Fall semester: day seventeen
Days off seem to evaporate into thin air very quickly, and even with a constant three-day weekend, I can never seem to have enough time to rest and recuperate after a week where I've been constantly on-the-go. I'm still not sleeping that well; while I was able to get some decent rest over the weekend, and last night as well, I am always feeling tired or lagged-out. It's a miracle that yesterday I was able to make it to almost 10:30 PM -- after eating, even, twice -- before I felt the need to crash out.
Yesterday morning, I finally took my laptop, coffee, and Powerbars back to the office. My office feels like an actual office again, or at least as close as it's probably going to feel to one. No, it's not my old office. It's never going to be my old office, comfortable and worn with the walls plastered in posters and cartoons. But it's an office, and it's an office which will do for now. After giving my old coffee pot to a friend, I procured an abandoned one last week from the student lounge (I say "abandoned" because it's been in there for all going-on-four-years now that I've been at the university, and had 1/4 inch of dust on it from sitting in the same place), and thus prevented the need to bring in my old spare pot from home. If nobody else is going to use it, I will. You snooze, you lose, new GTAs. Once I get a power system of some sort for the speakers I have (or, barring that, bring in a small radio with an aux input), I'll be able to listen to my iPod in there as well, and will actually feel normal and at home again in an office. I may not even bother; I'm only in there for a few hours in the morning twice a week.
My payroll status, however, is still up in the air. I filled out all the necessary forms and procedural stuff for the background check (which is now conducted online), and when I finished it last Wednesday night, I sent it off to the university. By Thursday afternoon, I had a full copy of it in my email. Whatever company the university does background check forms through is unique in that they send me a copy of the complete report as well. I've never seen that before. Obviously, there's nothing on there -- I told the Director and the office administrator this morning that it "gave me the opportunity to read through everything I haven't done" -- but I found it to be really neat; it had my last seven years of addresses and clean criminal checks from three states, and gave a breakdown of everything I'd been scanned for and all of the nothing that came up. Since it was finished so quickly, it's in the university's hands now, and my payroll has been redone to include it.
Here's the thing, however -- apparently, in order to get me paid on schedule (which would be on Friday) the department has to file some sort of petition to get me back on the original schedule, since it kicked back the original info because the background check wasn't on file. Now that it is, yes, I can begin receiving paychecks...except since because it wasn't on file before, I wasn't listed on the payroll for this coming Friday because that info was kicked back. Now that everything is in the system and ready-to-go, in order for me to get paid before the 27th they have to do some sort of audit to get me put on there again for this week -- normally something that is either impossible or is never approved by the payroll department anyhow -- but they're trying to push it through because none of this was my fault, and I sort of got dicked over by the system ("red tape," as the Director called it this morning). This isn't something the department has to do by any means; I'd still get paid on the 27th as my first check regardless if they couldn't push it through, but they're trying to do so as a favor to me for making me wait even this long, and since it's such a unique case where I didn't do anything wrong, they're trying to take care of it and fix it. That doesn't mean it will actually happen, but apparently it's now in the hands of what the payroll department decides to do.
As mentioned before, I'm not going to run out of money if I have to wait three more weeks total to get paid instead of three more days; that's not a problem. Yeah, I'll have to budget a little more over those three weeks, and will have to do my grocery shopping and paying of bills a little more carefully on a more precisely-timed schedule than the usual, but I'm not going to go broke or anything like that. Even if I run low and end up getting paid on the 27th as my first check, there's still four more days there in the interim afterwards that I would have to get the rent to the landlord, for example, and mail in this town only takes a day. So no, I'm not really worried about money right now. I've survived for much longer on much less. I will say, however, that what the department is trying to do to hurry it along is exceedingly nice of them -- and I personally, quietly thanked the office administrator in private this morning for all that she does, especially all she's done with my stuff over the course of the past two weeks or so, since I know she doesn't hear it enough.
In the meantime, I've paid the bills I have, paying off over $112 of my $212 credit card bill (so that I can free up some space on there for gas) and have taken care of everything else that's come in. So much of everything these days is a waiting game, as I've mentioned here before -- I'm either waiting for something to happen, waiting to get paid, waiting for enough time to pass before I can do some sort of task myself, etc. Everything in my life exists in carefully-metered time, time that can't really be altered that much.
