The Burning

Spring semester: day thirty-four

I'm pretty sure that either my allergies are really, really bad right now, or I re-scratched my previously-injured eye again while rubbing it due to them, because my eyes have been dry/burning and bloodshot/watery for the past few days now. I used to think that it was just in the mornings as part of my other allergies (they're always really bad when I wake up for the day) but it's not simply that, at least with the pineapple-eye. It's blurry like it was before when I injured it six months ago, and it just aches and waters almost constantly...which triggers all of my other allergies too. It doesn't bother me as bad as it did when I injured it, but believe me, it's still a pain in the ass.

A big part of it is probably because I've been somewhat sleep-deprived as well; when I came home from teaching and doing my shopping yesterday, I ate lunch and went back to bed. While I slept, yes, I only slept for about...six hours? Something like that. I wanted to sleep for about ten or more -- a real, full night's worth of sleep. As I didn't, while I got back up and have gone about my evening/night since, I still don't feel very well-rested. As you folks may know, I've always had sleeping issues, though in the past year or so they've gotten particularly bad. I've now learned that it's not that I don't have time to sleep -- I mean, I do only work/teach three days a week, and two of those days are basically half-days (not counting lesson-planning time and grading time, of course) -- but it's still a problem. I've become dependent, at least on Monday nights, on taking a sleeping pill in the evening just so that I can force myself to sleep through the night and be able to take on my long day on Tuesday. I had to get more of those yesterday, actually, when I went to Walmart, and I took the last one out of my last packet of them about ten minutes ago so that I can sleep when I go back to bed fairly soon, and sleep long without having to worry about getting up at a pre-set time or by an alarm clock. It's a general restlessness -- I don't have any medical issues, such as sleep apnea (Daisy tells me that most of the time, I don't even snore) that I'm aware of, my bed is incredibly comfortable to me, and while I do drink a lot of coffee, I do know when not to drink it so that I can sleep...so what is it? I'd tell you if only I knew.

Daisy says that not only do her allergies make her tired/fatigued (as do mine), but they make it hard for her to sleep sometimes as well. If that's all it is, I can understand it, but still. Even when I'm incredibly exhausted I can only sleep for about eight hours or so at a time, and it's just not enough in some cases, for some days. This is one (of the many) reasons why Daisy and I put an elliptical machine on our wedding registry. No, nobody will probably get it for us and we'll probably end up getting it ourselves, but if I can bust my ass on the elliptical for an hour or so every night before bed, my hopes are that I can wear myself out enough to basically pass out and stay out for a long period of time, and get actual rest.

In other news, I've already started my work for the weekend. Next week, as you are probably aware since I've been talking about it, is the last week of classes before Spring Break, and I have a lot to accomplish in my classes between now and a week from now when my break officially starts for me.


Between that last sentence and this one, I went to bed for the night and got up around noon or so. My eye is still irritated, but it's not constantly burning and watering like it had been before. This may be because it's 55 outside right now and my allergies aren't going nuts anywhere near as much as they have been as of late. In fact, they're really not bothering me at all right now. I've opened the windows and turned off the furnace, obviously, in an attempt to air the house out and get whatever allergens are in here to sort of "blow out."

When it comes to work for next week, what I was referring to before I went to bed was that I have tooled and re-tooled my 210s' assignment for their big Proposal/Grant Request project and have tightly structured the rest of the semester around it. When I taught the 8-week version of the class, my students had but two weeks to put it together and have it ready to turn in, and then had to give an oral presentation on it the next night. The amount of work almost killed the students, and two or three of them couldn't do it all because they couldn't keep up. With this class being a full sixteen-week class and having only eight students in it, they have more time to get all of this stuff done; as it's the final project in the class, they have almost a month to work on and finish it before they give their Oral Presentations (their last grade in the class, sort of their "final exam") on it. However, as I'm sending them off into Spring Break to begin working on it and to begin doing their research, I have to make sure everything is done and ready for them to work on it by Wednesday night -- that means I have to get all of the handouts and assignments ready as well as print out and make copies of the 21-page example that I give them as a guide to follow. That's more behind-the-scenes work than it seems, and while I'm almost done with it, it takes me a while to structure and re-structure things to adapt the assignment(s) to a class that meets half as often but for twice as long.

The email went out this morning to all instructors/professors that midterm grading opens on Monday; I've already discussed midterm grades with my 102 students, but will have to do the same for my 011s and 210s as well. For the latter, the semester is progressing fast enough to where they'll know what they have in the class by the time midterms come about. For the former? There's still about 60% of the class assignments to go, and the midterm isn't indicative of anything for them (except that for some of them, they've already failed due to absences). I have to send out those emails as well this weekend. Luckily, my classes next week should be a breeze as we ease into Spring Break; I collect papers and give out the next assignment to 011, I collect journals and do a few activities for 102, and I collect papers and give out the big assignment to my 210s. I'll have a lot of grading to do come this time next week, but it shouldn't take me an incredibly long amount of time, and I'll be starting it ASAP once the break officially starts for me.

The plan, as of right now, is to spend the first half or so of my break at home doing that stuff and taking care of anything else that needs to be done. On Tuesday the 18th, Daisy comes down here and we either go back up that night or go back up in the morning, and I'll stay until Friday or Saturday (the 21st or 22nd). She should be taking that Friday off (or the Saturday off, depending on which one's available) and we'll come back on whichever night she can get off. I'll have a day or two here in the interim to finish up everything that needs to be done before I return to teaching and my schedule returns to normal for the remainder of the semester -- it'll be the last visit to Omaha I get until I go up there for the wedding itself.

As for the logistics of everything else going on with our living situation after that? Obviously, I don't know anything yet. With the semester ending basically two months from today, I need to get some useful info from the department/university in a hurry so that I can begin making plans for the summer and for survival. Even if all goes well with the university and I end up staying here for the foreseeable future, there's only a very slim chance that I'd have any sort of gainful employment through them over the summer, and despite our savings and the like, we can't survive and be able to pay our bills unless both of us are working -- regardless of what we're doing.

Daisy is the failsafe here; while nobody's going to pay me a livable wage for summer work unless I work some manual labor or backbreaking wage-slave job for those months, especially if I'm going to return to teaching in the fall in some capacity, Daisy already works full time and is looking to either get a promotion in her current company or get a better job that will allow us the breathing space needed to move and to survive and pay our bills. She's looking for that in Omaha, though, and has sent out several applications for new positions, so it's going to boil down to whether or not she can find something new and whether or not I'll be offered the position at the university that I've been looking to do now for almost two full years. Worst-case scenario is that neither one happens and we're both broke and scraping by on and with nothing after the wedding. There are so many variables at play that neither of us can say "Here's what we're doing and where we're going to be," because even now we just don't know. Many things need to fall into place, and until even one of those things fall into place we can't make any real plans. It's not that we're dragging our feet or hemming-and-hawwing, it's that our hands are tied for the moment even to the point where we can't make any true contingency plans because we can't see that far ahead.

Obviously, this is troubling and stressful. I'm basically scraping by paycheck-to-paycheck as it is, and am trying to spend or use as little money as possible aside from paying my bills so that there can be something left. Also obviously, that can only go on so long as well.

I also need to make some sort of decision this weekend on the insurance plan for the university, and let the HR guy know. Even if it's only going to be effective for a month or two if I don't come back in the fall, I have to do something to tell them what I want to do and have them put it into action. And I have my taxes to do as well. All of this stuff is so stressful and still hanging over my head that I just want to crawl into bed and curl into a ball until it all goes away, even though that's not how real life works.