And So It Begins...

Thanksgiving break, for me, at least, has begun.

To celebrate, I have gone to Walmart and purchased a ham. Yes, a ham. Yes, of course I realize that Thanksgiving is a turkey holiday. I don't care. I wanted ham.

I have never baked a ham before. Ever. When it came to the big cooking around the house for the vast majority of my entire life, it was done by one of two women -- either my mother, as I was growing up, or from 2006-2011, the former girlfriend.

Neither of these women do I live with anymore (obviously). So, for the baking of the ham I am on my own. Luckily, I picked a ham with an instruction label on it. Properly preparing, carving, and eating it will be my biggest non-school-related project of this next week or so. I see it as a metaphorical, masculine challenge of sorts -- if I can cook such a large hunk of meat, cut it up with a huge knife and two-pronged fork, and then growl as I eat it, I'll feel like a Viking. Bonus points if I break out the meat cleaver while doing so.

So, my break has begun. It will be eleven days long, and during it I will attempt (and hopefully succeed in) getting almost everything done for my classes this semester. Frankly, there's a huge to-do list to take care of, full of everything from reading three different books to writing papers to creating a poetry portfolio. More than anything else, though, Thanksgiving break is a reminder that the semester will soon be coming to an end, and that I'm that much closer to a (cold and poor) month of freedom -- during which I will be working on various personal projects of my own (on my own time), catching up on sleep and relaxation, and getting some much-needed quality time with my kitties.

Most of my friends and acquaintances within the department are leaving town for Thanksgiving or have already left -- some as early as yesterday morning -- to various locations around the country. Me? I slept until almost 1PM today and have spent the day in my bathrobe, doing laundry. Oh, I also ate lunch and drank some coffee, too. I'm actually glad to some extent that I don't have anywhere to go for Thanksgiving, and that I have too much stuff to do to really consider going anywhere anyhow. Last year I stayed home as well when the former girlfriend went to visit her parents for the week. My heart's just not in making trips to visit family for the holidays anymore; I don't particularly like to travel, I don't like sleeping in any bed other than my own, my car may commit ritual seppuku were I to drive it more than 150 miles in a day, I don't like being away from the cats for prolonged stretches of time, and I don't like not having the ability to sit in my room, drink coffee, smoke and be on my computer. I'm perfectly comfortable most of the time in my hermit's rut of "don't inconvenience me, and I won't inconvenience you."

Overall, now that I've been able to begin decompressing a little bit, my life is okay. For the most part. This is important because so many people I know are going through all sorts of bad shit right now. These things simply aren't going on in my life. So, right now, my life is okay. Simple logic, yes, but still. It's not good, it's not bad -- it's simply okay.

Because of this, it feels weird to say I'm a little lonely and depressed. This is, of course, why I keep busy most all the time, even when I'm at home on the weekends -- if I don't, not only will my work not get done, but I'll have time to think, time to ruminate...and that's a bad thing. Thinking about anything but what needs to be done or otherwise taken care of generally leads to problems and/or trouble for me and my mental state. This is why, in my downtime, I play my DS, listen to podcasts, clean the house/cook/do laundry, or write here. I also have whatever sporting event is on television at the time to distract me, as well as the cats.


...especially cats like Sadie, pictured above, who decided to lay on my lap/arm this afternoon shortly after I started writing his post, prompting this photo.

Yes, if you look closely, you can see the beginnings of gray in my beard. That's what happens when you get old, folks. Time to order up the Just for Men, I suppose.

I mentioned the ham earlier; I have since put it in the oven according to the directions on the label. It should be done in about two hours or so.

[EDIT] I did bake and carve the ham, and it was awesome.

The rent check has now cleared my bank account; it took the better part of three days to do so, but my balance is now accurate. My officemate told me the only thing he uses checks for anymore is rent. I still use mine for rent and all of my bills. I don't trust those online automatic-bill-pay systems, as I've already had enough problems with money over the years. I'd rather keep track of absolutely everything by hand. I'll actually be paid three more times before Christmas, and with my expenses running relatively light for the rest of the year, I should be just fine for my car insurance payment at the end of December. If nothing else, the paycheck I receive shortly before Christmas will completely cover it.

