Fall semester: day thirty
I find it slightly ironic that we are now thirty days into the fall semester (when it's only eighty days long) and I'm just now, today, getting paid my first real, actual paycheck. Yes, two weeks ago I got that "advance" check, but that was completely different than actually getting a check direct-deposited into my bank account as it's supposed to be. That sort of paycheck I haven't gotten since May. Well, until today, anyway.
All of my bills are paid with the exception of the electric bill, which isn't due until October 17 or something like that. I just got it in the mail yesterday, and it's only $60-something -- despite the fact that basically for three weeks straight I was running the air conditioner for several hours every day just to not die of heatstroke or drown in my own sweat. Okay, well, whatever. I'm not complaining.
Last night I drifted into mostly dreamless sleep after decompressing as much as possible. Daisy went out with one of her friends, so we Skyped briefly before I took a shower, trimmed down my beard because it was driving me crazy (it's still there, just much lighter/thinner than before) and went to bed around 8:30 or so. I woke up this morning at 7, allergy-stricken and with a sore throat from sinus drainage. Story of my life, I suppose.
It's been a rather stressful, tiring week. I've been sleeping at night again (mostly), so I always constantly feel like I'm not getting anything accomplished. Add to that two papers coming in this week (I have five total left to grade) and needing to pay all of my end-of-the-month bills, including rent, while balancing time with Daisy and time I need to eat and rest and try to make the world around me stop...and yeah, I'm a bit frazzled. I have so many looming responsibilities and so many things that must be done that I feel overwhelmed almost all the time, even though I'm anything but. I think there are primarily three types of people in the world: 1) those who love responsibility and work, live for it, couldn't picture a life without it, and thrive on always being busy and never stopping, 2) those who hate responsibility and work but can do it and manage it well when necessary, and 3) those who were not cut out for doing anything but the bare minimums, because anything else (such as trying to force them into category 1 or 2) stresses them out too much or causes them to go insane after a while, so they withdraw from people. I tend to mostly be category 2, but over the past few years I have been slowly slipping downward into category 3. I mean, this world sucks for the most part. Injustices, white-collar-crimes, and the fleecing of the people goes unaddressed while people keep up with the Kardashians or waste countless hours playing Grand Theft Auto V. I asked my students what the last book they read for pleasure was, in an attempt to teach them how to format dialogue for their narrative essays, and none of them could tell me because none of them read.
I'm getting more disenfranchised with and disgusted by the world every day, to the point where I want to just say "fuck it," withdraw myself from it, and detach -- go full category 3 and let the rest of the world implode upon itself. Like Christopher Titus, I believe we need an extinction-level event. This is why I love the concept of a zombie apocalypse -- good lord is the human race in need of a clean slate. We've become too stupid to be allowed to live. There's a reason zombie books and movies have become so popular as of late, and it's because secretly all of the fans want it to actually happen, due to the reasons I've stated above.
My classes this week were fine; my students (by and large, anyhow) have been impressing me with their papers, and have been doing well on them for the most part. I have several talented writers in both classes, students whose abilities would serve them well in a creative environment (like a creative writing program). However, usually the best "creative" writers make the worst academic ones, and vice versa. As the rest of the papers in my classes are largely, or completely, academic...well, we'll see what happens.
As I've gotten paid today, all of a sudden (as always) a large number of things have happened, all at the same time, which require money. For example, as if it could sense the fact that I was getting paid soon, yesterday my printer ran out of paper at the same time it began blinking its toner light, telling me that I need to order another $50 cartridge for it at some point soon. My old fan downstairs decided to fall over and break in half. My $3 yard sale TV downstairs decided to start randomly turning itself on and off at all hours of the day and night (I've since unplugged it). The cats are almost out of food. I'm on my last furnace filter. I'm almost out of laundry detergent. I have very few minutes left on my phone, so I've turned it off. Etc. Stuff like that. If I continually purchased or fixed everything that needed buying or fixing, I'd have a well-stocked, decently-running house that I wouldn't be able to afford to live in.
Despite this, I did order a bag of the cats' food from Amazon last night, along with a 4oz. bottle of peppermint oil to spray down the doors and windows with to keep out spiders. I don't want to spend any more money than I have to before I actually have to. Daisy's coming down this week, as mentioned before, and I'm trying to save most of my shopping for when she's here (since we like to do that together).
I don't really have a lot to do in next week's classes, which is good -- I've planned it that way, of course, to coincide with Daisy's visit. I'm covering the beginning of the new unit in my 011 class on Monday and continuing it on Wednesday, and on Tuesday I'm going over some examples of good writing in the 101 reader and some technical stuff in their textbook. On Thursday, Daisy will more than likely sit in on my class with me again, I'm collecting their workshop copies/journals, and I'm doing a Q&A session sort of thing. It's a relatively light week because we're going into the midterm point of the semester. Once Daisy goes home, I will be burying myself in work for the rest of next weekend...since, well, I'll have to. The week afterwards is a long one, and it leads into midterms and "fall break," which for me is little more than two extra days off where I'll be doing a ton of work at home instead of in the classroom (or on campus somewhere).
I'm trying to get everything I can taken care of before "fall break," including calculating midterm grades and all of that other miniscule stuff, as I need as much of those five days in a row off to craft lesson plans for my 210 class that I start teaching the night before the break begins. When I come back from the break, I come back to a veritable nightmare -- three papers/assignments due from all three classes all at the same time, one after another, and therefore three new units I begin teaching all at once. This wouldn't be a problem if I were teaching three sections of one class, but it's one section each of three different classes (obviously). That triples my prep time.
Friday, September 27, 2013
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Buy More Shit
Fall semester: day twenty-eight
I mentioned briefly, almost in passing, that for the past month or so my internet connection has been screwing up. It doesn't happen a lot, but I've noticed a pattern to it -- when I use it, and I mean use it (i.e., Skype with Daisy, downloading my daily podcasts, anything that takes an actual real amount of bandwidth) it will almost always, eventually or very quickly, cut me off. As in, the entire connection will reset, and I'll have to wait for the modem to reconnect. This is a process that usually takes no more than 2-3 minutes at the most, but it's a huge pain in the ass.
For a while, I thought it was my modem or router slowly dying, as I've had both since I've been living here in Kansas. The router, actually, is older -- I bought it when I still lived in Missouri in, oh, 2007 or so. I thought that until I noticed the pattern -- it would only cut me off when I actually used the connection for bandwidth-intensive stuff; it wouldn't randomly just reset (which would mean there was something wrong with the actual cable company or the "main line," as they call it, up the street). It stopped doing it for a while...maybe a week or two, and I thought it was done. I knew that the cable company (Cox Communications) had been working on the lines and stuff around the area, as every day I saw Cox bucket trucks around the neighborhoods here in town when I went to or came back from teaching. I didn't think much of it. Yeah, connections are going to be screwy if they're working on the system, obviously.
About a week ago, around the time all of the Cox trucks started disappearing around the neighborhoods in the area, I began getting in-browser pop-ups from Cox, saying things like "As you know, we've now upgraded our systems to give you the fastest internet experience possible! To properly take advantage of this experience, it is recommended that you purchase this new modem!" and then they have a link to it.
First of all, no -- I didn't know this. I could assume they were doing upgrades or something along those lines (pun intended) by all of the trucks around town, but as for actually being told? No, I was never told about this in my bill or via phone/email/etc.
I pay almost $60 a month for internet alone through Cox. I have the second-to-highest speed package (the highest package is something like $80-90 per month). Not only that, but the modem I have, and use, was purchased from Cox themselves at the office, because they told me that was the best one to use for the connection. The modem wasn't cheap; I believe that it was something like $60 or so, added to my bill in a few monthly installments (at least they didn't make me pay for it outright, up front).
Frankly, it's sly and underhanded what they're doing -- especially as, over the course of the past four years of living here, they've raised my rates (without making the service perceivably faster or, even, different to me) at least five times. $43.99 became $46.99, then $48.99, then $53.99, and now it's $56.99 every month for me to get internet. Again, I have the second-to-fastest service they offer, and compared to most residential customers, I barely use it -- I don't stream Netflix for hours on end (I don't have Netflix) and I don't game online with my PC or gaming console -- something else that sucks a ton of bandwidth. No, I use my connection to blog, download about 300MB of podcasts every few days, check my email, use Facebook, and Skype with Daisy. That's it. And now, since I've not purchased their more than likely proprietary "new modem," every time I do anything that bandwidth-intensive in the least, my connection resets.
My point is that there's nothing wrong with the modem or connection I have -- it's that they've subtly modified it from the home office or the main line to "act up" when I actually use it for anything, and then they can put that in-browser pop-up (that my ad-blocking software won't catch) to turn on afterwards to tell me to hey, you need to buy more shit from us! Yeah, no. I've been working on, and working with, computers and internet connections for seventeen years. I know what they're doing here. That's sneaky, underhanded, money-grubbing bullshit. If you really want me (or anyone) to upgrade to the "new modem," how about you take the extra money I've been paying every month after each rate hike you've done over the past four years and pay for it with that? Or, y'know, for people on the higher tiers of service (like me), who have purchased their original modems from you (like me), do some sort of discounted or trade-in plan, at the very least? Nope. Buy more shit.
Mind you, there are situations in which I would see this as a feasible option. If they'd seriously upgraded their systems, and I'm talking Google Fiber-style, then yes, obviously, I'd probably need new hardware to support that. If I'd noticed any change in speed whatsoever with the modem and service I have now, up or down, I could see that as well. But, everything remains the same except for the fact that they've done something in their systems, something sly and underhanded, to basically reset the connection of someone with one of the older modems any time they try to use it for anything bandwidth-intensive so that they can say that the modem is the problem, so you need to buy a new one. Again, I'm not stupid. If it runs perfectly fine at the same speeds as always until it trips a flag in their system that kicks me off, there's nothing wrong with the modem -- if it was truly incompatible in any major way, it either wouldn't work correctly at all, or it would work at drastically reduced speeds compared to before. Also, if it were going to be made incompatible, there would have been no end to the calls, emails, and mailed notices telling me I had to upgrade or lose connectivity...because that's what Cox does. I may have given them a lot of shit in this post, but they do have the best customer service I've ever seen when it comes to problems -- any time I've ever had to call them for anything, the problem has been fixed very quickly (sometimes within an hour). No, this is the company, not customer service, trying to jack their customers. In essence, they're trying to make it extremely frustrating or inconvenient to not buy more shit from them.
The problem is that I wouldn't be opposed to this were it necessary and not done in such a bullshit-filled way. If I'd been notified that they were upgrading the systems and that my modem would possibly not work as well on the new systems, I might've bought into it. If I'd noticed any difference in speed, as mentioned before, after the new systems were in place -- such as my page-loading/download speeds being half of what they were before, or something like that -- I would realize that to "keep up with the times" I'd have to get a new modem to be more compatible with their new infrastructure. If I'd been offered any sort of upgrade or trade-in deal for this modem, because of their new systems, I might have done it. but that hasn't happened. Instead they're instituting a jack of sorts. When I use bandwidth and their computers see I have the old modem, there is some sort of electronic flag or switch that's tripped that resets it, even though it's perfectly fine and is working just fine on these "new systems." So, in essence, what they're doing is denying me the service that I've already bought and paid for, all in an attempt to persuade me to line their pockets a little more than I already do.
I'm not going for that. And I'm sure I'm not alone. When enough people call and complain that their connection is getting dropped over and over again yet their rates keep going up every year, they'll either start a promotional program for a discount or trade-in, or they'll remove that flag in their systems. Or, conversely, if they want to be cocks about it (no pun intended) they'll just say "you have to upgrade to this new modem" and shut off connectivity for all of the old ones. I somehow doubt they'd do that, however, as it would be a PR nightmare for them. The bottom line and my overall point, however, is that nobody should have to purchase new equipment when their old equipment functions perfectly fine, and their little "oh, let's change some flags in the system to make the appearance of incompatibility" thing is total bullshit. I feel bad for the people who opened an account with them two or three months ago and who just finished paying off their old modem only to have this shit happen to them. Part of that is why I see all of this as inexcusable without some sort of discount or trade-in program.
Anyway, any time I download an episode of a podcast (usually anywhere between 60-200MB per episode) it'll kick me off now. It's like clockwork. It takes me ten times as long as it did before to get my podcasts for the day because it'll boot me off and reconnect me who knows how many times. I've been in the midst of Skype conversations with Daisy, when nothing else on my computer is running or downloading anything, and it'll boot me off -- apparently Skype is too bandwidth-intensive for their servers. Yet, I watched the entire WVU game on WatchESPN last weekend, in HD, and it didn't do anything. So who knows. What I know is that unless I'm forced to, I'm not spending any more money on another modem. I give the cable company enough money every month as it is.
I mentioned briefly, almost in passing, that for the past month or so my internet connection has been screwing up. It doesn't happen a lot, but I've noticed a pattern to it -- when I use it, and I mean use it (i.e., Skype with Daisy, downloading my daily podcasts, anything that takes an actual real amount of bandwidth) it will almost always, eventually or very quickly, cut me off. As in, the entire connection will reset, and I'll have to wait for the modem to reconnect. This is a process that usually takes no more than 2-3 minutes at the most, but it's a huge pain in the ass.
For a while, I thought it was my modem or router slowly dying, as I've had both since I've been living here in Kansas. The router, actually, is older -- I bought it when I still lived in Missouri in, oh, 2007 or so. I thought that until I noticed the pattern -- it would only cut me off when I actually used the connection for bandwidth-intensive stuff; it wouldn't randomly just reset (which would mean there was something wrong with the actual cable company or the "main line," as they call it, up the street). It stopped doing it for a while...maybe a week or two, and I thought it was done. I knew that the cable company (Cox Communications) had been working on the lines and stuff around the area, as every day I saw Cox bucket trucks around the neighborhoods here in town when I went to or came back from teaching. I didn't think much of it. Yeah, connections are going to be screwy if they're working on the system, obviously.
About a week ago, around the time all of the Cox trucks started disappearing around the neighborhoods in the area, I began getting in-browser pop-ups from Cox, saying things like "As you know, we've now upgraded our systems to give you the fastest internet experience possible! To properly take advantage of this experience, it is recommended that you purchase this new modem!" and then they have a link to it.
First of all, no -- I didn't know this. I could assume they were doing upgrades or something along those lines (pun intended) by all of the trucks around town, but as for actually being told? No, I was never told about this in my bill or via phone/email/etc.
I pay almost $60 a month for internet alone through Cox. I have the second-to-highest speed package (the highest package is something like $80-90 per month). Not only that, but the modem I have, and use, was purchased from Cox themselves at the office, because they told me that was the best one to use for the connection. The modem wasn't cheap; I believe that it was something like $60 or so, added to my bill in a few monthly installments (at least they didn't make me pay for it outright, up front).
Frankly, it's sly and underhanded what they're doing -- especially as, over the course of the past four years of living here, they've raised my rates (without making the service perceivably faster or, even, different to me) at least five times. $43.99 became $46.99, then $48.99, then $53.99, and now it's $56.99 every month for me to get internet. Again, I have the second-to-fastest service they offer, and compared to most residential customers, I barely use it -- I don't stream Netflix for hours on end (I don't have Netflix) and I don't game online with my PC or gaming console -- something else that sucks a ton of bandwidth. No, I use my connection to blog, download about 300MB of podcasts every few days, check my email, use Facebook, and Skype with Daisy. That's it. And now, since I've not purchased their more than likely proprietary "new modem," every time I do anything that bandwidth-intensive in the least, my connection resets.
