The last day of my Spring Break
I am unable to sleep.
Well, that's not exactly true. I was able to sleep a few hours earlier tonight, from about 10 until 2, had two nightmares (neither of which I can remember now) and found myself staring at the ceiling or at my cat, Pete, who was curled up under my arm under the blankets with me. I laid in bed until almost 3 trying to go back to sleep, until I realized that if I just got up and stayed awake all day, it would reset my body clock and I'd be able to go back to sleep tonight at a reasonable hour so I can teach this week and get back to the grind. I sighed, dressed myself, and returned upstairs.
Most of the day yesterday I was quite lethargic; I couldn't force myself to wake up fully, I didn't want to do my reading (I forced myself through as much of it as I could) and I was just, well, generally fed up. I'd reached my "breaking point" of sorts when it came to my studies -- there's only so much day-in, day-out of studying and reading I can take before I just want it to be over and done. It didn't help that I really didn't like much of Dean Young or Bob Hicok -- who I was reading yesterday, see previous post -- and the chances were slim that either of them would be included on my comps, or so I thought. That may change; keep reading.
Really, as I told Daisy, I just wanted a break. An actual spring break. I wanted to be able to wake up and to not have to do anything, to be able to sleep as much as I needed without having to worry her, be able to not worry about if I'd have enough time to take care of my chores and studies, not worry about bills to be paid, lessons for my students that must be planned, and to be able to try to forget about the massively-important exam that's coming up in twelve days. What I want to do is play video games, watch movies on the couch with the cats, go get a cheeseburger if I want one, and be able to decompress. Because at this point I sorely need that. I've probably read 2,000 pages of literature this past week, and have taken 200 pages of notes. I'm rapidly reaching burnt-out. Even thinking back on all of that reading right now, even the bigger poets, I couldn't necessarily tell you off the top of my head anything that I've learned about them, either stylistically or content-wise. It's all in my head somewhere, mind you, and it's in my notes, but as for retention and accessibility? My brain's hard drive needs to be defragged. Badly.
Daisy is sick again; she has a sinus infection/bad cold/flu/etc. Her immune system is terrible; in the past nine months she's been sick about once or twice a month, for a few days at a time. She's off work now until later this week, as she's completed her training now and formally starts her night shifts this weekend, so she has a doctor's appointment this afternoon and is having full bloodwork done to see if they can figure out why she's sick all the time. I've posited that it's more than likely because she's had a lot of stuff change in her life over the course of the past several months, including stress levels and different medications she's on (for female things), and it's wearing her down a lot. She was out of work for a long time, and was suddenly thrust back into a working schedule of long hours, which tires her out. She says she never gets stressed, but whether she feels it or not -- realizes it or not -- her body does. She always gets sick after being around one or more of her sisters' children, and her mother is a teacher and is around kids all day. She is known to be allergic to lots of different things and have those allergies either disappear or return with a vengeance. She likes to go out with her friends to different clubs/bars to events or to see music (her favorite band was in Omaha this week), etc. I told her all of these things are probably compounding upon one another, aggravated by her already nasty seasonal allergies anyhow, and are just beating her down from the inside out. She jokingly blames it on me ("I never got sick before we were together; this is all your fault!" etc) but I remind her that I've only been sick once since the two of us have been a couple, and that was with a sinus infection that her mother's antibiotics quickly cured (at the cost of an itchy rash for a day or three). I beat the hell out of my body, figuratively speaking -- I eat poorly a lot of the time, drink too much coffee, smoke too many cigarettes, barely get the amount of sleep I need (especially during the semester), and I very, very rarely become ill with any sort of real sickness.
Regardless of what's wrong with her, she's getting it checked out this afternoon (she'd already had a checkup appointment thing scheduled anyhow). Hopefully the doctors will be able to help her feel better; I hate seeing her sick and miserable because there's nothing I can really do down here in Kansas. She told me this weekend that she thinks the new girl who sat behind her at training got her sick. That's possible. She's having flu-like symptoms of all sorts, as well as a sinus infection on top of that, and the flu's been going around pretty badly. I told her that bad sinus infections are nothing to fuck around with, especially since the really bad ones you may not even know you have until your entire body goes haywire all of a sudden. I've read about sinus infections making people vomit and/or have uncontrollable diarrhea, giving people the impression they have the stomach flu or food poisoning, etc. It happens.
