Our First Day Back(ward)

Fall semester: day two

As an aside before I begin, I do rather like keeping track of the days here, as you see above. I've done it for years now. Sometimes it feels good to be able to keep everything inside a set frame that I can look at and say well, I got through all of the days leading up to this one, at least, or something to that effect. As the semester winds down, I can look at it and say X days to go...

There were many times over the course of the past three months where I never thought I would see this day again -- the first day of a new semester where I'm teaching classes, I mean. As I told Parker last week, I never thought I would sit on the couch in his office ever again. I had a rather...well, depressing summer, as you folks know. Not depressing like "oh god this is the worst summer ever" but a summer which, until a little less than a month ago, I was receiving rejection after rejection for teaching applications, my money was running out, my patience for other people and society in general had worn down to nothing, etc. Yes, actual depression was involved for a good chunk of time. I was convinced for a while that even with my skills, experience, and shining recommendations, I would never teach again -- adjuncting at the university was truly my last hope, the last-ditch backup plan that, after a while, was forced to become the main plan if I didn't want to end up working at Walmart or Wendy's. And it wasn't guaranteed. I was a failure, a failure with two degrees and $40k in student loan debt -- the last of which, which I'd saved for almost a full year -- was petering out slowly as I was using it for survival purposes and bills.

By luck's good graces, of course (which is unusual because I consider myself to be really unlucky most of the time) I got three classes to teach at the university for the fall, and would be able to become a professor, a real professor, in my own right.

It's really strange to think about, actually. It's sort of bittersweet. I will be making enough money over the course of these next sixteen weeks to live on fairly comfortably, and will be able to rebuild some of my savings as well in that time, but it almost feels like...a step backward, sort of? I've graduated and have my degree, yes, but I'm still employed by the same university, the same department, and am surrounded by the same people because even with my Master's degree I couldn't break free of the situation. Think of it as a rocket that cannot reach escape velocity, so it falls back to earth a short distance from where it took off.

Don't get me wrong -- I am excited and slobberingly grateful to be teaching at the university this semester (and quite possibly next semester as well, knowing my luck) because I absolutely adore my job and thrive in an academic environment, but this isn't at all where I thought I'd be after graduation. I had friends and family ask me many times things along the lines of "so what's next?" and I had nothing to tell them, because I didn't know where I'd end up. I've had many, many plans that have fallen through or changed drastically over the course of the past year, and if I were to travel back in time to the first day of classes last year to tell myself where I'd be now, past-me would be like "wow, really? way to go, future me." Sarcastically, of course. I'd had plans to move to the east coast to work for publishing houses and teach at one of a large number of small universities, I had plans to find teaching work in Omaha, I had plans to return home to West Virginia (as much as I desperately did not want to) to work somewhere around my hometown, etc. Over the past year, all of those plans had to be scrapped due to my lack of ability to find stable employment in any of those places, and I ended up being left with my last, and only, option.

So really, my interior monologue is asking me are you better off now than you were before graduation? And the answer, really, is yes and no. It's yes in that I'm getting paid quite a bit more money per paycheck than I did before, I'm no longer taking or studying for classes of my own, and that I'm still teaching, but it's no in that I'm on campus twice as much as I was before, my schedule is alternating back and forth between campuses, I'm driving back and forth more than I've driven since probably my first year of grad school, I don't yet officially have a new office, and getting any free time to myself or time to spend with Daisy is going to be maddening, especially after October 10.

But that's how it goes; this is the hand I've been dealt, and I am incredibly grateful for what I have and what I'll do with it.

Yesterday I exhausted myself doing everything I needed to do before the beginning of the semester today. I took care of all the fluids in the car, draining the rest of my bottle of coolant into it (it was, indeed, a bit low) and put another quart of oil as well as a few good shots of Marvel Mystery Oil. I took out the trash, cleaned the cat room, reloaded the dishwasher, cleaned off the kitchen counters, made sure my syllabi were completely ready, and to be assured that I would sleep, before I went to bed I took three melatonin pills. I was in bed by 9PM, if not before.

I did not go to Walmart; I was hot and tired, and doing everything I needed to do around the house had drained me to the point where I didn't want to get dressed, get in the car, drive there, go shopping, come home, put everything away, and then go to bed. No, by the time I was getting ready to sleep I was so not up for that sort of adventure. As a result, I had to stop at the gas station yesterday morning to get more cigarettes before I drove to campus; I had no other choice if I wanted to be able to survive the day without killing someone. I decided that if I desperately needed to, I could stop at Walmart on the way home.

