Endings, Part II

Fall semester: day seventy-three

It's cold.

I don't like the cold. At all.

Yesterday morning when I got up, it was 21 degrees in Newton. I was not expecting this. There was no wind, but it was still super-cold. The Monte Carlo does well in the cold, most of the time. She rattles and shakes a little more than usual, but other than that she gets along fine in the cold. I do think she tends to burn a little more oil in the cold, though. I don't know why.

By the time I got to campus yesterday morning (at 7:10 AM, mind you) the temperature had dropped by five degrees. It was 16. So far, yesterday was the coldest day I've had to deal with probably all year thus far -- last winter, especially in the spring semester, it was fairly warm. Most of the time, the temperatures barely dipped below 25. Yes, that's cold, but it's not the extreme crazy cold that Kansas winters are known for. My first year of grad school, in 2010-11, was a horrific winter (for Kansas, anyway). We had multiple ice storms/snowstorms, and sometimes the high temperatures would be, oh, five degrees...with a constant 25mph wind. Taking that into perspective, I shouldn't complain too much. Around this time last year, we had a mild ice storm that I got caught in driving home after my poetry workshop class one night, which turned a normally 25-minute drive into an hour-long crawl back north through the tundra. That, luckily, I have not yet had to deal with. Most of the time now, the temperature here has been relatively pleasant -- last winter we got one "snowstorm," and that gave us about three inches or so...that melted off the next day.

In emailing back and forth with my mother, however, on the mountain back home in West Virginia, not only did they get that crippling storm last month that knocked out power for a week or so, but apparently the snow and other shitty weather really hasn't stopped there too much. My parents went out Christmas shopping on Saturday and almost had an accident, as apparently it's been snowing there like they're already in the dead of winter.

Meanwhile, tomorrow it's supposed to hit 70 again here. Welcome to Kansas.

Still, the weather back home doesn't exactly fill me with hope or giddiness when it comes to the trip I'll more than likely be making out there over Christmas. As I've mentioned here before numerous times, my biggest fear is that I will get stuck there because of weather, missing my flight back and leaving the cats here with a more rapidly-dwindling food and water supply until I can get home. That is a big, big-time nightmare for me; I don't like to leave the cats alone anyway, but I absolutely hate leaving them alone any longer than I have to. It makes me go nuts. My other fear is that my flight from one place or another will be delayed, and I'll miss my connection back to Kansas (or miss my connection to Pittsburgh). This is why I don't like traveling during the holidays, and especially why I don't like traveling during the winter. At all. It fills me with apprehension, and (ironically) none of it has to do with actually flying. Hah.

As an aside, I love to fly. The flights themselves may be cramped or otherwise on small planes, but the actual time I spend in the air is only about three hours. I've made the trip back home several times, and it's a little over an hour's flight to Chicago O'Hare (an airport that I despise, but oh well) and a little under two hours from there to Pittsburgh. I usually leave Wichita's airport at around 6AM -- I request that my mother get me the earliest flight possible, which is usually a 6AM flight -- and arrive on the ground in Pittsburgh shortly before or shortly after noon, barring any delays.

My mother is still looking into tickets; the plan, which is pretty finalized at this point, is that I'll fly into Pittsburgh on the 21st and will return home on the 26th. I'm not exactly sure of how the logistics of this will work, but eh. My mother and her travel agent (because yes, she still uses a travel agent) work all that stuff out; I've always flown through her travel agent, who my mother has known for almost as long as I've been alive. I trust the woman, she gets my mother good deals on things, etc. Once the trip has been finalized, my mother will run it by me and I'll give her the go-ahead to order the tickets, which she will. I know the drill at this point; I've been through it many times before.

