Crazy Times

Fall semester: day eighty-four
One day remaining

It is 1:15 in the morning on what amounts to my final day of fall semester, and I am awake. In a short twenty-one hours, probably less, I will be completely finished with fall semester 2011, and it could not come soon enough. Because of this, it doesn't really matter what time I'll arrive on campus tomorrow (as long as I can get a parking spot somewhere, and I'm not going in early. My final exam in my Middle Eastern/Asian Lit class is at 7PM, and with my grading done already the only things I have to do on campus are make sure my laptop is charged (for the exam) and give Suri her Christmas present. I have my alarm clock set for 10AM, though I would imagine depending on what time I go to bed, I'll more than likely hit the snooze button once or twice, and that will allow me a few hours in the interim to get up, get something to eat, get dressed, and venture south to Wichita.

I doubt there will be many folks around the department anyhow; most of my friends and colleagues within the program do not have finals, or if they do they've already taken them and left town. Most graduate-level classes do not have a final exam; that is the big difference between undergrad and graduate school. Instead, they have final, or "seminar," papers due, sometimes 20-30 pages in length depending on the course. My Middle Eastern/Asian Lit course is an exception to the rule simply because of the professor's teaching style and the fact that the class is a "special topics" course, which all students in the program must take once (the subject of said "special topics" course changes every semester; this semester it just happened to be Middle Eastern/Asian lit, with one of my favorite professors).

I got the grade back from said professor on my Midnight's Children paper, by the way -- I received 22.5 out of 25 points, or a 90%. I was a bit surprised, as it's a rather low score for me from said professor, but then again I remembered that he tends to grade this class a little harder because it is that "special topics" course. The coursework is more rigorous, the grading's a little tougher. Regardless, going into the final exam I still have a 96% A in the class. The exam's worth 25 points, or 25% of our grade in the class, and as I should get the full score for class participation (10), I could get a 12/25 on the final exam and still get an A- in the class. Granted, this will never happen unless I have a sudden bout of narcolepsy in the middle of the exam, and I'm still going to do my best regardless, but it's comforting to know that if needed, I have a few points to spare in case I have a total brain fart in the exam room -- which, again, is unlikely.

I made a rough, three-page study guide for the exam this afternoon when I got up, drafting out how I'd like to answer the exam's essay questions. Once I get to campus, or before I leave the house tomorrow, I'm going to make all of the required notes in my books so that I have a plan of attack for the exam. We're allowed to use our books and any notes written in our books, but not our class notes or any other outside stuff (i.e., handouts, powerpoints from presentations, etc. are forbidden, as is the internet). I've always done really well on his exams; this will be the fourth one I've taken as a graduate student, and never have I gotten below a 93 or 94%. Last semester, I got a full 100 on the final, and this semester I got a 98% on the midterm, so my track record is good. When it comes to essay tests, even if I'm not given the opportunity to use books or notes written in books, I can usually do exceedingly well -- I tend to have the ability to access some sort of uncanny gift, like I can tap into the pure knowledge filed away in my brain to pull out the important stuff for such exams. I don't know how I do it, but I do.

In the past 24 hours or so, I have received several student emails inquiring about their grades on their last papers and their final exams. Since I have already uploaded those and grading is complete, of course, I can tell them. Every email so far, however, regardless of how good/bad the student did in the course, thanked me for an awesome semester and gave me nothing but the highest praise and their gratitude for the help and accessibility I provided them as a professor this fall. These kids stunned me; they're good kids, they were willing to learn and grateful for the opportunity to do so with me in the specialized Engineering/Science Writing English 102 course. Most of them could have aced the normal 102 course with flying colors, but they chose to take the different specialized course with me because it would offer them a different sort of challenge.

This is a clear disconnect from the normal run-of-the-mill 101 students I taught previously, students who were forced to take the course by the university. While yes, I did have some exemplary students in those classes and made several lifelong friends in several of them, there is a very distinct difference between 101 students and 102 Engineering English students, and really, I'm impressed in a big, big way.

As for the end of the semester itself, these are crazy times, in more ways than one. Looking back on it, it could've been better. As you know (especially if you read my last post), this semester I've been severely cash-strapped and broke, I've been doing patchwork repairs and maintenance on my car just to keep it running, and budgeting for absolutely everything. I've also been struggling to keep my head above water with two different labor-intensive lit courses -- in one of which it was very hard to keep an A, and the other was no slouch either. I've lost a lot of hours of sleep due to insomnia/loneliness as well as working on things that need to be done in and around the house or for my students, and I haven't been able to properly enjoy a single football game all season without multitasking on schoolwork at the same time.

Yet, despite all of this, after tonight I will be half-finished with my graduate school education, something that seems like a milestone to me (or at least seems more important than it should). I still have a roof over my head, a car that's running, food to eat, and three cats who love and adore me. I'll have a month off of school, and while it may be a relatively poor month, it is a month during which I can focus on myself and on my own projects/problems, such as my writing, cleaning the everliving fuck out of this house as much as possible, getting my car's oil changed and getting it worked on (if possible), and working on a new edit of my book for not only the Kindle edition, but for print as well.

As I type this, Sadie (my little gray cat, who's dumb as a brick) is laying on my feet and snoring. Literally snoring. This cat:

Yes, I know, she's beautiful; her mother was a full-blooded Russian Blue. She's my shadow and my little baby -- and boy, does she know it. I took this picture of her last night as she decided that it was time for me to hold her on my lap, and that she wasn't taking no for an answer.

Ahem. Anyway.

I am greatly looking forward to the spring semester; I have an awesome schedule, some fun and interesting classes that I am incredibly interested in taking (including an editing class), and I will have more than enough time to sleep, study, write, and take care of the important things in life. I will also have a lot more money to work with, and a lot more free time to actually pursue things like not being as much of a hermit around the department and my friends, as well as trying to land that lucky (or unlucky, depending on your viewpoint) girl I've been passively courting as of late. I'm also expecting to fly out to West Virginia to visit friends and family in the spring, as well.

Things are looking up; this next month off is exciting, and the spring semester looks exciting and promising. It's the next three weeks or so that I'll be broke beyond belief that concerns me right now. My bills, for the moment of course, are paid. It's the ones coming up that will quite literally break the bank if my parents don't drop my birthday/Christmas money into my account soon. Again, I'm looking at at least a $200 deficit, if not more, because of that damned car insurance being due in two weeks. I'd really rather not put it on my credit card if there's any way I can possibly avoid that; I'll need the credit card for tires for the car, as well as the oil change (more than likely) soon enough. My mother hasn't yet responded to last night's email about it, but that's probably because she's been really busy at work this week. I believe it's the last full week my parents will work before Christmas.

As for most of my friends, like I said, they've already left town -- and two of them are even on other continents right now. Suri and Jay remain, as well as a few others, because they're taking their final exam with me in class tomorrow night, but most folks have long since skedaddled their way off of campus and out of this city/state to return home for the holidays. I can't say I blame them; once I'm done with my exam, I will be gathering anything I might need over the course of the next month from my office, such as my laptop and a few other essentials, and I'll be revving the Monte Carlo back to Newton for my winter break as well.

Because of my financial situation and the time constraints involved, obviously, I'm not sure everyone will be getting their packages I need to mail by Christmas. While I will need to get stamps over the course of the next week or so, I'm not sure I can afford the postage to mail any of the things I have readied until I get money from my parents, and of course all of the rent/bills and car insurance must be paid first ASAP before anything else can be worried about or otherwise dealt with. I did have enough old stamps (meaning, stamps that were about seven or eight years old) to send out one package today, to my friend Shanna, from my mailbox. Other than that, I still have about five or six others that must be weighed and mailed at the post office; it can't be avoided. So, some (if not all) of you may be getting some late Christmas presents this year. For that I apologize.

As you probably already know, I'm too poor to send out Christmas cards this year as well, so if you want to save yourself a stamp and not send me one, I completely understand. Believe me, it's okay. No worries, no hard feelings, etc.

Anyway. I must go to bed now, as it is late and I am beginning to feel it. When I next return to the blog, the semester will be over and I will be free.

My Only Friend / The End, Part II

Fall semester: day eighty-two
Three days remaining

I wonder, actually, how many of my readers get the reference in the title of these latest two posts. If you don't, look up the Doors song "The End." It was also used in Apocalypse Now, for those of you who aren't necessarily fans of The Doors. Using that as my title is sort of funny on multiple levels for most of my classmates and colleagues, who spent many weeks this semester reading Heart of Darkness and/or writing about it and/or using it to make some comparison with Apocalypse Now in said writing, as the movie is based on the book (albeit a bit loosely at times).

