The End of the Semester

Spring semester: day seventy-eight

My semester is over. At least the classes are, anyway. I will return to campus but two more days before dropping off my keys, cleaning out my office, and leaving for good. On Tuesday night I taught what may very well be the last class of my career as a professor, ever -- my 011 night class. It went uneventfully; they took their practice final, turned in papers, and and then one by one went home, with me going home after the last students finished. I stopped at Burger King -- the first time I've gotten any fast food of any sort in about a year -- and got dinner so that I wouldn't have to cook, then ate it, Skyped with Daisy for a bit, and went to bed.


It feels weird and sudden, but then again, so does the end of every semester. It always just stops, and when it does I'm left alone with little to do. Except, well, this time I have a lot to do -- all stuff to ready for the move and for my wedding.

I only have to go back to campus for the final exam and for the grading of those final exams -- two days maximum. My 011 students' final exam is next Tuesday night, during roughly the same time we have class (it starts a little later than our class normally runs). Once that's done and graded, I'm gone, leaving the halls of the department behind forever -- for better or worse.

I felt this way last spring as well, as I didn't know then if I'd ever teach again after I graduated with my Master's degree. Yet, even then I knew that if I didn't find something else (and I didn't) I had somewhat of a safety net of working at the university in the fall again, and I did. This time around that's not the case. Once I leave Kansas, and leave the university, it is very, very unlikely that I will ever come back. For any reason. I will have a completely new, completely different life in Omaha with my wife. If I had uncertainty that I'd ever teach again after graduating last spring, that uncertainty has multiplied a hundredfold now. I honestly don't know what the future holds for me. I can't even tell you where, or if, I'll be working in a month's time. Let alone further ahead than that. It's goddamned frightening, the kind of fright that could keep a man awake at night (thankfully I'm so overwhelmed and exhausted that all I want to do is sleep). There's only so many things I can take care of or worry about at once, and I have so many of them yet to do.

The hot temperatures have continued; it's gotten into the 90s almost every day for the past week, reached 97 yesterday in Wichita, and is on track to do the same here again today before storming like hell tonight (possibly, anyway). To have it go from the 30s and 40s into the 60s and 70s for about two weeks, to spiking into high 90s and 100s is a little too much to take all at once. I have not turned on the air conditioner, though my fans are getting much use and the windows are propped open to try to move air through the house. It doesn't do much good -- it's not even noon yet and it's already 87 degrees in my room, which is a really bad sign. As you folks may know, my room takes forever to cool back down once it's heated up, and during most of the overnight hours the top floor of the house just gets hotter and hotter no matter what I do, like some sort of asshole duplex greenhouse effect. It's not uncommon to have it be over 100 in my room at night in the summer for no real reason, even if it's in the 70s outside. At that point, the air conditioner doesn't even help -- it throws up its proverbial arms and can't do anything. Even with the air conditioner running, if I were to turn it on, it would maybe drop the temperature in my room to 90. Maybe.

"You won't have to deal with it for much longer," Daisy told me. "Won't it be nice to have a place where it's easy to keep cool or keep warm all the time?"

Yes, yes it will be. My central air and furnace work just fine, though both of them destroy my electric bill if I run either of them too much.

I Skyped with Rae for a little while yesterday afternoon about her job and travel plans for the wedding. She's going to be in town for several days before (and a few days after) the wedding, and as she's starting a new job that she can do from anywhere with an internet connection, she has a little more wiggle room than usual for travel. She's apparently going to be in Omaha a lot this summer, which is good.

Everything is slowly falling into place, I suppose -- I have a twelve-item list of things to do administratively before the move, and about five of them are done. Yesterday I submitted the transfer request for the cable internet account to the Cox Communications people via an online form so that I can have it turned on at our new place by the week I'm settled in. It gets turned off here on the 20th and turned on in our new place on the 24th, with free installation and a discount for the first three months. I scheduled the electric to be turned off here on the 24th, and to have the last bill sent to our new address. Now all I have left to do is change the addresses on my credit cards and have the water/trash service ended in a little less than two weeks. And, y'know, pack and clean.

I've done a fair amount of packing and cleaning over the past 24 to 36 hours, and plan to do more tonight once it cools down some and possibly storms. There's a good bit of it to do, obviously, but I'm slowly working through it all. I packed up a lot of dishes and the like in the kitchen onto one of the biggest boxes I had, a box that a Dell computer came in (which I was lucky enough to get from the nice administrator lady on the West campus). I washed the kitchen rugs, and those rugs will be the last things packed into the box (for padding) before I seal it up this evening. I also wiped down the stove and counters, though I'll have to do that several more times between now and when I move as well. The remaining things in the spare room and bathrooms are next before I slowly begin moving everything down to the basement bedroom as a "base of operations" for all of the boxes.

"Do you think you'll be able to fit everything into the apartment?" Daisy asked me.