However, as I mentioned in my last post here, this throws a wrench into any holiday plans I would have had with Daisy simply because of the way the days fall on the calendar. If I'm flying out on the 21st, that's the day after my birthday. That means I'll leave the house at about 3AM on the night of my birthday to get to the airport and get through security with no issues, and means that Daisy won't get to celebrate my birthday with me (and no one else will, either, because of the schedule). Being in West Virginia over Christmas also means, obviously, that I won't be able to spend the holiday with her, or do anything holiday-related, until at least the 27th -- as I'll fly back home on the 26th. I know this sort of upsets her to an extent, even if she doesn't show it or otherwise say anything about it, but not much can be done.

My schedule for December, for the most part, is a logistical nightmare of things that I have to do or otherwise must be done on or by certain dates. Here's a brief rundown of everything I can think of off the top of my head:

Tuesday, December 4: The last day of classes for my students; I collect their papers and send them on their way for nearly a week before their final exam.

Wednesday, December 5: The last day of classes for me. Daisy should come into town that night, hopefully, and will probably get here by the time I get home. This is a week from today.

Friday, December 7: The Department Christmas Party, which Daisy and I plan to attend (barring any unforeseen circumstances, of course). Also, payday.

Saturday, December 8: Daisy will have to go home in the morning, as the rest of the day and the next day, I will be grading ALL of my students' papers to return to them at the final exam.

Sunday, December 9: OH GODS TONS OF GRADING FROM DAWN UNTIL MIDNIGHT OR LATER

Monday, December 10: "Finals feast" at noon in the Writing Center, followed by proctoring our students' final exams from 1 to 2:50PM, which will then be followed by grading of the finals and calculating final class grades for said students. My grading partner is the director of the 102 Comp program, which I specifically requested, so my actual grading should go rather quickly.

Tuesday, December 11th: Finally, a day where I really don't have to do anything, unless there's an unforeseen complication with my students' final exams. If not, and everything's done, I plan to sleep most of this day.

Wednesday, December 12: My final day on campus for the semester; our Playwriting class is meeting at 5:40PM to get our final copies of our plays back, and we're being given information on how to submit our plays to contests and the like. If there are any complications with student finals or final grades, they will also be resolved by this day, because I want to get the hell off campus and be done.

Thursday, December 13 to Thursday, December 20: A full week of rest, which I will sorely need. Most of my friends are leaving town for home during this time, if not beforehand. I plan -- yes, specifically plan -- to not. do. anything. I don't want to leave the house unless I have to, I don't want to have to spend any money, I don't want to see anyone, go anywhere, or do anything at all. I need this decompression time. It's the only week I will have had since early August where I will have no true responsibilities, social obligations, or any other tasks or errands required of me. Therefore, I plan to sleep a lot, watch movies, and finally play my Xbox a bit, which hasn't been touched since early May. I have been looking forward to this week of responsibility-free solitude for months, my friends. Months. And the fact that said week ends with my birthday is the icing on the proverbial cake.

Friday, December 21 to Wednesday, December 26: My probable trip home to West Virginia. December 21 is also payday.

Thursday, December 27 onward: unplanned. Probable re-revision of my thesis and ordering books for comps. Paying the rent, bills, and my car insurance, and after that, who knows -- as I am not sure I will have money afterwards to go anywhere or do anything substantial aside from minimal grocery shopping and the like.

Daisy has always called me a "planner," as you know; I cannot function without a day-to-day "to-do list" or some sort of structure that I've planned out for myself to go about. If I don't have this structure, not only do I feel somewhat listless and lost, but I also won't do anything at all; I'll sleep for fourteen hours a day, get up, eat, dick around on the computer, and go back to bed having accomplished nothing. I have to create a set schedule for myself to do things on a daily basis, otherwise I have no motivation to do said things. I am a driven person when things have to be done and I know they have to be done on a certain schedule, but if they don't? I have no motivation whatsoever. I've always been the guy who just wants to do as little as possible and reap the biggest rewards from that. Obviously that demeanor changes during the semester, when I have a set list of tasks to accomplish, but if I'm given an open schedule and free reign to do whatever I want with it? I procrastinate, I waste tons of time, I laze about and accomplish little, if anything.

This is going to be a problem next semester; I already foresee it.