I did not end up doing that, by the way (I did it in the overnight hours tonight, for reasons which will soon become apparent). By the time I got back up to Newton after my class yesterday, I was tired and didn't want to deal with it. Also, since I wore actual pants yesterday -- and corduroy at that -- I wanted to take them the fuck off, since sweat was running down my legs like rivers. It was nearly 90 degrees by the time I got home yesterday afternoon, and that's no fun for anyone actually dressed professionally.

My class itself went...okay, I suppose. I wouldn't say it went great, or even well. The students in my 011 class almost seem afraid of me. Barely any of them spoke, and I absolutely hate the room I've been stuck in to teach -- it's basically a science classroom. I don't have a lectern or even a table to stand at or sit at, to I was forced to stand in front of the room, or pace back and forth in the front of the room, while I delivered my first-day-of-class, let's-cover-the-syllabus speech. I don't know how I'm going to rectify this situation, or if there's anything I can do to change it anyway. The classroom is oddly shaped, and it's small and cramped -- not much larger than, say, my living room and kitchen combined. For any of you who have been to my house (a fair amount of my readership here, actually), you know how small of a space that is. For twenty students and myself. The chairs/tables were filled completely, and I still had four students absent. I don't know what's going to happen if those four students show up on Wednesday along with everyone else. There's nowhere, really, to put them. I may have to see if I can get a change of room, because I'm really not sure I can deal with that all semester long.

Anyway, I reassured my students that even though I seemed like a hardass while reading from the syllabus, I'm actually a pretty laid-back guy and I'm there to help, not to frighten them. I told them that this is the shortest they'd see my beard all semester, and probably the most dressed-up for classes they'll see me as well. While I'll look somewhat respectable most of the time, it's going to get to the point where I will psychologically need to teach in a t-shirt at times. They seemed to get the fact that I know what I'm doing, I have the experience and wherewithal to teach them, and were a little more at ease by the end of the class. This morning they just seemed fairly frightened -- most of them seemed jarred and didn't know what to expect from their first college class ever. And, really, for a lot of them, it is. I asked, and about 80% of the students in that class graduated from high school in May. They don't know what to expect, they're nervous about college and about college English, and I would imagine over the course of the next few weeks they'll slip more into their normal classroom roles.

One guy did ask me after class if I was serious about the attendance policy. He also happened to be the only student in class who was easily in his mid-to-late-40s.

"Yes," I replied firmly, "I am. It's department policy, not mine."

I wanted to say something along the lines of can you not read, since it's in the syllabus which I just went over less than fifteen minutes before, but then again I realized that this was 011, and there is the genuine possibility that students in this class don't have the greatest reading comprehension skills.

I ran into the Director yesterday morning when I first got there. He and I were dressed similarly, with dressier shirts on and long pants.

"I look respectable," I said. "...it burns."

Mind you, I was wearing a simple button-up white cotton shirt, plaid with brown and blue stripes. The brown matched my corduroy pants, the blue matched my socks and sneakers. Everyone was really impressed, saying things like "wow, you look nice," etc. Parker was awed by my transformation from grad student in Batman t-shirts and long unruly hair to somewhat-clean-cut, respectable Brandon. He was even more awed by my ability to match everything I was wearing, as if he didn't think I knew how to do that.

I have clearly given these people the wrong impression about me for the past three years. I can and do clean up nicely when I need to.

"But," I told Parker when we were alone in his office yesterday, "I am sweating like crazy. Tomorrow I'm on West campus. Nobody sees me. Shorts and sandals, totally."

"Right on," he replied. "I don't blame you."

This is true, really. On West campus, there's nobody there from the department. Nobody there knows me, since I haven't taught there in over a year. At the most, the only people who may recognize me are one or two fellow adjuncts, the ones who teach there all the time, or one of the office support staff there. To everyone else I'm just another instructor, and most of the time, don't look too much different (or much older) than the actual students there. To those ends, yes, today I will indeed wear one of my other dressy button-up shirts, but I am totally wearing my shorts and sandals, because I don't want to sweat half a gallon of liquid from my pores.