My point is that there's nothing wrong with the modem or connection I have -- it's that they've subtly modified it from the home office or the main line to "act up" when I actually use it for anything, and then they can put that in-browser pop-up (that my ad-blocking software won't catch) to turn on afterwards to tell me to hey, you need to buy more shit from us! Yeah, no. I've been working on, and working with, computers and internet connections for seventeen years. I know what they're doing here. That's sneaky, underhanded, money-grubbing bullshit. If you really want me (or anyone) to upgrade to the "new modem," how about you take the extra money I've been paying every month after each rate hike you've done over the past four years and pay for it with that? Or, y'know, for people on the higher tiers of service (like me), who have purchased their original modems from you (like me), do some sort of discounted or trade-in plan, at the very least? Nope. Buy more shit.
Mind you, there are situations in which I would see this as a feasible option. If they'd seriously upgraded their systems, and I'm talking Google Fiber-style, then yes, obviously, I'd probably need new hardware to support that. If I'd noticed any change in speed whatsoever with the modem and service I have now, up or down, I could see that as well. But, everything remains the same except for the fact that they've done something in their systems, something sly and underhanded, to basically reset the connection of someone with one of the older modems any time they try to use it for anything bandwidth-intensive so that they can say that the modem is the problem, so you need to buy a new one. Again, I'm not stupid. If it runs perfectly fine at the same speeds as always until it trips a flag in their system that kicks me off, there's nothing wrong with the modem -- if it was truly incompatible in any major way, it either wouldn't work correctly at all, or it would work at drastically reduced speeds compared to before. Also, if it were going to be made incompatible, there would have been no end to the calls, emails, and mailed notices telling me I had to upgrade or lose connectivity...because that's what Cox does. I may have given them a lot of shit in this post, but they do have the best customer service I've ever seen when it comes to problems -- any time I've ever had to call them for anything, the problem has been fixed very quickly (sometimes within an hour). No, this is the company, not customer service, trying to jack their customers. In essence, they're trying to make it extremely frustrating or inconvenient to not buy more shit from them.
The problem is that I wouldn't be opposed to this were it necessary and not done in such a bullshit-filled way. If I'd been notified that they were upgrading the systems and that my modem would possibly not work as well on the new systems, I might've bought into it. If I'd noticed any difference in speed, as mentioned before, after the new systems were in place -- such as my page-loading/download speeds being half of what they were before, or something like that -- I would realize that to "keep up with the times" I'd have to get a new modem to be more compatible with their new infrastructure. If I'd been offered any sort of upgrade or trade-in deal for this modem, because of their new systems, I might have done it. but that hasn't happened. Instead they're instituting a jack of sorts. When I use bandwidth and their computers see I have the old modem, there is some sort of electronic flag or switch that's tripped that resets it, even though it's perfectly fine and is working just fine on these "new systems." So, in essence, what they're doing is denying me the service that I've already bought and paid for, all in an attempt to persuade me to line their pockets a little more than I already do.
I'm not going for that. And I'm sure I'm not alone. When enough people call and complain that their connection is getting dropped over and over again yet their rates keep going up every year, they'll either start a promotional program for a discount or trade-in, or they'll remove that flag in their systems. Or, conversely, if they want to be cocks about it (no pun intended) they'll just say "you have to upgrade to this new modem" and shut off connectivity for all of the old ones. I somehow doubt they'd do that, however, as it would be a PR nightmare for them. The bottom line and my overall point, however, is that nobody should have to purchase new equipment when their old equipment functions perfectly fine, and their little "oh, let's change some flags in the system to make the appearance of incompatibility" thing is total bullshit. I feel bad for the people who opened an account with them two or three months ago and who just finished paying off their old modem only to have this shit happen to them. Part of that is why I see all of this as inexcusable without some sort of discount or trade-in program.
Anyway, any time I download an episode of a podcast (usually anywhere between 60-200MB per episode) it'll kick me off now. It's like clockwork. It takes me ten times as long as it did before to get my podcasts for the day because it'll boot me off and reconnect me who knows how many times. I've been in the midst of Skype conversations with Daisy, when nothing else on my computer is running or downloading anything, and it'll boot me off -- apparently Skype is too bandwidth-intensive for their servers. Yet, I watched the entire WVU game on WatchESPN last weekend, in HD, and it didn't do anything. So who knows. What I know is that unless I'm forced to, I'm not spending any more money on another modem. I give the cable company enough money every month as it is.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Reconciled
Fall semester: day twenty-seven
My first paycheck of the semester is in the bank; my mother deposited it yesterday afternoon, and it was already showing up as "pending" last night. That means, more than likely, it processed and dropped in at the end-of-day cycles (I haven't checked again this morning). This is good; it allowed me to pay my rent (not that I couldn't before, just that I wanted to wait on that check to get in there) and reconcile my bank account so that I know what I have and what my budget for the future is going to be.
While I am tired, I am not "sleepy" tired. I came home from teaching yesterday, made a big lunch, watched three episodes of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! back to back on YouTube (oh, sweet sweet YouTube), and then worked on a number of small things around the house -- I took out a blanket for the bed, brought the trash cans up, etc. Nothing major, nothing strenuous, nothing of real consequence. I stayed awake until around 10PM, when I finally went to bed. A lot of this was helped by the fact that my allergies had mostly tapered off as well...at least for last night, anyway. Upon getting up this morning, they had returned full force, and even after being awake for more than an hour, I am still trying to remove snot from my sinuses.
I'm sure you needed that visual.
The car is leaking more fluid again -- looks like coolant, probably because I just refilled it -- but not a ton of it. Probably coming from the overflow valve again or from the thermostat, which sticks sometimes. If it keeps leaking I'll put the rest of the can of radiator stop-leak into it, which should (as it's in the name) keep as much coolant in it as possible because, ahem, it should stop the leaking. After putting more oil and coolant in it Sunday, I had one of the smoothest, quietest drives ever to and from class yesterday. I guess the trick is to keep everything almost constantly completely full. I'll be putting gas in it this morning before my jaunt to West campus for the day anyway, as it needs a good fill-up now that I've put about 215 miles or so on it since the last one -- now is the best time possible, as gas prices went down twelve cents per gallon this week. At least here, anyway.
The car's still getting used to the weather, too -- yesterday morning it was 57, and in the afternoon it was 80. Yeah, temperatures bouncing back and forth, etc, you know the drill. It looks like most of the next ten days or so will be the same, according to the forecast. Right now, at 7AM, it's 61.
My in-class conferences/peer review sessions went amazingly well yesterday. Everyone was there but three students, and nearly everyone had me look over copies of their papers -- which were, for the most part, pretty damn good. I was impressed by a fair share of them, actually. These students who I thought were extreme slackers and who didn't care about this class have actually started producing admirable work in it. This gives me hope for the rest of the semester. I'm going to need that hope to keep going, as they're turning in a paper every two-to-three weeks from this point forward, some of them more complicated than others...and then they have a practice exam and a final exam to take as well. I did, however, leave that class yesterday with a new-found confidence and pride in my students, instead of the normal soul-crushing defeat and disgust I feel most days. So, that's a plus, right? That means I'm not failing as a professor, right?
Before I went to bed last night, I flipped through the chapter I'm covering in there in our next class, and printed their new assignment sheet and Unit 2 timelines for them. I'm excited to get the semester moving forward at an ever quicker pace now. Those papers come in tomorrow, and we're covering comma splices and run-ons, which I noticed in some of the drafts and pointed out -- so it's a pretty apt lesson plan the Director's wife designed for that class.
I'm collecting papers this morning in the 101 class. I told Daisy that since there are only 10 of them, and I've technically read five of them already (workshop copies), I'm going to sit down and grade them all in one session if at all possible just to get them out of the way. It shouldn't take me more than a few hours at most, and it will clear up some time to begin grading the 011 papers when they come in tomorrow. It'll be the first set of papers I've sat down to grade since early May. For some reason, it seems...feels...right? I don't know. While it's a tedious task, it's something that I'm so used to that when I do it, I'm like Neo in the Matrix -- I can uncross my eyes and look at a page and all of the errors and problems pop out at me, like I'm reading code. As I actually got a decent amount of sleep last night (only eight hours-ish, but still decent) I should have enough energy and mental capacity to knock all of those papers out with one swift blow.
I posted a message on Blackboard a bit ago, reminding them that hey, they have to upload their papers through SafeAssign before they'll be graded. Only four of them have done so thus far, though the ones who have did so early. They also happen to be my better students (from what I can tell at this early juncture, anyway).
I have decided to go full casual today, and have put on skull-and-crossbones socks (what I call my "paper grading socks," much to most students' chagrin), a safari-esque overshirt, an X-Men t-shirt, and shorts. Oh, and Sperry Topsiders, one of my favorite pairs of shoes that I barely ever wear anymore (mainly because they're so uncomfortable to stand/walk long distances in, like I do when I have to teach on main campus). This is the most casually I've ever dressed for teaching this semester, but as it's West campus -- where I have no one to impress -- and all I'm doing is collecting papers and assigning the next one, well, it's not like I have to look super-businesslike. These kids already know my style pretty well, though I tend to class it up at least a little bit when teaching them, even.
Last night before bed, I went through the spare room and unpacked some of my fall clothing -- mostly what I purchased at Goodwill in Omaha after graduation. I got a few pairs of pants and a dressy shirt or two up there, so I readied those items for wear next week when I expect it to be cooler outside than it is now. I've already worn a fair amount of those clothes; all of the corduroy pants I own, for example, were purchased on that trip -- three or four pairs.
So that's my day for you. At least the weather is somewhat nice and should remain that way for a while. I'll be leaving the house soon, and actually...I'm somewhat excited to see what these kids can do in their papers.
I must be crazy, right?
My first paycheck of the semester is in the bank; my mother deposited it yesterday afternoon, and it was already showing up as "pending" last night. That means, more than likely, it processed and dropped in at the end-of-day cycles (I haven't checked again this morning). This is good; it allowed me to pay my rent (not that I couldn't before, just that I wanted to wait on that check to get in there) and reconcile my bank account so that I know what I have and what my budget for the future is going to be.
While I am tired, I am not "sleepy" tired. I came home from teaching yesterday, made a big lunch, watched three episodes of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! back to back on YouTube (oh, sweet sweet YouTube), and then worked on a number of small things around the house -- I took out a blanket for the bed, brought the trash cans up, etc. Nothing major, nothing strenuous, nothing of real consequence. I stayed awake until around 10PM, when I finally went to bed. A lot of this was helped by the fact that my allergies had mostly tapered off as well...at least for last night, anyway. Upon getting up this morning, they had returned full force, and even after being awake for more than an hour, I am still trying to remove snot from my sinuses.
I'm sure you needed that visual.
The car is leaking more fluid again -- looks like coolant, probably because I just refilled it -- but not a ton of it. Probably coming from the overflow valve again or from the thermostat, which sticks sometimes. If it keeps leaking I'll put the rest of the can of radiator stop-leak into it, which should (as it's in the name) keep as much coolant in it as possible because, ahem, it should stop the leaking. After putting more oil and coolant in it Sunday, I had one of the smoothest, quietest drives ever to and from class yesterday. I guess the trick is to keep everything almost constantly completely full. I'll be putting gas in it this morning before my jaunt to West campus for the day anyway, as it needs a good fill-up now that I've put about 215 miles or so on it since the last one -- now is the best time possible, as gas prices went down twelve cents per gallon this week. At least here, anyway.
The car's still getting used to the weather, too -- yesterday morning it was 57, and in the afternoon it was 80. Yeah, temperatures bouncing back and forth, etc, you know the drill. It looks like most of the next ten days or so will be the same, according to the forecast. Right now, at 7AM, it's 61.
My in-class conferences/peer review sessions went amazingly well yesterday. Everyone was there but three students, and nearly everyone had me look over copies of their papers -- which were, for the most part, pretty damn good. I was impressed by a fair share of them, actually. These students who I thought were extreme slackers and who didn't care about this class have actually started producing admirable work in it. This gives me hope for the rest of the semester. I'm going to need that hope to keep going, as they're turning in a paper every two-to-three weeks from this point forward, some of them more complicated than others...and then they have a practice exam and a final exam to take as well. I did, however, leave that class yesterday with a new-found confidence and pride in my students, instead of the normal soul-crushing defeat and disgust I feel most days. So, that's a plus, right? That means I'm not failing as a professor, right?
Before I went to bed last night, I flipped through the chapter I'm covering in there in our next class, and printed their new assignment sheet and Unit 2 timelines for them. I'm excited to get the semester moving forward at an ever quicker pace now. Those papers come in tomorrow, and we're covering comma splices and run-ons, which I noticed in some of the drafts and pointed out -- so it's a pretty apt lesson plan the Director's wife designed for that class.
I'm collecting papers this morning in the 101 class. I told Daisy that since there are only 10 of them, and I've technically read five of them already (workshop copies), I'm going to sit down and grade them all in one session if at all possible just to get them out of the way. It shouldn't take me more than a few hours at most, and it will clear up some time to begin grading the 011 papers when they come in tomorrow. It'll be the first set of papers I've sat down to grade since early May. For some reason, it seems...feels...right? I don't know. While it's a tedious task, it's something that I'm so used to that when I do it, I'm like Neo in the Matrix -- I can uncross my eyes and look at a page and all of the errors and problems pop out at me, like I'm reading code. As I actually got a decent amount of sleep last night (only eight hours-ish, but still decent) I should have enough energy and mental capacity to knock all of those papers out with one swift blow.
I posted a message on Blackboard a bit ago, reminding them that hey, they have to upload their papers through SafeAssign before they'll be graded. Only four of them have done so thus far, though the ones who have did so early. They also happen to be my better students (from what I can tell at this early juncture, anyway).
I have decided to go full casual today, and have put on skull-and-crossbones socks (what I call my "paper grading socks," much to most students' chagrin), a safari-esque overshirt, an X-Men t-shirt, and shorts. Oh, and Sperry Topsiders, one of my favorite pairs of shoes that I barely ever wear anymore (mainly because they're so uncomfortable to stand/walk long distances in, like I do when I have to teach on main campus). This is the most casually I've ever dressed for teaching this semester, but as it's West campus -- where I have no one to impress -- and all I'm doing is collecting papers and assigning the next one, well, it's not like I have to look super-businesslike. These kids already know my style pretty well, though I tend to class it up at least a little bit when teaching them, even.
Last night before bed, I went through the spare room and unpacked some of my fall clothing -- mostly what I purchased at Goodwill in Omaha after graduation. I got a few pairs of pants and a dressy shirt or two up there, so I readied those items for wear next week when I expect it to be cooler outside than it is now. I've already worn a fair amount of those clothes; all of the corduroy pants I own, for example, were purchased on that trip -- three or four pairs.
So that's my day for you. At least the weather is somewhat nice and should remain that way for a while. I'll be leaving the house soon, and actually...I'm somewhat excited to see what these kids can do in their papers.
I must be crazy, right?
Monday, September 23, 2013
Nothing There, Part III
Fall semester: day twenty-six
Monday morning, I feel you.
