The End is Near

Spring semester: day thirty-eight

In four hours, I will be done teaching for twelve straight days. I will load my belongings back into the Monte Carlo. I will drive back north, back to Newton. I will stop at Walmart to do my shopping-for-essentials, for which I have already made a list and put said list inside my class folder for this morning so I won't forget it. I will bring said essentials home and put them away, before basically locking myself inside my house like a hermit until Daisy arrives in four and a half days.

This is my plan. It's a good plan. I like this plan. I'm excited.

Depending on my energy levels, allergies, and ability to stay awake, I'll either start my grading and midterm grade calculations tonight or tomorrow. Regardless, I plan to have them finished by tomorrow evening. There's a lot I have to do between now and when I leave for Omaha, and I'm not leaving all of it for after I get back (as when I get back, I'll more than likely once more be exhausted after all of the running around we'll do while I'm up there, and won't be motivated to do much of anything). The house desperately needs to be vacuumed, the kitchen and counters need to be cleaned, the oven scrubbed. I really need to make time to do my taxes. I'll have bills that come in this weekend that will need to be paid before I leave (my Citi card bill, for example, came in yesterday, and my internet bill should arrive right around the time I leave). I need to put the car in the garage and check/replenish its fluids, as it will be sitting for well over a week. As it's now warm again on a daily basis and looks like it'll stay that way, I should probably replace all of the old spider traps in the downstairs and garage with new ones. Stuff like that. My grading and student-related responsibilities are but a small slice of the overall pie.

After a few days of having the furnace off, it got cold enough last night to where I needed to put it on this morning for a while when I got up, as it was pretty chilly in the house. It's supposed to reach 70 or higher this afternoon and be gorgeous outside. I probably won't be awake long enough to enjoy it that much; my insomnia that used to bother me big time on Monday nights (until I started taking sleeping pills and going to bed in the evening) has now switched to Wednesday nights, it seems. I don't generally sleep that well on Wednesday nights, because I'll get home well after 9PM, will eat something, and then will have to wind myself down and basically force myself to try to sleep in order to get up early on Thursday mornings to go teach again (such as, ahem, today). Sometimes this works better than others, obviously. Last Wednesday night I barely slept more than two or maybe three hours total, as the rest of the night I was tossing and turning and couldn't get comfortable. Last night I was tired, yes, but not tired enough to completely fall asleep until after 1AM...when my alarm goes off at 5. I hit the snooze four times this morning.

I've found that my "natural" sleep cycles are for me to want to go to bed at about 4 or 5AM and then get up between 1 and 3PM. That's just the way I've always been wired, really. I've been like that since I was a teenager -- those are just the hours where I get the best sleep. Real life, jobs, and other responsibilities have been continually fucking up that ideal sleep cycle for me since I was about fourteen years old. I've always done my best work, and I've always been most productive as a writer in the middle of the night. I like to clean and cook in the middle of the night. Being awake in the middle of the night means that all of the idiots in the world are asleep and I don't have to deal with them. In the summers, the middle of the night tends to be the coolest, most comfortable time to be awake because there's no blazing Kansas sun melting/scorching everything it touches. The middle of the night is the best time to go shopping at 24-hour stores like Walmart, since nobody is there. There are many, many advantages to that sleep schedule that cannot be taken advantage of when things like jobs and responsibilities keep me from doing it, and because I cannot sleep my ideal hours/schedule most of the time, I find myself almost constantly fatigued, sleeping when I can, and wanting to sleep when I can't. Hence, wrapping back around to my original point, why I tend to have insomnia during certain nights of the week.

In other news, I've been really getting into these guys as of late:

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Yes, the video is goofy, but the song is great. I've never heard of them before (nor have I heard them on the radio anywhere) but their Vevo channel on YouTube has a ton of their songs/videos. This song in particular has been stuck in my head off and on for the better part of a month, similar to how the "Dayman" song from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia was stuck in my head for days on end after I watched that episode.

I don't really have the time to listen to much new music anymore. Music used to be a huge, huge part of my life -- in undergrad, I followed record release dates and the like, plotted them out, and then went to the record store on campus (which, I've been told, no longer exists) to pick up new albums once or twice a month for the artists I liked. It was during that time when I discovered artists like Franz Ferdinand, The Killers, The Strokes, Clinic, Radiohead, and The White Stripes for the first time -- back before YouTube, back before iTunes was a "thing." Yeah, I know, I'm old. I wanted to cry when many of my students told me they were born after Kurt Cobain died. My car is a 1996 model, which means it came out in late 1995. Even my car is older than some of my students. Now, though? I really don't have the time or patience to sift through a lot of the (rather shitty) new music out there, and of course have no money to be taking to record stores -- the few that exist now -- to pick up new albums once or twice a month. While I have been able to get into a few new bands over the past few years, it's only been a handful at best, and the state of radio -- even for the music I like -- is fucking terrible now and has been for many years.

Speaking of State Radio...

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You'll almost never hear stuff like this on the radio. Not even on "alternative" stations, because most of those stations are like "let's throw on another shitty Coldplay or Mumford & Sons record!"

For the record, I can only tolerate Coldplay in very small doses, and I fucking hate Mumford & Sons. Call me a heretic if you want. The station I listen to out of Kansas City (and really like) even plays too much crap for me. They do play these guys, though, who are probably the best thing to come out of St. Joseph, Missouri since...well, ever:

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...and I should know, as I lived in that shithole of a town for over three years.

I think a big part of why I like these guys so much is because their vocalist sounds like Misfits-era Glenn Danzig. 

Anyway. Wow, I'm way off track.

Today in my 102 class I'm collecting journals and we're doing a fun exercise out of the workbook as we run headlong into Spring Break. Will it take the whole class? Eh, I don't know. I doubt it. It'll probably take a good chunk of it, though. I have a brief discussion of midterm grading and then a Q&A session scheduled for their current essay first, so that they'll actually ask me questions if they have them -- if I schedule that for the end of the class, nobody will say anything because they'll just want to leave. I'm not stupid, obviously. As half of the class didn't follow the directions on their first paper and will more than likely do rewrites on it (I've already gotten/graded one), some of them definitely should be asking questions on this one if they have any issues whatsoever, otherwise they'll have a good shot at mathematically failing the course because they don't pay attention to what I tell them.

So. On that note, folks, I shall take my leave of you. I will, of course, update you over the weekend on the progress of my tasks, of which there are many, and the status of the trip to Omaha. Right now, however, I'm really, really looking forward to ending the first half of my semester and diving into Spring Break.