Mind you, even after Daisy's been ill right before coming down here (or gets ill right after returning home) I've never gotten sick from her. I (very, very jokingly, mind you) told her that she might have cancer. It's not a funny joke, really, but at this point it would at least be a bit of an explanation. Besides, if anyone is going to get cancer in this relationship, it's going to be me -- what with the cigarettes, red meat, and coffee. I'm fully aware of this fact. She mentioned in passing today how forty years from now, our kids will want us to be alive and healthy, and I laughed and said "seriously, do you think I'm going to live until age seventy?"
I've always held close to the theory that I'll be dead before forty, that even my parents will outlive me. I've mentioned this before and have joked about it in the past, but have held onto that belief at least in a passive fashion. Forty would be a decent life for me; I'd be satisfied enough, I always thought. Now that I'm going to get married and have a future ahead of me, I'm beginning to rethink that stance. But I still somehow doubt I'll live to seventy.
In other news, we did get our big snowstorm as predicted this weekend; I didn't pay a ton of attention to it, really. I knew it was coming, and ordered pizza on Saturday afternoon when I got up just so I wouldn't have to go out and so I wouldn't have to cook anything. It was spitting snow then, around 2PM. By the time 7PM Saturday rolled around, we were in whiteout, blizzard conditions here in Newton, and it got progressively worse in the overnight hours.
Parker and I made another donut bet on the storm as the predictions rolled in on Friday night/Saturday morning -- we based our totals on what Wichita Mid-Continent Airport would have on the ground when the storm had rolled through.
Parker: 1.5 inches, based on the fact that a lot of the southern part of Kansas at that time was predicted to get a bunch of rain/sleet first.
Me: 2.5 inches, with the additional prediction (not affecting the bet) of 4 inches here.
By the time I went to bed on Sunday morning around 5AM, there was easily four or five inches on the ground here in Newton. The wind was howling, hard, and it was once again a white nightmare outside. This didn't really mean much to the bet, however, if Wichita didn't get anything. I'll remind you that I'm 22 miles to the north of Wichita, and most snowstorms have the rain/snow line that bisects the two towns -- south of that line gets mostly rain, north of it gets mostly snow (and more of it). I couldn't tell you why this happens; there's no real elevation difference or anything, but that's how it usually plays out.
When I woke up yesterday, I had the rundown from Parker already waiting for me in my inbox -- the lowball had screwed him again. Mid-Continent Airport had an official total of 4.5 inches on the ground there. I had a little more than 5 here in Newton, eyeballing it. I once more won the donut bet, and he's bringing them in on Tuesday morning. As for the snow itself, by the time I got up around 11, there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and the sun was rapidly melting it off. By the time the sun set last night, more than half of the snow on the ground had melted, and the roads (which were totally covered at 5AM) were dry. Today, once it gets warmer outside and the sun comes out, I'll clean the remaining snow off my car (the sun doesn't reach it when it's parked halfway under my balcony in its normal spot) and prepare it for my drive to campus tomorrow. The rest of the snow should melt off and dry up fairly rapidly; by Wednesday it's supposed to be in the 50s, and Thursday and Friday in the mid-to-high 60s. Because of all of the snow and its melting, however, I'm going to avoid doing any laundry or running any more water than I have to for the next few days to that my drain doesn't back up again. I'd rather not have to worry about that sort of mess while I'll be reviewing everything for comps.
Speaking of comps again (and wrapping back around to the beginning of this post), I received an email from my director this morning, CC'ed to all of us who are taking our comps under him:
Can you give me (by Tuesday) hard copy copies of 4 poems you would be interested in doing a close reading analysis on as part of your comps exam? They should come from your reading list obviously, and ideally they should be no more than a page each, two at most. You might think both of the poem itself and its relationship to the author's larger body of work, characteristic style, etc.
I will select 1-2 of these to actually appear on your exam.
I hope you had a good break!
This is nothing short of amazing.
Why? Well, at first glance, it may seem to be fairly innocuous -- the director is trying to help us out a bit and figure out what we've been most interested in when it comes to our studies.
At second glance? He's basically letting us pick what we want to write about.
We have three questions on the comps, with an A or B option on each one. By picking the right pieces to give him hard copies of, we're basically helping to write 33-66% of our exam. I sent him an email telling him that I would certainly do this, and that the poems would be in his box by tomorrow morning. He replied by saying "I should've clarified -- contemporary poems."
Okay. Well, that's fine -- I'd picked a poem each by Ben Lerner, Frank O'Hara, Anne Sexton, and Bob Hicok. I chose them carefully; if asked to analyze each one, to pick each one apart and dissect it, I could easily do so, and do so in reference to their styles and each poet's larger body of work. I asked him if O'Hara and Sexton were contemporary enough (O'Hara died in '66, Sexton killed herself in '74), and said if they weren't, I'd make alternate selections -- if forced to do so, I'll pick poems that are even easier to dissect.
