The Fatigue

Fall semester: day four

If there's one thing I've noticed thus far about my fall semester of teaching, it's that there's a lot of...well, waiting around. I don't necessarily mind this, but I've found myself doing a lot more waiting, pacing back and forth, and not sleeping than I've found myself teaching.

Mondays and Wednesdays, of course, involve a lot of waiting. Get up, go to campus, wait roughly four hours until I can teach and come home. The parking situation on main campus is an absolute mess. By the time I get there (at around 7:20 or so, give or take) the front third to front half of the student lot is already filled. By 8 it's usually completely full. By 9:30 or so when Parker arrives, he's lucky to find a spot. By the time my 11AM students come to class, they're telling me that they're parking on the street and walking a good half-mile or so to class. The university doesn't need a new dorm; it needs a five-or-six-level parking garage. Or less students.

I'll say this, though -- on Tuesdays and Thursdays when I teach on West campus, I roll out of the house after 8AM, make the beautiful drive through back roads and countryside, and get to the campus around 8:40-8:50 before my 9:15 class. There are twelve cars in the parking lot other than mine. Twelve. Ten of them are my students. The other two are the office staff.  There is not another single morning class taught on Tuesdays and Thursdays on the West campus -- it is a ghost town.

It is 3AM, and I once more find myself waiting. My fatigue has taken a strong hold this week, and has worked hand in hand with my insomnia. This means that I am sleeping at extremely odd hours, for varying lengths of time, yet when I'm awake and at home I have little energy to do anything productive, and I am usually between times where I could get any more actual productive sleep as well, due to the schedule I have to keep. Yesterday afternoon, for example, I got home around 12:30. I took off my hot, overbearing dressy clothing, let Daisy know I was home safely, and ate lunch on the couch with a book. When I felt myself getting sleepy, I went downstairs and went to bed. I woke up around 11PM, wide awake and unable to go back to sleep or keep sleeping, but with no real energy to do anything once awake.

This is apparently my life right now until I can figure out how to better regulate my sleep patterns. Basically, I now wait until I can leave the house in a little over four hours, go teach my class, come back home, and if I'm tired, sleep then. It's maddening.

Some of you may be thinking why don't you just go back to bed if you're tired, and try to sleep until you have to get up and get ready? I did this last night; I was stuck awake until 2:30 AM or so when I had to get up at 5, and was sleepy, so I set my alarm and went back to sleep...only to wake up at 5, hit the snooze three times, finally got up around six, and felt like absolute shit. Making myself go back to sleep is pointless if I can't get a good six-to-eight hours, because I will wake up feeling much worse than if I just stayed up and drank about four or five more cups of coffee to compensate. When I crash out, however, I crash out.

This has, of course, put a damper on communication this week between me and Daisy; we've Skyped but once since Sunday, and all other communication back and forth has been via message here and there, spottily at best. She's been off work since Tuesday morning, but of course, I haven't. I sleep when she's awake most of the time, and vice versa. I really won't get the chance to talk to her again until at least this afternoon, and that's if neither of us are asleep. Knowing how my body works, as soon as I eat something upon arriving home in the afternoon, I have about an hour (maximum) after that before I get so tired that I literally cannot sit upright and must sleep. By the time I get home from teaching I am also usually ravenously hungry as well, so you can see how this cycle tends to work most of the time. This also happens regardless of how much I've slept the night before or how much caffeine I've consumed prior to eating. It just does. I conk out, the combination of having a full stomach, responsibilities taken care of for the day, and my fatigue finally taking over.

I checked on my office situation yesterday morning while on the main campus, and it remains much the same.

"So do I have a key yet?" I asked the administrator.

"They've made it and it's coming in the mail, as much as I hate it that they send it that way. I've offered to send someone over to pick it up, but they always just send it. When the mail comes today I'll see if it's here."

Mail in the department comes in around midday, sometimes a little earlier or later. My class is at 11, and after it I go back home, since I have literally nothing else to do on campus after it.

"That's good," I said, relieved. "I won't be back on campus today after my class until Monday morning, since I teach tomorrow on West campus, so keep me posted on it."

I thanked her graciously, of course. This morning, since I didn't have an office to sit in, I sat in the lounge and read probably 100 pages of the Pears Cyclopaedia from 1985, a book which someone long ago left in there and had forgotten about. It was mildly interesting if only because it was shocking to see how woefully outdated much of its information was 28 years later. I also made a mental note to charge and bring my DS with me on Monday in case I still don't have access to my new office yet.