See? Multiple levels, like I said.

Anyway.

I have been spending my evening creating Christmas presents for friends. The post office is going to love me when I jaunt in there in a few days with a huge sack of packages to mail. I say "in a few days" because not only do I have to mail these things quickly if I want them to get to their destinations (all around the US) by the holidays, but because my need for stamps dictates that I must go to the post office within the next few days, otherwise I won't be able to mail out any of the bills that will be coming due in two weeks, roughly. My car insurance is due two weeks from tomorrow, and right now I am barely scraping by; saving money on gas by not needing to drive the car a lot over the next two weeks helps somewhat, but still, I am hemorrhaging money right now at what is, quite possibly, the worst time of the year to do so, and the car insurance is just part of it (though a large part of it). That's due to poor timing/bad luck on when I chose to purchase the car and insure it, though, and there's nothing I can do about that. My parents still have not deposited my birthday/Christmas money in the bank, at least according to my account, and that is currently a huge problem as all the bills are coming due. Without that money -- which will hopefully be a large amount that arrives soon -- even with my paycheck next week I will be completely and totally broke by the end of the month because of that fucking car insurance I have to pay.

When I say "completely and totally broke" I mean it. As in, zero dollars left in my bank account. Zero.

If it weren't for that, I'd be fine. I will not have enough money in my bank account, even if I purchase nothing else at all (like groceries, for example) between now and the 31st to pay the rent, car insurance, and the internet bill between now and then with what I currently have and what I will have with next week's paycheck. I just won't. I'd be short, and I'd be short by a lot. Like, short by $200 or so. That's taking nothing else into consideration, nothing at all. That car insurance is fucking me up for the entire month's finances, as it's almost an entire paycheck in itself.

My last-ditch saving grace -- the only safety net I would have to buy me the time I desperately need to accrue the Jan. 6 paycheck as well as get the other half of my student loans for the year about a week after that -- would be to put the car insurance on the credit card, if that would be possible. Mind you, I absolutely do not want to do that, as it would basically max out the card in the first month I've had it, but if I have no other options and it's either that or be homeless, well, it's the only other thing I could do.

I've done well so far, but the end of the year is a major snag for my finances, if you couldn't guess. There's about a good two week gap or so (luckily between the semesters) that I will be fairly penniless or close to it, before I get paid again and before the other half of my student loans drop into my account for the spring. My goal was to survive on what I have until then, barely scraping by paycheck-to-paycheck. However, the university has thrown another wrench into those works because of the New Year's pay cycles rebooting/restarting/what-have-you. I mentioned this briefly before, but January 6 is the last paycheck we'll receive for the fall semester. This wouldn't normally be a problem except that because of the new pay cycle starting, we won't be paid our first check of the spring semester until the beginning of February -- almost a month later and a full two weeks after we've once more started classes. They gave us notice that this was going to happen well in advance, but notice does not equal money in our bank accounts, and as GTAs we're already really poor.

That leaves a small window between December 23 (my next paycheck) and the 6th where I will have no money, and another smaller one between the 6th and whenever my loan drops that I'll once more be scraping by, regardless of how much money my parents give me for the holidays. The unfortunate thing is that I can't wait until that check on the 6th for all of the bills and rent; the car insurance is due on the 28th, and the rent is due (as always) by the 1st. The internet bill is usually due the last week of the month as well, meaning all of my monetary obligations must be taken care of with whatever money I have, or will acquire, between now and January 1.

Like I said, without that fucking car insurance being due right now, I'd be fine. I'd be more than fine, actually.

This is, of course, a stressor for me. A big one. And there's not much I can do about it other than hope my parents gift me my birthday/Christmas money soon or run myself into $400 of credit card debt the first month that I've owned a credit card. If all of the bills were due two weeks later than they are, it wouldn't be a problem; it would be a non-issue. But they're not. So it's an issue.

For those of you going tsk-tsk Brandon, you knew your car insurance was going to be due at the end of December... yeah, well, you can shut up. Knowing that doesn't magically make all of my other financial obligations go away, nor does it change the fact that all of us GTAs were basically blindsided by the fact that we're not going to get paid for almost a month in the interim. When one works in academia for low wages in exchange for free MFA degree tuition, one can't save money or hide it away because there's none left to save at the end of the month. If it weren't for the other half of my loan money coming in around this time in January, believe me, I'd be fucked then by not getting a paycheck, and I'm fucked now because of the car insurance. It's a double-fucking on all fronts, financially speaking, and it's not like any of us have a way out of not getting paid for a month. I'm not the only one of us who has been bent over the proverbial desk by the end of the year.

At least I don't have to buy Christmas presents for anyone this year.

Anyway.

My grade for my Grad Studies in Fiction class (the one I wrote the Madame Bovary and Mrs Dalloway papers for) has already been posted, as I expected it would be, and it is indeed an A-. To me, that still counts as an A, and as long as I get A's in my other two classes (as I expect to), my straight-A streak remains unbroken even after what was possibly the most work-intensive, brutal semester of my entire academic career. I am, of course, looking forward to the spring -- when I'll not only have an easier schedule and more money, but I'll be able to actually get some sleep and free time to myself to focus on my life as well as my writing, and anything/everything that entails. It's sort of a freeing thought, to be honest. I try to be optimistic about a lot of things, but whether I'm ultimately successful in that optimism is arguable.

Spring semester will also be the last semester with a lot of my friends and colleagues in the department -- a large chunk of said friends will graduate with one degree or another at the end of it. This includes a few poets, almost all of the fiction MFAs (save for the scant few who started when I did) and all of the MA students who entered in my class or before, as the MA program is only two years, and the MFA three. Suri is one of the MA students who will graduate in the spring, and I've already told her I am going to positively cry my eyes out when she does so and leaves the department/city/etc. She's probably the closest friend I have not only in Wichita, but in the entire state of Kansas. I'll be lost without her daily dose of cynicism and sobering, flat-out realism.

Please note that I haven't cried in many months, and didn't even cry when the former girlfriend and I broke up. It takes a lot to get me to cry these days, due to my low expectations in life. "Losing" a lot of my friends at once, especially Suri, to graduation will get me to do it, trust me. I'm considering elaborate kidnapping plans.

Kidding.

They'll be relatively simple kidnapping plans.

Kidding.

All's quiet on the other remaining fronts; I'll be spending all day tomorrow making my study guide for my Middle Eastern/Asian Lit exam, taking notes in the books, etc etc. It'll take me a few hours at the very least. After I take the exam, this hellish semester can be marked down in the books as completely over. Ironically, Thursday night after the exam would be about the only time this semester where I'd be in the mood to go out with my friends and colleagues in the class and get completely fucking hammered out of my mind on many beers...but, again, I have no money. Oh, sweet irony! Thou art a cruel, cruel mistress!

Anyway. More posts will be coming as more things develop, and as the semester grinds to a long-awaited end this week.

My Only Friend / The End, Part I

Fall semester: day eighty-one

All papers have been graded, scores calculated. The final exam has been given, graded, and final scores have been calculated. The final letter grades and percentages for my students have been calculated, recorded, and posted online to Banner, the university's grade system.

I am done. My latest semester as an English instructor at a (minor) American university in the midwest, at least, is over. All of my students' grades were uploaded before I left campus this evening, leaving my final exam in my Middle Eastern/Asian Lit course the last, and only, thing left for me to do this semester before I can finally call it over and done.

This was not a small task. I've been awake since shortly after 5AM taking care of all of these tasks, two different meetings, the actual proctoring of the final, and then the mad rush to get everything graded -- because, once one is halfway done grading, why stop working until it's completely done?

None of my students failed, except for the two who failed for absences long ago in the semester. There were a few who came damned close to not passing the class, within a point or two (literally), but they made it through due to their hard work on the last paper and their final exam. I am proud of my students, very proud indeed. It's the first semester I've taught where the only failures have been for absences. I can't tell you how remarkable that is, frankly, because that never happens. I was stunned. I can't wait to streamline the course over the winter break to make its timeframe go a little more smoothly and keep the work ticking along at a solid pace free from any hang-ups I had during my first time teaching the class this semester.

The department today was a veritable ghost town. Those of us who were there most of the day spent it grading or writing papers, and then after the final, all of us were grading in that mad dash to finish everything as soon as humanly possible, for those of us who could do so. I was paired with a third-year instructor (and brilliant fiction writer) who already graduated yesterday, so in order to get everything taken care of so that he could be done since...well, he already graduated, we attacked our exams together and had each others' copies graded within two hours. It was interesting, to say the least, but really no different than I've ever graded with anyone else before. He told me I must be an awesome instructor for my students to produce exams as good as they did, so that's a plus.

