Five of the past seven days that classes have been in session, I have been on one campus or the other teaching them. This is not a realization I take lightly. Being an adjunct professor is, on some levels, a walk in the park, and on others it is completely exhausting, draining, and frustrating.
Add to this that for the past ten days or so overall, it's been searing, scorching hot outside every time I leave the house, and I feel more drained than I usually do at this time of the semester. The heat, though technically seasonable, is overbearing at times. I feel like Lawrence of Arabia walking to and from my classes with the sun beating down on me and not a cloud in the sky to protect or shade me.
I am not a fan.
My school email is completely on the fritz, as they say. Or, at least I think it is -- I haven't received an email from any of my students (or anyone else but the director's wife) since before classes started. I'm not getting department-wide emails or updates from the campus system administrators. I'm getting nothing. Yet, if I send an email to my school email from one of my personal addresses (and vice versa) it goes through fine, so I don't know what the problem is, or if there really is one. To remedy any problems if they exist, I created a special Gmail account for class issues and sent it to my students, telling them that when they need to contact me, they need to send it to both my school email and the new Gmail -- if it shows up in the latter and not the former, well, I'll know something's up.
I can't stand the school's email system anyhow. It's nice in principle, but its mail servers are really slow, messages will time out half the time and say they haven't been sent when they have, etc. The school can spend millions on wiping out the best parking lot on campus to build a new (unnecessary) dorm, they can spend millions rebuilding and designing the student union (which was perfectly fine to begin with), and they can fill classrooms with brand-new desks and equipment, yet they can't fix the email system or pay their GTAs more than $8500 a year.
I'm guessing most schools have these sorts of issues, though.
Upon getting up on Saturday morning to mow the grass, I found that I had another bright-orange door-hanger notice on my (rarely used) bottom door -- they were going to be repaving the streets again.
Okay, I thought, so why are they telling me this? They've already done mine.
My street is T-shaped. The bottom, vertical part of that T is the street I live on, which they already paved last month (as you may remember). The top crossbar? That's the street that leads me to my street and is the only way in and out -- my street is a dead-end, as right next to me is the neighbors' horse ranch. They were repaving the crossbar part, the street that connects to mine. That means my street would again be completely closed and locked down, again, after 7AM on Monday morning.
Fuck, I thought.
Mind you, I normally leave the house on Mondays (at least now, anyway) at that time of day, roughly, so this wasn't a huge issue. What was a huge issue is that when they're paving, they close down the street until they're done...which usually takes nine or ten hours. I could leave the house just fine in the morning, but when I would typically return home around 1 or so in the afternoon, I'd still be blocked out of getting back down my street and getting home for another four hours or so.
It appeared that I would have time to kill. Time that, on Mondays, I typically do not want to kill, as I generally just want to get home, eat, and pass out so that I can get up and do work before I have to teach on Tuesdays.
Sunday night around 6:30, I took a sleeping pill to ensure that I would actually go to bed and get some real rest (instead of forcing myself to go to bed only to lay there for an hour or three, frustrated that I couldn't sleep, and then get back up). On weekends I'm used to sleeping as much as I want, when I want, and that makes it really difficult to sleep normal hours on Sunday nights when I have to get up at 5AM on Monday morning. There's little I can do about it most of the time, unless I force myself to get up really early on Sunday morning (never gonna happen) or take a sleeping pill to force myself to rest.
When I got up yesterday morning (yes, I did sleep the whole night) I left the house around 6:30 to avoid any barriers they'd set up to close the street, and stayed on campus until around 3:30 yesterday just to be able to kill that necessary time. 3:30 is about my limit on days I stick around; if I don't leave by then, I can't leave until around 6 or so because of bumper-to-bumper, car-overheating-in-95-degree-weather traffic on the interstate for about five miles. Before that is good, and after that is good. I figured if I left around 3:30 I'd be able to avoid traffic, stop at Walmart on the way home to kill a bit more time, and then by the time I was done with that, the street would be open again and I'd be able to get back to the house. The gamble here was that if the street was not yet open again, I'd be stuck sitting in my black-on-black car with leather interior in 95-degree weather and a load of cold groceries from Walmart until it did reopen, something (of course) I was hoping wouldn't happen.
It didn't happen, thankfully. I rolled down my street around 4:45 and it looked as if the road had been open for some time. I saw one road-crew truck further down the lane about two blocks awake, though what they were doing down there was beyond me.
I also, finally, got my office yesterday. To little fanfare, at that.
The key had arrived at some point since last Wednesday when I was last on the main campus; it's shiny and bronze and new, and I "moved in" what little I had with me to my new office. It's larger than I expected -- the adjunct I'm sharing it with has remarkably little clutter and/or other stuff filling it, so there's plenty of room. One of the other GTA offices provided me with a computer desk that they weren't using as well, so even though it's small I will have a base of operations there when necessary. I will have to bring my name placard back in to campus and will have to find a way to affix it to the door, though, as there's only one holder for a name (again, one-person office). I left a note on my officemate's desk thanking him for use of the space, and stuck my desk and other stuff (new tape dispenser, some pens and other office supplies) in the corner to mess with later. It'll be next week before I even attempt to bring in anything like my energy bars, coffee pot, or laptop to set up there -- I've got too much to deal with right now to try to gather those things and take them in tomorrow.
