Forewarned is Forearmed

Fall semester: day sixty-seven

Sunday was the last day of "grace" on my student loans, as you know. Yesterday was the first day they entered "repayment" status, not that anyone at the loan servicer told me -- which, really, is a bit surprising. They emailed me to tell me my loans had entered grace two days after graduation; I got that email when I was in Omaha with Daisy, visiting her family that week.

I logged onto their website this morning, and it still shows that my payment due is $0.00. Okay, well, maybe they haven't updated their information yet. Who knows. You'd think it would all be automated. Or, perhaps, they've seen in their records that I applied for forbearance and it's been redone and granted, but I haven't gotten the paperwork yet. Perhaps a human actually read my email and redid it, but I haven't heard anything from them yet in email or by mail. I don't know. Really, I don't. According to the statement I have in my kitchen, my first payment is due on the 11th of December.

This leaves me in a tricky spot with few options. While I could redo the forbearance form I sent them before in the span of a few minutes, and fax it in today or tomorrow, if it says my balance due is still $0.00 on my account there, it's likely to get kicked back to me again -- especially if this is indicative of someone actually working on my account in the meantime. I jumped the gun a bit before; I don't want to do it again. However, if nothing changes over the next few days, and I get no further emails, bills, or letters or anything like that, I've got little choice -- I have two days at the maximum to make a decision on what to do, as if I need to fax those forms, I won't be able to have access to a fax machine after Thursday for over a full week. With that due date being on the 11th and me not getting back on campus after Thursday until the 2nd, if I don't send those forms again this week I risk my forbearance not being processed in time, even if they're faxed.

Daisy tells me her parents have a fax machine (Dad is an IT guru), but I don't want to cost them money by sending a fax while I'm up there over part of next week unless it absolutely cannot be avoided, obviously. And I'm not going to pay five bucks to send a fax from a grocery store or copy center if I can avoid that, too. So, really, it's more of a waiting game as always. I'll weigh my options for the next 36 hours or so and figure out what I can -- or should -- do.

In the meantime, life goes on as normal. This is my last teaching week of November -- my last real teaching week of the semester, really -- and with it comes a lot of work to do which will keep me busy/stressed/swamped for the vast majority of it. I have so much to do that I wrote out a daily, detailed to-do list of everything I have to do every day this week. If I hadn't done that, I would forget things. That's how swamped I am. I have so much to do that I simply can't remember it all in my brain. It also doesn't help that half my week, I am stuck in an office for twelve hours straight. That helps me do some things, yes, but not everything. The rest of the time it feels like a prison. I don't have the option of doing a lot of that work at home. As you know, during the week at home, most of what I'm doing is sleeping. It's all I can do, really.

"So being a teacher is your chosen career path because...?" Daisy asked me earlier.

"Because I can do it and I'm good at it," I replied. "And because I can't make any money as a poet."

Sad, but true.

More than anything else I'm just trying to make it through the rest of the semester. I get paid on Friday, and must immediately mail out my rent check and any other bills I have before going to Omaha for a few days, whenever I leave. The weather is supposed to get nasty this weekend -- snow and ice are probabilities -- so Daisy and I are trying to figure out when would be the best time to make said trip without worrying about needing to drive through all of that. Most of the actual weekend I'll be grading anyhow, in order to finish up all I can before I have to leave the house. I'll have a little time to finish the rest of it up once I return, but not a lot. There's just so much of it to do. It's all I can do right now to not let it overwhelm me.  