6:18 AM. Warm shower, coffee, and cigarettes acquired. Secret Beatles t-shirt (the Revolver album cover) under classy, zip-up jacket. Corduroy pants. Peer review of papers in my class today. Let's do this.
I went to bed relatively early last night. I told Daisy, who was getting ready for work at the time, that I needed to get something to eat, take some melatonin, and go to bed. I knew that if I didn't take melatonin (which I have a large bottle of), I wouldn't be able to sleep the whole night -- I didn't get up yesterday until nearly noon, because (again) my body told me that since I had the day off, it was time to sleep as long as possible. I took the melatonin, made a small dinner, and halfway watched the Steelers get beaten by the Bears (to put them at 0-3) before I went downstairs to sleep. I was out almost as soon as my head hit the pillow. I must not have moved much the entire night -- when I awoke to the clock radio this morning (playing Queen's "We Are the Champions" loudly at 5AM) my neck was killing me, and my allergies in the night had completely filled one side of my head with snot. Even the warm, almost hot shower this morning did little to help either affliction, and I'll either take some sinus/pain pills this morning before I leave or I'll need to take them by the time I get home early this afternoon.
The car is still in the garage; I didn't leave the house the entire weekend, nor did I mow the grass. The vast majority of my weekend, as you probably gathered from my previous posts, was spent sleeping as much as possible -- something that was incredibly necessary for me to recharge my internal batteries. This means, in addition to the amount of sleep I got last night, that I should be able to stay on this somewhat-normalized sleeping schedule from this point forward, as long as I try to -- meaning, if I get uncontrollably sleepy at 2PM or 3PM this week once I'm home, I must fight it as much as possible, and pound coffee until it goes away. I have to train myself to feel normal again and sleep "normal" hours again during the night, as in a few weeks when I will begin basically tripling the time I spend on campus and outside of my home every week, it's not like I'll be able to just up and go to sleep then. I'll also need to stay awake during the afternoons this week as much as I can so that I can grade my students' papers when they come in tomorrow and Wednesday -- yes, I could wait on those until the weekend if I truly wanted to, but I don't want to rush through them, and I want to salvage as much of the weekend as I can for sleep, football, and household chores, including the aforementioned mowing of the grass, bill-paying, and some shopping.
Amusingly enough, I am not tired right now. Could I go downstairs and be back asleep within about thirty minutes if I wanted to be? Yes, of course, but am I actually tired right now? No. Well, at least not in the I hate my life and everything it's become sense of the word "tired," as I have been as of late.
I wrote a bit about the "peer review" my students are going to do today in class in my post here last night. I do wonder how many of them are actually going to show up for it. Last week, we got a memo in the department for those of us who teach in the building I teach in (which includes a good chunk of us, including me and Parker) that said the air conditioning unit in the building was out of commission for "a while." Apparently, it needs several parts which take some time to obtain. I've also learned that when we get a memo that says "a while," it usually translates to "for the foreseeable future." As a result, it was 90 degrees in my classroom on Wednesday, and I quickly gave my lecture while sweating through my dressy shirt to a bunch of sweating, fanning-themselves students, and we got the hell out of there. Parker was quick, and lucky, enough to procure a replacement classroom for his students in the building the department is in, and moved his class over there. I didn't have that luxury. As far as I know, the air conditioning unit hasn't been fixed yet (I've not been told anything about it, at least), so even though it's much cooler today (57 outside) I don't expect all of my students to show up to class simply based on Wednesday's experience alone. I also don't expect half of them to show up because they won't have anything to review with their peers, and because on any given day it's become normal for that class to have five or six absences anyhow. This means it could either be a really short class on the one day before their papers are due where we're scheduled to be in there working on them the entire time.
One of my students in that class, and another in my 101 class, said that for their speech class they need to interview one of their professors, and they've both picked me. Apparently they have to do that sometime within the next few weeks, if not this coming week. I've sat for these interviews before -- they're pretty basic questions about the college experience, and they can (at times) be fun -- but even though those students told me they want/need to interview me, they haven't contacted me to set up a time as of yet. The student from the 011 class told me she'd try to do it today before class, during my normal "office hours" (a term I use loosely) time, but I told her to give me a heads-up on it, and she hasn't yet done that.
On that note, I need to gather my things, pull the car out of the garage, and barrel down the highway to campus. Hopefully the temperature in my classroom won't be sweltering, and hopefully it will be a teaching day where I can actually accomplish something...provided my students show up.
Monday morning, I feel you.
6:18 AM. Warm shower, coffee, and cigarettes acquired. Secret Beatles t-shirt (the Revolver album cover) under classy, zip-up jacket. Corduroy pants. Peer review of papers in my class today. Let's do this.
I went to bed relatively early last night. I told Daisy, who was getting ready for work at the time, that I needed to get something to eat, take some melatonin, and go to bed. I knew that if I didn't take melatonin (which I have a large bottle of), I wouldn't be able to sleep the whole night -- I didn't get up yesterday until nearly noon, because (again) my body told me that since I had the day off, it was time to sleep as long as possible. I took the melatonin, made a small dinner, and halfway watched the Steelers get beaten by the Bears (to put them at 0-3) before I went downstairs to sleep. I was out almost as soon as my head hit the pillow. I must not have moved much the entire night -- when I awoke to the clock radio this morning (playing Queen's "We Are the Champions" loudly at 5AM) my neck was killing me, and my allergies in the night had completely filled one side of my head with snot. Even the warm, almost hot shower this morning did little to help either affliction, and I'll either take some sinus/pain pills this morning before I leave or I'll need to take them by the time I get home early this afternoon.
The car is still in the garage; I didn't leave the house the entire weekend, nor did I mow the grass. The vast majority of my weekend, as you probably gathered from my previous posts, was spent sleeping as much as possible -- something that was incredibly necessary for me to recharge my internal batteries. This means, in addition to the amount of sleep I got last night, that I should be able to stay on this somewhat-normalized sleeping schedule from this point forward, as long as I try to -- meaning, if I get uncontrollably sleepy at 2PM or 3PM this week once I'm home, I must fight it as much as possible, and pound coffee until it goes away. I have to train myself to feel normal again and sleep "normal" hours again during the night, as in a few weeks when I will begin basically tripling the time I spend on campus and outside of my home every week, it's not like I'll be able to just up and go to sleep then. I'll also need to stay awake during the afternoons this week as much as I can so that I can grade my students' papers when they come in tomorrow and Wednesday -- yes, I could wait on those until the weekend if I truly wanted to, but I don't want to rush through them, and I want to salvage as much of the weekend as I can for sleep, football, and household chores, including the aforementioned mowing of the grass, bill-paying, and some shopping.
Amusingly enough, I am not tired right now. Could I go downstairs and be back asleep within about thirty minutes if I wanted to be? Yes, of course, but am I actually tired right now? No. Well, at least not in the I hate my life and everything it's become sense of the word "tired," as I have been as of late.
I wrote a bit about the "peer review" my students are going to do today in class in my post here last night. I do wonder how many of them are actually going to show up for it. Last week, we got a memo in the department for those of us who teach in the building I teach in (which includes a good chunk of us, including me and Parker) that said the air conditioning unit in the building was out of commission for "a while." Apparently, it needs several parts which take some time to obtain. I've also learned that when we get a memo that says "a while," it usually translates to "for the foreseeable future." As a result, it was 90 degrees in my classroom on Wednesday, and I quickly gave my lecture while sweating through my dressy shirt to a bunch of sweating, fanning-themselves students, and we got the hell out of there. Parker was quick, and lucky, enough to procure a replacement classroom for his students in the building the department is in, and moved his class over there. I didn't have that luxury. As far as I know, the air conditioning unit hasn't been fixed yet (I've not been told anything about it, at least), so even though it's much cooler today (57 outside) I don't expect all of my students to show up to class simply based on Wednesday's experience alone. I also don't expect half of them to show up because they won't have anything to review with their peers, and because on any given day it's become normal for that class to have five or six absences anyhow. This means it could either be a really short class on the one day before their papers are due where we're scheduled to be in there working on them the entire time.
One of my students in that class, and another in my 101 class, said that for their speech class they need to interview one of their professors, and they've both picked me. Apparently they have to do that sometime within the next few weeks, if not this coming week. I've sat for these interviews before -- they're pretty basic questions about the college experience, and they can (at times) be fun -- but even though those students told me they want/need to interview me, they haven't contacted me to set up a time as of yet. The student from the 011 class told me she'd try to do it today before class, during my normal "office hours" (a term I use loosely) time, but I told her to give me a heads-up on it, and she hasn't yet done that.
On that note, I need to gather my things, pull the car out of the garage, and barrel down the highway to campus. Hopefully the temperature in my classroom won't be sweltering, and hopefully it will be a teaching day where I can actually accomplish something...provided my students show up.
Sunday, September 22, 2013
Nothing There, Part II
The problem with being a relatively productive individual is that everything that needs to be done is done long before it has to be (for the most part) and what's left is a...well, lull in action.
I always have what I call "Sunday chores" to do; they entail everything around the house that I haven't had time to do over the week beforehand and didn't want to do over the weekend while I was sleeping more than being awake. They also include the things I have to do every week, such as whatever laundry I have, cleaning the cat box, readying and taking the trash down to the road, etc.
It's not that I'm tired. I'm not. What it is, more than anything else, is bored. And I know that this concept probably makes you laugh, especially as I've written here many times that I'm so busy and stressed that I can barely sleep. Well, I am. During the week, that is. By the time Saturday and Sunday roll around, unless I've collected a ton of assignments and/or have a lot of reading to do for my students' classes (to prepare lesson plans and the like), I am just...here. Alone, with the cats. If there aren't any interesting football games on -- right now, there aren't, as my teams either played earlier this week or are playing tonight -- and I don't have anything to do that's incredibly pressing, I just sit here. Daisy sleeps all day on the weekends because she works on those nights, and I just sit here, fully rested from a few good nights' worth of sleep, but simultaneously bored and restless because there's not something occupying my time. And, for the record, nothing sounds interesting or engaging. That's a big part of it, too. Could I mindlessly zone out and watch football that I don't care about? Yeah, I suppose. Would it cure the boredom or restlessness? No.
I suppose I should be feeling thankful and should be reveling in this sort of freedom now before I will no longer have it on the weekends after this one. On Friday, I assembled the weekly lesson plans for my 210 class, and found that even though there's no final exam, due to its accelerated nature, I'm basically collecting a complex paper (or other assignment) from them every Tuesday night. Every Tuesday night, with the exception of Thanksgiving week, from October 17 through the beginning of December. There will be no week during these times -- from now forward, really -- where I don't have a stack of papers to grade or edit hanging over my head. I've tried to plot out the dates for the rest of the semester as best as possible right now, and this is how they (tentatively) look:
September 24 (T): 101 paper 1 due.
September 25 (W): 011 paper 1 due.
October 16 (W): 011 paper 2 due.
October 17 (R): 101 paper 2 due, 210 paper 1 due
October 22 (T): 210 paper 2 due.
October 29 (T): 210 paper 3 due.
October 30 (W): 011 paper 3 due.
November 5 (T): 210 paper 4 due.
November 12 (T): 101 paper 3 due, 210 paper 5 due.
November 18 (M): 011 paper 4 due.
November 19 (T): 210 paper 6 due.
December 2 (M): 011 paper 5 due.
December 3 (T): Oral Presentations in 210.
December 5 (R): 101 paper 4 due, Oral Presentations in 210 conclude.
For those of you keeping count, that's fifteen papers and an entire week of oral presentations I'll be dealing with, and none of this (obviously) counts weekends that workshop copies come in for these classes, or times when I'll collect the journals for grading, or quizzes that I'll administer (some of which will be long) and spend time grading through as well, or time spent reading and lesson planning for these kids. No, this is simply the list of paper due dates. Note the (lucky) gaps I have in time at the beginning of October (midterms, and coincidentally, my anniversary with Daisy) and through Thanksgiving week, when I've canceled my classes...and compare that with how frequently papers are coming in on all the other dates. It's a blessing of sorts that I'll be stuck on West campus all day on Tuesdays and Thursdays with nothing to do, because otherwise, trying to grade all of these at home, in stacks one after another, would kill me. Some of those days, some of those weekends, are going to be terrible. If I think I never get any sleep now? Hoo boy, give it a few weeks. Then we'll see how frazzled I am. I may as well purchase the IV bag and hook for coffee right now.
Speaking of purchasing things...unless my mother dropped it in there yesterday after I checked my account yesterday morning upon waking up, my paycheck is not yet in the bank. I don't know if this means that it hasn't arrived yet (which is unlikely, since I sent it six days ago) or if she hasn't dropped it in there, or if it's just taking the weekend to deposit it. I don't know because, uncharacteristically, I haven't heard anything from my parents since Thursday (I think). Just a bit strange, that's all. What it really boils down to is that I'm going to end up getting paid twice this week, and what's in my bank account now will basically triple by next weekend once both checks are in there. That's good; I have to pay the rent sometime this week, put gas in the car on Tuesday, and will need to go do some basic grocery shopping probably after class one afternoon (or, if I again become an insomniac of some sort, in the middle of the night one night). There are several things I need to order from Amazon, as well -- for example, I give the cats two different types of urinary tract health cat food (mixed and blended evenly) and they're out of one of the two kinds. It's cheaper to order it on Amazon than it is to buy it in Walmart, as wild as that sounds. I need to order several ounces of peppermint oil, as well. Why, you ask? Because spraying it around doors and windows is a huge deterrent to spiders -- they hate it. It's also something that won't hurt the cats, as other sprays and the like would. With today being the first day of fall, and with temperatures plummeting at night to the point where I'll probably need to start using blankets on the bed downstairs again soon, spiders will start coming into the house like crazy again. They always do around this time of year. June and October -- get out of the heat / come in from the cold. Etc. I don't want to make any of these purchases until I am a little more financially comfortable, even if they are only $10-15 each. I'm neurotic that way.
I emptied the last of my bottle of Marvel Mystery Oil into the car this afternoon, and added another quart of oil for good measure. Do I think it really needs both? No, probably not, at least not all of it right now. But it's preventative, I suppose. I put more coolant into the tank as well, even though it was only a little low, simply because I already had the hood up, and again, preventative measures. I need to be able to keep that car running as healthily as possible, even if I'm only putting highway miles on it. The car still drives a lot every week, and while it's good on gas mileage for its age and wear/tear, keeping all of its vital parts in the best shape I can will only help it stay alive. More of those fluids (coolant, oil, Marvel Mystery Oil, fuel system cleaner, etc) are all on my shopping list for when I have the money to get them, as well.
Because I'm collecting papers from my students this week, it's a pretty quiet week overall. Yes, I'll be grading through all of those papers, but my actual lesson plans are fairly minimal. Tomorrow in my 011 class, it's "in-class conference/peer review" day, which means students bring in their drafts to trade with their peers and edit each others' papers, and I sit at the front of the class and do the same for anyone who wants me to look theirs over and focus on no more than three issues. This means one of two things: 1) everyone will be there and there will be a long line for me to look over papers one after another until the class ends, or 2) nobody will show up because they're not done with their drafts and/or don't care. Judging from the number of absences I've had in that class over the past two weeks or so, it could go either way, though I'm expecting more of the latter than the former. The final copies of those papers come in on Wednesday, and we cover a chapter in the book before the next unit starts. In my 101 class, papers come in on Tuesday and we begin the next unit then, with about four handouts and minimal class discussion, and I cover the first new reading assignment and have an in-class quiz on Thursday. Pretty rote, pretty basic stuff. Nothing that's going to cause me to have a lot of work to do but the actual grading...and even that should go fairly quickly for their first papers, anyway.