I have little actual responsibility next semester, and a very open schedule. As it's my last semester before I graduate, one would think that it would be filled with deadlines and things that I absolutely must do ASAP OMG, but really, it's not. I have to turn in a copy of my thesis sometime in February, I have to read and study for comps, and I have to teach my students. That's it. I'm not taking any actual classes ("Visiting Writer," at one hour per week for a month, barely counts as a class), and the only days I'll have to be on campus are Tuesdays and Thursdays, as the schedule for my Engineering English 102 classes never change. As a result, I'll be at home in quiet and solitude a lot more, and five of the seven days of the week, I won't have to wake up before noon if I don't want to. I'll still have to keep office hours and will still have to work in the Writing Center on campus an hour per week, but I will schedule those hours right after I teach to maximize my free time.

Free time in grad school is such a luxury. To finally have a ton of it, in my very last semester at that, will be amazing. Of course, a lot of that time will be spent on reading and studying for comps, and on grading my students' papers, but for the most part I'll be on autopilot. I've refined my class's lesson plans to the point where I don't need anything to change or be changed from this point forward, and likewise I'll be teaching the same class I've taught for the past two years. My thesis, if I wanted to turn it in now, I could do so and call it done. However, I'm not going to slack on that, and will be reworking or completely rewriting some (if not most) of the poems within it. No, most of this free time I'll have will be spent fairly constructively, despite all desires to slack off. I'll be sending out numerous submissions to publications one after another, going back to my list of places to send work, and I will also be, ahem, looking for a job.

I've mentioned before that I don't have a clue where I'm headed after May, and that still remains true. The job market for MFAs is super-dismal right now, and has been for a few years. I'm too far in debt from student loans to go somewhere else for a PhD, and doing so would only prolong the inevitable entrance to "real life" anyhow. While I'd like to find some place and job in Omaha, where Daisy is, I may not be able to, and I'm not going to bank everything on that simply because my girlfriend lives there.  If I've learned anything from my friends' and colleagues' experiences over the years, it's that if you're offered a job somewhere, anywhere, and it pays well and you can do it? You take it. You take it because there may not be another offer waiting around the corner. You take it because even if it's not ideal, you still have to live, work, eat, and pay bills. You take it because, if you're like me, you can't wait on things to fall into your lap, because the time will be ticking until student loans have to start being paid back. Take it, take it, take it. If I find something in or around the area? Great. If I find something in Omaha? Even better. But if I'm offered a job somewhere like Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, etc? I'm still taking it. I can only be choosy to a certain degree, and while I may have to work a menial job in the meantime (or adjunct for a semester or so at Flat State University if I'm really desperate), as soon as I find something worthwhile, I'm not passing it up. If it's somewhere far away, I can only hope that Daisy will join me in the move (and I hope I have the money and means to actually get there).

Note: I realize that this makes me sound really self-serving and somewhat callous to an extent. I do. I also can't default on my student loans, and I also have to be able to support myself somehow. It will be a scary time, and it will certainly be a look out for number one situation. Everything else simply must come secondary to that, whether I want to or not. I am a writer, a poet. While my MFA is a terminal degree, it is not a very marketable one, and I know this. It's a very sobering thought. Most people getting a Master's degree know where they're headed in life, at least to a certain extent; I, however, do not. I have not looked for a job of any sort for the past four years, because I haven't needed to. I lucked into the job at the newspaper, and then I got into grad school and became an instructor. In those four years, the job market has changed drastically. There's no guarantees of anything, not that there ever was, and especially for people in my field, opportunities are hard to come by. I also refuse to flounder joblessly like I did after I graduated from WVU in 2005; I will find something. I just may have to make some sacrifices and a lengthy move somewhere along the way.

On that note, it is now time for me to gather my things and make my way to campus for my customary fifteen-hour Wednesday. It does give me comfort, however, that it's the last fifteen-hour Wednesday I should ever have to spend on that campus -- next week, I won't be holding office hours (as my classes will be over) and I will be able to sleep in a bit and roll onto campus around 1PM.