Good Surprises

Easter Sunday

This weekend was awesome. I'll start out by saying that.

Some of you folks would probably like an update on what's been happening over the course of the two weeks (now going on three) since Spring Break ended and I returned home from West Virginia, since that's all I've been writing about in great detail. The short version of that story is that everything has pretty much returned to normal, or at least my version of normal, anyhow. As the semester ramps up (or winds down, depending on how one looks at the end of spring semester), not only do I have a lot of my own work coming due, but I have a lot to take care of for my two classes I teach -- for example, this weekend I just collected their second (of three) papers, so I have forty of those I must grade through as soon as possible in order to clear my plate of any other student-related responsibilities. I'll also be creating a ton of different handouts and other final course prep material, and I have a meeting with my "boss" of sorts on Tuesday to sort out everything for the final paper and final exam. There isn't a day for the next month or so that I won't be balls-to-the-wall busy with something to do, not to mention that I have a semester-long Editing project that I haven't been able to touch as of late. Here's what my schedule looks like for the next two weeks or so:

4/8 (today) -- Grade through as many papers as possible. Take care of all household chores that I didn't get to this weekend thus far (the reasons for this I will mention later in this post).

4/9 -- Monday. Register for fall semester at 7AM. Go back to bed, get up, continue grading papers/working on other homework. Finish as much as humanly possible. Probably get a headache while doing so. This includes writing a new poem for workshop and completing another gift poem assignment, as well as editing/critiquing the poems up for workshop this week.

4/10 -- Tuesday. Teaching my two classes' worth of students at the library, for their "library day" activity. Returning to the department for a meeting with my bosslady. Office hours, during which I will continue my grading (because I'm sure I won't be finished yet). 4:30-6:50 Poetry workshop class. Return home exhausted, but purposely leaving the remainder of those ungraded papers at work so that I don't have to mess with them until Wednesday morning.

4/11 -- Wednesday. Get up, go to campus. Start office hours, hopefully finish grading any and all papers I have left to grade. Work Writing Center hour at 12. Go to practicum at 2. 4:30-6:50 Editing class, after which I will once more return home exhausted, once more purposely leaving any papers left to grade (my hopes are that by this point, there won't be any) for Thursday morning before class.

4/12 -- Thursday. It's SPTE (read: university teacher/professor/GTA evaluations) day in my classes. Deal with those, collect my students' proposals/annotated bibliographies to grade, cover a lesson in the textbook. Remind them that conferences are next week, so we won't be meeting in my class but in my office, and that normal office hours on those days don't exactly apply. Finally, a break -- go home shortly after noon, probably pass out. Get up, clean house like crazy (for various reasons, again, that I will mention below).

4/13 -- Friday. Also, thankfully, payday. Go to bed probably around 4AM. Get up, continue cleaning house until I'm finished. Attempt to grade as many proposals/annotated bibliographies as humanly possible. Lady arrives in town again that afternoon, to spend the weekend with me as she has an appointment at a school here in town.

4/14 and 4/15 -- Time with Lady while she's here, including her appointment and some shopping/other fun couple stuff before she (regretfully) must return to school.

4/16 -- Monday. Again. Finishing the grading of any proposal/annotated bib assignments, making sure all bills that are due soon are paid and mailed, and once more finishing up any homework for my poetry class that I've slacked on over the weekend. Also working on my Editing class's final project.

4/17 -- Tuesday. No teaching; conferences instead in my office. Taking student conferences all day until 12:30 or so, then office hours, then my 4:30-6:50 poetry class as per the usual. Must finish an extraneous assignment for this class by this day, otherwise I'll never get it done.

4/18 -- Wednesday. See schedule for 4/11. Nothing ever changes on Wednesdays.

4/19 -- Thursday. Again, no teaching. I'll be finishing the second half of my conferences with my students, for as long as that takes, and then at 4PM I am participating in the spring MFA poetry reading in the basement of the library. Lady will be in attendance, coming to see me read and meet my friends from the department. It will be the first time she's seen me read any of my poetry aloud. Return home after the reading, go to bed early so she can get up and drive back to school in the early morning hours (unfortunately she has classes that next day, Friday, she can't miss -- despite my wishes for her to stay the weekend again).