It was the first time I've been asked such a question -- up until now, she was always of the mindset that yes, while I have a whole house full of stuff to move, she still had a lot of stuff as well, and up until now she was not worried about my ability to easily fit my stuff in there. It's one of the reasons I got the 17-footer truck -- my reasoning is that yes, we'll need a truck that big to move the bigger stuff like the bed and the washer/dryer, but also because no matter what she already has in our new apartment...if it fits in the truck, it'll fit in the apartment. 

"Well, it better," I said. "I've already given away or sold basically everything I can give away or sell. Everything else I have, I do need to keep."

It does look like a lot more than it is, and I understand her concerns -- it's because everything in the house is all spread out still, and there are going to be lots of boxes. Playing "box tetris" in the truck around the larger items will be easy enough to do; that's one of the few fun things about moving. I am compulsively organizational if nothing else, meaning that the truck will be completely filled and organized much like a Tetris board would be, with the hardest stuff to move -- like the washer/dryer and bed frame -- going in last (so that it can be the first stuff out and set up in the new place).

I don't yet know how I'm going to move the cats; I have their carriers, of course, but it's been five years since they've been in them for a long car ride, and they like to wail incessantly because they get scared. I can only hope that "moving day" for them is a cool, quiet day without too much sun or heat, because it's a long, long drive to Omaha. Luckily, though, they'll either be in the truck with Daisy or in Daisy's car with me -- and both vehicles will have air conditioning (while my car, which I'm driving up there two nights prior to the move, does not).

Yes, I'm letting Daisy drive the truck. Why? Because a.) she actually knows where it's going, as I've not yet been to our new place, b.) because I hate trucks and have trouble judging distance on anything that's not the same relative size/shape of my/her car, and c.) because she used to own a truck and knows how trucks handle. The closest thing I've ever driven to a moving truck is my ex's mother's van, and as I hated the way that thing handled (it drove like a fucking brick), I'm letting my future-wife-with-more-truck-experience drive the moving truck.

Yes, driving it is basically driving in two straight lines (one north, one east) until we get into Omaha proper, but I'm so not taking any chances.

Apparently the higher-ups at Daisy's job are excited for me to interview with them and (more than likely) work there -- they've been having discussions about it during their meetings for the past two weeks or so, trying to iron out the details and the collaboration/schedules/Daisy-can't-have-power-over-me dynamic. No, obviously, I do not yet "have the job" or anything like that, but (apparently) everyone there expects me to get it and begin working with them sometime in June. Which, of course, I would be perfectly fine with -- it would mean I wouldn't have to worry about money so much (or, really, at all) when Daisy and I would be finally pulling in enough to survive on comfortably. Is it teaching? No. Does it pay a shitload more than I made teaching over the course of this past year? Yes. 

"Look, babe," I told her, "if I'm getting a steady paycheck? I'll do anything in that job within my ability. I don't start drama, I don't get embroiled in other people's lives -- hell, I don't like being social in the first place. I go in, I do my work, I go home."

So there's that, at least. It's not set in stone or anything, but it's good to know that I'm wanted somewhere for work, especially as every other application, resume, or CV I've sent out over the past two months has been a dud and/or the positions have been filled by other people probably not as qualified as I am.

"They asked if you'd still be teaching," she said. "I told them probably not."

"I won't be teaching unless someone gets back to me about teaching," I replied, "or unless someone offers me classes that will be taught on days I'm off. Or, unless someone actually wants to hire me to teach and pay me a living wage...at which point I wouldn't be working for [company] anyhow."

There is an exception to this, of course; the 210 class I've been teaching has online sections that I could feasibly teach entirely remotely from Omaha (without ever, ever setting foot on the university's campus again) since there's no final exam in the course. 90% of the curriculum for 210 I post on Blackboard anyhow, and I have a shitload of course materials that I could throw up there and "lecture" on with no issue. I sent an email to the Director asking if this would be feasible -- as the class basically runs on autopilot anyhow, and the extra money it would pull in would be more than worth the several hours per week that I'd have to put into grading papers -- all online, mind you -- even if I had a few sections of it. It would also allow me to keep teaching and therefore keep adding to my CV. If nothing else, it's a backup plan for extra money, and worth looking into even if nothing at all comes of it.

The rest of my day today has been spent...well, asleep, mostly. Now that I no longer have to keep anyone's schedule but my own (except for those last two aforementioned days on/around campus) I don't have to keep a set sleeping schedule, either. This is good, as the sweltering heat makes me extra tired anyhow, and I feel like I'm at least somewhat beginning to catch up on all the rest I lost over the course of the semester. I'll need to, of course, since the move won't be fun or easy. A lot more of the packing and moving boxes ramps up this weekend once I can organize some stuff for good, and I'll begin cleaning furniture and rooms soon thereafter. I don't have a ton of time, obviously, so I have to plan all of this stuff out and do it as I come across it.

I am, however, meeting my friends for donuts and coffee tomorrow night at the all-night donuts place. We're supposed to meet up there around 11, which I believe is when they open. That'll give me a nice bit of detachment from everything else going on. As you folks know, well, I don't get out much.