Nothing There, Part III

Fall semester: day twenty-six

Monday morning, I feel you.

6:18 AM. Warm shower, coffee, and cigarettes acquired. Secret Beatles t-shirt (the Revolver album cover) under classy, zip-up jacket. Corduroy pants. Peer review of papers in my class today. Let's do this.

I went to bed relatively early last night. I told Daisy, who was getting ready for work at the time, that I needed to get something to eat, take some melatonin, and go to bed. I knew that if I didn't take melatonin (which I have a large bottle of), I wouldn't be able to sleep the whole night -- I didn't get up yesterday until nearly noon, because (again) my body told me that since I had the day off, it was time to sleep as long as possible. I took the melatonin, made a small dinner, and halfway watched the Steelers get beaten by the Bears (to put them at 0-3) before I went downstairs to sleep. I was out almost as soon as my head hit the pillow. I must not have moved much the entire night -- when I awoke to the clock radio this morning (playing Queen's "We Are the Champions" loudly at 5AM) my neck was killing me, and my allergies in the night had completely filled one side of my head with snot. Even the warm, almost hot shower this morning did little to help either affliction, and I'll either take some sinus/pain pills this morning before I leave or I'll need to take them by the time I get home early this afternoon.

The car is still in the garage; I didn't leave the house the entire weekend, nor did I mow the grass. The vast majority of my weekend, as you probably gathered from my previous posts, was spent sleeping as much as possible -- something that was incredibly necessary for me to recharge my internal batteries. This means, in addition to the amount of sleep I got last night, that I should be able to stay on this somewhat-normalized sleeping schedule from this point forward, as long as I try to -- meaning, if I get uncontrollably sleepy at 2PM or 3PM this week once I'm home, I must fight it as much as possible, and pound coffee until it goes away. I have to train myself to feel normal again and sleep "normal" hours again during the night, as in a few weeks when I will begin basically tripling the time I spend on campus and outside of my home every week, it's not like I'll be able to just up and go to sleep then. I'll also need to stay awake during the afternoons this week as much as I can so that I can grade my students' papers when they come in tomorrow and Wednesday -- yes, I could wait on those until the weekend if I truly wanted to, but I don't want to rush through them, and I want to salvage as much of the weekend as I can for sleep, football, and household chores, including the aforementioned mowing of the grass, bill-paying, and some shopping.

Amusingly enough, I am not tired right now. Could I go downstairs and be back asleep within about thirty minutes if I wanted to be? Yes, of course, but am I actually tired right now? No. Well, at least not in the I hate my life and everything it's become sense of the word "tired," as I have been as of late.

I wrote a bit about the "peer review" my students are going to do today in class in my post here last night. I do wonder how many of them are actually going to show up for it. Last week, we got a memo in the department for those of us who teach in the building I teach in (which includes a good chunk of us, including me and Parker) that said the air conditioning unit in the building was out of commission for "a while." Apparently, it needs several parts which take some time to obtain. I've also learned that when we get a memo that says "a while," it usually translates to "for the foreseeable future." As a result, it was 90 degrees in my classroom on Wednesday, and I quickly gave my lecture while sweating through my dressy shirt to a bunch of sweating, fanning-themselves students, and we got the hell out of there. Parker was quick, and lucky, enough to procure a replacement classroom for his students in the building the department is in, and moved his class over there. I didn't have that luxury. As far as I know, the air conditioning unit hasn't been fixed yet (I've not been told anything about it, at least), so even though it's much cooler today (57 outside) I don't expect all of my students to show up to class simply based on Wednesday's experience alone. I also don't expect half of them to show up because they won't have anything to review with their peers, and because on any given day it's become normal for that class to have five or six absences anyhow. This means it could either be a really short class on the one day before their papers are due where we're scheduled to be in there working on them the entire time.

One of my students in that class, and another in my 101 class, said that for their speech class they need to interview one of their professors, and they've both picked me. Apparently they have to do that sometime within the next few weeks, if not this coming week. I've sat for these interviews before -- they're pretty basic questions about the college experience, and they can (at times) be fun -- but even though those students told me they want/need to interview me, they haven't contacted me to set up a time as of yet. The student from the 011 class told me she'd try to do it today before class, during my normal "office hours" (a term I use loosely) time, but I told her to give me a heads-up on it, and she hasn't yet done that.

On that note, I need to gather my things, pull the car out of the garage, and barrel down the highway to campus. Hopefully the temperature in my classroom won't be sweltering, and hopefully it will be a teaching day where I can actually accomplish something...provided my students show up.