Tuesdays and Thursdays, I've decided, will be much more casual than Mondays and Wednesdays are on the main campus, at least for a while. No, I'm not going to break out the t-shirts immediately and try to pass myself off as the super-groovy-fun-time professor, but I will dress more casually and work my way down to that eventually, say, around late September or so. I'll put it this way -- once hoodie weather starts, I will be back in my element for the most part, more than likely on both campuses. Until then? I shall attempt to at least appear mostly respectable. I only have so many respectable-ish outfits that I can cycle through when I'm teaching four days per week.

In other news, my internet was out for a long time tonight. Yesterday when I got home, I messaged Daisy to tell her I was home and safe, made lunch, and watched the first half of Thor. It was hot and stuffy in the upstairs of the house, and I was tired, so I went downstairs and went to bed, only to wake up around 10PM. I hadn't done much; I got up, readied my stuff for today's class -- including filling out my gradebook for everything I needed to fill out, and sent Daisy a few messages telling her I was awake, since for some reason I couldn't sleep anymore (even after being mind-numbingly exhausted when I went downstairs). I began uploading course documents to my students' Blackboard pages when the internet stopped responding.

Hm, I thought. This can't be good. I checked the modem. Yep, internet was out. Cable was out, specifically. I know what the corresponding sets and patterns of lights on my modem mean, so I can easily diagnose problems like this myself. This happened at exactly midnight, so I thought they may have been doing some sort of monthly test on things, and didn't think much else of it. I also know that when the cable goes out, it's usually back on within a few short minutes, and that after I refresh the IP on my router when it comes back, everything is normal again.

Ten minutes went by. Fifteen. Twenty. Still out. I turned on my phone and sent Daisy a text message, telling her that the internet was down and that I was going to take a shower and go to Walmart, finally. I wasn't tired enough to go back to sleep, and I needed to go anyway (truthfully, I would've gone were the internet actually working, since I'd put it off for two extra days anyhow). By the time I showered, dressed, and left the house, it was 1AM, and the internet was still down.

It didn't come back. When I got home, I worked more on the long letter to my grandmother that I've been writing for over a month now (I'm on page sixteen) and played a game on my computer. I knew I wasn't going to get to go back to sleep; I was too awake, not to mention that I didn't really care since I also knew that this morning's class would go quickly and then I'd be back home to sleep when, and as much, as I needed to. I began drinking coffee, alternating between that and Cherry RC Cola (which I picked up at Walmart while I was there). I made a sandwich and ate it as my "dinner" at 2:30 AM. I turned on the AC and let it run, as for some reason it was almost 90 upstairs in my house.

Finally, around 4:30 AM, when the internet had still not come back up, I made a service call to Cox, the cable company. They have an automated menu that lets you request a "box refresh," which means they reset your connection at the central hub. When I chose that option, an automated voice came on that said that there were a large number of outages in my area and that technical crews had been dispatched to work on them. Hm. Interesting.

The internet popped back up sometime after 6AM or so (I wasn't watching or paying attention when it did) and has been fine since. Were I to have slept the entire night as I usually do on weeknights before classes, I may not have noticed it was out. I wonder how often this happens, actually.

My schedule for the day is rather brief. I'll leave the house here around 8, since I don't have to worry about parking on the West campus. I'll teach my first 101 class of the semester at 9:15, a class which only has ten students and should be quite short because all we're doing is going over the syllabus and class policies, and then I'll drive back home. Barring any sort of awful traffic or other issues, I should be back home before 11AM -- an extremely short day for me. I'll spend as much time driving to and from there as I will in front of the students in the class. And, with a class of only ten students, I'll be able to whip through things with no problem, hopefully, for the entire semester. It's the large classes which are difficult to teach because there are so many papers and assignments to grade. Smaller classes are more intimate groups with more class participation and more camaraderie, and I am totally lucky this class is a small one, as it's the class which will produce the most work for me throughout the semester, with four long papers, workshops, a multitude of quizzes and journals, etc.

I told Daisy that I'd be home relatively early, and once I am, we can finally Skype again for the first time since briefly on Sunday...provided that the internet continues working, anyway. She gets off work until Friday after she gets home this morning, and we're trying to plan for her to come down here next week on her days off, since I won't yet be incredibly busy in the semester. The real work with my students will kick off around week three or four, when they're beginning their papers and the like. Until October 10, anyway, even when I keep the 101 class the entire time, I should still be home well before noon. That is a major plus when it comes to my teaching schedule for the first half of the semester.

On that note, I must change my clothing and ready myself to drive southwestward. Is that a word? It is now; I have two English degrees, and therefore have license to make shit up.