In other news, I received my long-dreaded Mrs Dalloway paper back today. It was in my mailbox this morning when I came in, and I was almost afraid to read the comments on it -- though, of course, I did anyway. My professor liked it, or at least liked it well-enough. He said that it was pretty solid work, though I could've used another source or quote here and there, and I could've focused a little more on a few aspects of one of the characters. He gave me an A- on it, which is still the highest score I've received in the class. As that paper is 40% of my grade in there, I'm guessing that I'll receive an A- as my final grade too. That's fine with me. The work is done; I've washed my hands of the entire debacle and am happy with that paper and that grade.

Suri, meanwhile, is still working on that paper for that class, and will be turning it in late. The poor girl is swamped this semester with all sorts of stuff to do, and I feel so bad for her; she barely gets any sleep as it is, she has a busy life with her boyfriend and his kids, and she's juggling grad school and teaching all in the midst of that too. Yet, through it all, she perseveres, and still has time to order not one, but two different birthday/Christmas gifts for me -- one for me, and one for my furry children, apparently, according to what she told me today. It's still coming in the mail. I still feel bad that I really have nothing to give her, nor do I have money to get her anything (I am so miserably broke right now). I'll have to make it up to her in the spring.

I was able to scrape the vast majority of the remaining E-6000 adhesive off my car window, and ended up pulling some of the (peeling) aftermarket window tint off with it. That stuff dries really hard and firm. That crisis was averted, at least; I was afraid that some of it would drip downward and glue my window shut. Luckily, it did not do so. However, on the way home tonight, the "low oil" light once more kicked on in the Monte Carlo, and I pulled into Walmart before coming home to pick up four quarts of oil (two regular, two high-mileage) a new bottle of antifreeze/coolant for the winter in case it starts leaking again, and a box of light bulbs for the house (because I'm down to my last one). The total was $36, and for the first time I used my Amazon Visa card. Might as well put a little bit of a balance on it to pay off later in full to help build my credit. After all -- again, see above -- I'm broke.

Of course, once I'd purchased these things and got back in the car to drive home, the "low oil" light had gone off. Figures.

Regardless, once I got home I performed engine surgery on my car, giving it a quart of oil and filling it with more coolant. It hasn't leaked any as of late, but making sure its levels are at their right amounts can only help. Hopefully that will help "winterize" the landboat that it is for the next few months. It's burning through a quart of oil every 500 miles or so, roughly (because every 500 miles the light will come on and I'll put another quart in), which isn't horrible, but it's also another sign that I need to get the car worked on/tuned up/etc, and soon. It's old and beat up, yes, but it's reliable as long as I can do my own patch-job preventative maintenance to it, like I did tonight. A real tune-up, of course, requires money that I don't have right now. When I get the oil changed -- probably shortly before spring semester starts -- it will more than likely go on the credit card. I hate the thought of that, but I can't really help it. My actual, accessible money has to go toward food, bills, and rent. Other stuff can get paid off as I am able to do so. It's a sad state of affairs being a poor graduate student, let me tell you. The real reason I don't shave, for example, is because I can't afford razors.

Okay, that last part is a lie. I love my beard.

This afternoon, I received this email from one of my current students who just took his exam today:

Thank you Mr. Rush. You were one of the best teachers I ever had and I appreciate all the help you offered me throughout the semester. I am definitely recommending your class to anyone I know.

On average, while I don't like to brag about it really, I receive at least one or two of these emails from students at the end of every semester. It is emails like this one, folks, that make my life, my career choice of academia, and all of my hard work seem like it's totally worth it. Yes, there's a ton of academic bullshit involved with being a graduate student in general, let alone being a GTA. Yes, there are long hours, many of them lost poring through papers looking for errors and flow issues. Yes, many cups of coffee are consumed and many collective nights of sleep are lost. But it's the ability to affect students, the ability to get them to work, to think, and to learn how to appreciate their college education that is the most rewarding. I teach my students the way I wish I had been taught in undergrad -- with a fun, laid-back approach and vigorous class discussion, but I also make sure they don't slouch and do their assignments. I want them to enjoy it. I want them to test themselves, to learn something about themselves, to break whatever limits they had in their minds about what they may have been capable of in an English composition course. It's not exactly an "O Captain, My Captain" moment, but it's close enough for me.

It's emails like that, however short, that make me realize that maybe I wouldn't be so bad off teaching composition for the rest of my life if that's the hand the cards end up dealing me. I can live with that. It may not be high-paying or glamorous, but it makes me feel like I'm doing something good. Like I'm doing something positive with my life that means something. Few people ever get that sort of satisfaction from what they do, even by the time they reach retirement age. I've had that satisfaction many times, and I'm not even thirty. I am much more fortunate than I know.

On that note, folks, I shall leave you. I plan to sleep until noon tomorrow. It is a good plan, a solid plan, and I am proud of it.

Operation: E-6000

I don't know who invented the industrial adhesive E-6000, nor do I care. I just know that it's very, very messy and not exactly the most useful substance on the planet.

As you know if you read my previous post, I needed to glue a suction cup handle to my car window, as the cups wouldn't hold on their own. E-6000 is supposed to be one of the strongest adhesives on the planet. It didn't work (no matter how hard I tried, it wouldn't stick), the handle broke, the window is covered with the shit (which I will have to scrape off after it dries, and the tube of it -- an aluminum tube, mind you -- burst all over my hands when I was using it.

Few things are more maddening to get all over your hands than industrial adhesive, let me tell you. It's worse than super glue. In fact, it's like silicone (which wouldn't work on the window, either). Once it begins to set/dry, it becomes very rubbery and must be scrubbed/peeled off like caulk. I'll have to wait to tomorrow and take a scraper/butter knife/what-have-you to get it off the car window. It now looks like I'm back to square one with the window, and I'm out of options. So it's possible that for the remainder of the winter, I'm just going to have to be cold all the time when I drive.

In case you didn't know the (rather embarrassing) details of the situation, my Monte Carlo has power windows that don't work and/or are off-track. To raise/lower them, I must do it by hand. This normally wouldn't be a problem, but the driver's side interior door handle is broken as well, so to get back out of the car I must reach out the window and open the door from the outside. If the window is all the way sealed, I can't open it/slide it down from the inside. At all. So no matter what, while I'm driving I always have to leave my window down about half an inch so that once I get to my destination, I can push it down the rest of the way, reach outside, and open the door. Then I have to get out and pull it back up to seal it again. It's a huge pain in the ass, and I wanted to get a suction cup handle to attach to the interior of the window for the wintertime to that I could seal it fully while driving, as it's fucking cold here in Kansas and all of my driving is fast interstate driving.

Andrea got me a suction cup handle, but it wouldn't stick to the glass on its own. That's why I needed the glue, to attach it permanently. The glue wouldn't make it stick either, the handle broke, there's a ton of glue on the glass I'll have to scrape off, and I'm back to square one -- like I said, it looks like I'm going to be freezing while I drive for the rest of the winter.

The passenger's side door handle does work, by the way, but for someone as large as I am, even in a car with a cabin that big, it's very difficult for me to just hop over the seat and get out that way (trust me here, I know from experience). That's only an option if I have no other way to get out of the car, or if the window ends up getting frozen/jammed shut somehow. It'll happen eventually, I'm sure, especially if we get the ice storms the midwest is known for at some point this winter.

Yes folks, welcome to my life. This is what happens when you buy a white-trash landboat with the last $500 you have to your name just to have something to drive.

At least the E-6000 didn't do any damage to the car; the glue is on the aftermarket tinted window that is peeling and makes it hard to see in the dark anyhow. If nothing else I'll cut off the part of the tint that the glue is on with a razor blade, or something, if it won't easily scrape off. I hate tinted windows anyhow.

But enough about my car-related problems. She has fresh air in the tires and a full tank of gas in her, and she seems happy enough.

I finished grading tonight. It took a little more than three hours. All of my students now have their final scores tallied going into the final, and none of them are going to fail the course (except the ones who have already failed for absences and stopped showing up many weeks ago once they did). I almost drank a celebratory beer after I finished grading, but my heart wasn't in it. Truthfully, I feel a sort of emptiness now, a boredom that not even my Pokemon or my podcasts can get rid of. It's strange, really. I figured I'd be all excited to be free of almost all of my responsibility for the semester, but really I just feel...blah. Almost as if I have no purpose in life now for the next month or so.

That and I'm slightly miffed about the car window.

Anyway.

