Radio Silence

Spring semester: day thirty-seven (in a row?)

So, folks, it's that time.

I've collected my students' papers and have already graded them, over the span of about fourteen hours total. Out of my total of forty-six students, two didn't turn in papers, and three will get a zero as they did not upload them to SafeAssign. I did this so that I can get said papers back to my students tomorrow -- it will only help those of them who wish to do rewrites, and it will let them know more accurately why they have the midterm grade in the class that they have. It was a long, brutal slog of a grading process to get them all done before bed tonight, but it's for the best that I did so. I also had to finish up my assignments for the visiting writer, and was also forced to prepare for tomorrow's class, in which I'll be covering two articles, introducing paper 2, and giving a quiz before I let my students go for spring break. It will be a very long, work-filled day. I've already told Daisy that, basically, she won't get to talk to me for most of tomorrow, due to everything I have to take care of before break starts.

I'm already exhausted; the events of this weekend -- what with Daisy being here, then her getting stuck halfway home in the snowstorm, then my basement flooding again, and now with the papers, grading, reading, and everything else I've been doing, I'm severely sleep-deprived and will more than likely remain that way at least until Friday or Saturday. Everything that must be done between now and then seems like an insurmountable task, coupled with the fact that once break starts on Saturday, I basically have to cut off contact with everyone in order to buckle down tightly, brace myself, and read hundreds of pages per day of comps books, taking notes on them all. I call this "radio silence." My phone will remain off, my computer will (for the most part) remain off, and I will be immersing myself in book after book after book. Unless something happens, or unless I get through my studying faster than expected (an unlikely event in itself), you really won't hear much from me here until around the end of the month or so when I emerge from my literary self-exile to see the light of day once more. This is not something I want to do -- ignoring everyone and everything in the world around me -- it is something I simply must do if I want to graduate in a month and a half. It's not a choice. I cannot get distracted, and cannot be disturbed during these next few weeks.

Of course, since I have to spend all of this time reading and studying, it's going to be the most beautiful weather of the year during Spring Break -- on Friday, for example, it's supposed to hit 79. Tomorrow? 72. It's not supposed to drop below freezing again at night for the foreseeable future. Spring, apparently, has finally arrived -- two weeks after two crippling snowstorms back-to-back, and four days after one hit Daisy in Nebraska.

I have ordered my last set of comps books, emptying my "booklist" wish list on Amazon to the tune of about $80. They arrive on Friday. Yesterday I got my T.S. Eliot collection in the mail, as well. I don't want to have to buy all of these texts either, obviously, but if reading and studying them all means I'll graduate, well, I don't have much of a choice there. On the plus side, I get to support some poets whose works I admire (well, the ones still alive, anyway; most of them are long dead). Again, going into Spring Break I'm upping my game -- I'd like to get through two or three full collections per day. If I can do that, the remaining days afterwards I can simply review my (well-written) notes to beef up my mind in preparation for battle.

The drain field has gone down back to normal again; both last night and tonight I showered normally, and yesterday I did a full load of laundry with no issues. I still have a lot of backed-up laundry to do over the course of the next week or so, but for now everything appears to be fine once more. Hopefully it stays that way, as I've been putting off washing the sheets and blankets for far too long. I need to switch out the entire set of bedclothes to more summer-friendly sheets and blankets if it's going to stay warm, so this needs to be done at some point soon. I'll have to work my way through all of my laundry slowly, however, so that I can avoid any more flooding incidents, and I'll be keeping my eye on it as much as possible for a while when I do happen to run a lot of water at once, just to be safe. At the very least, I'll have ten days in a row off, days where I don't have to go anywhere and can do things like laundry and cleaning between different volumes of my comps studying.

Daisy has been at her new job for two days already; today was supposed to be her third day of training, but she's violently ill -- she thinks it's food poisoning of some sort, as it's not acting like a stomach virus -- so she called in sick and they told her she could catch up on everything tomorrow when she goes back in. I feel so bad for her; as I was grading all day, I didn't even know she was sick until after 9PM tonight as we'd been mostly out of contact for the day. This training she's going through is difficult for her, as well; training at her new job lasts a full two weeks, eight hours per day, and she's basically given lists of terms, acronyms, and scripts that she has to memorize, as she's tested on them. She mentioned referring me for a job at this place once I graduate, but as much as I'd love the money, it's not a job at all suited for me -- I don't have the patience or the skills for it, and while I do already know a fair amount of the terms she was telling me she has to memorize, working in an environment that's so high-stress, not to mention with lots of other people, rubs me the wrong way. Daisy is, as much as she doesn't want to admit it or thinks otherwise, much, much more social than I am, and thrives in high-stress environments. I'm totally not that guy. I'm the teacher, the writer, the guy who wants to be left alone to his own devices to do his work on his own time and get paid for it with minimal social interaction and an ability to hold some sort of authority over himself.

On the plus side, she does get paid for her training, and should get a paycheck for her first week there (read: this week) at the end of next week. I get paid on Friday, as the break starts, which is good -- it'll offset the $80 I just spent on books and the $116 I just spent on work clothes for Daisy (clothes that, I'll add, she looks fantastic in). I've also timed my gas fill-ups on my car rather well, too; I have more than enough gas to get me back and forth tomorrow, and won't have to get any more until the next time I decide to go out -- which could be the middle of next week or later, depending on when I next need groceries. I'm planning to stop tomorrow night on the way home for around-the-house essentials like cat litter, cigarettes, and coffee (the "three C's," as I call them). Most anything else can wait a while, as I have a large amount of food to live on for a bit.

I've also made the announcement to most of my colleagues and friends (and I'll make it to my students in the morning) that since it's supposed to be really warm for the foreseeable future, over Spring Break, the beard is coming off. I no longer need a "hair scarf," as it's the middle of March and will only get progressively warmer from this point forward through the summer. I'll probably shave it off tomorrow or Friday, depending on how tired I am tomorrow night when I get home. I wanted to style it into a handlebar mustache with long sideburns, but I'll probably just shave it all off with my trimmers, leaving it a bit longer and/or thicker in the goatee area. I very, very rarely shave clean when I have to be around people on a regular basis, as I look like I'm twelve. Looking like you're twelve when you're a university instructor, male or female, is a bad bad thing -- you'll immediately lose respect in the eyes of your students. We'll see what happens; my beard has been driving me nuts for the past few weeks anyhow, and if I take it off now it'll grow back to a somewhat-respectable length by the time I graduate in May, if I let it.

On that note, I'm going to bed, as I'll be getting up in a little more than five hours to get ready to go to campus; I'm stuck there tomorrow night until at least 6PM, as I have my final meeting with the visiting writer at 5. Maybe, if I'm tired, I'll get to take a nap in my office in the afternoon.