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.