Shanghai'd!

Spring semester: day ten


Last week went quickly, and for the most part, all is as it should be.

Not a whole lot happens when things are going well. "Well" is a relative term anyway. Suffice it to say that the semester has now slowly begun to hit its groove, so to speak, and I'm settling into it relatively normally.

As I mentioned in my last post, the battle with financial aid and the graduate school is over; my loan dropped into my student account a week ago today, which meant that it covered my student fees and I didn't have to pay them myself. By Tuesday evening, the refund had been processed and the remaining large chunk had been dropped into my actual bank account, meaning I could breathe a huge sigh of relief. Since then, my stress levels have dropped considerably, and I have been able to focus on the more important parts of my day-to-day life. In addition to that, I got paid for the first time this semester on Friday, so I have a bit more of a cushion as well.

However, even though I no longer have to worry about financial troubles for the time being, I've not been doing a whole lot other than schoolwork and sleeping. I am on campus this semester for a grand total of about sixteen hours a week -- from 7AM to 5PM on Tuesdays, and from 7AM to around 1PM on Thursdays (and that's a liberal estimate for Thursdays). Six of those hours are spent teaching my students, and the remaining hours are spent in office hours, the Writing Center, or attempting to be social with the handful of close friends I have left in the department who have not yet graduated -- Rae, Jay, Parker, Ryan, etc. When I spend five of the seven days of the week at home or running errands, social time is at a premium -- especially with everything else I have to do on any given day/week.

I always thought that in my last semester, my students would get lots and lots of attention to detail on their classes -- I thought I'd have the time to spend hours making lesson plans, grading papers, working with them on a one-on-one level if necessary, but I have now realized that won't necessarily be the case -- at least not until mid-April, anyhow, once my comps have been taken and my thesis has been turned in to my readers. At that point I'll barely have three weeks left of classes and teaching before I graduate and it's all over. And then I have to go back into the "real world."

For all of the worrying and hand-wringing I did about my finances, now that I've had those problems solved, I've done relatively little with the money I have. What I have done is pay all of my bills, from my rent to the electric, water/trash, and credit cards. I wrote my bi-yearly donation check ($40) to the DAV, the only charity I donate to, and did some minor shopping for some essentials -- last night I made a trip to Walmart in the overnight hours to get a lot of the rest of the stuff I needed for around the house, and covered most of the proverbial bases. This afternoon or evening at some point, I plan to venture over to the Dollar Tree and pick up the remaining stuff I can get cheaper there. I am happy to say, though, that my fridge is (mostly) stocked, as is my pantry.

I also ordered some incense off Amazon and ordered one of Daisy's Valentine's Day presents. I figured that ordering it early, at what was then the end of January, would give it plenty of time to get here.

Ahem, I thought wrong.

Once it shipped, I looked at the estimated arrival date (as I always want to be home whenever one of my packages arrives, if possible). It said between February 26 and March 14.

...what?

Mind you, I have Amazon Prime. This means I get free two-day shipping on anything I purchase from Amazon itself. This does not, however, extend to items purchased from independent sellers on Amazon, which this apparently was. I suppose that for this item, I overlooked that. Still, there's also no reason for any package to take a month (or, by the latest estimate, a month and a half) to get to me. Ever. As this seller enabled tracking, I looked at the shipping progress.

Latest event: SHANGHAI.

Fucking Shanghai? Seriously? My present for Daisy is getting shipped to me from the coast of goddamned China.

I...yeah, I really don't have the words here. What I got her is very nice, but I didn't know it was in China. China. What the hell, man? Shouldn't the site say that before you order, or something? "Ships from China" would be really helpful.

I told her I would've canceled the order if it had not already shipped. Now, since it already has, it would be more trouble than it's worth to send it back and get the refund for it. Fuck it; when it gets here, it gets here. Who knows, it may arrive well before Valentine's Day. Or it may arrive around Spring Break. So, really, it's anyone's guess, and at this point I'm back to square one on things to get her.