The upper level undergrad classes are all filled with instructors lined up for them for the spring; this is good. It means that all of the composition courses (read: what I teach) will possibly be assigned sometime sooner than later as well. I've been told that's easier to do for the spring semester since all of the GTAs are already there and locked into whatever they'll be teaching -- for the vast majority of them, anyway. And, again, there are several of them who won't be teaching in the spring anyhow, freeing up more sections. I know, as mentioned before, that I'll more than likely get the 102 section over on West campus on the same days/times I'm teaching over there now, which is nice, but even that's not a guarantee. The spring semester runs late as well, as we end the fall so early and don't go back until January 21. I'll be happy to do whatever they give me, though I do hope it's about the same amount or more that I'm doing this semester. I know hoping for more work to do sounds crazy, especially with how swamped I am now, but the reason I'm so swamped is not because I have three classes, but because they're three different classes -- two of which I've never taught before. That means three different schedules, three different sets of papers and assignments, and three different lesson plans. That's three times the work I'd be doing if I were teaching three sections of the same class -- say, 011 or 101, because I'd be using the same schedule/lesson plans for all three. Ironically, it would be less work I'd have to do if I taught five sections next semester, if three of them were the same course. I'd be thrilled to teach five sections next semester even if they were all different courses. More work? Yes, absolutely. But that's offset by the money I'd make, which I'd sorely need leading up to my wedding.

Right now, though? Again, who knows what's going to happen. Daisy and I are examining all of our options, but we won't be able to make big concrete plans at least for another two months at the least. That leaves a ton of stuff just hanging in limbo, and we play the waiting game. I hate waiting on anything. I am not a patient person, not in the least, and I just want things to be sorted out and taken care of by the powers that be so that I don't have to stress over them and/or worry where my next paychecks are going to come from after the end of the year.

"I don't have Christmas Eve off," Daisy told me. "Or New Year's Eve."

"Does that mean you work the night beforehand and get off at 7:30 AM on Christmas morning, or what?" I asked.

Generally, Daisy's job is good with holidays; if she has to work the night before a holiday, she usually gets off at midnight, as they're not open on holidays. For example, when I was last there over July 4, she had to work the 3rd until midnight, and then was able to come home because the 4th was a holiday. I don't know if that will be the case at Christmas. She does have to work at least one night while I'm there over Thanksgiving, because she requested Black Friday off that week in order for us to get our official "engagement photos" taken, possibly do some shopping, and then come back home to Kansas. Still, her work schedule is always a mess when she has to request days off, because she works a real job that doesn't get a month off or more between holidays like teachers/professors do.

As for whether or not she'll have to work the overnight into Christmas morning, who knows -- she hasn't given me a concrete answer on that yet. I do know that Christmas week seriously messes with her work schedule, though. I plan to spend Christmas in Omaha, as it's the last year that Daisy herself will get to live there and spend Christmas with her family -- not to mention because I was in West Virginia last year for Christmas (and stuck there two extra days because of snowstorms). The timeframe is something of a quagmire, though, because of the week that separates Christmas and New Year's, and her work schedule.

"I can do one," I told her, "but I can't do both. I can't leave the cats alone for well over a week in the winter when I don't know what the weather is going to be like. That's what happened last year with that big snowstorm on the day after Christmas back home, and I'm sure you remember how that went. I'm not risking something like that again."

As you may recall, that storm hit here first (according to all accounts, anyway) and then smacked the east coast, closing down Pittsburgh's airport and keeping me stranded back home until I could get the first flight out of there. Because I couldn't get anyone to really update me on everything going on back here, I didn't know how bad the storm was when it hit here; for all I knew, the power could've been out in my house for several days, pipes frozen, cats freezing to death, etc. I've only got three things in this world that nobody can take from me -- Daisy, my cats, and my car. And I am extremely obsessive over all three. And always, over the holidays, some snow/ice storm blows up without fail when I have to travel. That's why I hate, hate hate to travel over the holidays.

As I've been typing this early this morning, the weather forecast for the weekend has changed -- it's supposed to be nice and somewhat mild today, but by Thursday afternoon/evening and Friday we're supposed to get a rain/snow/ice wintry mix thing. Next week's weather (at this point) appears to be clear, at least for me here in Kansas. Who knows what will happen in Nebraska. It was snowing up there last week when it was 70 here. I may have a shitty drive home on Thursday night, for all I know at this point. That's not good when it's a long drive through cornfields and darkness to get back to the interstate, which may be just as bad.

On that note, I shall leave the house to deal with my extremely long day. I have a ton to do today, as always, and will be working basically from my first minute on campus until my last. Sigh.