I've been told in the past that grading goes much more smoothly and pleasantly with alcohol involved. Hahah, no, no it doesn't. Not for me. Aside from a bottle of champagne Parker gave me upon my graduation, I have no alcohol in the house anyway. I drank the last of the beer I'd had since last Thanksgiving very slowly over the course of the summer, and I'd like to save the bottle of champagne for when Daisy comes down, to celebrate our anniversary.
Daisy and I have been slowly, sloooooowly working on our wedding planning. In the past few weeks, I've made a semi-finalized guest/invite list, we've settled on our traditional "first dance" song (something that frustrated us both to no end) and we've been putting together the playlist for the iPod-like-device we'll use for the music at the reception. We're trying to figure out the logistics for a lot of different little things, such as when guests/family from out of town will arrive and what they will be fed, when we're planning the rehearsal dinner/after-wedding brunch/etc, how we're going to cater the event (since Daisy has decreed that all food at the reception will be vegan no matter what), and so on.
"How do you want to go about the post-wedding brunch the next day?" she asked me.
"Say what?"
"The post-wedding brunch, where close friends and family come and eat and we open up all of our wedding gifts."
"...what?"
I'd never heard of this. I've never been to a post-wedding brunch before, and didn't know they existed. Furthermore, at every wedding I have ever been to, the bride and groom have opened their gifts in front of everyone during the reception -- or gifts in the form of cash in envelopes, not physical gifts, were what was given. Some weddings had a mixture of both, but I will say that every wedding I've been to has had some sort of gift-opening procedure during the reception. Every one of them.
"If people are getting gifts for us," I said, "which, as you know, I really don't think is necessary anyhow, if we open them at the reception and personally thank the gifters, it saves us from needing to write thank-you notes. I thought that's why people did that."
Daisy had no clue what I was talking about; she seemed mystified that this sort of thing does actually happen, and happens pretty frequently.
"No," she said, "it's customary to either open gifts in private or at a post-wedding brunch the next day. Really, it is. Look at this."
She then sent me this photo, screencapped with her phone from some website:
"...yeah," I told her, "I've still never heard of that at all."
I also think it's hilarious that the word "honeymoon" is mentioned.
"I mean, it doesn't matter to me at all either way," I added, "but if we're not going to open them at the reception in front of everyone, I'd much rather just do it in private on our own."
I say this because, despite the fact that we do have a wedding registry on Amazon with some things on it that would be nice to have, I would much, much rather just have people give us envelopes of cash instead. Receiving an appliance for the kitchen, while nice, doesn't pay the bills or let us recoup some of the exorbitant costs of everything we'll need to make the wedding happen in the first place. Besides, if we get gifts and decide to open them in private on our own, the next week after our wedding is like a second Christmas for the year.
I also say this because I'm an evil, evil person, and if we're not opening gifts in front of everyone at the reception I'd rather just do it at home in private, since my goal in doing it at the reception would be to make everyone envious and jealous. Yeah. These are the thoughts going through my head.
"I'll do the thank-you notes if you want," Daisy told me. "You won't have to worry about that."
"Good," I said, "because there will be so many people there who I don't know at all and have never met before, and I won't be able to keep track of all of them or what they give us, if anything."
This is true; as mentioned before, Daisy easily has 3X, if not more, people coming to the wedding on her side than I have on mine. My guest list will be about fifteen or so friends from the department or around the area, my Raiding Party (five more people), and my parents. That's it. No, seriously. I have roughly forty people who will show up, if that many. She has close to eighty that she's inviting, whether they show up or not.
I'm planning to send out the "save the date" notes in my Christmas cards this year; I'll have two different versions of it, actually -- one with "formal invitation to follow" written at the bottom and the other without that little line. The one with the invitation line will be sent to everyone on my cards list who will actually be invited personally to the wedding, whether they show up or not, and yes, a formal invitation will eventually follow to them. The one without that line will be sent to everyone who I know, even if I wanted them to be there, will never in a million years fly to Omaha for the wedding, and the included announcement is basically an announcement that will tell them "Oh, Brandon's getting married? Better send him some money." That's the one that will go out to most of my family and family friends who in no way, shape, or form would be interested in coming to, and/or would not be physically able to attend, the wedding. It's pretty similar to my graduation announcement in that respect. This way, nobody gets left out, everybody knows about the wedding, and we only have to make and send invitations to the people who will actually bother to attend -- thus saving us money. I'll give Daisy the PDF files for each of the announcements, and she'll be able to do the same with her own Christmas cards this year if she so chooses. I found this to be a pretty ingenious idea, and Daisy thought it was a good idea to do it with the Christmas cards as well.
So, I've got all of this going for me, at least. On that note, I shall eat, watch a bit of the Steelers game, and go to bed.
I always have what I call "Sunday chores" to do; they entail everything around the house that I haven't had time to do over the week beforehand and didn't want to do over the weekend while I was sleeping more than being awake. They also include the things I have to do every week, such as whatever laundry I have, cleaning the cat box, readying and taking the trash down to the road, etc.
It's not that I'm tired. I'm not. What it is, more than anything else, is bored. And I know that this concept probably makes you laugh, especially as I've written here many times that I'm so busy and stressed that I can barely sleep. Well, I am. During the week, that is. By the time Saturday and Sunday roll around, unless I've collected a ton of assignments and/or have a lot of reading to do for my students' classes (to prepare lesson plans and the like), I am just...here. Alone, with the cats. If there aren't any interesting football games on -- right now, there aren't, as my teams either played earlier this week or are playing tonight -- and I don't have anything to do that's incredibly pressing, I just sit here. Daisy sleeps all day on the weekends because she works on those nights, and I just sit here, fully rested from a few good nights' worth of sleep, but simultaneously bored and restless because there's not something occupying my time. And, for the record, nothing sounds interesting or engaging. That's a big part of it, too. Could I mindlessly zone out and watch football that I don't care about? Yeah, I suppose. Would it cure the boredom or restlessness? No.
I suppose I should be feeling thankful and should be reveling in this sort of freedom now before I will no longer have it on the weekends after this one. On Friday, I assembled the weekly lesson plans for my 210 class, and found that even though there's no final exam, due to its accelerated nature, I'm basically collecting a complex paper (or other assignment) from them every Tuesday night. Every Tuesday night, with the exception of Thanksgiving week, from October 17 through the beginning of December. There will be no week during these times -- from now forward, really -- where I don't have a stack of papers to grade or edit hanging over my head. I've tried to plot out the dates for the rest of the semester as best as possible right now, and this is how they (tentatively) look:
September 24 (T): 101 paper 1 due.
September 25 (W): 011 paper 1 due.
October 16 (W): 011 paper 2 due.
October 17 (R): 101 paper 2 due, 210 paper 1 due
October 22 (T): 210 paper 2 due.
October 29 (T): 210 paper 3 due.
October 30 (W): 011 paper 3 due.
November 5 (T): 210 paper 4 due.
November 12 (T): 101 paper 3 due, 210 paper 5 due.
November 18 (M): 011 paper 4 due.
November 19 (T): 210 paper 6 due.
December 2 (M): 011 paper 5 due.
December 3 (T): Oral Presentations in 210.
December 5 (R): 101 paper 4 due, Oral Presentations in 210 conclude.
For those of you keeping count, that's fifteen papers and an entire week of oral presentations I'll be dealing with, and none of this (obviously) counts weekends that workshop copies come in for these classes, or times when I'll collect the journals for grading, or quizzes that I'll administer (some of which will be long) and spend time grading through as well, or time spent reading and lesson planning for these kids. No, this is simply the list of paper due dates. Note the (lucky) gaps I have in time at the beginning of October (midterms, and coincidentally, my anniversary with Daisy) and through Thanksgiving week, when I've canceled my classes...and compare that with how frequently papers are coming in on all the other dates. It's a blessing of sorts that I'll be stuck on West campus all day on Tuesdays and Thursdays with nothing to do, because otherwise, trying to grade all of these at home, in stacks one after another, would kill me. Some of those days, some of those weekends, are going to be terrible. If I think I never get any sleep now? Hoo boy, give it a few weeks. Then we'll see how frazzled I am. I may as well purchase the IV bag and hook for coffee right now.
Speaking of purchasing things...unless my mother dropped it in there yesterday after I checked my account yesterday morning upon waking up, my paycheck is not yet in the bank. I don't know if this means that it hasn't arrived yet (which is unlikely, since I sent it six days ago) or if she hasn't dropped it in there, or if it's just taking the weekend to deposit it. I don't know because, uncharacteristically, I haven't heard anything from my parents since Thursday (I think). Just a bit strange, that's all. What it really boils down to is that I'm going to end up getting paid twice this week, and what's in my bank account now will basically triple by next weekend once both checks are in there. That's good; I have to pay the rent sometime this week, put gas in the car on Tuesday, and will need to go do some basic grocery shopping probably after class one afternoon (or, if I again become an insomniac of some sort, in the middle of the night one night). There are several things I need to order from Amazon, as well -- for example, I give the cats two different types of urinary tract health cat food (mixed and blended evenly) and they're out of one of the two kinds. It's cheaper to order it on Amazon than it is to buy it in Walmart, as wild as that sounds. I need to order several ounces of peppermint oil, as well. Why, you ask? Because spraying it around doors and windows is a huge deterrent to spiders -- they hate it. It's also something that won't hurt the cats, as other sprays and the like would. With today being the first day of fall, and with temperatures plummeting at night to the point where I'll probably need to start using blankets on the bed downstairs again soon, spiders will start coming into the house like crazy again. They always do around this time of year. June and October -- get out of the heat / come in from the cold. Etc. I don't want to make any of these purchases until I am a little more financially comfortable, even if they are only $10-15 each. I'm neurotic that way.
I emptied the last of my bottle of Marvel Mystery Oil into the car this afternoon, and added another quart of oil for good measure. Do I think it really needs both? No, probably not, at least not all of it right now. But it's preventative, I suppose. I put more coolant into the tank as well, even though it was only a little low, simply because I already had the hood up, and again, preventative measures. I need to be able to keep that car running as healthily as possible, even if I'm only putting highway miles on it. The car still drives a lot every week, and while it's good on gas mileage for its age and wear/tear, keeping all of its vital parts in the best shape I can will only help it stay alive. More of those fluids (coolant, oil, Marvel Mystery Oil, fuel system cleaner, etc) are all on my shopping list for when I have the money to get them, as well.
Because I'm collecting papers from my students this week, it's a pretty quiet week overall. Yes, I'll be grading through all of those papers, but my actual lesson plans are fairly minimal. Tomorrow in my 011 class, it's "in-class conference/peer review" day, which means students bring in their drafts to trade with their peers and edit each others' papers, and I sit at the front of the class and do the same for anyone who wants me to look theirs over and focus on no more than three issues. This means one of two things: 1) everyone will be there and there will be a long line for me to look over papers one after another until the class ends, or 2) nobody will show up because they're not done with their drafts and/or don't care. Judging from the number of absences I've had in that class over the past two weeks or so, it could go either way, though I'm expecting more of the latter than the former. The final copies of those papers come in on Wednesday, and we cover a chapter in the book before the next unit starts. In my 101 class, papers come in on Tuesday and we begin the next unit then, with about four handouts and minimal class discussion, and I cover the first new reading assignment and have an in-class quiz on Thursday. Pretty rote, pretty basic stuff. Nothing that's going to cause me to have a lot of work to do but the actual grading...and even that should go fairly quickly for their first papers, anyway.
I've been told in the past that grading goes much more smoothly and pleasantly with alcohol involved. Hahah, no, no it doesn't. Not for me. Aside from a bottle of champagne Parker gave me upon my graduation, I have no alcohol in the house anyway. I drank the last of the beer I'd had since last Thanksgiving very slowly over the course of the summer, and I'd like to save the bottle of champagne for when Daisy comes down, to celebrate our anniversary.
Daisy and I have been slowly, sloooooowly working on our wedding planning. In the past few weeks, I've made a semi-finalized guest/invite list, we've settled on our traditional "first dance" song (something that frustrated us both to no end) and we've been putting together the playlist for the iPod-like-device we'll use for the music at the reception. We're trying to figure out the logistics for a lot of different little things, such as when guests/family from out of town will arrive and what they will be fed, when we're planning the rehearsal dinner/after-wedding brunch/etc, how we're going to cater the event (since Daisy has decreed that all food at the reception will be vegan no matter what), and so on.
"How do you want to go about the post-wedding brunch the next day?" she asked me.
"Say what?"
"The post-wedding brunch, where close friends and family come and eat and we open up all of our wedding gifts."
"...what?"
I'd never heard of this. I've never been to a post-wedding brunch before, and didn't know they existed. Furthermore, at every wedding I have ever been to, the bride and groom have opened their gifts in front of everyone during the reception -- or gifts in the form of cash in envelopes, not physical gifts, were what was given. Some weddings had a mixture of both, but I will say that every wedding I've been to has had some sort of gift-opening procedure during the reception. Every one of them.
"If people are getting gifts for us," I said, "which, as you know, I really don't think is necessary anyhow, if we open them at the reception and personally thank the gifters, it saves us from needing to write thank-you notes. I thought that's why people did that."
Daisy had no clue what I was talking about; she seemed mystified that this sort of thing does actually happen, and happens pretty frequently.
"No," she said, "it's customary to either open gifts in private or at a post-wedding brunch the next day. Really, it is. Look at this."
She then sent me this photo, screencapped with her phone from some website:
I also think it's hilarious that the word "honeymoon" is mentioned.
"I mean, it doesn't matter to me at all either way," I added, "but if we're not going to open them at the reception in front of everyone, I'd much rather just do it in private on our own."
I say this because, despite the fact that we do have a wedding registry on Amazon with some things on it that would be nice to have, I would much, much rather just have people give us envelopes of cash instead. Receiving an appliance for the kitchen, while nice, doesn't pay the bills or let us recoup some of the exorbitant costs of everything we'll need to make the wedding happen in the first place. Besides, if we get gifts and decide to open them in private on our own, the next week after our wedding is like a second Christmas for the year.
I also say this because I'm an evil, evil person, and if we're not opening gifts in front of everyone at the reception I'd rather just do it at home in private, since my goal in doing it at the reception would be to make everyone envious and jealous. Yeah. These are the thoughts going through my head.
"I'll do the thank-you notes if you want," Daisy told me. "You won't have to worry about that."
"Good," I said, "because there will be so many people there who I don't know at all and have never met before, and I won't be able to keep track of all of them or what they give us, if anything."
This is true; as mentioned before, Daisy easily has 3X, if not more, people coming to the wedding on her side than I have on mine. My guest list will be about fifteen or so friends from the department or around the area, my Raiding Party (five more people), and my parents. That's it. No, seriously. I have roughly forty people who will show up, if that many. She has close to eighty that she's inviting, whether they show up or not.