My internet, which was out all night Monday night (as you know) has been incredibly spotty for the several days since; in the overnight hours that I've been awake, it has gone offline over and over, only to pop back up a few minutes later. I counted at least four times it's gone out in the past 2.5 hours tonight, and probably missed a few times as well. I don't know if the techs are upgrading it or working on it or what -- all I know is that I've been living here for over four years now, and every year the price of my monthly internet goes up a little bit more. Originally it was $47, then $54, and now it's $57. If I'm still with the same company next year, I'm guessing it'll be over $60. And that's just for internet alone, the second-fastest-tiered service they have. I don't have telephone or cable television through them (I don't have it at all, and if I did, I'd barely use either one anyhow). In those four years, the internet has only gone out for a long stretch of time a very small handful of times. Even during the worst thunderstorms or ice/snowstorms, I haven't lost it for more than a few minutes at a time, and then only very rarely.

My 011 class yesterday went well; in the interim between Monday and yesterday, someone completely rearranged the classroom and actually made the desks and chairs fit into it really well. I now have a desk and chair in there myself (no podium or lectern, though), so I have a teaching space that will be effective enough for the semester. The students seemed to be a little more loosened-up for yesterday's class as well, though that was possibly because we didn't do much other than the diagnostic essay. Unlike other diagnostics in other composition classes, these kids get theirs back and we discuss them in class next week. I graded them one by one as my students turned them in and left the class, and honestly was pretty surprised by their ability to write (for the most part). Judging by their diagnostics, some of these kids would do perfectly fine in 101, so why many of them tested into 011 is beyond me. I'm more concerned about those students who are signed up for the class yet haven't showed up yet -- I've got four or five of them out of a full class capped at twenty. If they don't show up, it's less to grade, yes (they'll auto-fail in two more weeks due to absences alone), but they're going to have some real issues if they suddenly appear in class on Monday morning asking me what they've missed.

As for my 101 class, today I give them their diagnostic. In the overnight hours, to try to be as productive as I can while awake and hating it, I wrote up lesson plans and made handouts for the entire semester through early November. This was like going back in time, sort of, to a simpler era of teaching, and adjusting the readings/schedules to do everything within the allotted timeframe felt totally freeing and almost like reflexes, muscle memory of teaching 101 all flooding back to me, despite the fact that I only taught it for one two-semester year. Thankfully, in the new version of the textbook, they do have a few of the readings I used to cover in appropriate units, so I was able to incorporate a few of those. I didn't make out a schedule for the last unit of the semester yet (early November through finals week in December), though, because I need to overhaul some of the dates and timeframes on that, especially around Thanksgiving week, since I already plan to be out of town and in Omaha for that week.

Pete and Sadie have about halfway made up, it seems. She'll occasionally still growl or hiss at him every few hours, but no longer goes after him or seems to care when he's around unless he looks at her like he wants to spar with her. He even spent some time earlier cuddled up to her licking her ears and face, which she didn't seem to mind. Then again, Sadie is basically bipolar anyway, so who knows.

It's hot; really hot, actually. By the time I got home from class yesterday it was around 90, and my car -- since it's all black with black leather interior, and sat out in the sun all morning -- was sweltering and oppressive. I immediately ran the AC when I got home, and let it run until I went downstairs to bed yesterday afternoon. I turned it on for a while more when I got up, before realizing that it wasn't doing much good. On Tuesday when I ran it once it got stiflingly hot, I let it run for about six hours, and it dropped the temperature in the house considerably before it began making its whining noise again and stopped blowing, signifying that I'd run it too long in this humidity and that it was freezing up. At 6:30 in the morning, in my Man Cave, it is 88.7 degrees. It's 70 outside right now, with a predicted high of 92 this afternoon. I have no doubt I'll have to run it when I come back home from teaching this morning.

Yesterday, only four days after I sent the payment, my new registration sticker for my car came in the mail. That's super-fast, and I'm glad I no longer have to worry about it. I have to remember to put it on the plate in the coming days at some point, though technically I don't have to until the end of September. The car needs a fill-up at the gas station this morning before I drive to/from West campus. It looks like, on average, I'll have to fill the gas tank about every week and a half or so during the semester. I drive a little further on Tuesdays and Thursdays, since the West campus is a little further out of the way for me. I'm getting excellent gas mileage, though, even better than before, since I put new oil and Marvel Mystery Oil into the car last weekend. I don't know if that's really the reason why or what, but it's still good.  This morning I'll put some fuel system cleaner into it on fill-up, as it's been a few months since I last did that (and because I haven't driven the car a lot all summer up until this week). That should hopefully knock any more "kinks" out of it, if there are any.

