The Slog

Fall semester: day three

Oh, I'm already feelin' it, folks.

Feelin' what, you may ask?

I call it the slog. It's that continual dragging feeling that one gets when one is busy, has a lot of things to do that he or she may not remember without writing it all down, and the specific point in time that those things start to wear one down when one compares the hours spent doing them versus the hours spent sleeping. It is after this point where one finds him or herself, well, slogging through things.

I have already started to reach this point on day three of the fall semester, and I've only been on campus five times (total) in the past month.

This does not bode well, folks. It does not bode well at all.

Last night I went to bed around 1. I didn't have to get up early this morning, which should be obvious from the fact that I'm writing here at 10AM, and instead set my alarm for 8. When the alarm went off, it felt like I had gotten no sleep whatsoever, even though I'd slept for almost seven hours and had an afternoon nap yesterday for about two.

I have myriad things to do, and this week is just now ramping up, even though it's already Wednesday morning. Over the next 36 hours, at least 20 of them -- if not more -- will be spent on campus, either in classes (my own as well as the ones I teach) or in my office for office hours/working on various things. Today I have class from 1:30-4, office hours from 5-7, and my workshop class from 7:05-9:45. While I don't know if either of my classes today will last the full time as they're the first ones of the semester, I still have to plan for them if they do. After I get home tonight, I have to sleep fast because I'll be getting up at 5AM again to go back in to teach tomorrow morning, and then have more office hours and another late class tomorrow night at the same time as tonight's.

Yeah. Welcome to my semester, folks. I may only have to go in three days a week, but two of those three days are pretty long, ending at 10PM. It's no different than last semester -- when I actually had to be there four days a week, or fall semester last year for that matter, but still. As I mentioned before, I think I'm getting too old for this shit.

Friday is supposed to the the first meeting of the EGSA as well as the first meeting for the staff of the school's literary journal. It all starts at 11AM. Why they schedule it on a Friday, when none of us have to be on campus for anything, let alone a meeting, is beyond me. Those of us on the staff at the journal, at least, repeatedly requested last semester that future meetings not be held on Fridays for that very same reason. I probably won't get home on Thursday night until around 10:30-11ish, as I have my late class -- which means that at 11AM on Friday, I will probably still be asleep. This is also problematic for me as it costs me about $7 in gas every time I make a trip to Wichita and back, and puts 48 more miles on the car, for a meeting that usually lasts less time than it takes to drive there and back. It's just not economically or realistically feasible for someone like me. I'm one of the three current nonfiction editors on the journal's staff, and I would like to keep that position, but if it means that I must attend every meeting, especially if those meetings are held on days where I won't normally be on campus, then I'll have to give it up -- at least for this year, anyhow. Realistically, all I do is receive submissions from the editors via email, and approve/reject them via a reply. While that position may look good on my resume in the future, it's already on there from last year, and I'm not going to tax the car (or my wallet for gas, or my sleep schedule) any more than I have to in order to get to these meetings. With my schedule this semester I don't have the time to do anything extra for the journal but edit that stuff, anyhow -- I've got two lit courses and a poetry course to worry about, and two classes to teach and grade papers for.

In other news, from this point forward I'm not going to talk much about my book here -- unless, for some reason, it starts selling thousands of copies overnight and I can't figure out why. I don't really want this blog to turn into a plug-machine of shameless self-promotion, even if I am more narcissistic about myself than I rightfully should be most of the time. I've sold several copies already, and if that's all I end up selling, period, I'll be happy. Over the course of the next few days, I'll probably post a link to the Amazon page for it somewhere on my sidebar to the right, or link to it in the header of the blog or something, but other than that it's not like I'm going to go balls-out advertising it. If it sells and people like it, good. If it doesn't sell that well, I'll shop it around to publishing houses and literary agents over the course of the next year, and try to get a print version made. No biggie; you folks know me -- I go with the flow.

On that note, I need to leave the house now in order to make the slog to campus for the day's classes and other activities. Here's hoping I can get a decent parking spot and won't have to walk half a mile to the building on another day where the temperature is supposed to be over 100.