Taking a cue from my friend Jay, I applied for and was approved for an Amazon-affiliated Chase Visa card. It has a $400 limit. Once they actually send it to me in the mail, this means that I may be able to use it to put new tires on my car and slowly pay them off, depending on how expensive said tires may be. I say may because I'm pretty sure tires for my car will be more than $400. The Monte Carlo has huge wheels and a wide wheelbase, so I don't know how much they'll be, even if I go to Walmart for them (which I probably will, really). Depending on wear/weather, I'll have to do that soon. I drive the car too much to put it off. Even if I have to get the cheapest tires that fit my car, they'll be better than the old, worn ones on there now.

The car seems fine, by the way. I'm keeping an eye on the weather; if it's going to drop down really cold at night again any time over the course of these next ten days, I'm going to stick it in the garage and leave it there until I have to go back to school. I don't foresee myself needing to drive anywhere but to the post office and/or Walmart until classes resume. I say post office because I'm going to try to get some of those packages I've been hoarding mailed out sometime while I'm off, since I have a bit of time and money to do it.

As for the oil change I was expecting to need around this time? I still have about 800 miles to spare before it's necessary, according to my odometer and the sticker on the inside of my windshield. I have also, as you know, put two quarts of new oil in it myself over the course of the past three months of driving 150 miles a week or more, so I'm not exactly sure how necessary it will be to do it "on time" now. I still will, but it's going to be a ways off yet. I can say with certainty that I won't drive 800 miles between now and the beginning of spring semester unless something catastrophic happens. The mere thought of the cost of 800 miles' worth of gas for that car makes me twitch, though. I've spent more money on gas for that car since June (when I bought it) than I paid for it.

And I still haven't gotten the suction-cup handle to put the window up/down in the winter...though I have added it to my wish list on Amazon.

Since I've been home, the cats have barely left my side. They seem thrilled that I'm here and am paying attention to them much more than usual, instead of my usual routine of sleep/get up/go to school/come home/repeat. This is odd because I'd have these days off anyway; yes, I'm off already, but my actual extra days of vacation don't start until Tuesday (because, y'know, I'm always home on the weekends). It's almost as if they know I'm not going anywhere for a while. I told Pete (my big boy cat) last night that I really wish all of them spoke and/or completely understood English, as it would really eliminate a large chunk of confusion for them and/or loneliness in my solitary life up here in Newton.

Anyway.

The presentation Suri and I gave on Thursday night in our Middle Eastern/Asian Lit class went well, I think -- even if my laptop played the part of a POS and refused to work with the projector system correctly (we ended up using our professor's laptop, for which I was infinitely grateful). I was really tired and rushed through my section a bit more than I would have liked, but I was worried that Suri wouldn't have the time to cover her section completely. She did, though, and well; aside from a few small snafus with both the powerpoint file and the both of us, we carried the discussion well. The worst time to give any presentation whatsoever in any class, especially a long powerpoint presentation, is the last night of class before Thanksgiving week at 8:30PM or later. By that time we, as well as most of the class, are loopy and tired and just wanting to go home for the weekend. I'm surprised nobody fell asleep.

This weekend will be the first true weekend I've had to myself since the very beginning of the semester. I'm trying my hardest to do almost nothing related to school so that I can get rest and relaxation. I'll get back to actual work on Monday or so, and begin writing my papers/taking care of everything I need to get done over the week off, but as I mentioned before, this weekend is really just for me more than anything else right now. It's a few days I need to reboot my system before getting back to my writing, swinging and fighting to get everything done. While I have a ton of stuff to do, the vast majority of it will only take a few days if I bust my ass doing it. If I do, it'll free up even more free time for me, leading all the way into the winter break.

One of my old friends (a former editor for a website I used to write for, actually) is making a road trip west over the coming week. I told her if she needed a free place to stay for a night or so to avoid paying for a hotel room, I have a spare bed. Well, I have a bed period. Don't forget that I also have the air mattress in the spare room, too. There's nothing sexual in this offer of a free place to sleep, obviously, despite the fact that she's a hot, buxom blonde. It would just be nice to have someone around for a day or so. Besides, I may be creepy at times, but I'm not that creepy. Any of my friends, male or female, are welcome to visit and always have been. Especially if they're traveling and I can help them out. It's just the right thing to do. No clue whether she'll get close to my area in her travels, but I thought I'd offer, at least.