I made my shopping trip to Walmart this afternoon against my better judgment, as it was a Saturday afternoon two weeks before Christmas Eve. The place was crazy, as expected, and crammed so full of people I could barely walk up and down the aisles with my cart. I guess white trash in the midwest have yet to discover purchasing Christmas gifts online via places like Amazon. Still, I was able to make the purchases I needed to make in order to get me by for the next week or two, because after Thursday is over I plan to sleep for a few days and not do a whole hell of a lot. As you know, once my break starts I'm only going to leave the house when absolutely necessary. I'll have to do that again soon, though, as I need to mail off my Christmas packages as well as get a book of stamps, because after paying the bills yesterday, I am now completely out. Here's hoping my mother made it to the bank today to deposit my birthday/Christmas money like she said she would, because I'm going to need it quite soon. Virtually all of my paycheck from Friday went into paying the bills and getting groceries today, and I now find myself back where I was before, really no better/no worse off. I don't get paid again until the 23rd or so.

I did purchase for myself my one and only birthday present today, though -- it's a Batman hoodie made to look like the old-school grey costume, and the hood has the bat ears on it. As I wrote on Facebook, "yeah, I'm gonna be that guy." If you want to see what it looks like, it's this, only mine (regrettably) did not come with the cape, as it's the adult-sized version. It was $20, but I know that aside from my parents' money, it's the only birthday gift I'll receive.

Well, that's not entirely true; Suri told me she has some sort of gift for me, though I don't know what it is. This came as a big surprise, to be honest -- I didn't know anyone in the department exchanged gifts with one another, and certainly wasn't expecting anything from anyone, even Suri. I feel sort of guilty that I haven't gotten her (or anyone else) anything.

One of my colleagues, the poet fellow this year, was talking to me on Thursday during my downtime, and told me that if I was bored, I could always go Christmas shopping in the several hours before my class. I had to laugh.

"For who?" I asked. "Without [the former girlfriend], it's just me and the cats, and it's not like they know what Christmas is."

"I dunno," she said, "parents?"

"Nah," I said. "My parents are 1,000 miles away and always tell me to save my money and not get them anything because they know I'm poor."

That has been my parents' response for the past five years, by the way, when I've asked them if they've wanted me to get them anything for Christmas. After the first three years or so, I just stopped asking because I knew what their response would be.

Also, in case you were wondering, I'm not sending out Christmas cards this year; I don't have the money or stamps for it, and for that I apologize. It's no slight against anyone who will send me a card regardless, of course, it's just that I'm poor. All of my close friends know this already. I have a card I'm going to print out at work and stick in my friends' mailboxes in the department, but other than that I'm not doing anything. I really can't afford to. It's sad, I know, but all of my close friends who live out of state are getting packages in the mail over the next few weeks anyhow, so that counts for something, right? Please say yes.

I'm afraid I'm just not in the "Christmas spirit" this year as much as I usually am, either. Can you really blame me? It's been a horrific year overall, and it's the first Christmas I will spend totally alone with no one else around. I didn't even venture into the "Christmas section" at Walmart this afternoon to look at the decorations or try to find a Santa hat to wear to school next week for finals. My heart's not in it. It's not like I'm religious or anything (and haven't been for many years), but the holidays have always been a time for family and friends, but my friends are all leaving town, and my family is 1,000 miles away. Christmas, just like Thanksgiving was this year (and last year), will be just another day on the calendar for me.

At least I can take solace in the fact that this year I won't be suffering from food poisoning that will confine me to a bed for the better part of a week, as I was a few years ago during Christmas -- including Eve and Day. That was...oh, '07 or '08, I believe. I can't remember. I just remember that it was absolutely godawful horrible, and nothing short of my house burning down or the death of a family member will top that for worst Christmas ever.

Protip for you folks trying to avoid such a Christmas: don't trust expired lunch meat. Ever. I can't tell you how difficult it is, even now, for me to eat sliced deli turkey. The very thought of it makes me ill.

On the plus side, though, it doesn't look like it's going to snow again until the 19th, which makes me a little happy, at least. By that point I should be long done with all of my schoolwork for the semester, safe and sound in my house with the cats and my Batman hoodie. Don't judge me.

Tomorrow I may start creating my study guide for my Middle Eastern/Asian Lit final, or I may not. I really don't know what I'll do. Maybe I'll sleep until the evening, get up, cook some really bad food and watch a lot of cartoons. I'm good at that. Who knows.

Video Killed the Blogging Star

I spent a fair amount of my evening searching the house for a bottle of super glue, because I know I have a bottle of some sort of glue called E-6000 or something like that somewhere in this house.

I need this glue for several reasons, but the biggest is for the window of the Monte Carlo. Without going into shameful details, let's just say that what I need it for involves handles and suction cups, and leave it at that.

Anyway, in search of this glue (which I, eventually, found), I was looking through my big metal file cabinet where I tend to store my more interesting and/or important things, when I came across something strange. Or, at least, something forgotten.

It was a camera. A digital video camera.

I will say that I had long forgotten that this camera existed; the former girlfriend's mother bought it for us for Christmas several years ago off Woot, long enough ago that we were living in Missouri at the time, and neither of us could get it to work correctly with our computers. It also sucked its 2 AA batteries dry within about five minutes of use, and didn't come with a wall plug. Because of this, it sat on tables and desks for a long period of time, and then upon moving to Kansas it somehow got stuck in with all of my "electronics that may prove useful eventually but currently aren't" box o' stuff. The former girlfriend would later buy a really nice digital camera fairly cheaply, I got her old 3.2 megapixel camera, and the video camera was quickly forgotten.

I pulled it out of my file cabinet and examined it like a caveman would examine a primitive tool. I knew it wouldn't be a great camera, but I figured messing around with it wouldn't hurt. I took a one-minute-long test video of the cats, and watched it play back. That in itself was enough to run through a set of cheap batteries, completely. I searched around my room until I found the batteries I purchase specifically for my cameras (high-end Energizer lithium ones), and was loading them into the camera when I noticed something.

The camera has an SD slot. I have spare SD cards.

I slid one of the SD cards into the camera with the new batteries, and immediately I had full battery life and two hours' worth of full video capability. Hm. This could be interesting.

I took a four-minute video of me and the cats wandering about the house, this time making it a good, solid test. Upon playback on my computer (oh, I so love the fact that my PC has a front-loading SD slot), most of the video is grainy and dark. Clearly, 2AM in my house is not the best time to take video, even in my Man Cave. But, in the more well-lit rooms (such as the bathroom) it ended up taking decent video.

Hmmm, I thought. It's finals week. The department is very, very well-lit. I'd love to get some video of all of us around the school.

I have a very small photographic record of my graduate school education, and very few photos have been taken of me as a graduate student or with my friends. Aside from an embarrassing photo of Rae in her office (freely viewable on Facebook, by the way) and a few pictures of me with Jay and/or the former girlfriend, not a lot of recent pictures of me exist, and aside from a poetry reading the library filmed last spring, no video of me exists at all. Call it my sense of sentimentality kicking in, but I'd like to get at least some video footage of my friends while I'm here in graduate school, if only to watch said footage many years from now (probably while stinking drunk) to say something along the lines of a slurred "Those were the daysh. I mish those peoples."

Please note: while I am a nostalgic person (the former girlfriend always said that I was living in the '80s, or sometimes '70s, due to my love of all things retro), I am rarely a sentimental one. I don't generally keep collections of things simply because of sentimental value, with one of my few exceptions being my collection of old, sometimes falling apart t-shirts that I've had since middle school (and still wear). I recycle old papers and the like, and I tend to throw away -- or donate to various charities -- anything I don't need after a while, usually once or twice a year. But videos and pictures of my friends from this period of my life? Those are things I want, things I want to hold on to. Despite the sheer amount of work and bullshit involved at times, graduate school has been a very big, exciting, and important part of my life, and I want to record it. I want to remember it. I want to be able to focus on the good parts of it when it's all said and done.

Yes, of course, I could've been doing this already; I could have taken $150 a year or so ago, when I had that much money to spare, and purchased one of those FlipHD cameras or something like that, but the thought never occurred to me. A lot of thoughts don't occur to me when I'm bogged down with as much work as I am on a regular basis.

Now that I'm poor, of course, I don't have that money to spare. I was paid today, for example, and more than half my paycheck went directly to bills. More of it will go to this week's shopping when I go out tomorrow, which is okay only because my mother told me she'd be dropping my birthday/Christmas money into my account tomorrow.

But I digress.

So, on Monday, I'm going to try to get some video of some of my friends in the department (those who don't mind being filmed/interviewed, anyway), and maybe a professor or two. I do have several professors who adore me who would more than likely submit to a few questions or short video sessions. I just want to document something, you know? Even if some of them, and some of my friends, are already gone for the semester, getting anything would be better than nothing. Monday is video day, for lack of a better way to put it.