"You don't have to get me anything, baby," she told me again. "A simple 'I love you' would be wonderful."

Again, trapppp. Trap. I know Daisy isn't materialistic (not in the least, actually) but I have been in enough relationships to where I know that not doing something for Valentine's Day is widely regarded as a bad move. She doesn't want me to feel obligated to get something for her, and I don't -- but it's a personal thing for me. I haven't had a Valentine in a long time. I haven't had anyone to be romantic with on that day. I know it's a stupid day, yes -- for years I called it "Black _______" where the blank was replaced with whatever day of the week Valentine's Day fell on. I'm not a big fan of it in general, yet, there's something inside me that always wants to do something for Daisy whenever I have the opportunity to do so. Call it pride, call it false (or otherwise misleading) chivalry, but it's important to me to do something for her -- it's not because I feel forced to, because I don't.

"Tell me what it is!" she said earlier.

"I can't do that, love," I replied. "I mean, it will get here eventually."

"Well tell me something about it then!"

Nooooope.

As a bit of an addendum to this story, I re-checked the tracking on it this morning, and it's currently in Chicago. Who knows what that means, however. While Chicago is about ten hours away from here, depending on land shipping speed it could get here in a week or a month. On the plus side, the incense I ordered at the same time should arrive in my mailbox this afternoon, shipped USPS. I'm waiting until Thursday or so, tracking it every day for an estimated arrival, and if it appears to be taking a long time, I'll come up with a backup plan for Daisy's Valentine gift.

Of course, we don't yet know when or if she'll even be able to make it down here in a week and a half anyhow.

Over the course of the past week or so, Daisy has been vetted by several different jobs -- finally, her applications and follow-ups are paying off -- and tomorrow morning while I'm teaching, she'll be in an important one-on-one interview for a position that she's moderately excited for. If she gets it, her financial woes from being unemployed for three months will subside, but it will also mean that she will be able to visit less, and we'll have less time together to talk and decompress. It would be wonderful were she to get the job, but it may end up skewing our Valentine's Day plans if she has to work that weekend. Luckily we still have enough time to plan around that if something happens or changes.

In the meantime, I'm trying to get a lot of stuff done in my own life in regards to my students and my own work. I have my first meeting of the semester with my thesis director on Thursday at 3:30, a time that's not exactly convenient for me (I'd usually be home for about three hours on Thursdays at that time), but eh. Tomorrow morning when I get to campus, I'm sticking a full draft copy of my thesis in his mailbox, and Thursday's meeting is going to be me asking, primarily, "Hey, you have my reading list. This is what's on it. What do I need to focus on the most?" My reading list for comps covers thirty poets. The comprehensive exams, from what I've heard, are less than five questions, all essay. Therefore, there's no way that everything on one's reading list can possibly be used on a comprehensive exam. As my thesis director is the one who writes the questions, and as it's his job to advise me on such things, I need to know what I should be laser-focusing on so that I can read and study those selected texts quite closely (and order the ones I don't already have from Amazon). I can already guess what about half of my comps questions will cover, as I know my director's likes and dislikes -- however, I'm sure there will be a curve ball thrown in there, and I want to know, roughly, what to expect. I take the exam on either April 4 or April 5, which means that within the next several weeks, those questions will be written if they haven't been already. This means I have exactly two months to prepare myself as much as possible -- and the start of that is finding out what the hell I need to focus on more than anything else. I have a few books already, but the majority of the rest I will either need to find in public domain PDF form, or order from Amazon rather quickly. As mentioned before, during this time while I'm preparing for comps, don't expect to hear a lot from me here on the blog -- I won't have a lot of free time at all for anything internet-related, and updated will come seldomly, in spurts.