4/20 -- Friday. See Lady off in the early morning (probably no later than 6:30 or so) before spending the day working on editing my students' workshop copies, collected in their conferences with me, and trying desperately to finish up a draft of my Editing project if at all possible. Most of this work will continue throughout the rest of the 4/21 - 4/22 weekend.

So yeah, I've got a lot on my plate to deal with over the course of the next two weeks or so. However, that's what's ahead of me -- let's move back into the present and recent past to bring you up to speed.

Tomorrow morning, as previously mentioned, I register for the last real semester of schooling I will ever endure. This is a bittersweet moment, but a good one nonetheless. I'll never have to take a semester of actual classes ever again after I register tomorrow morning. How can this be, you ask, because I still have next spring as well? Well, let me explain.

During my advising appointment (which took place on the Wednesday after Spring Break ended), my advisor -- who is also the director of the creative writing program -- told me that I should take a nine-hour fall semester. This is fine, of course, though not what I was expecting. I have covered all of my course requirements but two -- one more lit course and my "enrichment" course, which is a graduate-level course outside of the department -- and my original plans were to take one of those courses in the fall and the other in the spring. The enrichment course I chose was Playwriting I, offered through the theater department -- a course that many of us MFAs take when it's offered because it's fun and still allows us to creatively write, just outside the department. Said course is only offered in the fall, so originally I'd planned to just take that, take my thesis hours, and deal with the lit course (whichever one it ended up being) and my other thesis hours in the spring. Simple enough, right?

Well, not exactly. Yes, Playwriting I is offered in the fall, and I will be registering for it tomorrow morning as long as I can get into it (if I can't, I have a few backups in Sociology and History ready to go). But my advisor encouraged me to get the other lit course out of the way as well, just so that when I came back in the spring after Christmas, I would have no classes to take but the three thesis hours I required to graduate. She suggested that I should add the class being taught by the new poetry professor in the department (the one I had last semester), as it's a "studies in surrealism" in poetry sort of class -- and that it would count as my other lit course. While I was initially apprehensive about this, after discussing it, I was like eh, why not? and summarily put myself on the list for it. I'm not a big fan of surrealism in poetry, but if it means I don't have to take yet another Shakespeare, American/British Lit, or Renaissance Lit course instead in its place, I'm game. So, I'm set up for Playwriting, Surrealism, and thesis hours for the fall. My schedule will be much like it is now for the most part.

However.

The Playwriting class is Monday/Wednesday. Yes, two days a week. The Surrealism class is Wednesday night. If I'm still teaching Tuesday/Thursday, it means I'll be in there four days a week instead of three. Yes, all four days, with basically one or two things to do each day I'm there, and no way out of it. I asked, because of this weird schedule, if I could get my teaching days switched to Monday/Wednesday instead, so I could take care of everything on those two days and not have to worry about being on campus the rest of the week, but if I'm teaching the Science/Engineering English again in the fall, that will be impossible as that class meets at set times -- Tuesday/Thursday, 9:30 and 11.

I say "if," because I've also thrown my hat in the ring to teach the online versions of either English 101 or English 102. Two of the GTAs who now teach those are graduating this semester and they need to fill those spots, if not open up more sections as well. I have put in my request to teach one of these classes for three reasons:

1.) It would mean that I would never have to be on campus for the entirety of my last semester at Flat State University -- if I'm just having thesis hours and I'm teaching my classes through their online system, I'll never have to be there at all but maybe once a week for office hours and at the end of the semester for their final exam.

2.) I've been wanting to teach the online classes since I started there, as I already make incredibly detailed handouts and timelines for my students to follow -- 95% or so of which I can easily take care of online without changing around my lesson plans (or the way I make said plans) by any large amount.

3.) Because those chosen to teach online are given paid training at the end of this semester -- an online "boot camp" if you will, and it pays very, very well -- something like $1,700 for as little as two weeks worth of "hey, come in here and listen to us teach you how to teach online."

