Stir-Crazy, Bored, and Lonely

Fall semester: day forty-seven

It figures that the one night that I should be asleep at 2:30 AM, I can't sleep at all. This is, of course, coming off four days of +/-10 hour nights of sleep, in which I was convinced that there was something wrong with me because I was sleeping so much.

Then again, Monday night insomnia is nothing new to me at this point, and it shouldn't be new to you, either, if you've been reading this blog for a while. I think I'm going to give up even trying to sleep on Monday nights for the most part from this point forward. If it happens, it happens, but it doesn't really tend to matter either way, as on Tuesdays I can come home at noon and pass out if I wish -- and not necessarily have to get up before 10 or so on Wednesday mornings unless I choose to.

I've been asked by some friends and colleagues why I come in to campus on Wednesday mornings at 7:30 when I don't even have class until 1:30. Most of the time, the answer is simple as well as twofold: yes, it's mainly to get a parking spot that I don't have to fight for, but it's also because I can get a lot of work done in and around the office that I don't necessarily have time to do on a Tuesday or Thursday morning -- such as preparing lesson plans or handouts, finishing any reading for my classes, or printing off/making copies of stuff I need to hand out or turn in. It also gets me out of the house for a few extra hours and helps me do something constructive, despite whatever level of sleep deprivation I'm dealing with at the time. I get to be a little more social, I get stuff done, etc. Whatever works; I live a boring life -- any time spent in the real world outside this house and my Man Cave is good, right?

Tonight's insomnia has me in a weird place. I am not in the least bit tired, either mentally or physically, and in fact, once my coffee kicks in I'll probably be actually energetic. Gone is that fatigue I was fighting for the better part of the weekend.

I'm also in a weird place because, for the first time in a long time, I've been able to finish all of my work well ahead of schedule. By yesterday afternoon, I'd finished reading Crime and Punishment (or, at least as much of it as I needed to read to write a response paper on it, which I also did...which means I skipped about 300 pages and read the last forty pages of the book or so to find out what happened). I had also finished all of the house cleaning and laundry I needed to do well ahead of schedule too, as I started the laundry on Thursday night. I read The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, as mentioned before, all in one day. I went out and did the grocery shopping and filled the car with gas yesterday. All of the work for my classes this week was done by Saturday evening, including critiquing my students' workshop essays as well as my fellow poets' workshop poems. I even paid the rent and stuck the check in the mail, as well as sent off a surprise package to my dad.

So, by about 5PM last night, having done everything that I needed to take care of, I found myself in a really weird headspace -- one that I haven't experienced in several months -- I was bored. With that boredom came this weird sense of calm, like the eye of a hurricane was passing over me. I knew that my work wasn't done for the semester, not by a fucking long shot, but for the remainder of the day and for the better part of the next two days, I was free, in a sense.

Mind you, as I said before, there is always something else to be done, or at least something else that can be done, sometimes well in advance. For example, I could be reading the next book for either one of my lit courses, if I wanted to do so. Well, I could, provided those books were here at home with me, which they're not. I keep them all on my bookshelf in my office. I could also be working on revising/adding to my Midnight's Children paper, as an expanded version of that will be due in December. However, we've not gotten our grades back for the first paper (read: version) yet, and until that happens I don't want to go around changin' shit. Our professor is a busy man this semester -- he's teaching undergraduate courses as well, and is still in the process of grading our midterm exams that we took almost two weeks ago. I would imagine it'll be another week at least before I find out my grade on the paper, and probably another few days before I find out my grade on the midterm. There's no hurry, really; there may be a ton of work in that class, but as long as we do it, we're usually graded pretty favorably.

This is also the same professor who holds an upscale Christmas party every year for faculty and staff, in the penthouse ballroom of the very nice apartment building he and his wife live (and own their apartment) in. The man's not only super-intelligent, but is incredibly classy. This year it may be the only extracurricular activity I take part in, department-related or otherwise -- and mainly out of respect to that man and the brilliant classes I've taken by him over the past year. This is a big deal, as if you know me, I'm not big on social functions. At all.