Today, Daisy is coming down to spend the next few days with me. She gets off work at 7:30, and I'll leave my house around 8:10 or so to go teach on West campus. By the time I get home around 11, I'll have some time to tidy up a bit more around the house and/or take care of minor student stuff for tomorrow before she arrives this afternoon and we can both sleep. Part of the reason I went to Walmart yesterday was not only to kill time, but to be able to get stuff to cook while she's here -- she wants tacos, and while I have some of the vegan taco ingredients already, I needed to get more. She's bringing the rest of our cooking supplies, so it's basically a half-and-half thing.
I don't know what we'll do (or what we'll have time to do, really) while she's here; as mentioned previously here in the blog, Daisy's only time off during the week comes during my absolute busiest days of the week. The majority of tomorrow I'll be gone on campus while she (hopefully) sleeps, and on Thursday I've asked if she wants to come to class with me so she can see how I teach -- since I don't have to get up as early on Thursday and because it's not like anyone on West campus is going to care or notice that my fiancee is sitting in on my class with me. It also lets her spend a little more time with me, it's the first real/full lesson I'll teach to my 101 class, and after that it's the end of my week anyhow.
Regardless she'll either have to go back on Thursday night or Friday morning at the latest, as even though it's a holiday weekend she still has to work up until Sunday night at midnight before she gets any of that "holiday" time off. While yes, I think this is ridiculous, it's the way her job works.
As for her trip down here? Well...
"I'm going to try to shower and go. I'm hoping my energy kicks in," she told me this morning when I asked her what her timeframe was.
"Regardless, you must keep me updated today on what you're doing and the progress of your trip, because by the time I get home I'm going to be really hungry and/or sleepy," I told her. "This means that I need to know where you are and when you're going to get here, because if I fall asleep and you show up an hour into that sleep and wake me up, I'm going to be REALLY cranky and/or angry. Not at you, of course, but because I more than likely will need that sleep and will once more be stuck wide awake."
This may sound harsh, but it's absolutely true. I don't get much sleep anymore, as you probably know. I'm not trying to be mean; I'm trying to keep Daisy on somewhat of a schedule, while slowly trying to wean her off of her I'll-get-there-when-I-get-there, Daisy Standard Time.
"...I find it frustrating that I'm always supposed to have a never ending supply of energy and operate on everyone else's schedule," she replied.
This is also a very valid point. Her sister and nephews are in town, her mother is still recovering from her surgery, her father had horrible food poisoning last week, and she works an incredibly inconvenient set of hours every week. So, really, I completely understand her frustration. She doesn't sleep that much either, and the drive down here to visit is a long one. However, and again not to sound harsh, but there is little I can do about any of that.
"[Daisy], my week is only halfway over and I have a LOT of work I have to do before that week is finished," I told her. "I'm on a set schedule that doesn't change, and there's nothing I can do about that. I told you, and you know, that I have to operate on my own hours and timeframes during the semester and do work and get sleep when I can. I can't help that your schedule clashes so horribly with mine."
"Honey, I'm not trying to lecture you," I added. "I'm just saying that if you have to sleep before you come down you have to tell me this, and/or if your schedule changes you also have to tell me because I have to worry about and take care of all of my own stuff for today and tomorrow regardless of when you get here, and I need to know when I can do that with the least amount of inconvenience to you."
I love Daisy very much, but if there's anything that's a point of contention in our relationship it's that our work and sleep schedules do terribly, horribly clash with one another. Frequently, whenever we do get to Skype or message one another back and forth, one or both of us should ideally be sleeping during that time, so it throws off our patterns a bit more. The messages I cut-and-pasted above were sent back and forth while I was getting ready to leave the house this morning to teach, and while she was still at work. That's what our communication has been like since the semester started. No, it's not ideal. But it's what we have to work with, and we deal with it the best we can.
Thankfully, I do have an extra day of decompression time this weekend, since we don't have classes on Monday because of Labor Day. Not only will that save me some gas money (which is important, since we don't get paid for the first time until September 13) but it means I won't have to get up at 5AM and go to the main campus on Monday to sit around for four hours before I teach. It will also allow me to work up the week's lesson plans at my leisure while I get to bask in the first weekend of college football. WVU plays for the first time on Saturday, though it won't be on broadcast TV out here -- I may have to find some way to watch it online.
In the meantime I am simply battling the brutal heat -- it hit 95 or so yesterday, and with the humidity and mugginess in the air, it felt well over 100. I've been running the air conditioner in the house for hours every day, despite the fact that my electric bill will steadily rise in my doing so, just to be able to not sweat through every piece of clothing I have on. Taking off the clothing doesn't help, either; the sweat just rolls down my body in big, thick drops and will soak wherever I'm sitting or laying. On Skype with Daisy over the weekend, I showed her my tank top I was wearing, which was completely soaked through as if I'd taken a shower with my clothes on. Seriously. There's not much I can do about being so hot; all I can do is basically drink a gallon or more of ice water or other liquid every day and try to stay cool. I got a big can of Gatorade powder last night at Walmart, despite the fact that I didn't want to spend the $8 on it, because I need to be able to keep myself hydrated with something other than water sometimes.
So that's all that's going on right now. I'll update you again in another day or three when I have the time to do so. That time, over the course of the rest of the semester, will soon become more and more valuable.
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