Daisy told me last night that sometime in the next few weeks she wants to come back down for another visit, and I honestly told her that I don't know how or when that would be possible at this juncture. This is because this weekend I will have a set of student workshop copies to work on, the following week I'll be workshopping in class, the next class day after that I'll collect all of those papers, and then the very next day I'll be collecting the papers from my other class. I'll grade all of those, then I'll collect journals. By the time I grade the journals, it's midterm and I'll have to calculate midterm grades, and then my third class, the Business Writing class, starts a month from today, and I'm stuck on West campus (or at least in the immediate surrounding area) for thirteen hours per day twice a week from then until early December. Of course, in the interim I also have to be rewriting and reworking an old syllabus and weekly lesson plan for that class, and have to start once more searching and applying for other teaching jobs which would start in the spring in order to better secure financial stability for the foreseeable future. Oh, and lest we not forget that my first student loan payment is due in late November, and I'll have to spend another $300 to renew my car insurance again in December and AHHHHHH!
See what I mean, folks? It's harder to plan things out than it looks.
"I'd like to be able to come down again before you start teaching that other class," Daisy said. "I can do it anytime as long as you give me some advance notice."
She asked me to look at my schedule(s) and see if I could plot the best time to do it and then tell her when, basically. I'm okay with that, but doing that is a lot harder than it looks when student work begins to ramp up and start pouring in. The easiest time (theoretically) would be the 24th through the 27th, as that's the week I'm collecting my first papers, but that's only "easy" if I get paid this week. I spend a lot of money when Daisy's here, whether I plan to or not -- I fill her gas tank at least once, I have to get vegan food for our meals, we go out to a movie, etc -- and if I don't get paid until the 27th, I really don't have the funds for any of that extraneous stuff between now and then. I'm not going to tell Daisy "hey, sure, come down when you want, but you have to pay for everything we eat/do." Mainly because I'm not an asshole.
As for my own life I feel rather scatterbrained right now -- for example, after spending twenty minutes yesterday morning on the main campus making copies of everything I would need for my class today, I (of course) had a brain fart and left all of them there on my desk in my office instead of stuffing them into my bag to take with me back home and to class today. This means that while gathering my things this morning to prep for class (since I'm also scatterbrained enough to not even think about doing that before I went to bed last night) I realized that I had three different handouts that I was going over today, and without them, I have no lesson whatsoever. This means that I had to print out close to fifty pages on my own printer, stapling some of these pages myself, in order to actually be able to teach this morning. Obviously, I'm not normally this frazzled. Last week when I went to teach on West campus, I forgot my cigarettes and lighter at home, which (as you could probably guess) did not make me that happy. This morning, because it was so hot yesterday and I was sweaty, I had to leap into the shower for a five-minute scrubdown in order to make myself look and feel somewhat presentable, and I still feel restless, frazzled, and ill-prepared for class. I'm a third of the way through the semester, folks. I should've hit my stride by this point and I shouldn't feel so scattered all the time. It's not even a sleep issue for the most part, but a "holy shit, I have to get up and do this every day whether I want to or not" issue. Again, I love my job, I love teaching, but it's not like a teacher's job ever truly stops until those final grades are entered and the semester ends. That's why it's so difficult to schedule time for visits with Daisy -- I always have to meter my time and keep constantly thinking a week or two in advance, and that's really hard for me to do. I've always been a "take it day by day" sort of person. Teaching twice a week, when I was a GTA, was a lot more manageable, at least mentally. I taught two classes twice a week and they were the same classes with the same lesson plans, on the same campus, and when I was done, I did the necessary work for them and had a breather before I had to do it again. Now, with two different courses on alternating days and with a third one starting in a month, I'm dreadfully out-of-sync and feel like there's always something else to do, something constantly hanging over my head, and I can't get into a "groove," so to speak, because my schedule alternates back and forth, back and forth, from one campus to the other and back again.
On that note, I need to go; I must put gas in the car before my drive to West campus this morning (part of why I paid off a large chunk of my credit card bill, as mentioned above). My week isn't even half over yet.
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