I've mentioned before that over the summer, my finances are in extreme dire straits (and no, I don't mean the band). As I did not win the fellowship (the story about that is forthcoming) -- not that it would pay me in the summer anyhow -- and as none of us yet know who will be selected to teach summer sessions, this is the only option other than, say, breaking down to work at a fast food place or at Walmart I will have to be able to survive this summer without paychecks. $1,700 would be life-changing for me for the summer. I could quite easily live on that. Would it be glamorous? No, and I'll still need to save as much as I can from each paycheck from now until the end of the semester to get by, but it would pay the bills and allow me to focus on putting together my thesis -- which is what I should be spending those months doing anyhow. I can save money from my paychecks as much as I want, but without other income after they stop, I will not last past mid-July before I run my bank account completely dry because of bills, rent, and food. That's just the cold hard facts. Adding to the misery is the fact that my car insurance (all $382 of it) comes due at the end of June, so that in itself is another one-two punch to the gut when I'll already be financially struggling. While I could put that on one of my two credit cards, do I want to? Fuck no. My point is that if I don't get one or the other and/or can't find at least a part-time job -- demeaning to my position/education or otherwise -- there's no way I'll survive until August. No way at all.

However, in order to teach the online classes I not only have to get a greenlight to do so from the department, but I would have to help find someone who could "replace" me as the instructor for the Science/Engineering 102 sections I teach now. This is harder than it sounds on both fronts; while some of my colleagues are interested in teaching said courses, they're either locked into what they're teaching, they've already put in for teaching another class (such as remedial English, ESL, or business writing), or they don't have the "technical experience" to teach the class (read: they're not huge nerds like I am). All of these are big ifs, and it's looking more and more by the day like I'll have to plan for worst-case scenario to actually happen -- meaning I won't get a summer teaching position, won't get the online courses, and will have to find something to do to make money this summer outside of the school environment, all while trying to put together my thesis.

But...the silver lining is, of course, that I won't have to take any classes next spring, regardless of all of those events.

Anyway.

The registration process and being unlocked to register for my fall classes was a whole other animal as well. I had to get both poetry professors to sign off on my "prospectus" sheet in order to even be able to enroll in thesis hours for the fall. This means I had to ask one of them to be my director, one to be my second reader, and that I must be "thinking about" who I'd like my third reader to be. Plus I had to give the director a tentative title, subject matter, and estimated length of the project (read: basically tell her what the thesis is actually going to be).

We're a year out, folks. I have no fucking clue what my thesis is going to be yet, what I should title it, what it's going to consist of, or how long it's going to be. All of those things I wrote on the sheet, just to be able to register for the thesis hours themselves, are basically bullshit. I'm a poet. If I were a novelist, it would be different. As a poet, my thesis is basically just a collection of edited, polished poetry of a publishable quality. That's it. I don't know what I'm going to call it, what will be in it, or how I'll arrange it. I have no clue. I have enough shit to worry about right now in my daily life, and many other things to take care of first before I can even seriously think about that stuff. So, really, I made up a title and BSed a title/chapter headings/estimated length just to make the department happy so that I can graduate on time. Poets think different from other writers, and I think I do especially; whatever goes into my thesis will go into my thesis. I'm not going to obsess about it a full fucking year in advance. Like I said, I have other important things to deal with right now -- like how I'm going to be able to eat and keep the air conditioner running this summer.

Anyway.

The title of this post is called "Good Surprises" for a reason, folks, and it entails what happened this weekend. So let me tell you that story.

I stayed up really late on Thursday night. Really late -- I didn't go to sleep until 7AM on Saturday morning, after the sun came up. This is because I'd taken a nap on Thursday afternoon, I'd collected forty papers from my students that I didn't want to grade yet, and I was severely, severely sleep-deprived. I can't get back on any sort of really normal sleeping schedule after the travel and events of Spring Break, and because of that I am struggling through my days in a zombie-like state, fueled by many cups of coffee and many cigarette (or, in my office, eCig) breaks. So, when I got up on Friday afternoon, I stumbled upstairs, made coffee, and made a vow that I just wanted some time to relax, some time for me -- I didn't want to deal with any schoolwork or anything else -- I just wanted to sit here and write and decompress. That's why the last two posts about Spring Break went up on Friday afternoon/evening.