Anyway, in other news, I have accomplished relatively little this weekend. It is almost 3AM on Saturday morning, and I have barely touched anything school-related. When I say "school-related," I really mean "grading my students' papers." I have about twenty of them left (give or take), and while they won't take too long, I intend to get them done in the afternoon so that I'm not stuck rushing through them on Monday morning before the exam, calculating points and totaling grades before said exam.

By the way, that's why I make sure I have all of my students' work graded every semester before the final exam takes place -- it means I don't have to calculate points. I tally up what they have out of the 900 available points in the class going into the exam, and then add the exam score to it to get their percentage. There's 1000 points total in the class. This means, after their exam score is added on, if they have 875/1000, their final grade in the class is an 87.5%, which I'd round up to an 88% B+. Pretty simple. Saves a ton of time. Getting all of that done beforehand makes my final grade calculations take about ten minutes total.

Like I said, I'm learning things about being a teacher. Valuable, time-saving important things. The irony in this, as I haven't done anything this weekend thus far, is not lost on me, and is in fact staggering.

I didn't mention in my previous post about what the final exam for the Middle Eastern/Asian Lit class will actually entail. It includes six questions, split into three parts. We have to write three essays, picking one question from each part to answer. This was expected, pretty much, except for the fact that we don't exactly get to pick which books we'd like to write on. We've read five books between midterms and now, as I mentioned before -- the first section deals with one of those books, the second section deals with Anil's Ghost (meaning, even though I disliked the book and didn't finish it, there's no way I can get out of writing an essay about it,) and the third section we can pick from one of two books. The book I wanted to write about the most -- Bharati Mukherjee's The Holder of the World -- was left off the exam entirely, and we don't even have the option of writing about it. Instead, we're forced to write about Anil's Ghost. Whether we want to or not. Our professor must really love Michael Ondaatje. It may be the most recently-published book we've read this semester, but Ondaatje's much better at poetry, in my opinion. The novel is fucking dull. But then again, that's just me, and just my tastes.

So, between Monday and Thursday night, I'll be taking notes in the books and crafting some sort of study guide for the exam, a study guide which I can basically memorize in order to spit it back out on the page. The rules of the exam are that we can use our laptops to type up the exam in-class, and that we can use our books and use any notes we've written in our books, but we can't use our class notes or the internet. As my laptop is unable to pick up a wireless signal anywhere in the building with its (very) weak wifi card, I don't have to worry about the internet thing anyway. In my office it's always hardwired into the wall, because that's the only way I can get network access on campus.

Studying for all of these exams has become more of a time-sink than anything else, really. I'm used to said professor and these types of exams at this point; what takes the most time is the crafting of notes and talking points inside my books, and the thought processes that go into structuring a study guide and then memorizing it enough to write a strong, well-planned-out essay for each question. I always do exceedingly well on his exams, but that's only because I invest so much time into the work involved for studying for them. Again, I can do this because I have no social life to speak of, and live 20 miles north of all of my friends.

The car needs air in its tires again, especially the back left one. I think that's the one which seems to be most "worn." I've pumped it up twice this semester already, but it slowly begins losing tire pressure over time and sags quite a bit after a while. It's nowhere near flat, of course, but it does get lower than the others. I always try to keep them all properly inflated; if I don't, not only will it raise my risk for a blowout, but it'll kill my gas mileage and mess with the way the car handles, obviously. Both of those are rather important things, as you may have guessed, especially with bad weather right around the corner. Luckily, I won't have to drive the car a lot over the winter break unless I choose to, and I'll be lucky enough not to have to change the oil for another 300-400 miles or so even after the semester ends.

I do, at some point, want to make a trip over to Hutchinson to the mall and to Target, though that may wait until well after Christmas, and well after all of my financial obligations are taken care of. Keep in mind that I have an extra expense of about $300 this month due to my car insurance coming due again. This is another reason I'm glad my parents are dropping birthday/Christmas money directly into my bank account very soon.

In other news, I have been passively wooing a girl over the past few weeks. This probably doesn't come as a huge surprise to most of you who are close with me in real life (and not just here on the blog), as I've talked about her in conversations before, usually in hushed tones for fear of jinxing things. When I say "a girl," I sort of mean it; she's young. Younger than the former girlfriend, by several years, and I'll leave it at that. She's an undergraduate student (though, thankfully, not one of mine, or even a former student of mine, because that would be weird). She's the sister of one of my good friends and she's an adult, and that's all anyone really needs to know right now. I am, as I've said before about many situations, cautiously optimistic.

When I say passively wooing, I also mean just that. It's a very passive thing. I've become old and wise, and have learned to expect (nor offer) nothing until we get to know each other better, which is what I've slowly been trying to do as of late. We spent a few hours together in my office on Wednesday afternoon, just hanging out and talking. Her sister thinks we're "a perfect match," despite the age difference, though I don't know the girl well enough yet to gauge what she actually thinks. I'm also not going to ask, as we're just starting to get to know each other better (obviously). It's an interesting situation, that's for sure, and I'm treading lightly. I greatly respect the girl's sister, as she's been a good friend to me and has encouraged me, at least, in my endeavor of wooing. My luck with women, however, is historically bad -- the former girlfriend being the only exception (well, until the end) -- so I have to tread even lighter than usual. It's not about being commitment-phobic or anything along those lines; I'm keeping it very cordial, very chaste to prevent myself from being an idiot and screwing everything up.

Luckily, as far as I know, she doesn't read this blog. As far as I know.

If nothing comes of it, that's fine; as I've mentioned before, repeatedly, it's not like I have the money to support a full-fledged dating relationship again anytime soon, though in the spring I will have the time. If something does come out of it, obviously that would be very, very nice. I already know that if a relationship of any sort blossoms, things will move very slowly, and I am prepared for that.

I will say, however, that this girl has some of the most beautiful eyes I've ever seen; they're almost hypnotic. I'd follow those eyes anywhere.

She's also a drummer. And I play guitar. What wonderful music we could make.

Ahem. Anyway.

Once the day breaks and I crawl out of bed sometime in the mid-afternoon hours, I'll be spending my time grading and making a run to Walmart for necessities, getting air in my tires at the gas station, etc. In the meantime, however, it is after 4AM and I need to get some sleep. I've been awake for 20 hours or so now -- uncharacteristic of me for a weekend, when I don't have to be awake any longer than necessary.

Repent! The End is Near, Part III

Fall semester: day eighty

Finally, it's done.

Well, technically, anyway.

Yesterday I "taught" my last classes of the semester. I say "taught" because all I did was give them the practice exam to better prepare them for their final on Monday, and gave them their final farewells. The great experiment of the semester in teaching Science/Engineering English 102 for the first time was mostly a success, to be honest. I wasn't sure I could do it effectively when I first started the class, but as the semester progressed, I realized that not only could I do it, but the philosophical aims of the class -- any sort of technology-oriented class like this, actually -- weren't so different than my own aims in teaching. What I also realized was that said class is simply a modified version of the normal 102 with a different primary textbook and different paper topics...and very nerdy ones at that. I can get behind that. For example, the first unit could be summed up in one statement: how robots may eventually kill us all, and why.

No, I'm not kidding. I get to teach an English class that involves an in-depth discussion topic covered for several weeks -- as well as in my students' first paper -- about a possible impending robopocalypse. No wonder I liked teaching this class so much.

Overall, though, I think I learned as much about teaching over the course of this semester as my students learned from the coursework in the class. I can't say this all the time; this semester of teaching allowed me to broaden my own horizons when it came to what an English class could be and how it could function in the broader scope of students' education. This may be the only time I say this, but I believe I am fortunate in being able to teach such a class at Flat State University, as it's really a unique course that I've not really seen offered before. I'm proud to be one of the few people chosen to teach such a specialized course, and despite the outwardly flippant or outside-the-box subject matter, it does prepare these kids for what they'll be doing for the rest of their collegiate careers -- writing papers in a concise, scientific way, formatting them correctly, looking for the most authoritative, accurate sources on their subjects and citing them correctly in their research. The subject matter may have been fun, but the coursework was academic and dead-serious. That mix, I think, is what made the class incredibly successful.

And, I might add, it was incredibly successful; limiting it to science/engineering majors who had to get special approval from their respective advisors before being able to enroll sort of upped the ante for the quality of writers in the class -- as a result, my students all semester have been outstanding, with none of them doing poorly. I expect that the only failures will be from too many absences (the department, regrettably, still has an attendance policy). Restricted enrollment plus highly interesting subject matter means that the students who want to be there and are interested in the work will do well in said work. I couldn't have asked for a better semester of teaching, to be honest.