I leave the house in about eighty minutes or so; I showered earlier and put on a fresh, new undershirt I purchased from Walmart on clearance, which I will wear with the shirt I wore to teach in on Monday and a pair of shorts (since it's West campus and all). I told Parker that since I travel between two campuses on different days, I could cut my laundry in half by wearing the same outfit to teach in on alternating days, depending on weather of course. For example, I wore the same shirt yesterday to teach in that I wore when I taught on Tuesday on the West campus. Today I'll be wearing the same shirt I wore on Monday when I taught on the main campus. I consider this to be a small stroke of genius. As long as I don't, like, spill coffee on myself or anything like that, I can get by with two outfits for any given week most of the time if necessary, and may be able to do something along these lines indefinitely for most of the semester. Why not, you know? If nothing else I'll at least be able to do it with my pants, as I have several identical pairs of pants, and don't tend to get them as dirty as quickly.

It's amusing to me how much time and thought I put into what I'm going to wear. I'm not generally that kind of person, yet I already see myself de-evolving into Polo shirts instead of button-up shirts for my West campus days next week, and probably dressier t-shirts for the week after, normal tees the week after that. For my main campus days? Pretty much the same sort of schedule, though a little more slowly. I doubt I'll start wearing my t-shirts until I wear a hoodie or zip-up jacket over them later in the semester, probably past the midterm point when it's colder and I've begun the big wardrobe switch from summer clothes to fall and winter clothes.

Yes, I do put thought into this, don't I? This is totally bolstered by the fact that -- as I mentioned above -- aside from me, my students, and two office staff members, West campus is deserted when I'm there. It's not like I have any administration over there that I need to, or must, impress. That may change for the second eight weeks starting in October, but still. If I wasn't so bored and restless and wanting to get it over with, I could conceivably leave the house at 8:30 or later and get there five minutes before class started, but I always give myself some extra time for traffic or car troubles, as well as a smoke before I go inside to teach. That's also part of the reason I go to the main campus so early on Monday/Wednesday as well, though the bigger reason is parking.

Parker has seriously upgraded his office this semester, even though he is scheduled to graduate in December. He brought in a massive lounge chair that he calls "the throne," and the title is accurate. It's wider, and twice as deep, as my couch. His officemate, not to be outdone, brought in a vertical ionizing fan with remote controlled-oscillation and three speeds. With some new lamps for mood lighting as well, the office is now a completely different place. I can't help but feel a little envious, as I expect my own office (when I get it) to be small, cramped, and nowhere near as inviting. But, it doesn't really matter as long as I get it.

I may stop for Burger King on my way home from teaching; I should roll off the interstate and back into Newton around 11 this morning, before the lunchtime rush. I don't really have anything in the house that I want to eat, and what I have been eating (mainly sandwiches and the occasional can of soup) has really started to wear on me. I have boxed stuff in the cupboard, such as mac & cheese and couscous that I could make, but I'm already tired (again, the fatigue) and by the time 11AM rolls around and I get back up here, I will totally be in full weekend mode, and will want to do nothing but stop doing work, including cooking. As you folks may already know, it's not like I eat fast food all the time, or really at all -- maybe once or twice a semester I'll stop for it just so I don't have to make anything at home -- but I have been desperately craving a burger for the past few weeks, and since the McDonald's in Walmart shut down, Burger King is the closest option for me (and it's right off the interstate on the way home). I may consider it. It depends on how tired and/or hungry I am by the time I get back home.

I messaged Daisy in the overnight hours and told her that if she was awake before 8, we could Skype before I went to campus, but I doubt she will be. As a result I probably won't get to talk to her until this afternoon, provided I'm still awake when she's around.

My weekend plans are sparse; I need to mow the grass again, more than likely, which I'll do on whatever day is the coolest and least sunny, and I'll be spending a bit of time working on student stuff, but other than that? I desperately need to get some quality, off-the-grid sleep where I don't have to worry about getting up at a set time and don't have to plot my resting hours around when I can get it or when I can feasibly continue sleeping instead of just staying awake for hours upon hours on end to power through things. I'll need to write out my rent check and mail it, which will be another large chunk of money gone from my bank account, but thankfully that will be replenished in another three weeks or so with my first paycheck (September 13). And, luckily, I only have another four days of teaching after today before I get a four-day weekend for Labor Day, as well. With Daisy coming down midweek (at least she plans to, I believe) I've got a good stretch of days ahead of me.

Now, off to teach.