Tomorrow, I collect my students' first "papers" of the semester -- a 20-point homework assignment that is assigned for me to gauge where everyone is when it comes to collegiate writing, formatting, MLA citation, and grammar. Some students do well on it, others do very poorly on it -- same as pretty much any other paper in the class -- but it lets me see the skill level I'm working with, and allows me to tailor my lessons on those core writing concepts over the course of the rest of the semester. It also serves the dual purpose of scaring off those students who can't write a coherent sentence, as the more timid ones will see me dump half a pen's worth of red ink on the page marking their mistakes, and they'll drop the class in the time between now and early March, when their first big paper of the semester is due. Some wait until after that paper to make a decision, as well. It's all about perspective. Again, as this is my last semester teaching and I have my own work to worry about/finish, I'd like to have as few students as possible -- and right now my sections are nearly completely full. In comparison, several colleagues of mine have classes of only five to ten students at most -- which I would absolutely adore, as it would totally free up a lot of my time. Yes, in case you hadn't guessed, I'm extremely envious of those folks. Since my Engineering English class is in high demand, and we're in the last semester of its existence for the foreseeable future, it's unlikely that I'll have a lot of people drop it, grades be damned. That's just how students are. I've had students on my roster in the past several semesters who have never shown up to a single class -- they're not enrolled to take the class, usually, but because they need full-time for financial aid, more than likely, and said class is just a placeholder for those credit hours.

I've also been keeping busy around the house, doing a form of, ahem, spring cleaning, so to speak. My house has a ton of junk in it, mostly left by my ex when she moved out a year and a half ago. I'm slowly getting rid of the stuff I don't need week-by-week, trashing it or recycling it, and keeping/boxing up what I do need and want to keep. For the past year or so, I've saved every large-ish (or otherwise useful) box I've gotten when I've ordered something from Amazon, and have a collection of decent-sized boxes now in my spare room. I've used those boxes to go through a lot of my excess stuff, have figured out what I want to keep but won't use over the course of the next year or so, and have been slowly packing it away about a box or two every week. Yesterday, for example, I cleaned out my upper cabinets in the kitchen, which were filled with plasticware and glassware that hasn't been used in several years. I recycled a lot of the plastic and glass stuff I'll never use, and the glasses and the like I want to keep (champagne flutes, martini glasses, margarita glasses, etc), I stuck in the dishwasher to get all the cabinet dirt/dust off of them before I pack them away. If I use them eventually (like, four or five years from now), good. If not, I'll donate them to Goodwill or the DAV. Processes like this require me to look ahead a bit and be semi-omniscient -- thinking things like is there any conceivable situation in which I will possibly use this anytime before I move out of this house? And, if the answer is no, box it up. It'll save me packing time later, especially if I acquire an out-of-state job or teaching position shortly after graduation in May. There's something incredibly cleansing, calming even, about getting rid of or boxing away a lot of this stuff. I may have a room full of boxes when I'm done, but they'll be boxes I won't have to mess with until I leave this place, and when it comes to the stuff I trash or recycle, at least I'm getting my money's worth from the city trash and recycling service, for once. Usually, on my own I barely make enough trash to take the cans to the curb more than once or twice a month. Now I'll have a reason to take them down there every week.

Finally, to close this post, I'd like to mention that it is 55 degrees here today without a cloud in the sky. I mention this solely because, back home in West Virginia, my parents have two feet of snow, with nearly another foot coming tonight. My hometown of Morgantown, as well as on top of the mountain where my parents live, is like a war zone. All of the schools (and a few of the colleges/universities) are closed, there are accidents everywhere, and roads are being shut down. According to my mother, it's horrible there. Yet both of my parents got up this morning and went to work just fine. For those of you who live here, keep that in mind the next time it snows an inch or two here in Kansas and everyone overreacts, panics, and acts like idiots. I was tempered in snow. My county's school buses had huge chains on their wheels. My bus stop was at the end of my country road, almost a half-mile from my front door, and even when it was -10 outside with a foot of snow on the ground and one-lane mountain roads due to snowdrifts, we still had school.

That being said, I'm very glad it's 55 degrees here right now, with that temperature not expected to waver too much over the course of the next week or so.