I'm excited about this opportunity; depending on how he uses the poems and/or splits them up on the exam, that/those question(s) are basically a lock for me. It also allows me to put a bit more of a laser-focus on those four poets, putting them in my proverbial sights, to be able to pound out a ton of good information on them in any situation and in most contexts. Having this opportunity also considerably lessens my worries and apprehensions about comps, knowing that 33-66% of the actual exam may or will involve my own guidance on the questions.
Mind you, of course, this doesn't mean my studying is anywhere near done. I must refresh myself on the heavy hitters, so to speak, such as Dickinson, Whitman, and Eliot. I must read up some more on Yeats, Keats, and Wordsworth, and refresh myself on Auden and Robert Lowell. I'll have to flip through, if not actually read most of, the five criticism books I have (which were the first five books I purchased, actually, at the end of last semester), as well as the Crane book when it comes in. And there's the massive review of my notes I'll be doing as well. So no, I'm not out of the woods yet, but I do see the light at the end of the tunnel. For the moment, though? I'm definitely a bit more relieved and feeling a little more comfortable in my knowledge and situation.
Today is sort of a "free day" for me, really; I can do mostly whatever I want with it when it comes to my work. As it stands, I need to make lesson plans for this coming week and prepare to receive my students' workshop copies on Thursday, and if I'm feeling awake enough, I may attempt to draft out my taxes or vacuum the house. Compared to reading 300 or more pages a day and taking notes on them, those tasks seem easy to accomplish. I need to do my taxes soon, otherwise I'll keep putting them off over and over and over again, and will be in a mad rush to do them and mail them out after comps finish. I've tried to plot out a rough schedule of how the next few weeks will pan out:
This week (3/26 - 4/1):
Teach Tuesday/Thursday. Sleep in/review notes on Wednesday. Collect workshop copies on Thursday, edit through them over the weekend, read the Crane book when it arrives (or get the library/online copy), review notes and authors hardcore once more for the rest of the weekend.
Next week (4/2 - 4/8):
Conduct workshops Tuesday/Thursday. Review notes/authors again on Wednesday and Thursday night, more hardcore than before. Prepare for everything I can. Next Friday, the 5th: Comps. Take comps. Come home, pass out for the rest of the weekend and hope I did well enough to pass. Be nervous wreck about that until I hear my results.
April 8 forward: relax. Downtime. Sweet, sweet downtime. Print/prepare copies of my thesis for the library's archives, and deliver them by the 15th. Regardless of how comps pan out, even though I'm pretty sure I'll do fine, there's nothing left after them for me except for teaching work.
The two weekends after comps (the 6-8th and 12th-15th) are interesting ones, really -- they're the last ones where I'll have anything of consequence to take care of before the semester finally ends and I barrel towards graduation. On Sunday, the 7th, the MFA graduates reading is supposed to take place in the library. I've been a part of this reading for the past two years; usually, they want the graduates to read as well as those who are not yet graduating but are in the program. However, this year they've scheduled it on a Sunday (yuck) and on the Sunday after comps take place (double-fucking-yuck). Because of this -- ironically, when I'm supposed to be taking center stage as I am actually graduating this time -- I'm not going to do it. I have no desire to read any of my work this year, and even less desire to do so on not only a Sunday afternoon, but basically a day and a half after I've taken my comprehensive exams. Everyone who's graduating this semester will have taken their exams in the two or three days prior to that reading, which means they'll be just as burned out as I predict I will be. This is incredibly poor planning; not just because it's on a Sunday (when none of our official student readings have been on a Sunday before) but because it's right after comps. I don't know if anyone has signed up to do the reading or not; it was announced two weeks ago, and nobody has since updated any of us on the schedule/plans/attendance/etc. If it were for a Thursday afternoon after comps (such as the 11th), as our readings normally are, I would have no problem doing it or attending it. As it stands? I'm not going to be anywhere near that place on a Sunday afternoon when I'll more than likely be sleeping, trying to decompress and empty my brain's recycle bin, or will still be incredibly apprehensive and nervous about my scores.
The weekend after that, I will have collected my students' second batch of papers and will be spending the weekend grading through them one by one. I've given them an extra day of padding in the interim to account for the massive number of workshops we have in the groups for this paper (and so that I wouldn't be grading over the weekend after taking my comps) and I'll be preparing for that aforementioned headlong rush from then to finals week and graduation. I'll have a bit more free time in the interim after those papers are graded, but it's safe to say that I'll have something to do every single day until around the middle of April.