If nothing else, I've got ham to feed her if she's hungry. That's a plus.

Since most everyone who could afford to do so (or afford to cancel next week's classes they're teaching) are out of town now for the holiday, the 'net has been rather quiet and I haven't had anyone to talk to that much. I did, however, have a long, fairly normal conversation with the former girlfriend last night (yes, I know, it surprised me as well when she messaged me). Other than that and a few random, short conversations with a few other friends, there's been relative radio silence.

If I had more money, I'd get out of the house and wander about the state tomorrow; I haven't been to Hutchinson in ages; it's been almost a year since I was out there to the mall or to Target/Kmart. I'd like to take a day over the Christmas break to do that at some point, depending on what time I have, the weather, and whatever money I have to spare. It's been so long since I actually got out of this house to do something other than go shopping for simple necessities/groceries or school. Despite my cravings for some sort of fast food, I haven't even had a burger or fries that I haven't made at home since before the semester started. If nothing else, that should tell you how much I watch my budget.

So, on that note, I'm off to take care of a few more things around the house. I'll update periodically over the break, of course.

Dirty Energy, Part III

Fall semester: day sixty-four

The "rent crisis of 2011" has been averted, or at the very least is in the process of being averted, as I type this.

Yesterday morning, still worried/anxious about what was going on, I called my landlord once I got to school (around 8AM or so) and gave him the rundown: my check had not been debited from my account yet, I wanted to make sure he'd actually gotten it, that I was sorry to bug him about it but wanted to let him know that if he'd hadn't received it, it's not because I was delinquent and trying to get a free month's rent, etc. You know the story at this point; there's no use in rehashing it all here.

"Well, as far as I know, there aren't any 'marked accounts' this month," he said, or something to that effect, insinuating that if they hadn't received the check they would've realized it. "But," he continued, "I'll have [my wife] go through the account book to make sure we actually received it and will call you back, okay?"

I, thanking him, agreed. He also told me that it was no bother at all; he was happy I'd called and had showed concern, actually. So, immediately, I at least knew one thing: well, at least I'm not getting evicted. That in itself was a major plus.

About three hours later I received the call. It was his wife (who also adores me, incidentally).

"Yes, Brandon, we did receive your check; you mailed it on the 25th of last month."

Again, another huge sign of relief, because this was correct.

"We had it in the back of the deposit book," she went on. "Why it was never deposited with the rest of them is beyond me, but we'll run it over to the bank today."

Third huge sigh of relief.

"Thank you so much," I said. "I was worried that you hadn't received it at all, and was very concerned, so I wanted to check in with you two so that if you hadn't, I could write a new check and get it to you ASAP. Wouldn't want to cheat you folks out of a month's rent, or anything."

"That's very sweet of you," she said. "I really appreciate your honesty and am glad you called, because otherwise we probably wouldn't have known anything was wrong."

I thanked her again, she told me to have a blessed day (she's a very, very sweet old woman) and hung up, a huge weight off my shoulders. If the check was deposited yesterday as she said it would be, it should clear my account sometime today or tomorrow at the latest. Usually takes about two days for it to show up.

It was only a while after I'd gotten off the phone with her when my more evil side realized wait, you mean I could've gotten a free month's rent had I not said anything?

I would not, however, have let it lie; for one, it would've eaten away at more of my concentration abilities (as well as my conscience in general) over the break, and for two, I am nothing if I'm not honest in all things I do, especially something so important as keeping my landlord happy when he and his wife already adore me because I've always been as helpful as possible when I can be.

So, that should be taken care of. I made the remark on Facebook that there's one huge weight off of my shoulders...now to take care of the other seventeen.

It's 6:10AM right now. Upon getting up, I showered and am now quickly ingesting my dirty energy of coffee. In thirty minutes, I will leave the house for the day, brave the 21-degree morning (yes, it's that cold outside today) to get gas and head to campus, where I will spend the next fifteen hours straight before exhaustedly returning home around 10PM to start my Thanksgiving break. It couldn't come soon enough.

My presentation in my Fiction class seemed to go well yesterday, to be honest. I tried to cover three varied topics and give out some information (as well as a handout) on them, and it generated a fair amount of class discussion. I hope the professor enjoyed it, as I can never get a full read on what he's thinking. I'm not sure anyone in the class ever can, to be honest.