I'm planning to send out the "save the date" notes in my Christmas cards this year; I'll have two different versions of it, actually -- one with "formal invitation to follow" written at the bottom and the other without that little line. The one with the invitation line will be sent to everyone on my cards list who will actually be invited personally to the wedding, whether they show up or not, and yes, a formal invitation will eventually follow to them. The one without that line will be sent to everyone who I know, even if I wanted them to be there, will never in a million years fly to Omaha for the wedding, and the included announcement is basically an announcement that will tell them "Oh, Brandon's getting married? Better send him some money." That's the one that will go out to most of my family and family friends who in no way, shape, or form would be interested in coming to, and/or would not be physically able to attend, the wedding. It's pretty similar to my graduation announcement in that respect. This way, nobody gets left out, everybody knows about the wedding, and we only have to make and send invitations to the people who will actually bother to attend -- thus saving us money. I'll give Daisy the PDF files for each of the announcements, and she'll be able to do the same with her own Christmas cards this year if she so chooses. I found this to be a pretty ingenious idea, and Daisy thought it was a good idea to do it with the Christmas cards as well.
So, I've got all of this going for me, at least. On that note, I shall eat, watch a bit of the Steelers game, and go to bed.
Saturday, September 21, 2013
Nothing There
I tend to be a pretty proactive person. When something needs to be done, I do it -- regardless of whether I want to or not, or whether I have the energy to do it or not. It's this sort of mentality that got me through grad school with enough spare time to breathe and actually get a fair amount of sleep (most of the time), and made my colleagues look at me in shock when I told them I had a paper done and turned in a week or more before the due date. Yeah, that happened a lot. I don't slack; I never have been a slacker on anything. Work and other responsibilities always come first. I've always seen it as one of my character strengths, even if it ends up meaning that I don't really have a social life and/or barely see or speak to anyone (outside of what few friends are in the department at 8AM on Monday/Wednesday, or my students) but my cats and the late-night Walmart cashiers. I talk to Daisy about ten hours per week when it used to be ten hours per day (how I slept then, I'll never know).
On Thursday, when I went to teach my 101 class, only six students showed up. Four of those six had already workshopped their papers, so they were left with little to do since the rest of the class had failed to actually be in attendance. The other two brought in drafts that, yes, we did go over both as a class and in peer review, but overall I was basically a ball of frustration that the class had been a waste of time for most people there who had actually done their work correctly beforehand. We did what little we could, and then I talked about the upcoming unit that we're starting on Tuesday before I dismissed.
It was frustrating because, due to the absences, it wasn't a very productive class, and there was little I could do to change that; workshop week is pretty essential to the classroom environment. It's important. If people don't show up for that, it's not like there are backup plans in place because that's what we're doing that week. I felt like I'd wasted the time of the students who showed up only to have nothing to do, since the people who would provide them with their work for the day were absent, and I felt like my own time (and gasoline) was wasted because I had to drive down there and back when I much rather would have stayed home and gone back to bed.
Yeah. So that was my Thursday. I went home, still deliriously tired, and called my grandmother -- the 19th was the 31st anniversary of my grandfather's death, and I call her every year on that day. I put my car in the garage, as the weather predicted severe storms and possible tornadoes. It did little more than rain hard, twice, for about an hour each time. I told Daisy that I was going to bed, as I was completely exhausted, and did.
When I awoke, again, it was dark. I'm getting used to going to sleep when it's light (or mostly light) outside and waking up when it's dark and pitch black. It makes me feel like a vampire to a certain extent, but, especially when I'm done for the week, it works. It works well. I went down to get the mail and saw that it had rained, but it wasn't doing anything outside then (around 8:30-9PMish).
I'm getting to the point where there are big chunks of time I just don't remember at all. This is more than likely due to my near-constant fatigue and sleeplessness. It takes a long time after I wake up now for me to be anywhere near alert and cognisant of what's going on around me or what I'm doing and when. Therefore, I just don't recall what I did during certain times because I hadn't been awake for hours yet. Thursday night was one of those times -- while I got up at the time mentioned above, aside from vaguely remembering hearing it start to rain again around 10 or so, I remember next to nothing until 1 or 2AM when I called Daisy on Skype. I know I made something to eat and checked Facebook and the like, but I must've sat here dazed for three or four hours on end because really, I wasn't completely awake. I wonder if it's going to get to a time where I'm so constantly exhausted that I don't remember anything I do, if those first few hours I'm awake that I can't remember anything are going to stretch into most of my day, and then all of my day, and then I'll try to look back to remember my thoughts and actions during those times and just draw a complete blank....yet all of my work will be done and all of the bills will be paid because somehow in those somewhat-lucid hours I at least knew what I had to do.
By 4AM, I told Daisy I needed to go back to sleep. She was staying awake all night (because she still has to keep her sleeping schedule even when she's off work) and I couldn't stay up anymore. My allergies and fatigue put me into a haze, and I'd once more exhausted my useful awake time...in the span of less than three hours. I went to bed and slept until after noon for the first time in weeks -- just out-like-a-light, dreamless sleep during the hours of the night and morning when my body constantly wants and needs it, yet I can never get it.
I mailed my paper paycheck to my mother on Tuesday after picking it up on Monday morning. She had the day off today and told me that if it had arrived by the time she did her weekly shopping, she'd stick it in the bank while she was in town. I checked my account about an hour ago, and there's nothing in there yet, so I'm guessing it either hasn't been processed by the bank or it has not yet arrived in the mail. Once I get that check in the bank, along with the normal check I'll get next Friday, I can work on stocking the house with groceries and other necessities for the coming weeks. As you know, I normally just get the bare minimum needed for survival when I make a trip to Walmart for shopping; I try to spend as little money as possible and get the items that will keep me going and fed for another week. Once I get those two checks in the bank, I can better assess my finances and can finally make a big shopping trip to get everything I need or around the house, including not only stuff to cook but ancillary things like cleaning supplies, more laundry detergent, car stuff, etc.
The storms and rain rolling through brought with them cooler, much more live-able weather; the temperature today has barely reached what it is now, 73, and the highs for most of this next week are supposed to be around that as well, with lows in the 50s and 60s. This probably means that it'll be snowing around the second or third week of October, right as I get into the swing of teaching my 210 class two nights a week. I say this because, again, that's what fall is in Kansas -- two weeks or so of actual seasonable weather before the snow/ice/sleet sets in for five months and the state becomes a miserable place to live again.
My car is still acting a bit strangely, though I'm not sure if it's the weather changing or not. It's started dripping a bit of oil and coolant again -- not much, but a little -- which is probably because of the humidity and weather changing, but it's also being sluggish, the brakes are starting to lock up on me a little more when I have to brake hard (occasionally at stoplights that turn yellow when I'm too close to go through), making the car spin its tires a bit when I let off the brake and press the gas again, etc. Little things like that. Most of them can more than likely be chalked up to the car's age and the rapid up-down flux of temperatures and humidity we've had here over the past week or two -- again, as I've said before, fast weather changes in general make that car temperamental as hell -- but it's still not something I like. Most of the oil in the car is clean and new, and most of the coolant is as well. While the car's in the garage this weekend I plan to put another quart of oil in (it's been about a month since I've checked its levels) if necessary, and do the same with the coolant as well. I have an entire bottle of Marvel Mystery Oil I haven't opened yet, so I'll put that in with the oil -- you add it to both the gas and oil -- and I'll put more in the gas tank when I fill up on Tuesday morning. If anything, the car is overworked -- I barely drove her all summer long, and now I'm putting 200 miles a week on her again. Once the weather stabilizes, I expect her behavior to stabilize as well. Say what you want about that landboat, but she drives exceptionally well in the winter, in cold temperatures. She does not, however, like the heat and humidity.
My grandmother asked about my car on the phone, and if it was still running well. I told her yes, it was still kicking.
"I can't wait for the day where we can afford to buy you a new car," Daisy told me last night. "When we don't have to worry about money and you won't have to worry about all of the things that could go wrong with the one you have."
Yeah, me neither.
"Wouldn't it be great if I got a $35k a year job and you could actually take some time to find a job that was right for you, where you would sleep normal hours?"
Yes, yes it would. I've always said that there are few things that money can't fix. Everyone who says that money can't buy happiness has obviously never been incredibly super-poor and in debt, or they don't know/care how to manage finances like I do.
Daisy also asked me last night about what's going on for Christmas and New Year's; my grandmother asked me the same thing when I was on the phone with her as well. I have no answers.
"I haven't a clue," I told Daisy. "My parents haven't said anything to me about a Christmas trip yet, and since you're staying at home, I don't know what I'm doing. It's also going to heavily depend on what I'll be doing for a living once January rolls around. Regardless, I'm not going to have any spare money at the end of December, that's for sure."
This is completely true on all fronts; Daisy has told me that since it will be her last Christmas living at home (since, y'know, we're getting married next summer), she's going to stay there and do all the family Christmas stuff no matter what I do. I told her that this was fine and I understood it perfectly; she's very close with her family. On my side, my parents haven't mentioned anything yet about Christmas -- it's still over three months away -- and I don't know what their plans are, if they even have any. If I find a job someplace else once the semester ends, December may be the last month I'll be living in this house, which means I really can't just up and disappear for a week around the holidays, not that I'll have the spare money to do that anyway. My last paycheck of the semester is on December 20, and that will more than likely go mostly to rent and bills for January...if I still plan to be living here then, of course. Chances are that I'll either be spending Christmas here alone with the cats (as is customary) or I'll be in Omaha. I couldn't tell you one way or the other how any of that's going to play out, because I really can't look that far ahead yet -- mostly because of those money issues and needing to know where my next paycheck after December 20 is going to come from, and when it's going to roll in.
Sadly, it's looking more and more like the only truly feasible option for my survival is to adjunct again here in the spring. Anything else would be almost impossible to do when it comes to survival from January through May. My paychecks, while they are now of considerably larger amounts than they were when I was a GTA, still aren't enough to float me for five months after this semester ends if I can't get anything else. I'd be lucky to last until the end of February, simply because it will all run out quickly after that last check drops. If I'm not adjuncting then, I have no money coming in and no job prospects, and I'm back where I was in July -- except it will be in the dead of winter.
But Brandon, you may be saying, you said this fall you're applying for teaching positions in the spring all over the place again, didn't you?
Yes, that's the plan, but starting somewhere new in the spring is much different than starting somewhere new in the fall. I have a window of about a month or so, maximum, during the worst weather and cold of the year, to uproot myself completely, clean out this house and move out, to get somewhere and find a new place to live if I'm hired there -- all during one of the most hectic, most expensive times of the year to travel and move, the holiday season, during a time where I will have no money to finance said move-out, travel, and move-into somewhere new. I can neither put into words nor fully fathom how horrific it would be to try to do all of that with no money and no outlets to get more money over the span of a month during the holidays. That means I would have to severely limit my job search and availability to either...well, here in the state somewhere, within a few hours' drive, or to Omaha, where I'd have a support network of Daisy and her family. The time I had to even consider teaching on the other side of the country somewhere ended in July, and won't pick up again until after Daisy and I are married -- it is simply impossible to do everything necessary for a move of that caliber in less than a month during the worst time of the year to do so.
If the university here allows me to adjunct again in the spring, what it does is buy me some time and keeps me employed when I desperately need to be in the months leading up to the wedding, time during which I can be applying for more permanent employment in the fall, and time where Daisy and I can figure out where we're going to be and what we're going to be doing there.
I have not resigned myself to this, and I don't want anyone to think that. I am currently pursuing several good job leads right now, including a big, important one that I applied for today, but this is indeed the life of an adjunct. This is my life: scraping by. Teaching here for another semester -- if they keep me on -- isn't ideal, no. It will mean Daisy and I will have to wrangle out ways to keep planning the wedding and she'll have to find somewhere to live near me sometime in the mid-spring (at the latest), even if that means she moves in here for a month or two and gets a job here for a while -- but teaching here again is a job for me, and I must remain employed somehow or, really, I lose everything. It's not like I have a savings account -- I'm not paid enough to have one. It's not like I have money socked away for a rainy day. This is it. This is what I've got to work with. No, I don't like this, but teaching until May, getting married, and then having three months after the semester ends to figure out where we'll settle to live and work is a lot more do-able than having our entire lives thrown into chaos and upheaval for a move that neither of us have money for in December, a week after the semester ends, when all of the holidays are rapidly approaching. It's not poor planning, it's not poor anything -- it's the way timeframes work in academia mixed with horrible weather, lack of money, and holidays. Daisy doesn't get any "holiday time" off; she has about four extra days off throughout the entirety of November and December, including Thanksgiving and Christmas, because of her job. My bills and rent don't magically disappear when the semester ends, either. My car insurance, for example, comes due again at the end of December, and were it to come due right now it would take about half the money I currently have in my bank account to pay it. And, again, who knows if the car itself will last me through the end of December?
None of it is pleasant, but all I can do is do what I can. I know that sounds oversimplified and stupid, but it's true. As Daisy is fond of saying herself, it will all work out one way or another. That's the only way to look at it, really.
Not everything has been good recently; as of late, a lot of bad has overshadowed what has otherwise been a decent, if slow-going, semester thus far -- for example, one of my former students from my very first class I ever taught was killed in a fiery car crash a few nights ago on the interstate up here in Newton. It was so bad that it took them a few days to identify him, and while I'd read about the crash in the news, I didn't know it was him until they released the name last night. Yes, people die in car accidents every day, but he's the first and only (to the best of my knowledge, anyway) of my former students who have passed. For some reason it makes me feel...older. More mortal. I drive 200 miles in my car every week, a car that is probably in much worse shape than his was, though they haven't yet released a "known cause" of the accident. If it can happen to one of my best former students, it can happen to anyone, including me. I've had a lot of friends and colleagues die of various causes over the years -- some from cancer, or heart conditions, or murders (yes, murders; I have two friends who were murdered in separate incidents), but mostly car accidents. And here I am, driving more every week than about 95% of people I know.
I could've been killed on Thursday morning, actually -- a hardware-store pickup truck which I was following on my way to West campus had a 4x4x4 wooden cube (probably used as a brace for some construction project) fly out of the truck bed when it went over a bump in the road; if I'd been directly behind the truck with no time to react, it would've gone through my windshield and hit me. Luckily, I wasn't -- I was in the lane next to the truck, and he had a good three or four car lengths of space between he and I. The piece of wood bounced on the road a few times, and crossed my lane, before coming to a stop right around the yellow lines. I was able to adjust my position in the lane to avoid hitting it with about a second and a half to spare, if that. Again, my hyper-vigilance while driving saves the day. I didn't tell Daisy or anyone else about this incident because, well, a) I forgot about it until now, and b) why worry anyone needlessly when I'm fine and the car is fine? It is, though, another example about how much danger we can be in and not even know it until something happens.
There's a memorial service planned for my former student, as he was well-liked and was one of the officers in one of the campus fraternities, but I don't know anything about where and when it will be yet. If I'm around or available when it's happening, I plan to go to it. I also think it's interesting (at the very least) that the university hasn't issued some sort of press release or news briefing on it, as they normally do when a student dies. WVU used to do that all the time, but then again WVU is a much larger university where a lot more students die every year (alcoholism, drug overdoses, suicide, being run over because they ran out in front of cars at places that weren't crosswalks, etc).
That actually says a lot about my alma mater, doesn't it?
Either way, yes, it's sad, but I can't really do anything about it.