As I've been feeling relatively free-spirited all night (for once), I spent a good chunk of my time cooking dinner and watching the World Series game -- a type of relaxation I don't get to do often. The rest of it I spent wandering the house doing various small tasks while listening to podcasts. When I found once more I couldn't sleep, I considered watching a movie, but realized that a) it would probably put me to sleep, and b) that sleep would not be very satisfying compared to just coming home after class and going to bed then. So, of course, I came here.

There's not been a lot going on in my little reclusive world, but then again there rarely is. Yes, in the back of my mind are always my budget woes and my mostly minor car problems, but most of the time I can push those things out of my head and not worry about them too much. The big news tonight was that apparently there's very rare aurora borealis lights and patterns visible here in Kansas, and it's visible as far south as Arkansas as well. I only heard about it on the news; I wasn't intrigued enough to actually go out and look to the northern skies. Let me know when the aliens land, or when the extinction-level-event meteor is about to strike the planet, and I'll go out and look. Anything else is mostly boring to me. Woo, a few red light circles in the sky! Etc.

A few people have asked me why my first book isn't available on Amazon anymore; it's not, that's true. I've taken it off so that I can edit it down and change around the file formatting for the print edition. This will take quite a long amount of time -- possibly as long as it took to put the original book together -- and I probably won't be able to even start on that work in earnest until the holidays. As I've said before, though, it will eventually be available again in one form or another. I just have to put a lot of work into its revision and republication. So, no worries.

At least my classes today should be rather short; it's workshop week, and only about 1/3 of my students even gave the class a workshop draft on Thursday. The rest of them will either come in today, or they won't be workshopped and those students will lose points. The final version of the paper is due on November 1, and with that starts the headlong rush to the end of the semester, full of work and the last large paper/project for my students. I'm hoping today we can get through the workshop copies we have, I can give a short lecture on a few of the things coming up, and all of us can get the hell out of there. By noon I'll be tired, I'm sure.

I just sent my mother a long email that sounded a lot like a "State of the Brandon" address. She's worried about my car as always, which is completely understandable, and told me that my insurance on it would probably be lower if I dropped everything but liability for it. Well yes, she's right, especially for a car that old, but all of the other factors against me (remember, the Monte Carlo is classified as a "sports car" because it's the Z34 model, I have no credit history because nobody will give me a credit card, and I'm a new driver with a new policy) are what keep it at $298 every six months. I know people who don't pay anywhere near that for insurance on their vehicles for a full year, let alone every six months.

In case you were wondering, I have a "medium coverage" sort of policy on that car; it's not full coverage, but it's not just liability either; it's more like liability with a few extras, such as optional, limited roadside assistance and a $50/100k policy on bodily injury/damages. Liability-only insurance, with all the factors against me, would save me a negligible amount of money -- something like $50 each period. Believe me, I checked. It's worth the extra $50 to get the extra coverage, even on a car that old. Perhaps the rate may go down in the future as long as I don't have any accidents, but for now, my 6-month insurance payment is due on December 30, and I have no clue at this point how I'm going to pay it unless I get a ton of money from relatives for Christmas.

This is also why I basically told my mother that anytime she wants to drop a shitload of money into my bank account, believe me, I wouldn't decline or fight it.

At least my electric bill -- which arrived in the mail yesterday -- is only $48 this month. I think that's the lowest electric bill I've ever received. And it's not due for another three weeks, which means I can save up a bit before I have to pay it; I'll get two more paychecks before it's due.

The weather has been gorgeous here for the past few days -- in the 70s or low 80s during the day, which has been nothing short of extraordinary compared to the low 50s of last week and well-below-freezing temperatures at night. Of course, this can't last -- starting tomorrow the temperatures are supposed to drop down low at night again and the highs are only going to be in the 60s again. As it may be the last week I get to wear shorts to school, I'm going to take full advantage of it. I've already broken out my coats/jackets, and have unpacked and readied all of my winter clothing in preparation for the next several months of nut-numbingly cold Kansas weather.