Today, really, is a rather lax sort of Thursday for me, comparatively speaking. I still have the normal Thursday tasks, of course, but I'm simply finishing up my conferences with my students, going to see the fiction MFAs read their work at the library this afternoon, and then I'll be giving my presentation on Comfort Woman in class tonight with Suri. There's a lot I'll have to do over the time I have off, as you know (including reading three entire books, the third of which was added to my list during last night's poetry workshop), but at least I'll be able to ease into it somewhat. Conferences and a presentation will help that quite a bit, as for both of those things, the work is already pretty much done.

The only shitty thing that's happened in the past 24 hours or so? I found out that the Monte Carlo's back window defroster is mostly useless. It works, but it takes forever to work. I can start the car, turn it on, and be most of the way to home or school before the glass is clear. Keeping an ice scraper in the car, at the ready, tends to be essential for mornings like today.

So, now I get dressed and go face the world. It's barely going to reach 50 today, so as it's 21 now, I think the leather jacket may have to make an appearance.

Dirty Energy, Part II

Fall semester: day sixty-three

Still no movement on the rent check. Everything else has cleared my account, including those long-pending debit purchases from Walmart and the gas station. I emailed my landlord about it yesterday morning but have not yet heard back from him; once I get to the office in about two hours I will call him, as now my worry has escalated and I need to be able to get everything sorted out/figured out soon for the sake of my peace of mind and concentration. In the meantime, I have put a "notify me" request on that check # through my bank's website, which means when/if it does clear my account, they'll send me an automated email saying it's gone through. Aside from calling my landlord this morning, that's about all I can do, really. My hands are sort of tied in the situation.

Longtime readers of this blog will possibly remember that this sort of thing has happened once before (and only once before), again involving the rent check, when I was living in Missouri with the former girlfriend about three years ago. The check got lost in the mail -- along with everyone else's in the apartment building I was living in at the time -- and the company who owned the building sent out eviction notices and posted them on all of our doors even though it was their fault (they were the ones who lost the checks). I ended up having to do a stop payment request on that check (a $30 charge through my bank) and immediately pay the rent at the super's office with a money order, with late fees included, just to be able to stay in the place we were living at the time -- even though, like I said, it was the building owners' fault. I never got reparations or an apology for my trouble, either.

This time it's different; this house (along with 90% of the other ones on this block) are all owned by the same guy, my landlord, who also happens to be the city commissioner. I have, so far, received no eviction notice or anything else from the man, nor has anyone else on the block that I've seen. As yes, it is possible that he hasn't cashed anyone's check yet, I'm a bit less worried than I would normally be in this situation, but again -- for peace of mind -- I need to talk to him and figure out what the hell is going on. Especially as I'll have to mail out next month's rent sometime around Thanksgiving, and that's a lot of money to disappear from my bank account all at once.

On top of all of this, my car started running rough(er) yesterday afternoon and the low oil light came on again. I put another quart of oil in it when I came home and checked its other fluid levels (which were fine). I know, right? As if I didn't have enough to worry about as it is.

All of my work for this week is done; I spent several hours yesterday afternoon putting together the final version of the powerpoint presentation Suri and I will be giving in our Asian/Middle Eastern Lit class tomorrow night, and after that was finished I sat down here and wrote the last two response papers (read: miniature book reports) that I had to complete for my Grad Studies in Fiction class -- which I'm also giving a presentation in this afternoon. As for tonight's poetry workshop, I have new poetry, yes, but our professor keeps assigning us new things to read on a daily basis to cover in class tonight, even though he has to know that hey, we're all busy and this isn't a lit course, it's a workshop. We're supposed to be reading/working on our OWN poetry and theories, not other people's.

Bad things are happening all around, not just to me, but to my friends as well. I'm not going to go into details here, but this time of the year sucks for most everyone I know, for various reasons. I have tunnel vision so terribly that one of my friends (who reads/loves this blog, incidentally) posted on Facebook last night that he'd be back in his hometown -- several states away -- on Saturday, and dumbly, I thought to myself, for what possible reason would he be going out of town?

And then I remembered, oh, right. Thanksgiving. Some people actually get some free time to celebrate the holiday and go back to visit their families. I don't have that luxury, so I was confused and didn't even think consider it for a good two minutes or so.