"The world is as cruel as it is beautiful," Parker said upon me telling him the story.
Yes, I suppose he is correct.
At the end of the week, I'm always asked about what I'm going to do over the weekend, usually by several people -- Daisy, students, colleagues, etc. I never have an answer for them. Why? Because it's not like I have a social life -- it's a Saturday night at 8:20 PM on one of the most gorgeous days of the past year, and what am I doing? I'm sitting at my computer in my underwear, with all three cats scattered around me sleeping on the floor. "What are you doing over the weekend?" is one of those questions like "How are you?" that I never know how to answer simply because my life is so boring. I could give those people an honest answer of "sitting around in my underwear, scratching my balls, and watching football while eating terrible food" or "I hate almost every waking second of every day," but I'm pretty sure they don't even want to know the fake answers, let alone the honest ones -- they're just asking out of courtesy. I'm still always jarred by the question. I also think that my lack of a ready-and-chambered response is indicative of my incredibly low self-esteem, as I find it hard to believe that anyone truly cares about how I am or what my weekend plans are. This is because, well, most people don't.
I do need to mow the grass one last time, and I'll probably do it sometime during this next week. The rains of the past few days will make it grow more if I don't, and the temperatures are much cooler than they have been. Aside from that? Nothing. I don't want to do anything -- it's my last real weekend where I won't be grading through a stack of papers and/or journals every week/weekend until December. And I'm already tired enough. Two nights of solid rest (I went to bed last night around 9:30 or so and slept until 10AM) allowed me to recuperate a bit, but tonight I don't plan to stay up late simply because of football tomorrow. These are my only days of the week where I get to actually sleep and rest and heal myself from the ongoing physical and mental scars accrued from my harsh, stressful mistress I call academia. I've already printed out all my lesson plans and handouts for next week, and I've paid all the bills I currently have. All I can do now is wait and try to relax somewhat, check the fluids in the car and try to mentally prepare for the onslaught of papers I'll be bringing home with me this coming week.
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Normality, Part II
Fall semester: day twenty-three
I suppose I'm okay. I mean, I guess. The past two nights I've still been sleeping strange hours -- last night I slept from 1PM or so to 11PM, and then went back to sleep between 2 and 6AM (still, of course, feeling sick and not wanting to go anywhere/do anything once I got up), and this afternoon I went back to bed after coming home from teaching, sleeping about seven hours or so then. By all rights, I am fully rested and should feel that way. So why don't I? I used to sleep four to six hours per night, period, when I was in grad school...with no issues whatsoever. What's changed over the course of the past four months to where I somehow can't do that anymore?
Again, maybe I am actually getting sick with something. It was about this time last year, maybe a little later, that I got my month-long sinus infection that spread to my ears, throat, and chest, and would not go away no matter what I did until I took powerful antibiotics for it. I've mentioned before that by around the beginning of October in the fall (or, conversely, the end of February or so in the spring semester), I will get sick. I can almost set my watch to it and plan for it. By those times, I'm worn down enough by the semester to where my immune system has done all the fighting it can do for a while, it goes on strike, and I get sick. I don't know if that's what's going on this time around or if it's just an inability to get any sort of restful sleep. I'm no more stressed than I normally am; in fact, without any work of my own to do in addition to teaching my classes, I'm even a bit less stressed. At least compared to this same time of year when I was in grad school, anyway. Again, as I mentioned before, the weather isn't helping much. On Monday it was cool and misty/rainy, and that remained the same yesterday morning before the weather patterns all of a sudden changed gears yesterday afternoon and today -- it was 68 when I left the house to teach this morning at 7AM. By 12:30 when I got home, it was over 90 with a cloudless sky, humid and windy. Tomorrow it's supposed to be pretty and nice in the morning, and then we're supposed to get severe thunderstorms all afternoon and night.
This is what happens when Kansas attempts to transition between the seasons -- violent storms for a week or two, and then (magically) it's the new season. As mentioned before, Kansas doesn't really have a spring or fall -- it's more of a "summer for five months, stormy week or two, winter for five months, stormy week or two, repeat." Note that this is only a ten-month cycle, so this is why we occasionally get snow in fucking May before finals week. Or, at other times, in September or early October. All of this stuff has occurred since I've been living here. It's either going to snow or sleet with possible 40-degree days of soaking miserable rain for the entirety of October, or it's going to be 90 degrees every day again. There is no middle ground.
I've already told my students -- especially my West campus students, as after October 10, I'll be stuck over there for 12-hour days twice a week -- that if the weather gets terrible, their classes will be canceled, and I will let them know ASAP if/when it happens. My car is too old, I am far too lazy, and I am paid far too little to drive 30 miles (mostly on back roads which will be the last ones to be treated) through snow and ice to cover a reading assignment that they can do on their own with a little guidance from me via email and Blackboard. I will be repeating this announcement to my business writing students as well once that class starts, as by the time it starts at 7PM two nights a week, it will already be dark and nasty on those back roads without streetlights anyhow, especially when the weather is bad.
I have made out my lesson plans for my 011 students for the rest of the semester. Well, at least the unit timelines, anyway. There are five papers in that class, and after this first one comes in a week from today, they're basically turning in one after another after another every two weeks or so. This means that after this weekend I'm really never going to have a "free weekend" where I can do whatever I want after I finish minimal lesson planning and the like...ever again, not until around Christmas. The paper schedule for my 101 class is unfortunately staggered against the 011s, not to mention whatever schedule I'll have set up for my 210s. If I'm not grading a set of 011 papers, I'll be working on workshop copies or grading final copies of my 101 papers, in addition to grading papers every week for that accelerated 210 course. There are eight assignments for the 210 course. There are eight weeks I'll be teaching the class. Coincidence? I'll have at least one, if not two, sets of papers that I'll be grading over the course of Thanksgiving week, even -- which, coincidentally (again?) is the week before the last week of classes because of how the semester is set up this year.
I'll just say that I'm glad Daisy is coming down the week before all of that starts up.
I'll also say that I am very glad I'm finally getting paid again on a regular basis, as it somewhat lessens the pain.
This afternoon, I posted this article on my Facebook, as several other fellow instructors/professors had posted it. It's about an 83-year-old adjunct professor at Duquesne University who had taught for 25 years and had been slowly stripped of her teaching duties due to her age being an issue for "teaching effectiveness" despite glowing student evaluations, and was finally dismissed completely by the university with no benefits, severance pay, or health insurance -- because she was only an adjunct, she got none of that, even when the university president was making $700k a year. Even after being a professor for 25 years, she was unable to support herself. Once the university decided to cut her, she was on her own. Her health declined and she had a heart attack and died shortly thereafter.
It's supposed to be a tragic story about the fate of the adjunct professor and about the state of most universities' adjunct professor systems and why they need unions -- and indeed, it is that -- but what caught my eye the most in the story was this:
Re-read that if you didn't catch it the first time, because I certainly did. A salary of between $3,000 and just over $3,500 per three-credit course.
Maybe that makes me shallow. Maybe that makes me uncaring, or unable to see the bigger picture here, but that jumped out at me when I read it. That's a lot more than I'm making this semester teaching three different three-credit courses. 50 to 75% more than I'm making, to be exact. And this woman was 83 years old and living on that. She couldn't even pay her electric bill and was sleeping in her office because she couldn't pay for the upkeep on the house she owned. What's worse? She had cancer, and had thousands in medical bills from treatments that did little more than simply keep her alive. In the end, that didn't even help.
The university system is a mess, and while I am indeed very happy and consider myself very fortunate to have a teaching job at all this fall, the pay difference between adjuncts and even simple lecturers -- leaving the tenure-track associate and assistant professor people completely out of the equation -- is nothing short of criminal. Adjuncts scrape by -- they do it because they have to, and colleges and universities know that and capitalize on it. One of our former GTAs who graduated two years ago (and was adjuncting for us up until recently), finally got a job at a local community college where they began paying her an actual, somewhat live-able salary...at the cost of her agreeing to teach seven different classes this semester alone. If that community college has a 25-person cap on each class and each class is full, that's 175 students. If those classes each have four papers per semester on average (as my 101 classes do, for example's sake) that's 700 papers to grade over the course of sixteen weeks. Simply to be able to make...what, $10k more a year? $15k more?
Is it worth it?
I'd rather shoot myself than do that for anything less than $100-150k a year. And I'd damn well better have full health, eye, and dental coverage as well. Right now, I have thirty students, and am still having trouble remembering some of their names occasionally, a full month into the semester. In three weeks, I'll get twenty more students. I don't know how I would deal with 175 students. It's not even realistically comparable, and yet, there it is.
I just don't want to be over eighty with cancer and unable to retire because, in my career, there's no such thing as "retirement." I don't want to live into old age having never made more than $20k a year, having never owned a new car or actual health/life/etc insurance or owned a home.
It's all too fucking depressing.
I have to go shopping tonight while I'm awake; I can no longer avoid it. I am out (or nearly out) of the three C's -- coffee, cat litter, and cigarettes. As two of those are the only things that keep me somewhat sane every day, and the third stops the house from constantly smelling of cat excrement, I have no choice. I'm awake, quite possibly until I return home again from teaching tomorrow, and have little else to do in the overnight hours but shower and take care of chores. Well, shopping (sadly) is one of my chores. And I certainly don't want to do it over the weekend when I need to be sleeping and recuperating to make myself feel normal again. When I got up, I made coffee, noted (by seeing her posts on Facebook) that Daisy was out for the evening with one of her friends, as is customary for her on Wednesday nights, and paid my cable bill that arrived in the mail yesterday (there's another $57 gone). What I really want to do, though I don't know if it's what I'll actually do, is get something quick and easy to eat from Walmart -- Hot Pockets or something like that, something different than what I normally eat -- and get the DVD of World War Z, and spend the rest of my night in relaxation before I have to teach in the morning. I have so, so few luxuries in life. Spending a night with cheap, more-bad-for-me-than-good food and a new movie is really all I have time for anymore during the semester. It's not much different when Daisy is here, either. At least I can justify it by having not slept well all week, and having felt like shit since...oh, Sunday or so.
In the morning, I shall teach, and it shall be as short of a class as possible. Workshops yesterday went well enough, I suppose, though I had more absences in that class yesterday than I've had all semester, and it was still -- for the first one or two students up for workshop, anyway -- like pulling teeth to get them to talk about their peers' papers. Tomorrow it's a little different. We have one workshop paper left to get through (one of those aforementioned absences yesterday) and then peer-review for the rest of the class. Their final copies come in on Tuesday, and I start the next unit then -- meaning that I have to ready the assignment sheets and the like for them over this weekend.
In the meantime? Bad food and zombies. And sleep.
I suppose I'm okay. I mean, I guess. The past two nights I've still been sleeping strange hours -- last night I slept from 1PM or so to 11PM, and then went back to sleep between 2 and 6AM (still, of course, feeling sick and not wanting to go anywhere/do anything once I got up), and this afternoon I went back to bed after coming home from teaching, sleeping about seven hours or so then. By all rights, I am fully rested and should feel that way. So why don't I? I used to sleep four to six hours per night, period, when I was in grad school...with no issues whatsoever. What's changed over the course of the past four months to where I somehow can't do that anymore?
Again, maybe I am actually getting sick with something. It was about this time last year, maybe a little later, that I got my month-long sinus infection that spread to my ears, throat, and chest, and would not go away no matter what I did until I took powerful antibiotics for it. I've mentioned before that by around the beginning of October in the fall (or, conversely, the end of February or so in the spring semester), I will get sick. I can almost set my watch to it and plan for it. By those times, I'm worn down enough by the semester to where my immune system has done all the fighting it can do for a while, it goes on strike, and I get sick. I don't know if that's what's going on this time around or if it's just an inability to get any sort of restful sleep. I'm no more stressed than I normally am; in fact, without any work of my own to do in addition to teaching my classes, I'm even a bit less stressed. At least compared to this same time of year when I was in grad school, anyway. Again, as I mentioned before, the weather isn't helping much. On Monday it was cool and misty/rainy, and that remained the same yesterday morning before the weather patterns all of a sudden changed gears yesterday afternoon and today -- it was 68 when I left the house to teach this morning at 7AM. By 12:30 when I got home, it was over 90 with a cloudless sky, humid and windy. Tomorrow it's supposed to be pretty and nice in the morning, and then we're supposed to get severe thunderstorms all afternoon and night.
This is what happens when Kansas attempts to transition between the seasons -- violent storms for a week or two, and then (magically) it's the new season. As mentioned before, Kansas doesn't really have a spring or fall -- it's more of a "summer for five months, stormy week or two, winter for five months, stormy week or two, repeat." Note that this is only a ten-month cycle, so this is why we occasionally get snow in fucking May before finals week. Or, at other times, in September or early October. All of this stuff has occurred since I've been living here. It's either going to snow or sleet with possible 40-degree days of soaking miserable rain for the entirety of October, or it's going to be 90 degrees every day again. There is no middle ground.
I've already told my students -- especially my West campus students, as after October 10, I'll be stuck over there for 12-hour days twice a week -- that if the weather gets terrible, their classes will be canceled, and I will let them know ASAP if/when it happens. My car is too old, I am far too lazy, and I am paid far too little to drive 30 miles (mostly on back roads which will be the last ones to be treated) through snow and ice to cover a reading assignment that they can do on their own with a little guidance from me via email and Blackboard. I will be repeating this announcement to my business writing students as well once that class starts, as by the time it starts at 7PM two nights a week, it will already be dark and nasty on those back roads without streetlights anyhow, especially when the weather is bad.
I have made out my lesson plans for my 011 students for the rest of the semester. Well, at least the unit timelines, anyway. There are five papers in that class, and after this first one comes in a week from today, they're basically turning in one after another after another every two weeks or so. This means that after this weekend I'm really never going to have a "free weekend" where I can do whatever I want after I finish minimal lesson planning and the like...ever again, not until around Christmas. The paper schedule for my 101 class is unfortunately staggered against the 011s, not to mention whatever schedule I'll have set up for my 210s. If I'm not grading a set of 011 papers, I'll be working on workshop copies or grading final copies of my 101 papers, in addition to grading papers every week for that accelerated 210 course. There are eight assignments for the 210 course. There are eight weeks I'll be teaching the class. Coincidence? I'll have at least one, if not two, sets of papers that I'll be grading over the course of Thanksgiving week, even -- which, coincidentally (again?) is the week before the last week of classes because of how the semester is set up this year.
I'll just say that I'm glad Daisy is coming down the week before all of that starts up.
I'll also say that I am very glad I'm finally getting paid again on a regular basis, as it somewhat lessens the pain.
This afternoon, I posted this article on my Facebook, as several other fellow instructors/professors had posted it. It's about an 83-year-old adjunct professor at Duquesne University who had taught for 25 years and had been slowly stripped of her teaching duties due to her age being an issue for "teaching effectiveness" despite glowing student evaluations, and was finally dismissed completely by the university with no benefits, severance pay, or health insurance -- because she was only an adjunct, she got none of that, even when the university president was making $700k a year. Even after being a professor for 25 years, she was unable to support herself. Once the university decided to cut her, she was on her own. Her health declined and she had a heart attack and died shortly thereafter.
