barring any unforeseen circumstances), Lady should be in attendance at the reading and will stay the night, as mentioned previously. I even told her to bring in any and all laundry she needs done, as well, as it's $5 per load at school for her to wash things, and I have my own washer and dryer (when either one wants to work, of course, but that's a story for another time). I have picked four poems to read -- two of which are brand-new and have not yet seen workshop. All of them are about the same length, and none of them are those long-lined, prose-ish poems I've read at readings in the past. I'd like to think that my style is evolving more with each passing semester, and that by the time I graduate next year, I will indeed have a polished thesis full of publishable works.

My best friend and sister Andrea mentioned that she got a hit on a technical writing job in Wilmington, NC. While I'm no technical writer (I mean, I have no real experience in that), North Carolina has always been one of my top three destinations for after I graduate and leave Kansas. The other two, prior to meeting Lady, were Pittsburgh or Philadelphia. Now those other two have been updated, as you know, to basically anywhere in New England, or somewhere around the Virginia Beach area. While Pittsburgh or Philadelphia would still be nice, I'm more focused on finding a happy medium area between my family, Lady's family, and wherever I'll end up working/living. Our hopes are that wherever we end up, we can get to either family's home within about six-to-eight hours or so of driving, which leaves a rather large circular radius of places for me to be able to settle and find work. Of course, by then if I'm going to be doing that much driving, I'll either have to get a better car or have maaaajor repairs done on the one I have. Still, with Andrea getting a hit from North Carolina, and with me having some friends either in the region (at least two in the state) and two more who went to undergrad there, I've got a good information network set up if there are possible writing or teaching jobs there. And Lady loves North Carolina, as well; she's spent a lot of time there.

I am awake and typing this post at 4:43 AM; insomnia has struck again on a Monday night (typical, I know) and therefore I cannot force myself to sleep. Now it is far too late to even try, as my alarm goes off at 5 (or, if I'm setting the alarm clock downstairs, 5:15). I was awake late working on school stuff as well as talking to Lady, who doesn't have anything pressing to do tomorrow, and rather than even attempt to sleep for an hour or two and end up a zombie the entire day, it's easier for me to down a pot of coffee and power through everything until I can finally come home and go to bed tonight. Yes, this means I'll be ungodly tired by the time I go to sleep (having been awake for about 35 hours straight, and only able to get about 4-5 hours of sleep on any given weeknight -- on average, of course) but hey, that's grad school for you. Perhaps if it's quiet this afternoon after all of my student conferences are done, I'll take a nap in my office. There's not a whole lot else I can do -- I have class from 4:30-6:50, then have to drive home and get something to eat before I can go to bed. It's a super-long day to be sure, but at least I can spend most of it leisurely because of my student conferences.

I'm not sure I really went into a lot of detail about what conferences entail. They are two of the most mentally (though thankfully, not physically) draining days of the semester, and they're required for anyone teaching English 102. Even though I teach the Science/Engineering Writing course, it's still technically an English 102 course -- just a highly specialized one. Sadly, this does not exempt me from conferences. Anyway, basically what happens is that class is not held within the classroom for a week, but everyone in both of my sections gets assigned a 10-minute window during the times I would regularly hold class to come up to my office and meet with me. I tell them their current grade, hand back any assignments they haven't gotten yet, and they get to ask me any questions/bring up any concerns they have with the class. For this, they get thirty points, and I send them on their way to finish their final papers for the semester. My class is set up a lot differently compared to the normal sections of 102, so my conferences are this week instead of earlier in the month. When we return to the classroom next week, it's workshop week, and then they turn in their papers on the 1st. The last day of classes is the 3rd, where they'll take a practice final exam in class, and then their actual final is on the 7th. The end of the semester is coming up so much faster than I expected it to, which means that over the course of the next two weeks I have a lot of work and a lot of grading ahead of me. So so much work.

After those two weeks, however? I plan to catch up on all the sleep I've lost over the course of the semester. This will take a few days at least, days during which I will more than likely be effectively dead to the world. Hopefully it'll reset my sleep clock for summer, and recharge my batteries from their proverbially-on-empty state they've been on all semester. It feels like I've just been bleeding energy from every pore, and that there's only so much I can bleed off before I just run out of power completely and won't function without a recharge. I just pray (well, okay, I don't pray, but I hope) that I can last until May 8 -- the first day, for me, of true time off, provided I have all of my final grades calculated and uploaded to Banner. After that, anything goes.

What else is going on this week? Not a whole lot, really. My practicum class will consist of our first practice grading session for final exams, which is more of an exercise than anything else -- all of us have been teaching for at least two semesters already (me, I've been teaching for four), so we're well-versed in final exam grading, but again it's one of those required things that we can't get out of. The department has its regulations that all of us have to follow. In my Editing class, we're covering a chapter in the book, and in Poetry this afternoon it's workshop as usual. For most of this week I'll probably be deliriously tired anyhow, so it's not like I'll notice if anything else happens.