The coffee still flows through my veins. All I have to do is get through today and tomorrow before I can come home, crash, and stay here.

That is, if I'm going to have a home to come back to. I will, of course, update you on what happens with the rent and the landlord.

Dirty Energy

Fall semester: day sixty-one

Still no movement on my bank account, either with the "pending" debit card purchases I made last week or with the rent check. I'm guessing this means that the bank's servers are being super-slow to update account information and the like, and not that there's any sort of real problem with my check or anything else. I expect it to show up on there eventually, and I am once more glad that I keep a pen-and-paper bank ledger on my desk to keep track of everything. If everything else goes in and out and the check still doesn't show up, then I'll still have a cause for concern. Right now I'm being cautiously optimistic that everything's just slow. Which happens on occasion. I so don't want to be the guy who bugs his landlord over shit like "hey, did you get my check? My bank won't tell me."

I've been in a haze all weekend; some of it was (and still is, to a certain extent) the bank anxiety weighing on me, but more of it is that I just want the semester to be done and over. I hate complaining about these sorts of things because it makes me sound like a whiner, but my brain is just shot and it wants to shut down and do something completely mindless for a while. It doesn't want me to concentrate on work or school, writing papers and worrying about money or when/if my car will start having major issues again -- my brain is like okay, we've had enough of this grad school, real-life worrying shit for the semester. Now we want to sleep, play video games, and listen to podcasts. And we refuse to do anything else.

The bad part is that my brain is trying to pull this shit about three weeks too soon, when it knows full well that I have a massive amount of things to do before the semester ends and that I can't just stop what I'm doing in order to placate its desires.

This sort of thing happened last fall around this time too, and it was around that point when I lapsed into a bout of severe depression for more than a month. Looking back on it now, I'm sure it was my creative, recreational mind's way of sitting in the corner and pouting, arms crossed, glowering at me because it didn't get its way.

This fall it's trying to take me by force -- if you don't do what I want you to do, I'm going to ensure that you can't do anything. It's a constant struggle to concentrate; my motivation and will to actually focus on what I'm doing, and what I need to be doing, is almost fruitless. It took me a lot of willpower to put together my presentations for both of my classes this week, and even more to read the books involved for said presentations. I'm still not done with one of the books, and every time I think about reading it, it makes me ill -- not because it's a bad book, but because I'd rather be sleeping or doing anything else than working on anything for school.

Case in point: I've been awake for a little over four hours. I've tried to get into doing my work again, as I'd like to get it finished before tomorrow afternoon. As soon as I started, I was swamped with an overwhelming go back to sleep feeling, to the point where I'm wobbly, weak and dozing off, and yawning -- no matter how much coffee I drink. If I were to actually go back to bed, I'd be wanting to play my DS in order to help go back to sleep. That's what my brain wants. it does not want me to work or do anything productive. It wants me to be a slacker.

I don't sleep well anymore, as you know. Part of it's loneliness, but the other part of it is knowing in the back of my mind that until the semester is over, it feels like wasted time -- or, unconsciously, I know I'll be unable to enjoy or get any real rest from the sleep, as there's always a set time it has to end before I have to get up and do some more school/work-related bullshit. You may think that's a laughable premise, but it's true, at least for me -- I sleep much, much better when I know that there's no set time I have to get up and do something else.

I don't care how much work I have to do over the Thanksgiving break (which starts for me, of course, on Thursday night); the first 2 days or so of it are going to be spent sleeping as much as possible and doing as little as possible for school.

No, I'm not making a turkey or anything else. You'd be shocked to see how bare my fridge and cupboards are. Yes, that's part of being poor, folks. On the plus side, I'm losing a lot of weight.

Anyway.

I slept for a few hours last night after finishing my fiction presentation before getting up at 7AM and registering for classes. I was awake for approximately twenty minutes (long enough to pee, turn on the computer, register, smoke one cigarette, turn off the computer, and go back to bed). Registration went off without a hitch, and I'm now currently enrolled for the spring in what may quite possibly be the easiest semester of grad school I'll ever have, if not my easiest semester of higher education period. I do look forward to the spring, because during the spring (and hopefully, for the next year after that) I'll basically be coasting downhill towards a degree; all of the hard, incredibly time-consuming classes will be behind me. The spring offers new hope, new free time, more money, better sleeping hours and possibly a chance to find a new romantic interest, as I'll have the time to pursue such things. It will also give me a lot more time to focus on my actual writing, which is obviously the entire reason I'm in school in the first place.