It's supposed to be a tragic story about the fate of the adjunct professor and about the state of most universities' adjunct professor systems and why they need unions -- and indeed, it is that -- but what caught my eye the most in the story was this:
Re-read that if you didn't catch it the first time, because I certainly did. A salary of between $3,000 and just over $3,500 per three-credit course.
Maybe that makes me shallow. Maybe that makes me uncaring, or unable to see the bigger picture here, but that jumped out at me when I read it. That's a lot more than I'm making this semester teaching three different three-credit courses. 50 to 75% more than I'm making, to be exact. And this woman was 83 years old and living on that. She couldn't even pay her electric bill and was sleeping in her office because she couldn't pay for the upkeep on the house she owned. What's worse? She had cancer, and had thousands in medical bills from treatments that did little more than simply keep her alive. In the end, that didn't even help.
The university system is a mess, and while I am indeed very happy and consider myself very fortunate to have a teaching job at all this fall, the pay difference between adjuncts and even simple lecturers -- leaving the tenure-track associate and assistant professor people completely out of the equation -- is nothing short of criminal. Adjuncts scrape by -- they do it because they have to, and colleges and universities know that and capitalize on it. One of our former GTAs who graduated two years ago (and was adjuncting for us up until recently), finally got a job at a local community college where they began paying her an actual, somewhat live-able salary...at the cost of her agreeing to teach seven different classes this semester alone. If that community college has a 25-person cap on each class and each class is full, that's 175 students. If those classes each have four papers per semester on average (as my 101 classes do, for example's sake) that's 700 papers to grade over the course of sixteen weeks. Simply to be able to make...what, $10k more a year? $15k more?
Is it worth it?
I'd rather shoot myself than do that for anything less than $100-150k a year. And I'd damn well better have full health, eye, and dental coverage as well. Right now, I have thirty students, and am still having trouble remembering some of their names occasionally, a full month into the semester. In three weeks, I'll get twenty more students. I don't know how I would deal with 175 students. It's not even realistically comparable, and yet, there it is.
I just don't want to be over eighty with cancer and unable to retire because, in my career, there's no such thing as "retirement." I don't want to live into old age having never made more than $20k a year, having never owned a new car or actual health/life/etc insurance or owned a home.
It's all too fucking depressing.
I have to go shopping tonight while I'm awake; I can no longer avoid it. I am out (or nearly out) of the three C's -- coffee, cat litter, and cigarettes. As two of those are the only things that keep me somewhat sane every day, and the third stops the house from constantly smelling of cat excrement, I have no choice. I'm awake, quite possibly until I return home again from teaching tomorrow, and have little else to do in the overnight hours but shower and take care of chores. Well, shopping (sadly) is one of my chores. And I certainly don't want to do it over the weekend when I need to be sleeping and recuperating to make myself feel normal again. When I got up, I made coffee, noted (by seeing her posts on Facebook) that Daisy was out for the evening with one of her friends, as is customary for her on Wednesday nights, and paid my cable bill that arrived in the mail yesterday (there's another $57 gone). What I really want to do, though I don't know if it's what I'll actually do, is get something quick and easy to eat from Walmart -- Hot Pockets or something like that, something different than what I normally eat -- and get the DVD of World War Z, and spend the rest of my night in relaxation before I have to teach in the morning. I have so, so few luxuries in life. Spending a night with cheap, more-bad-for-me-than-good food and a new movie is really all I have time for anymore during the semester. It's not much different when Daisy is here, either. At least I can justify it by having not slept well all week, and having felt like shit since...oh, Sunday or so.
In the morning, I shall teach, and it shall be as short of a class as possible. Workshops yesterday went well enough, I suppose, though I had more absences in that class yesterday than I've had all semester, and it was still -- for the first one or two students up for workshop, anyway -- like pulling teeth to get them to talk about their peers' papers. Tomorrow it's a little different. We have one workshop paper left to get through (one of those aforementioned absences yesterday) and then peer-review for the rest of the class. Their final copies come in on Tuesday, and I start the next unit then -- meaning that I have to ready the assignment sheets and the like for them over this weekend.
In the meantime? Bad food and zombies. And sleep.
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Normality
Fall semester: day twenty-two
I am ill. With something, anyway. I've been feeling sick since yesterday. I don't know if it's allergies, fatigue, stress, or if I'm coming down with something, but I've been sick to my stomach a lot (heartburn, indigestion, general unease) and my joints are all stiff and sore. I came home from teaching yesterday afternoon and my knees and ankles just ached, and my legs felt all weak and wobbly and sort of pained (similar to "growing pains" all of us had as kids). Yes, I could probably chalk it up to the rain and storms that have been rolling through the area for the past two days making me more allergic and fatigued than usual, but it's more than that. Every time I eat something, even if I'm ravenously hungry beforehand, I get sick to my stomach and feel unwell for an hour or two afterwards -- sometimes, like tonight in the overnight hours, to the point of cold sweats and dizziness. I've been like this for the past three or four days, and every time I eat, the same thing happens.
Amusingly enough, this does not happen when I sit here and pound coffee in an attempt to make myself alert and feel normal again. When I feel ill after eating, drinking a few glasses of cold filtered water from the fridge over the span of an hour or two usually helps quite a bit, as well. I'm not sure why. It's not that I'm incredibly thirsty, and I'm not dehydrated or anything like that...I just feel, well, ill.
Yesterday morning, I went over to payroll to pick up my check, and signed off on the paperwork for it. It was explained to me, in detail, what the whole "advance" nature of the check was, and what they meant by it, so here goes -- this is the best I can explain it from what I was told: because I wasn't in payroll for August's check, none of my "hours" (their term, not mine) have arrived in payroll or have yet been tallied up -- not even now. The "advance" was based on anticipated pay based on the hours that will roll in for the check on the 27th. In essence, it means I've been paid for hours that haven't been put on the books yet, and I've been paid out of a different set of university funds because of that. I had to sign a form that authorized the payroll department to -- once they get my tallied hours/info/etc for the 27th's check (which will be an entire month's amount of pay and time) to go back in and retroactively deduct the amount I was just paid on Friday so that the rest of my checks will normalize. In effect, it really is an advance in that sense. Payroll will get my hours for the month this week, and in the interim between the end of this week and the check on the 27th, they'll deduct the amount paid to me on Friday, and I'll be left with a normal paycheck.
Hopefully that makes sense. I understood it when the payroll lady explained it to me.
"I hope this doesn't mean that I'm going to have to go over there to pick up a paper check every two weeks," I told the office administrator this morning. "Because that's a huge pain in the ass when I have to mail my check back home to WV to deposit it."
"No, no," she replied, "all of your info is still in the system. They can't DD those 'advance' checks because of the funds they pay them with. Payroll said in that email I forwarded to you that all of your other checks will be paid normally."
This is true; I remembered that after she said it.
As for the check itself, it's a simple paper check that I bound with a deposit slip and note for my mother in an envelope, and it's being mailed home today. I need it in my account more than I need the cash in hand, especially as I'll have more bills coming due before the end of the month, and will actually have to get some more groceries again over the course of the next several days or so -- my last trip to Walmart was for "essentials only," because I never want to spend any more money than I have to, and when I'm not only busy but almost constantly sleep-deprived, fighting my way through the throngs of idiot mouth-breathers at Walmart makes me want to stab people in the eyes with a Bic pen. It becomes a chore, a battle of wits with my patience. I can't go shopping in the middle of the night anymore unless I don't have to teach the next morning, because shopping in and of itself makes me even more tired, which is a very bad thing when I'm as constantly fatigued as I am now.
I came home yesterday afternoon, driving through misting rain and fog (I had to turn on my headlights and keep them on for the entire drive, even though it was after noon), ate a little bit, talked to Rae for a while on Facebook, and then went to bed around 5PM. I sent Daisy (who had gone to bed about an hour or so before I got home) a message telling her I needed to sleep, and went downstairs to pass out.
When I awoke, it was dark -- but then again, it had been dark the entire day anyhow. I'd only slept for a little more than four hours; it was barely 10PM. And, once more, I was wide awake. There was no going back to sleep. I don't know why my body does this to me, this cycle of "well, it's a weeknight and you really need your sleep, so I'm going to fuck you over and force you to get up so that you don't get it" shit, but it's tiring. Pun intended. This only really happens during the week. It's like I have some sort of subconscious block installed in my brain, a subtle internal revolt against my new daily schedule that my body is trying to pull on me. My body doesn't like leaving the house for several hours a day four days a week to do a job. My body doesn't like responsibility. My body doesn't like the fact that I can no longer go to bed at 4AM and wake up naturally whenever I want to. So, it fights me. It fights me at every turn, it fights me and does shit specifically to piss me off, such as waking me up after a short four hours of sleep, or making me feel incredibly ill for an hour or two after I eat anything as a form of protest. I seriously think it does it just to fuck with me, like a fussy child would throw a temper tantrum to get its way.
Once I was awake and mobile, no matter how tired I was (and still am) there was no point in, or ability to, go back to bed. No, I'm up and now have to force myself to stay up whether I like it or not, lest I end up feeling even worse if I try to go back to sleep and get up again later, or sleep through the time I would teach my class this morning. I told Daisy (who is at work) that I would more than likely be coming home this morning around 11, quickly eating something small (so that I don't get super-ill again) and would be going back to bed and actually sleeping, even if it meant that I had to take melatonin or something beforehand to ensure that I actually stayed asleep for more than four hours. I felt like sobbing to her. I keep telling myself that I only have to be awake for five more hours, I told her. I could be asleep in ten minutes were I to go back downstairs now, but I can't -- I have to teach today. I have to get gas in the car and drive 56 miles, round-trip, to go over my students' workshop copies one by one until the class period runs out. I have to be awake until all of this is done, I have to be awake (and probably deliriously tired and somewhat delusional) until my schedule allows me to actually rest again. I always feel like I'm walking through a constant thin fog these days. That's my life -- always being just awake enough to barely function and perform the duties of my job, and being miserable the rest of the time. I'm so miserable because I'm so sleep-deprived and feeling ill that I feel like I could burst into tears at any time in frustration.
I just want to feel normal again. I just want to feel like myself.
Now you watch; I'll come back home from teaching this morning and I will be wired and unable to sleep, because my body likes to torture me both physically and psychologically.
The weather really isn't helping; it's near perfect sleeping weather, with it being 66, foggy, and damp outside. I love this sort of weather regardless -- my ideal temperatures, my ideal weather conditions -- but when I'm so tired it's like it's mocking me. And I again remind myself that even after today, my week is only half over. Fuck, just shoot me.
At this point, the pot of coffee I've drank since, oh, 2AM is barely even keeping me on an even keel. It's keeping me just awake and alert enough to stay that way. I know I can't keep doing this forever. I envision nights where, long after Daisy and I are married, I am awake with bloodshot eyes and sitting here at my desk because even then I'll be unable to sleep or get any rest due to my schedule, and because my body is an asshole it deprives her any ability to get me to sleep next to her. I don't want that to happen. That can't be my life. It already happens too much when she's here to visit -- many hours she sleeps are spent sleeping alone, because I cannot force my body to listen to me.
"You can't keep abusing your body and then get upset when it doesn't do what you want it to do," she told me earlier this week.
"I don't have a choice," I told her. "I don't get to magically say that I want to teach my classes in the middle of the night, when for some reason my body forces me to be awake even though I desperately need sleep. I don't get to pick the time that I want to leave the house to go teach, I don't get to do things my way. My body has to realize that it needs to listen to me whether it likes it or not."
I really do want to weep in frustration sometimes. I'm not making that up.
Up until about an hour ago, Pete was running through the house, back and forth, at full speed -- chasing the girls, making them hiss, bursting through my bedroom door with such force and speed that it would fly open and hit the doorstop on the wall behind it. He tried to jump into the shower with me when I was in there, he runs and jumps up on the counters, sinks, and tables, and does not appear to understand the phrase "PLEASE GO THE FUCK TO BED ALREADY." I desperately hope this means that he'll sleep with me today when I get home, because I have absolutely no patience for that shit when I'm trying to sleep. When I feel like this, my patience is already worn really thin anyhow.
As an example of this, I asked my 011 students yesterday how many of them had actually done the reading they'd been assigned (a whopping two-and-a-half pages, a 500-word short nonfiction piece) for class discussion. Only five out of the fifteen of them raised their hands, and then one of them spoke up:
"I don't have time for this; I have a two-year-old, I have work, and I have assignments to read and work on for all of my other classes."
"That's not my problem," I said flatly, "and that's not an excuse. When I assign you a reading, I expect you to do it. Your personal life, other classes, or children are not my concern. If you don't do the work that's assigned to you, you're not going to pass your classes. Get used to being in college, because this is what it's like."
Translation: Don't you DARE come into *my* classroom and tell me that what I've assigned isn't important enough for you to actually do, simply because you can't be bothered to do it.
She immediately looked down in shame once I said this and said nothing more. Good.
Again, I'm a pretty easygoing professor, but I don't tolerate insubordination or smart-ass comments like that, and I certainly will bring the hammer down on someone, or an entire class, who doesn't do the assigned work if I deem it necessary to do so. Was my response a bit harsh? Maybe. Was it warranted? Absolutely. I will put the fear of God into these kids if I have to, especially the slackers, and they'll either rise to the occasion or they'll drop the class and take it again next semester with someone else. Regardless, it's a win-win situation for me.
I am thankful that my 101 students aren't like that. Those students show up, they do their work, and they don't give me any shit about it.
As mentioned before, this week is workshop week for my 101 students. It's bittersweet, because though I don't have to do any lesson planning for them this week, workshop weeks are the only weeks of the entire semester where I'm virtually guaranteed to be in class the full 75 minutes each day. Most of my classes end up being about 40-45 minutes most of the time, especially the smaller classes, because once I'm done with my lesson for the day, I'm done with my lesson for the day. I'm not going to force my students to do busywork or needless group activities or anything like that if it doesn't benefit them and just keeps us all there longer. I'm a big proponent of the let's-teach-and-GTFO philosophy. Why make them sit there any longer than they have to? That means I have to as well. I'd much rather be at home. I'm sure they would as well.
Because of the cooler weather this morning and the off-chance of getting caught in a possible downpour either on the way to campus or on the way back, I have broken out one of my fleece jackets -- not a hoodie, mind you, just one of my zip-up jackets I bought several years ago at Target. Doing this also allows me to wear whatever I want underneath it; today it's an Angry Birds: Star Wars t-shirt I got on clearance from Walmart several months ago. This is another big reason I'm looking forward to "hoodie weather," as mentioned before. I also figure that if I wear it during class, it'll keep me awake since I can't get tired when I'm hot.
So, yes, my plan for the day is clear: leave the house. Teach. Come home. Sleep as long as humanly possible.
I am ill. With something, anyway. I've been feeling sick since yesterday. I don't know if it's allergies, fatigue, stress, or if I'm coming down with something, but I've been sick to my stomach a lot (heartburn, indigestion, general unease) and my joints are all stiff and sore. I came home from teaching yesterday afternoon and my knees and ankles just ached, and my legs felt all weak and wobbly and sort of pained (similar to "growing pains" all of us had as kids). Yes, I could probably chalk it up to the rain and storms that have been rolling through the area for the past two days making me more allergic and fatigued than usual, but it's more than that. Every time I eat something, even if I'm ravenously hungry beforehand, I get sick to my stomach and feel unwell for an hour or two afterwards -- sometimes, like tonight in the overnight hours, to the point of cold sweats and dizziness. I've been like this for the past three or four days, and every time I eat, the same thing happens.