With Daisy's work schedule in full effect, and her working every weekend, I don't know the next time she'll get to come down here for any stretch of time until graduation, which is troubling for both of us; with her new job and with my school schedule, our schedules conflict big time. She works nights during the latter half of the week; I work days during the former half of the week. When before, she was able to come down here on Thursday afternoons (after I was done for the week) and spend the weekend, she can no longer do that. Likewise, my week ends on Thursdays, and I'm off on all the days that she works. Actually getting any real time together before graduation is going to be a logistical nightmare, both in person and on Skype, and I can't change my schedule any more than she can change hers, and because she works nights, I'll be awake while she's asleep and vice-versa. If possible, she's planning to try to switch to the day shift after I graduate, and her bosses know she'd like to do this, but she doesn't yet know if that will be available or if her company will allow her to do it.
I had a long conversation with her this evening about what I plan to do after graduation. As it stands right now, and at my current rate of pay (also looking at my bank balance and trying to determine my monthly averages), barring any unforeseen catastrophic events, I should have enough paychecks and enough money in my account to live rather comfortably for most of the summer, if not the entire summer, if I budget accordingly. This does not take into account, of course, my tax refunds or anything else, but I can project with reasonable accuracy that I'll be able to survive most of the summer on what I have and what paychecks I'll get from now until the end of the semester when I'm done teaching. I also have three credit cards now, one a Discover card with a massive limit and no interest charges for over another year (which I've not used yet, I might add), and unless my car blows a major, major part which would render it unfixable or undriveable (read: I'd have to get another car), I should be okay for quite some time. This gives me some breathing space, some time to look for positions both here and in Omaha, and branch out my job search considerably after comps are finished. As mentioned before, I should also be on the adjuncting list for fall at the university, in case nothing else I find or can do pans out, but I've got some prospects. I've got some ideas and plans to set in motion. I just have to have the time to do them. What it boils down to though, really, is that more than likely I'll be in Kansas until at least the end of this year, unless something really good comes up in Omaha or someplace else before the year is out. Daisy understands this, and my parents know and realize this as well.
"If I have to, to pay the bills, I'll work at Arby's or somewhere while I keep looking and keep applying to other places and positions," I told Daisy. "I'm not above doing that if I must, and unlike the past two years, I don't have any sort of restrictions on whether or not I can work outside jobs during the summer anymore, since I'll be done with my degree."
As you may recall, a large part of why I was so broke last summer was because it is in our contracts as GTAs that while we are actively teaching, we cannot have outside work unless A.) it's a job we had before we got our teaching positions and has been approved and "grandfathered in" by the department/graduate school, or B.) we get special clearance from about three different people/departments/etc., fill out a ton of paperwork and declare that we need said position for survival and that it won't affect our ability to teach. Said clearance is near-impossible to get in the summer semesters, and as for ten of the sixteen weeks of the summer I was teaching (I taught the only ten-week English 102 course) it was a logistical nightmare. Failure to follow those proper clearance protocols can get you fired from your position as a GTA, permanently. They've relaxed these protocols a bit as of late -- several of the GTAs in the department now have been cleared for outside work -- but it didn't used to be that way, not at all. Once I graduate in May, if I need to get a McJob to bide my time and make sure the bills are paid, I no longer have to worry about that problem.
I am beginning, once more, to become incredibly tired. I messaged Daisy about an hour ago and told her that I'm awake and couldn't sleep, but am going to stay awake as long as possible today to take care of my lesson plans and the like. I also mentioned that I'll probably be showered and in bed by 5PM, because I know me and my body clock. I think her doctors' appointment is at 2, so staying awake until 5 or a bit later would only be beneficial to me -- I'd get to find out what they say about why she's sick and/or what sort of flu/sinus infection she has, and could then sleep all evening/all night to fully rest up for the rest of my week. It sucks that tomorrow is my "long day" on campus -- I'm stuck there until around 5PM for teaching, office hours, and the Writing Center. That's not necessarily pleasant for my first day back to school, but oh well. I also have to stay awake today because my parents' second Christmas box should finally arrive this afternoon with the mail -- at least, that's what the post office told them when they sent it last week. I'll have to keep an eye out for the mailman later today, as something that large they generally won't just leave on the doorstep.
On that note, I'm going to end this post and take care of those things I need to do around the house before Daisy gets up. Hopefully I'll get to talk to her sometime this morning and can get most of my tasks accomplished today.
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