Anyway, I got up again at 1:30PM, took out the garbage and finished off a pot of coffee, and here I am. A second pot of coffee is brewing now. Coffee has become my life's blood these past few months; I am truly unable to function in any capacity without it. Coffee is what keeps the sleep deprivation, which slowly builds up more and more severely over the course of the semester, at bay. Without it, my body realizes things like "Hey, you haven't had a full night of decent, responsibility-free sleep in months! Let's pass out for three days!"

You may laugh, but that's been known to happen to me, especially at the end of a semester. I'll be awake long enough to use the bathroom and eat/drink before an hour or two later, I'll pass back out for another long stretch of unconsciousness. It's how my body resets itself, how it re-regulates itself after long stretches of highly-stressful, sleep-deprived periods of time.

Coffee has become my dirty energy, as I call it -- a provider of energy that's not derived from a healthy diet, exercise, and proper amounts of sleep. It's what gets me up and keeps me going, and without it, I crash. It's another one of those things that for the moment, not much can be done about. In three weeks, I'll be able to ease off of it and get some proper sleep and relaxation. Right now, however? Warp speed, Mr. Sulu.

Tomorrow I have conferences with my students. Well, about half of them, anyway. The remaining ones will come in on Thursday. This is required for anyone teaching English 102; even though I'm teaching the science/engineering version, I'm not exempt from it. My students are bright, sweet, and know what they're doing (for the most part), so these conferences should go quickly and easily. I've given them the option of turning in their final papers early, as well, and for those of them in the final workshop group, if they do so they can avoid wasting our time in workshop and will get the full allotment of points. After conferences are done, I must jet back home to do whatever work remains for my reading/presentation in my Fiction class on Wednesday, and put together the other half of the powerpoint presentation that Suri and I will be giving on the novel Comfort Woman on Thursday night. I've already finished my half of the presentation (I had it done on Saturday) but to completely finish/format it, she's giving me her info to plug into the rest of it between now and tomorrow night. This means, unfortunately, that I have to stay awake tomorrow afternoon once I come home (which also means that I must actually get some decent sleep at some point tonight).

It is a long week, folks; here's what I have going on, en todo:

MONDAY (today): Register for Spring Semester classes. Completely finish Waiting for the Barbarians. Try to figure out some way to write a response paper on it for class, even though I'm doing a presentation on it on Wednesday. Also see if there's an angle I can take to write a response on Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key, as well, as if I do those two responses I'm done with response papers for the semester.

TUESDAY: Student conferences, day one (9:30-12:10). Return home, write/finish writing those response papers, email to self for printing at school. Get presentation info from Suri, add it to my Powerpoint and finish the presentation. Email a copy of finished presentation to her. Check bank account to see if anything's changed. Go to bed as early as possible once this stuff is done.

WEDNESDAY: Get up, shower, return to school. Print copies of the response papers as well as my Fiction presentation for class. Go to Fiction class, give presentation, try not to fuck it up (as it's only 15-20 minutes long and 20% of my class grade). Return to office, try to make any needed changes to Powerpoint presentation, if necessary. Check bank account, again, to see if anything's changed. Leave campus, drive to local bookstore for Poetry Workshop. Leave when class is done, drive home at 10PM, eat, pass out ASAP after eating.

THURSDAY: Student conferences, day two (9:30-12 or so). Practicum meeting with my supervisor until 1PM, in which I'll hopefully find out when/where the final exam will be taking place. Hour in the Writing Center from 1-2PM. Back to my office and/or Suri's office to make any final preparations for the presentation; as I'm doing conferences, my office hours are basically appointment-only this week (since, y'know, all of my students will see me anyway). Check bank account, again, for changes. Post class cancellation notice for next week on my office door. Night class; give the presentation with Suri, make it sound interesting, and hope my computer's battery doesn't die halfway through it. Finish class, drive home exhaustedly, and sleep until I wake up again because Thanksgiving vacation has begun for me.

Yes, it's a lot of stuff to do, and it's all crammed into the next three days. I can do it, of course; it's no different than any of the other rough weeks I have (except for the presentations, that is). But it also means that there will be a steady supply of dirty energy flowing through my veins between now and Friday morning/afternoon when I get up and start my break.