During this time, I'd been texting back and forth with Lady, as I frequently do when we're apart. We give each other updates on how our days are going, etc. I know her schedule at this point (for the most part) at school, so I know what classes she has and when she has to go to play rehearsal (she's an actress) and the like. That afternoon she was attending a baccalaureate meeting at the school, so I knew she was busy. After the meeting I assumed she'd gone to dinner with her friend, as her friend works at a small restaurant in the town where she goes to school, and Lady can eat free there when said friend is working. She told me AIM wasn't working on her phone, so I was waiting for her to get back to her room so we could spend the night talking.

Around 9:30 or so, she called me on my cell. I missed the call because (like an idiot) my ringer was still on silent from the day before of teaching, and I had the phone in my robe pocket, which muffled the vibrations. I was also listening to my podcasts in my earbuds, so it was hard to notice any noise or vibration anyhow. However, a little while later I received this text from her, which I did immediately notice, as I had at that point put the phone back on my desk:

"You should really answer your phone. Or go outside. Either/or."

This intrigued me. There were thunderstorms in the forecast, so I thought maybe she'd been looking at the radar and had seen something really nasty coming my way, or something like that. Yes, that was my first thought, because -- again -- I'm an idiot. I left my room, surely with a quizzical expression on my face, and walked out to the living room to look out the window...only to see Lady's car in my driveway. Surprise!

Like a madman I dashed to the door and flung it open to find her standing there. Apparently she'd been at the house for about twenty minutes or so, but with me in my room, my phone on silent, and my earbuds in, it's not like I had heard her knocking or had any clue that she was there. She'd come to surprise me for the weekend, for Easter weekend, and her mother had given her gas money to come see me -- because, even if neither she nor I are religious, she desperately wanted to be with me on a holiday weekend (well, that and we missed each other like crazy). It was the best surprise ever. I hadn't expected to see Lady until next weekend, as she's coming in then as well so that she can go to her school appointment here.

We had a wonderful weekend together; Friday night, because neither of us had eaten, we went out to Walmart (late night shopping, oh yes) and got materials to make a huge pot of penne with vodka sauce, as well as garlic bread, and ate a very late dinner while watching This is Spinal Tap before bed. I haven't seen that movie in yeeeeeears. We didn't fall asleep until 5AM. Yesterday, we got up late (understandably), and went to Hutchinson so that I could show her the mall (which is declining quite fast in quality), where we got some stuff at Bath & Body Works and Target, and I took her out to dinner at Chili's before we returned home. Last night, for the first time, I sat down and watched Rent. While I've had the opportunity to see it many times before, I'd never actually watched it. Lady loves the movie. Now, after seeing it from start to finish, I do too. Wow, what a fantastic musical film. We eventually fell asleep around 4AM, though I barely remember it. Like always, we fell asleep in mid-conversation.

This morning -- as she did two weeks ago when she was here after I returned from West Virginia -- she cooked me a wonderful breakfast. Homemade banana pancakes and sausage. She loves cooking for me, and I'm not about to argue with that. I put gas in her car so she could make the trip back to school, and we said our goodbyes for another five days until she returns next weekend...when I will have been able to clean the house beforehand.

Our times apart are becoming shorter and shorter in duration -- when we first got together, they were a lot longer. We used to be able to go without seeing each other for three weeks or so. That got shortened to two, then to one, now to about five days or so before we start going nuts because we're so far apart, in our respective towns and schools. I mean, obviously, it's not always like this -- there are and have been times where we haven't seen each other for long stretches of a few weeks (and due to our work/school, we simply can't sometimes) ...but since she hates being stuck alone at school and bored, she loves making the trip out here to Newton whenever she can on the weekends, and those trips are becoming more and more frequent. Yeah, folks, it's getting pretty serious -- I'm not afraid to say that. But then again, you could have probably guessed that already.

It is 4:19 AM now, even though I started this blog post in the afternoon (and took several breaks for grading/food/talking to Lady/other homework). I have to stay awake, because if I don't, I'll miss the 7AM registration time for fall semester. Once I register, I'll be able to go to bed. Finally.

I'll keep you updated on the happenings of my life over these next few weeks, of course. Soon, the semester will be over, and as I mentioned, that will bring with it a sense of dread as well as a sense of freedom. But for now, grading, registration, and sleep are all calling my name.