In other news, my former students are awesome. I've mentioned before that a few of my former students, all of them from the first semester I was teaching (strangely enough) have become friends of mine, if not close friends in several cases. One of them found me a case of the Scary Blackberry "Ghoul-Aid" Kool-Aid -- 72 packs in all -- and is bringing it to my office on Wednesday. In thanks, I am giving her (what else?) a pink tie-dye t-shirt I made that she wanted from my collection. I mentioned the Kool-Aid and that she'd found some for me here before, but I didn't go into much detail about it.

As an aside, my lovely friend Shanna back home, a woman that I may very well end up marrying one day (and no, that's not a joke -- but it is indeed a story for another time), found me thirty more packets of it while shopping this past week, and will be mailing them to me soon as well. So, my Kool-Aid search is over for the moment. I'll soon have enough of it to swim in if I so choose.

Another one of my former students, a girl who really needs an eventual codename in this blog because she does factor largely into my life at times (though that factoring comes and goes depending on how busy both of us are) just told me that she's probably going to end up moving to Seattle within the next year or so for a student exchange program. This sort of upsets me because not only is she one of the best undergraduate writers I've ever read, but she's super-intelligent and actually cares about what's going on in my life, stopping by my office a lot to hang out for no particular reason. She's a good friend and I'll be sad to see her go, if she does. On the plus side, however, she also told me that she'd happily come up to Newton and visit me if I get stir-crazy, bored, and lonely. I had to remind her that "stir-crazy, bored, and lonely" has been pretty much my daily life since the former girlfriend and I parted ways. So, perhaps I'll be able to have some visiting company over the course of the next few months at some point. It would be nice.

Before any of you say anything or start arching eyebrows, I will remind you that she is a former student. Emphasis on the former. Get your minds out of the gutter; I'm allowed to have hot nineteen-year-old friends that I'm not attracted to in the least.

Really, right now I'm not attracted to anyone, to tell you the truth. My penis is on hiatus. I may as well be a eunuch at this point.

Wow, there's a poem/book/thesis title for you: My Penis is on Hiatus.

Anyway.

Suri and I are delivering a presentation in two weeks or so on a novel called Comfort Woman or something. Like everything else in all the classes we have together, we're working on it together (mainly because the girl is the closest friend I have in Wichita, if not Kansas as a whole). Anyway, it's apparently a novel that involves a lot of rape, violence, gore, and possible prostitution. I don't know because I haven't read it yet, but when I heard the novel involved those topics/themes, it immediately piqued my interest. This probably means I'm a horrible person, of course, but after reading some of the most boring, long, and/or confusing novels for my lit classes over the course of the semester thus far, I long to read one that I may actually find exciting on some level -- or, at the very least, interesting. I'll be creating a PowerPoint presentation on the history around the novel and the author's background, and Suri will be covering the novel itself and the events that are going on within it. Our objective is to lead an hour's worth of class discussion, which -- knowing how much I like to hear myself talk (remember, I'm a narcissist at heart) shouldn't be difficult.

I also have a 15-minute presentation I have to prepare on a novel called Waiting for the Barbarians as well, and that will happen during the same week -- the day before my presentation with Suri, actually -- a week which will already be loaded for bear with that work, grading, and student conferences occurring. It's also the week before Thanksgiving. As I mentioned before, so that I don't have to waste the time/gas on coming to campus for one day during Thanksgiving week, I've canceled class for my students -- especially since about 80% of them wouldn't show up anyhow, I'm guessing. That gives me a full ten days or so off, during which I'll be doing all sorts of work like writing papers, reading books, and creating my poetry portfolio to turn in at the end of the semester.

On that note, I've been writing here for the better part of three hours, and this post is mammoth and massive, and I'm sure most of you have just skimmed it for any pertinent info. As always, I shall return to the blog once I have more time and more things to report. Until then, friends and readers.