For those of you wondering why my break starts so early, it's because the department doesn't hold classes on Friday, and I don't teach or have classes on Mondays. I also canceled the classes I teach on Tuesday (because, let's be realistic here, half of them wouldn't be there anyway and there's not a whole lot I can have them do but work on their papers over break). That added two days to my break, and we get Wed/Thu/Fri off next week. In essence, because of my planning ahead, I gave myself eleven days off in a row, uninterrupted -- by far the longest "vacation" I've had since summer -- to get all of my remaining big papers and other schoolwork done as much as possible.

On that note, folks, I need to get back to work. I have a lot to do tonight before I can go to bed with my DS, podcasts, and kitties, and not feel like I'm shirking responsibility.

What, Again?

Last month you may recall that it took until the 8th or 9th for my rent check to clear the bank. Don't know why, couldn't tell you why, especially as the landlord usually cashes it (according to my bank, anyhow) around the 1st or 2nd of the month. I wrote about it here then, because I was slightly worried about it.

Today is the 12th, and now this month's rent check has not yet come out. I crossed the line of irritation and went headlong into worry about three days ago. The check was written and mailed on September 24th (because, as you know, I keep track of that sort of thing very closely). I always send them about a week prior to the end of the month if at all possible, so that it has time to arrive in case there's a holdup with the mail. September 24th was nineteen days ago. That's almost 2/3 of a month, folks. Nothing. And, as usual, everything else mailed out on that day got to their intended destinations normally, on time, with no problems. Bills I wrote out checks for after I mailed the rent arrived at their respective places and came out of my bank account days upon days ago.

Money is not an issue, obviously, or I'd be a lot more freaked out. I can afford to cancel the check if I have to (if it never arrived) and write another one. It's the principle of the matter, really -- as I said last month around this time, these are things I should not have to worry about. I have enough problems in my life right now to where I shouldn't even have to think about whether the postal service is doing its job. I have two major projects to complete this weekend, each of them worth 20% of my grade in their respective classes. I have two novels to read as well, and a laundry list of things to do around the house that I've been putting off. I simply don't have the time or patience to be worrying about whether or not my rent is considered paid almost three weeks after the fact. I have too much to take care of.

I am in the realm of cautious optimism, really -- as I've said before, my landlord is an awesome guy, and both he and his wife rather like me. Therefore, I'm pretty sure that by this point, if they hadn't received my check, they would've let me know somehow, either by phone, by mail, putting a notice on my door, etc. I am also aware that my bank has been incredibly slow as of late in reporting most transactions, as well -- debit card transactions (such as when I get gas or groceries) will say "pending" on them for three or four days sometimes. For example, I got gas on Thursday morning, and got groceries Thursday night on the way home from my night class. Both of them show up (they'll show up on my account activity almost immediately) but they say "pending," with the clear date of November 14. That's Monday. Why it takes five days to clear a simple debit transaction is beyond me, even if one of those days in between is a holiday (remember, yesterday was Veterans' Day). Still, today banks should've been open as per the usual on normal Saturday hours, unless I'm missing something.

It's stuff like that which frustrates me. I'll always have a rough idea when something is going to come out of my account (and all deposits are posted to my account usually within 24 hours) but I'll never know for sure when something is going to be debited from me, only that it will. Eventually.

Because I've been patient and will always give reasonable time to let processes go through, I will wait until Tuesday. Tuesday is the 15th. That's halfway through the month, and two more business days that my bank can process my check. If it's still not listed on my account by Tuesday afternoon when I return home from class, I will call my landlord and make sure that he actually got said check. If not, we'll go from there. If he did get it, I'll see what's up with either him or the bank, because waiting halfway through the month to get a check to clear is personally unacceptable to me, especially when I'm on a budget and need money to enter/exit my account on a rather set schedule that I can keep track of and balance all of it without confusion.

Not to mention that, hey, within the next two weeks or so I'll have to write yet another rent check to him for December. This shit needs to be resolved soon. Soon. Yes, I just got paid on Thursday. That doesn't really matter much in the long run; I will always have more money going out every month than I'll have coming in. Always. Because, in case you didn't know, GTAs are paid horribly. We're several thousand dollars a year below the poverty level, and I've got at least another eighteen months of living this way before anything will get better...if it ever will. It's absolutely appalling, but it's something we have to live with. This state -- hell, most of this country -- does not pay its educators well. As I've said before, I made more than twice the amount I'm making now when I was working in a fucking grocery store.