Amusingly enough, this does not happen when I sit here and pound coffee in an attempt to make myself alert and feel normal again. When I feel ill after eating, drinking a few glasses of cold filtered water from the fridge over the span of an hour or two usually helps quite a bit, as well. I'm not sure why. It's not that I'm incredibly thirsty, and I'm not dehydrated or anything like that...I just feel, well, ill.
Yesterday morning, I went over to payroll to pick up my check, and signed off on the paperwork for it. It was explained to me, in detail, what the whole "advance" nature of the check was, and what they meant by it, so here goes -- this is the best I can explain it from what I was told: because I wasn't in payroll for August's check, none of my "hours" (their term, not mine) have arrived in payroll or have yet been tallied up -- not even now. The "advance" was based on anticipated pay based on the hours that will roll in for the check on the 27th. In essence, it means I've been paid for hours that haven't been put on the books yet, and I've been paid out of a different set of university funds because of that. I had to sign a form that authorized the payroll department to -- once they get my tallied hours/info/etc for the 27th's check (which will be an entire month's amount of pay and time) to go back in and retroactively deduct the amount I was just paid on Friday so that the rest of my checks will normalize. In effect, it really is an advance in that sense. Payroll will get my hours for the month this week, and in the interim between the end of this week and the check on the 27th, they'll deduct the amount paid to me on Friday, and I'll be left with a normal paycheck.
Hopefully that makes sense. I understood it when the payroll lady explained it to me.
"I hope this doesn't mean that I'm going to have to go over there to pick up a paper check every two weeks," I told the office administrator this morning. "Because that's a huge pain in the ass when I have to mail my check back home to WV to deposit it."
"No, no," she replied, "all of your info is still in the system. They can't DD those 'advance' checks because of the funds they pay them with. Payroll said in that email I forwarded to you that all of your other checks will be paid normally."
This is true; I remembered that after she said it.
As for the check itself, it's a simple paper check that I bound with a deposit slip and note for my mother in an envelope, and it's being mailed home today. I need it in my account more than I need the cash in hand, especially as I'll have more bills coming due before the end of the month, and will actually have to get some more groceries again over the course of the next several days or so -- my last trip to Walmart was for "essentials only," because I never want to spend any more money than I have to, and when I'm not only busy but almost constantly sleep-deprived, fighting my way through the throngs of idiot mouth-breathers at Walmart makes me want to stab people in the eyes with a Bic pen. It becomes a chore, a battle of wits with my patience. I can't go shopping in the middle of the night anymore unless I don't have to teach the next morning, because shopping in and of itself makes me even more tired, which is a very bad thing when I'm as constantly fatigued as I am now.
I came home yesterday afternoon, driving through misting rain and fog (I had to turn on my headlights and keep them on for the entire drive, even though it was after noon), ate a little bit, talked to Rae for a while on Facebook, and then went to bed around 5PM. I sent Daisy (who had gone to bed about an hour or so before I got home) a message telling her I needed to sleep, and went downstairs to pass out.
When I awoke, it was dark -- but then again, it had been dark the entire day anyhow. I'd only slept for a little more than four hours; it was barely 10PM. And, once more, I was wide awake. There was no going back to sleep. I don't know why my body does this to me, this cycle of "well, it's a weeknight and you really need your sleep, so I'm going to fuck you over and force you to get up so that you don't get it" shit, but it's tiring. Pun intended. This only really happens during the week. It's like I have some sort of subconscious block installed in my brain, a subtle internal revolt against my new daily schedule that my body is trying to pull on me. My body doesn't like leaving the house for several hours a day four days a week to do a job. My body doesn't like responsibility. My body doesn't like the fact that I can no longer go to bed at 4AM and wake up naturally whenever I want to. So, it fights me. It fights me at every turn, it fights me and does shit specifically to piss me off, such as waking me up after a short four hours of sleep, or making me feel incredibly ill for an hour or two after I eat anything as a form of protest. I seriously think it does it just to fuck with me, like a fussy child would throw a temper tantrum to get its way.
Once I was awake and mobile, no matter how tired I was (and still am) there was no point in, or ability to, go back to bed. No, I'm up and now have to force myself to stay up whether I like it or not, lest I end up feeling even worse if I try to go back to sleep and get up again later, or sleep through the time I would teach my class this morning. I told Daisy (who is at work) that I would more than likely be coming home this morning around 11, quickly eating something small (so that I don't get super-ill again) and would be going back to bed and actually sleeping, even if it meant that I had to take melatonin or something beforehand to ensure that I actually stayed asleep for more than four hours. I felt like sobbing to her. I keep telling myself that I only have to be awake for five more hours, I told her. I could be asleep in ten minutes were I to go back downstairs now, but I can't -- I have to teach today. I have to get gas in the car and drive 56 miles, round-trip, to go over my students' workshop copies one by one until the class period runs out. I have to be awake until all of this is done, I have to be awake (and probably deliriously tired and somewhat delusional) until my schedule allows me to actually rest again. I always feel like I'm walking through a constant thin fog these days. That's my life -- always being just awake enough to barely function and perform the duties of my job, and being miserable the rest of the time. I'm so miserable because I'm so sleep-deprived and feeling ill that I feel like I could burst into tears at any time in frustration.
I just want to feel normal again. I just want to feel like myself.
Now you watch; I'll come back home from teaching this morning and I will be wired and unable to sleep, because my body likes to torture me both physically and psychologically.
The weather really isn't helping; it's near perfect sleeping weather, with it being 66, foggy, and damp outside. I love this sort of weather regardless -- my ideal temperatures, my ideal weather conditions -- but when I'm so tired it's like it's mocking me. And I again remind myself that even after today, my week is only half over. Fuck, just shoot me.
At this point, the pot of coffee I've drank since, oh, 2AM is barely even keeping me on an even keel. It's keeping me just awake and alert enough to stay that way. I know I can't keep doing this forever. I envision nights where, long after Daisy and I are married, I am awake with bloodshot eyes and sitting here at my desk because even then I'll be unable to sleep or get any rest due to my schedule, and because my body is an asshole it deprives her any ability to get me to sleep next to her. I don't want that to happen. That can't be my life. It already happens too much when she's here to visit -- many hours she sleeps are spent sleeping alone, because I cannot force my body to listen to me.
"You can't keep abusing your body and then get upset when it doesn't do what you want it to do," she told me earlier this week.
"I don't have a choice," I told her. "I don't get to magically say that I want to teach my classes in the middle of the night, when for some reason my body forces me to be awake even though I desperately need sleep. I don't get to pick the time that I want to leave the house to go teach, I don't get to do things my way. My body has to realize that it needs to listen to me whether it likes it or not."
I really do want to weep in frustration sometimes. I'm not making that up.
Up until about an hour ago, Pete was running through the house, back and forth, at full speed -- chasing the girls, making them hiss, bursting through my bedroom door with such force and speed that it would fly open and hit the doorstop on the wall behind it. He tried to jump into the shower with me when I was in there, he runs and jumps up on the counters, sinks, and tables, and does not appear to understand the phrase "PLEASE GO THE FUCK TO BED ALREADY." I desperately hope this means that he'll sleep with me today when I get home, because I have absolutely no patience for that shit when I'm trying to sleep. When I feel like this, my patience is already worn really thin anyhow.
As an example of this, I asked my 011 students yesterday how many of them had actually done the reading they'd been assigned (a whopping two-and-a-half pages, a 500-word short nonfiction piece) for class discussion. Only five out of the fifteen of them raised their hands, and then one of them spoke up:
"I don't have time for this; I have a two-year-old, I have work, and I have assignments to read and work on for all of my other classes."
"That's not my problem," I said flatly, "and that's not an excuse. When I assign you a reading, I expect you to do it. Your personal life, other classes, or children are not my concern. If you don't do the work that's assigned to you, you're not going to pass your classes. Get used to being in college, because this is what it's like."
Translation: Don't you DARE come into *my* classroom and tell me that what I've assigned isn't important enough for you to actually do, simply because you can't be bothered to do it.
She immediately looked down in shame once I said this and said nothing more. Good.
Again, I'm a pretty easygoing professor, but I don't tolerate insubordination or smart-ass comments like that, and I certainly will bring the hammer down on someone, or an entire class, who doesn't do the assigned work if I deem it necessary to do so. Was my response a bit harsh? Maybe. Was it warranted? Absolutely. I will put the fear of God into these kids if I have to, especially the slackers, and they'll either rise to the occasion or they'll drop the class and take it again next semester with someone else. Regardless, it's a win-win situation for me.
I am thankful that my 101 students aren't like that. Those students show up, they do their work, and they don't give me any shit about it.
As mentioned before, this week is workshop week for my 101 students. It's bittersweet, because though I don't have to do any lesson planning for them this week, workshop weeks are the only weeks of the entire semester where I'm virtually guaranteed to be in class the full 75 minutes each day. Most of my classes end up being about 40-45 minutes most of the time, especially the smaller classes, because once I'm done with my lesson for the day, I'm done with my lesson for the day. I'm not going to force my students to do busywork or needless group activities or anything like that if it doesn't benefit them and just keeps us all there longer. I'm a big proponent of the let's-teach-and-GTFO philosophy. Why make them sit there any longer than they have to? That means I have to as well. I'd much rather be at home. I'm sure they would as well.
Because of the cooler weather this morning and the off-chance of getting caught in a possible downpour either on the way to campus or on the way back, I have broken out one of my fleece jackets -- not a hoodie, mind you, just one of my zip-up jackets I bought several years ago at Target. Doing this also allows me to wear whatever I want underneath it; today it's an Angry Birds: Star Wars t-shirt I got on clearance from Walmart several months ago. This is another big reason I'm looking forward to "hoodie weather," as mentioned before. I also figure that if I wear it during class, it'll keep me awake since I can't get tired when I'm hot.
So, yes, my plan for the day is clear: leave the house. Teach. Come home. Sleep as long as humanly possible.
News Large and Small
Fall semester: day twenty-one
I'm basically a quarter through the semester at this point, or a little more. Not that I ever have any time or presence of calm mind to really notice most of the time. In an average semester there are around eighty days (including breaks) and a six-day finals week -- the finals here start on a Saturday, not that any English classes have Saturday finals to the best of my knowledge. Next week I'll be collecting my papers from both of my current classes, and as soon as I'm done grading through those, I'll be making up lesson plans to follow for my third class (I won't have time to do so otherwise, since that class starts on the 10th and Daisy will be here for several days the week beforehand). So, because I can rapidly see my free time coming to an end rather soon, here are some things -- big and small -- going on in my life.
So yeah, there's this stuff. More coming later this week.
I'm basically a quarter through the semester at this point, or a little more. Not that I ever have any time or presence of calm mind to really notice most of the time. In an average semester there are around eighty days (including breaks) and a six-day finals week -- the finals here start on a Saturday, not that any English classes have Saturday finals to the best of my knowledge. Next week I'll be collecting my papers from both of my current classes, and as soon as I'm done grading through those, I'll be making up lesson plans to follow for my third class (I won't have time to do so otherwise, since that class starts on the 10th and Daisy will be here for several days the week beforehand). So, because I can rapidly see my free time coming to an end rather soon, here are some things -- big and small -- going on in my life.
- The white-trash, redneck family across the street from me -- the ones with the "yard car" and the heavily-pregnant woman with two (loud, uncontrolled) kids already who sat on her porch and chainsmoked until she did, eventually, have the third kid -- are gone. They spent the past few weeks moving everything out of their house, and have since completely vacated the premises. While the landlord has not yet put up a "for rent" sign in front of the house, he and cleaning crews/maintenance people have been there working on the house to get it ready for renters, and I've seen at least two new sets of people (who looked, unfortunately, to be of the same kind of people who lived there before) come to look at the place and leave with paperwork -- the application and background check form he requires.
- Shortly before those people left, their "friends" next door to me (two doors down on the right) and their other cohorts across the street -- the guy who used to have loud, screaming fights with his girlfriend and who played terrible music at incredibly loud volumes at all hours of the day and night -- left as well. Good. This leaves the neighborhood as it was when I moved in. Translation: no fucking screaming kids, loud music, or the cops frequently showing up to haul people off. Just me and a bunch of quiet senior citizens, which is how I like it.
- It's supposed to rain all day today, starting at around noon (read: when I'll be coming home from teaching). On Thursday it did the same thing, which made it a slow drive home as the rains were hard and driving with big wind gusts, making it almost impossible to see without running my wipers at full speed. Last night, it stormed pretty good for a while, and I put my car in the garage because we were under a severe thunderstorm warning for about an hour, and The Weather Channel said this storm had 60mph winds and half-dollar-sized hail (as I mentioned in my last post). It didn't. It rained for a bit and thundered some, and that was it. I went to bed pissed off because I knew I would have to take the car out of the garage this morning in the dark when it's hard enough to move that landboat in and out of it when it's light. If I had a compact car, this wouldn't be a problem, but I don't -- I have a long, wide "sports car." Geico, my insurance company, classifies it as a "sports car," anyway. Probably part of why my insurance is so expensive.
- I didn't feel well last night; my stomach was bothering me, and my allergies were going crazy (probably because of the storm). I didn't even talk to Daisy; once she was awake, I sent her a message telling her that I was exhausted and felt terrible, and I went to bed around 7:30 or so. I was out like a light, despite the fact that I'd gotten up around noon yesterday, and slept until 2:30 this morning. When I got up, I talked to her for a little while (she's at work, of course) and finally got a shower and did some stuff around the house, including a bit of final prep work for my students.
- Also, when I got up, I had terrible heartburn and sour stomach that was only alleviated once I chewed some Tums. I had to get rid of it ASAP; there's no time for that when I need to wake up and start chugging coffee in order to remain sane and functional throughout the day.
- I think I have a mild allergic reaction to the alcohol-based colognes and aftershaves I use, but only on my hands. They don't get swollen up or anything, but they do get what I call "allergy blisters," where clusters of those fluid-filled blisters pop up under the skin, similar to an allergic reaction to poison ivy or something like that. This is how I learned I was allergic to latex, too -- the same thing used to happen (though much worse) when I was a newspaper delivery boy in middle school, when for hours every morning I would be forced to rubber-band papers together before delivery. I never get the blisters anywhere else but on my hands, and they're not itchy or anything, just irritating. Oh well; I can't do anything about it. After a few days they dry up and disappear.
- This morning I have to go pick up my paycheck from the payroll office once I get to school. I have to mail it to my parents ASAP so that it can get put into my bank account without issue. Yesterday afternoon, I paid the bills that I currently have, so until the next set of them comes in (electric and cable, the latter of which will probably arrive today) I'm good. I am, however, a bit more worried about my electric bill than I have been as of late, since for about three weeks straight I was running the AC every day when it was 95-103 or so outside all the time.
- Daisy sent me the first picture I've seen of the inside of our wedding location tonight. It's...adequate, I suppose. It looks fairly small from the photo, but I would imagine that's the angle the photo was taken from and Daisy's camera. I'm fine with it; I didn't want anything fancy or artsy-fartsy anyhow -- remember, I'm the guy who originally wanted a Vegas wedding, or a wedding outside in the woods somewhere.
So yeah, there's this stuff. More coming later this week.
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