My students' final exam is on Monday afternoon. The vast majority of them have nothing to worry about as long as they show up and write something coherent. My hopes are that I can get the exams graded quickly and efficiently, and that I can completely calculate and upload my students' final scores on Monday afternoon and be done with my actual GTA-related work of the semester. Before I can do that, though, I have a full class's worth of papers to read and grade over the weekend. I've found, however, that these papers take much less time to grade than my former English 101 students -- these kids are good writers, they've paid attention in class, and they know what to do. For most of them at this point it's just "going through the motions."

I attended my last class of the semester last night as well; it was the final meeting of the Middle Eastern/Asian lit course, and was very short. I can't remember how long it was, but we got out of there more than an hour early, I believe. I came home, made something to eat, and fell asleep on the couch for the first time in several months. When I awoke, it was 2:10AM, I was sitting half-upright, and I was blanketed by all three cats -- Pete on my chest/shoulder, Sadie between my legs, and Maggie on my thigh. The fact that I slept through all of them climbing on me, especially Pete, I think is a testament to how tired I actually was. It was if my body realized that hey, the semester's over now, and it put me into a relative coma which lasted for a few hours. Not once on a weeknight during the semester have I ever fallen asleep on the couch. It's not even a comfortable couch; it's a loveseat from the '70s (or possibly early '80s) with a hide-a-bed under the cushions. I got up and went to bed downstairs, where my extra sleep on the couch beforehand only let me sleep until 9:30 this morning.

Today, there are no classes on campus; it is the university's official "study day." Because, of course, everyone can study for all of their exams over the course of one day. I don't even know when "Finals Week" officially begins or ends, to be honest with you. All I know is that I give my students their final on Monday, and that I take my one and only exam for the Middle Eastern/Asian lit class next Thursday night during normal class hours (7-9:30ish). I am certain that we'll be the only people in the department during that time, as pretty much everyone else will have vacated the premises and/or town for the holidays. The one drawback about taking classes with that professor is that we'll always have a midterm and a final. I'm willing to put up with that, however, for taking lit classes that I will actually enjoy.

Still don't know what I got on my Dalloway paper; even though I turned it in a week early, it still hadn't been graded (to the best of my knowledge, anyway) by the time we had our last Grad Studies in Fiction class on Wednesday afternoon. My professor told me he'd stick it in my office mailbox when it was graded, which I suppose has to be good enough for me. Said professor has also been really (read: uncharacteristically) nice to me over the course of the past two weeks or so, so maybe he's already read it. I haven't a clue, honestly. All I know is that whatever grade I get on said paper will more than likely be the grade I receive in the class. Whether I should be looking forward to seeing my grade, though, is questionable. I'll remain reserved until I see said paper's grade.

Meanwhile, I at least know that I have a 99% right now in the Middle Eastern/Asian Lit course, which means to get anything less than an A in there for my final grade, I'll really have to screw up the final exam (next to impossible, by the way, to do) and my professor would have to hate my paper, which I'm sure he will not.

Poetry? Eh. If anyone gets lower than an A in workshop -- any workshop, ever -- there's usually something really wrong, either with the professor or the student. As it's been a delightful semester in there for all involved, I have no worries.

So, I suppose that elusive free time, relatively speaking, has returned to my life. Yes, I have some grading and some studying to do over the course of the next week, but I can do those things at a quite leisurely pace if I so choose. If my luck holds out, I should be able to spend less than twelve hours on campus next week, only being there on Monday for my students' final and grading and on Thursday for my own. If the weather remains relatively nice as well, it would be even better. It can snow/ice/sleet/etc all it wants as long as it waits until after 10PM on the 15th. After that, I no longer will have to drive in it, and will no longer care -- as long as it doesn't inconvenience or endanger any friends and family traveling over the holidays, that is.

It has been an incredibly long semester, however; this is something that most of my readers not only know, but have experienced themselves (as about 85%, roughly, of my readers here are colleagues/former students, or are working in academia). But I know one thing for certain, and it's because I've proven it to myself this semester: I can survive on my own and do well. Or, relatively well, anyway. I mean this in myriad ways, really, as it's an all-encompassing statement. I proved to myself that I can live alone and pay the bills, even if I barely scrape by a lot of the time. I proved to myself that -- for the moment, anyway -- I can keep a fifteen-year-old car running well with little more than crossed fingers and safe driving. I proved to myself that, yes, I can balance teaching two sections of classes with three classes of my own to attend and do work for, two of the latter being reading/writing-intensive lit courses. I proved to myself that being single and (occasionally) really lonely is not the end of the world, and in that also proved to myself that while it may be nice to have someone else around, I don't need anyone but myself and my own determination to make it through grad school, especially in what has been my most hellish semester yet. I'm not trying to sound smug or self-righteous at all, really I'm not. All of these things have been huge personal issues for me that were, and still are in some cases, difficult for me to overcome. As you folks probably know, I've never lived totally on my own before, totally alone (except for the cats, who don't really factor into this sort of thing that much, as they're not human). Not only have I been able to successfully do so for quite some time now, despite a few setbacks and unexpected problems, I've been able to do it during one of the (arguably) most tumultuous years of my life, what with the breakup with the former girlfriend and the work-filled semester I've had to deal with.

Yes, I've lost many hours of sleep. Yes, I've more than likely permanently alienated some friends I was once close with. Yes, perhaps I've become a little more of a boring person than I expected myself to be at this age or at this point in my graduate school education. Yes, I've made many, many mistakes over the course of the past year or so, some of which still haunt me, and others that I've learned from in one way or another. 2011 has been a horrible, terrible year, but surviving it has taught me many, many things, especially about who I am and what I am capable of as an individual. It's been so long since I've been able to so fully focus on myself and the betterment of my own standing on life that I almost forgot how to do so. For so many years I was forced to focus on making everyone else around me happy -- first my parents, then later the former girlfriend and her parents -- now that I am able to focus on myself, I don't know where to begin, but I'm trying to piece it together a little more every day. As I've written here before, I don't know whether or not I'll ever truly be happy or even relatively content in my life, regardless of where I end up or what I end up doing. But surviving the events of this semester, and this year in general, is a good start. It puts me on a completely different track, gives me completely different ideas about things I could do with my life. I've realized that it's okay to be depressed, that it's okay to be uncertain. I've realized that there's no rhyme or reason to anything that happens, and -- permit me to be a bit nerdy and to quote the Terminator movies here -- there's no fate but what we make. This is why, every day, I try to better myself.

Anyway.

It should be no surprise to you that my mind tends to run in a thousand different directions at once, touching on the darker sides of depression, loneliness, and regret at times of the past and present, yes, but also trying to focus on the moment, on the future ahead of me, on the things and events that will happen or are possibilities. Despite a lot of things against me, I remain hopeful about the future, about the coming year. I'm a stronger person than I was a year ago (I prefer to think about it as becoming "battle-hardened"). I still get up every day. I still have hopes and dreams, I still have faith -- not necessarily in a higher power, but in myself. Even as a writer, I can't put into words how important that feeling, that drive within me is to my entire personality, as well as to how I view the world. The semester has ended. Soon, the year will end as well. It is, once more, a time for new beginnings. I'll turn 29 in eleven days, starting the last year of my twenties. I want that year to be a good one. I will do everything I can to make that year better than this one, to make up for my mistakes and sins of the past, to forge a new future for myself.

It is also no secret to most of you (if you can do math, of course) that this is the end of my third semester of graduate school, and I am now 1.5 years into my 3-year program. This means that I am now half-finished. To a certain extent I am filled with the accomplishment that, again, I'm half done, and it should all be coasting downhill from here (relatively speaking). To another extent, I think to myself something along the lines of "I'm only half done? Fuck." But, of course, that was to be expected. Everything is relative, and everything looks different depending on one's point of view. I'm a big proponent of the "cautiously optimistic" outlook -- acknowledging that yes, things might suck, but there's always the possibility that they won't suck too badly. That may be the closest parallel to the concept of being a realist that I will ever possess. That's also the outlook I have on the rest of my graduate school education, in case you were wondering. I do not, however, extend that outlook to the rest of my life. At least not yet.

So. The rest of this weekend, which is a day shorter for me due to my students' final exams, will be spent leisurely grading and reading, and trying to get back some of that relaxation time this semester so callously stole from me. Also, as the semester comes to a slow, torturous end when my students' finals are graded and my own final has been taken, my posts here will more than likely become more frequent as I'll actually have the time to update the blog more often. That's good, right?

Repent! The End is Near, Part II

Fall semester: day seventy-six

This is post #100 on the new, 2.0 version of this blog. Happy Blogiversary, or what-have-you. Figured that was worth mentioning in some respect or another.

I just realized that counting the entirety of finals week, there are only nine days of the semester remaining. I guess that means the semester consists of eighty-five days from start to finish (weekdays, of course, are the only ones being counted, and yes, breaks like Thanksgiving and Fall Break are counted too).

It seems like it's longer than that if you think about it, but really I guess it isn't.

Yesterday was one of those "do little, but accomplish a lot" sort of days for me. It's strange how things work out sometimes. Most of what I did was paperwork, pun intended -- I graded a round of rewritten essays and a few new ones, critiqued through the last poetry packet for workshop, and read about 100 pages of Anil's Ghost, the last novel we have to read for the Middle Eastern/Asian Lit course.

When it came to the latter, when I was about 90 pages deep into that 100-page reading, I came to the realization that, wait for it, I wasn't going to be tested on this material. Not really. Let me explain.

The final exam for that class is an essay test. It's also very similar to the midterm exam, which I wrote about here at length before -- however, the final is different. Before the midterm, we'd read three novels. We, therefore, had to write an essay on each of those three novels, and in class the week prior we wrote the questions ourselves. For the final, it will definitely be different. We've read five novels since the midterm was given, and there's no way we can write five essays in the time we're given for the exam, so our professor has told us basically that we'll have five questions and can choose from three of them.

This is similar to how he handled the final in the British Modernism class I took with him in the spring as well, for those of my friends who did not have the pleasure of taking that class with me.

Anyway, I don't know whether or not we'll be writing the questions for the final exam in this class as well, but it boils down to the fact that we only have time for three regardless. Which means, if he follows the same procedure with the exams he usually does, there are two books I won't have to write on at all if I choose not to.

This is good, because Anil's Ghost may be a fast read, but to me most of it is fucking boring, and I don't have the patience or desire to finish reading it. Yes, I can appreciate a good novel, but after this hellish semester of wall-to-wall work, I'm burned out on reading anything I don't absolutely have to read. Same goes for finishing Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler as well for my Fiction class -- I'm not going to be tested on it, there's no final in that class, and my final paper is already turned in. Theoretically, my grade in there is already set in stone once the aforementioned paper is graded, so why should I work extra to finish reading a book I didn't really enjoy in the first place? The last class will consist of little more than discussion, and I already know how the book ends.

Anyway. Back to the final for the Middle Eastern/Asian Lit course.

So, if there's only three questions on the final, I only really need to know in-depth information on the three books I choose to write on. Anil's Ghost is the only book I haven't read cover-to-cover for the class, so I'm fine there, and could probably write a good essay on it for an exam if I were forced to. Well, a passable one, at least. If I get bored, I'll possibly read more of it between now and Thursday night, but that also depends on how much free time I have as well when I'm not grading papers. Graduate students refer to this sort of thinking as "rationalizing reasons to be done with work." Because, theoretically, aside from my grading, I can call myself done if I so choose. I don't necessarily have to do anything else for the rest of the semester but show up, teach my classes, and grade.

To a certain extent, I feel like if I don't do anything but the bare minimum (read: see above) that I'm shirking my responsibilities or something along those lines, but there's also that voice inside my head telling me the semester is over, Brandon; just let it die. I'm trying not to let the voice of rationalization to get the better of me, but I also hate feeling like there's something I should be doing -- even if it's something I have no real reason or desire to do -- and I'm not.

To those ends, I have gone back through my Midnight's Children paper this evening (as today is the first day my professor told me I could turn it in) and have made some more minor edits now that I've had more than a week without looking at it. This not only makes me feel productive, but also lets me produce the best work possible for my professor -- it's probably the last time I'll be able to take him for the rest of my graduate school career (unless, of course, he offers a lit course in one of my final two semesters there), and I greatly admire and respect the man. Because of this, even though I already know I'll receive an A in his class and on this paper, I still want to give him the best reading experience possible -- if only because he deserves it and because I may eventually present this paper at a conference somewhere.

As an aside, I'm not going to any conferences in the spring; I have no money to do so, and most of them occur around, during, or shortly after Spring Break -- when, if I'm lucky, I'll be visiting my parents and friends back home in West Virginia. The annual PCA/ACA National Conference is in Boston this year, and as much as I'd like to go to Boston, I don't have the time or extra money to devote to it. When the former girlfriend and I presented at the last one this past spring in San Antonio, that was ungodly expensive even though we got to fly for free. It doesn't look like I'm going to be attending or presenting at any more conferences unless I somehow become independently wealthy overnight.

So, upon finishing those final edits to my Midnight's Children paper and sending it off to my professor, I now have one less thing at the end of the semester to worry about.

I do have some more grading to do tonight; SafeAssign (the university's plagiarism-checking system, used by almost all universities and colleges now) has been extremely slow over the course of the weekend, to the point where it's taking up to 48 hours or more to process papers. Obviously, I'm not grading any papers that haven't been submitted to SafeAssign, and the ones which have I've been waiting to clear the system have finally cleared it, except for two. I'm guessing it's because for many schools on the system, this is already finals week, and students are busy uploading final papers, which bogs down the system. So, once my last bits of grading are done, I'll be going to bed.

In other news, it's freezing here. The temperature didn't get above the freezing point all day, and it is clear that it's become winter -- or at least December -- in Kansas, because the wind has been whipping about all day/night too, and the wind chill is nine degrees. I really hope I can get the Monte Carlo started in the morning, and tomorrow night is definitely going to be one of those "stick the car in the garage" nights, as the temperature is supposed to drop down into the teens. It's pretty much been settled that I'll be wearing layers all week; the only question is how many. I'm really not looking forward to this sort of weather, especially when compared to the end of fall semester last year.

For those of you who don't remember the end of fall semester last year, it was almost seventy degrees during finals week. It was so nice we spent most of the afternoon after the exam throwing a football back and forth in the long stretch of grass behind the building. This year, in comparison, looks like it's going to be cold and miserable, if not snowy. We're supposed to get some snow here tonight, but nothing measurable. It hasn't started yet. I hope it passes us by. Cold is one thing, but snow is another.

Repent! The End is Near, Part I

This is my cat, Pete. There are many like him, but this one is mine. He's my big boy, my bastard, my cat-who-thinks-he's-a-dog. This picture was taken of him on my lap about fifteen minutes ago, as it's a cold and rainy Saturday afternoon and he wanted to be cuddled and kept warm by his daddy. He will turn five years old in March, and he weighs about fifteen pounds -- all lean muscle.

I don't write about my cats here that much because, most of the time, they feature prominently in my conversations/poetry a lot of the time anyway. A lot of my (low-end) poetry and/or writing exercises mentions at least one of them in some way, if just in passing, and my life revolves around these little furry shits, as they're always happy to see me, always miss me and show it when I come home from a late night of classes, and always want to be around me when I'm home. I would, quite simply, not be the same person without them.

I've thought about that and pondered whether or not it's sad and depressing to the outside world. If it is, I'm sort of okay with it. You know me and my motto of improving myself a little more every day -- one of the most noble things I can do in my life is to continually provide for these three fuzzy children of mine to the best of my ability at all times, and to never let them go hungry or feel unloved. If I can do that, at least I've accomplished something worthwhile in my life.

Anyway. Enough about the cats.

The last week of classes is upon us, and with it comes the mad rush by nearly everyone I know to get everything done or otherwise taken care of, and most of my friends are feeling crushed under the weight of academia. For example, Suri is writing three papers almost all at once and is stressed beyond anything I've ever seen in her. Rae lost five pages of work on her seminar paper, which is a huge blow to a paper such as the one she's writing, and therefore all of us apologized to her and almost cried for her as if she'd lost a family member. Jay, as well as some of our other classmates in the Middle Eastern/Asian Lit class, is swamped by revision and addition work for the final paper in there, as he just gave a presentation in the class on Thursday night that had been sucking up all of his other free time. These are just three examples of three close friends, but I've heard about the same from nearly everyone in the department. Like I said, November (and now, December) is a pain in the ass for everyone involved.

For the most part I've tried to keep a low profile, while at the same time feeling sympathy and empathy with all of my friends and colleagues. I've kept this low profile because, as you probably know, all of my hard work for the semester is now done. My papers are finished, my poetry portfolio has been turned in, and all that remains for me to do is some light reading, some grading, and taking the final in the aforementioned Middle Eastern/Asian Lit course. I've also kept a low profile about finishing all my work because I don't want people to resent and/or hate me, of course. Therefore, very few people who don't read this blog actually know about it, and all three of the above friends mentioned do read it, so eh (it's why I can mention them by name -- or, in Suri's case, a codename).

The end of the semester will come quietly, without a big "last blast" sort of scenario. Next week when I teach, I'm collecting my students' papers and giving a lecture on the final exam, then on Thursday we're taking a practice exam. Other than that, that's it. Everything's done but grading. There's a lot of that, of course, but it goes a lot faster than, say, writing a ton of papers or reading several books in succession. I can have my students' final papers graded in the span of about eight hours, if not less. The grading process for their finals won't take half that long.

The end of the semester also entails carefully partitioning out time for everything as well, for most people anyway. Careful consideration must be given to when we can write/edit our own papers, read our books, study for any/all final exams we have to take, and then figure out when/how we're going to grade our students' work. Because of that, this tends to be the time of the semester when the department goes quiet or empty, as everyone rushes to get everything done on their own time or schedule. As I have relatively little left to do, I have been focusing my time on relaxation (relative relaxation, anyway) and cleaning the house/taking care of the normal household chores. The upstairs bathroom needs a good scrubdown, for example. As this is the last weekend for college football until the bowl games start, I've been watching those as well. But, still, there's always something to be done; I have some early papers and rewrites of papers to grade, and I'd like to give my Midnight's Children paper a few more small edits and read-overs before I turn it in.

As an aside, I was planning to turn that in last week -- and asked my professor when he wanted it (since I'd be turning it in early regardless). I asked because I know he teaches at least two undergrad courses as well, and if he teaches them the same way he teaches our courses, he'll be pretty busy over the next few weeks with grading papers and exams. He replied that he was getting 40 undergrad papers on Thursday, so it was probably best to wait until at least Monday to turn in my paper. As I am certainly understanding -- and could use a few extra days to look at it, or possibly edit or work on it a little more -- I agreed. Not that I wouldn't have anyway. So, reworking that paper, if necessary, has also been added to my to-do list.

The Mrs Dalloway paper has already been turned in; my professor called it "a big, fat paper" with surprise and/or pleasure when I gave it to him, regarding its heftiness (15 pages). I hope he likes it, and I hope that this time he's not too harsh about my writing style. Right now, as (somewhat) ashamed as I am to say it, I have a flat B in that class by my own estimation, mainly because he grades quite hard. The highest score I've received in the class on any of my work in there has been an A- on one of the response papers. The rest have been B's or B-pluses. That includes the really long, intricate Madame Bovary paper I wrote in October (a flat B). The class has been interesting enough, yes, and we've read a few novels I've enjoyed, but that's par for the (lit) course, I suppose. Unless I get an A on the Dalloway paper, I'm not getting an A in the class, as that paper is 40% of my grade. If I get a B in the course it's not a big deal, but it means I'll break my streak of consecutive straight-A semesters (currently standing at four; my entire senior year of college and my entire first year of grad school).

This is so not incredibly important to me, really -- my GTAship won't be in jeopardy or anything if I get a B. Really, after taking two lit courses this semester, reading about fifteen novels, teaching two sections of Science/Engineering English classes for the first time, and taking a poetry workshop with a new professor (and an increased workload to go along with said professor)...not to mention dealing with a constant lack of sleep, worrying about money and my car, and starting a new life as a single man for the first time in six years...well, I'm lucky I've survived the semester period. A "B" on my grade report will so not be the end of the world. Would I rather have an A? Yes, of course. Will I get one? Probably not. And I'm okay with that.

This week, for the last week of class, our poetry professor is holding our class at his house to celebrate the end of the semester. I didn't really want to go; it seemed mostly frivolous to me, though I am interested in seeing where he lives. After all, it's not like we'll be doing any real work there that night. It's basically a get-together sort of hangout session, where we'll do a little workshopping, eat some dinner of some sort, and then say our final farewells. At least I assume that's what it's going to be. It's supposed to be a shortened class meeting, since it's the last one and it's at his house, so it should be interesting at the very least. It doesn't mean I can stay late, though; I always have to get home and get to bed ASAP on Wednesday nights so that I can get up and spend all day on campus again Thursday. As Thursday is the last day of classes, it's even more important that I'm well-slept and functional beforehand. You know how it goes for me -- no real relaxation until my work is done.

Despite the fact that most of said work is done, it will still be a rather long and busy week for me. As I'm collecting my students' papers on Tuesday, I'll be grading through them (as I mentioned before) as well as finishing my readings for my last two other classes for the semester. It's mostly busywork, but it's stuff that needs to be done. Next weekend is shorter for me than usual as well; usually I have Mondays off, but next Monday (the 12th) is when we're giving the final exams. There's also a meeting of the school's journal staff beforehand as well. All of this means that I'll be forced to get up at 5AM again and jaunt my merry way back to school for the first Monday I will have spent on campus all semester.

Thankfully I only have to be there one other day for the rest of next week, and that would be Thursday, for the final exam in my Middle Eastern/Asian Lit class. Thursday night, at that. Monday may be a long day, but if I can get all of the exams graded and final semester scores calculated, I shouldn't have to return to campus until then. If not? I'll go in early on Thursday and deal with all of it then. But mark my words, I'll be done with everything by next Thursday. I am so not returning to campus after that if I can help it -- there's no reason to do so, no reason to waste the gas. Once I've taken my last final and have submitted/turned in my students' grades, I'm done, son.

Of course, there are several extraneous things I have to worry about too, as well as extracurricular ones. For example, there's a pretty good chance that I'll be courting a fair lady at some point soon. Yeah, I know, that's surprising to me too. But more on that later, of course. No reason to get optimistic yet. There's too much to take care of and worry about in the meantime to get my hopes up about anything quite yet.

There is a stack of bills on the kitchen counter. These bills represent the vast majority of my expenses for the next month. Combined, they are also more money than I have in my bank account right now, by a considerable amount. Electric, water, and car insurance. All three came in this week within a day of one another. My car insurance, as expected, is almost $300. I believe it's $284, or something like that. It's due on the 28th. Electric is $90, due on the 19th. Water is $65, due on the 20th. With the rent due at the end of the month again it'll be a very tight month of December, with very little spare money for extra expenses, even with paychecks. This is why I'm glad my parents are giving me money for Christmas -- money which should be deposited in my bank account soon (or at least I hope so, because I need it ASAP).

Speaking of my parents, my mother is working on booking me a flight out to West Virginia over Spring Break (anytime between March 16 and 25, really, since I'll have four-day weekends again during spring semester). It's the only real time I have that I know I won't be bogged down with responsibilities until, say, May. She wanted to fly me out there in May after finals week ended in the spring, but if I'm teaching pre-sessions or Summer Session I, that wouldn't be exactly feasible. At least Spring Break is one of those times where it's "locked in" that I'll be off and available, free and clear. Besides, I'd rather not wait until May. If I don't do it as early as possible -- like, say, during said Spring Break -- then depending on when I teach this coming summer, it may never happen. I'll need to teach this summer regardless in order to be able to survive, as well as pay for the massive amounts of upkeep and repairs to the Monte Carlo (which, hopefully, will keep running until then).

Mental note: I still need to go to the hardware store here in town to make a duplicate key for the car.

In other news, I'll be more than entertained over the break; the lovely Andrea's gifts have arrived in the mail, and they are nothing short of awesome. The biggest of the four(!) things she got me was the entire run of Arrested Development on DVD. As in, all three seasons in one big box set-like bundle. Now I'll finally be able to see the series all of my friends tell me I need to sit down and watch. She also got me the suction-cup handle for my car window (remind me to tell you the story sometime of why I need one of those), a box of my favorite incense (Satya Saibaba "Rain Forest") and last but not least, a full-size, steel die-cast Star Trek science officer's insignia badge -- which is awesome and will immediately be going on my jacket. Which jacket, I'm not sure, but one of them.

Andrea is awesome. I so have to do something extra nice for her soon to thank her, and not just the big package I'm going to mail her anyway. It's friends like Andrea who keep me going, in more ways than one, even if she's 1,000 miles away.

Oh, before I wrap this up for the night, you're probably wondering how my kidney/back is doing. As far as I can tell, I'm fine. I haven't had any pain of any sort, not even a dull ache, in about two days or so. On Thursday night my special "Urinary Tract Health with Cranberry" pills arrived, so I've been taking at least three or four of them every day and have been drinking a lot more liquids, including a ton of water. Looks like I'm going to live, folks. If anything else happens, of course, I'll be sure to tell you.

The rest of my weekend will be spent working on the various household-and-school-related things mentioned above, but for the most part I'm going to see if I can get a fair amount of good sleep, good rest, in order to better prepare myself for the last week of classes. It is a last week of classes that could not come soon enough, really, and a last week of classes that I have been waiting to come to pass all semester long, as have most other people I know.