And people wonder why we need student loans to simply survive on. It's disgusting and disgraceful how little we get paid for what we do. I am definitely one of the 99%.

I've mentioned these facts because it comes on the heels of an announcement that our pay as GTAs will basically reset during the winter break. Usually our pay continues uninterrupted through December and into January, as we teach both months (just with a break in-between). Now we've been told that our last paycheck of the year will be at the end of December, which is as per the usual, but we won't be paid after that until the first week of February because of whatever fiscal year reset that Kansas does for people like us. This essentially means that all GTAs will have over a month without and between paychecks.

It also essentially feels like the state of Kansas is telling us "Hahahah, we've got you working for free until February, what are you gonna do about it, you poor fucking teachers? SUCK IT."

This would bother me a lot more (and I mean a lot more) if I didn't have the second half of my student loan, for spring semester, set to disburse shortly after the turn of the year. Without that, I would be completely unable to survive without a month's worth of paychecks. Completely unable. As it stands, I'm still completely livid, especially on the behalf of those of us who are really struggling right now money-wise and need those paychecks. The entire situation's fucked up, because, really, it's making us work for a month without pay. A month. How many of you have worked a job without being paid for a month? Yes, we'll get paid at the beginning of the next month, but as far as I know it's not like the pay is in arrears, it's just when paychecks resume as per the usual. I could be wrong, but either way, shit, is that wrong.

So yeah, anyway, that's how things are going right now. Could be better, could be worse. May have to deal with some rent-related bullshit this week in the midst of taking care of absolutely everything possible before the Thanksgiving break. This includes conferences with my students, finishing those two aforementioned projects, and doing a lot of other work. Yeah, I'll be lucky if I get any decent amount of sleep until the 18th or so.

Biblical Proportions

Fall semester: day fifty-seven

Yeah, so there was another earthquake last night. 4.7, fairly light (I believe that was the magnitude of the very first one of the three, as well). I felt it, but barely. I probably would not have had I not been sitting at my desk again, as per the usual. This one was just a light tremor, but enough to make me notice.

That's three earthquakes, all of them in exactly the same spot in Oklahoma, since Friday. Three earthquakes in four days -- around the same time of night -- with numerous small aftershocks. I would not at all be surprised if one of these three things were to happen:

1.) I would not be surprised if another earthquake were to occur tonight roughly around the same magnitude or larger.

2.) I would not be surprised if Oklahoma is completely swallowed by the earth (and truthfully, would it really be such a loss?)

3.) And I would not be surprised if, in the next quake, a massive underground Godzilla-like monster climbs out of the earth and starts eating people there.

The original, somewhat more logical question I asked on Facebook was "What's next, Oklahoma? Volcanoes? Locusts?"

Former student (and now close friend) Jordan reminded me that quakes are not new to the midwest, obviously, but they are fairly rare -- but most of the ones out here center around the New Madrid fault in Missouri (by St. Louis). Not in Oklahoma, or, as we saw this past spring, in fucking Arkansas, of all places. Quakes with epicenters in Kansas are rare as well, but not unheard of. Hell, even my home state of West Virginia had to deal with quakes earlier this year.

My brother put forth the theory that perhaps Mother Earth is angry with us. I'm beginning to believe him.

Yesterday, on my day off, it rained and stormed violently for most of the day, and stuck around for today. This morning when I left the house at 6:45 to make the trek to campus, it was misting rain. This isn't a problem, as I've said before -- the Monte Carlo performs just fine in the rain, with the added bonus of the rain rinsing all of the road dust off my car and making the faded paint shine like new -- and I have new, high-end wiper blades I installed on the car myself this summer. Driving in rain is no big deal. I've done it hundreds of times in several different vehicles, from the ex-girlfriend's Contour and old Grand Am, as well as her mother's minivan, to my Monte Carlo now. I made the trip to school this morning and it stopped raining, so I figured that would be the end of it, as we weren't really supposed to get anything else today.

I was totally, absolutely wrong.

By 11, the beginning of my second class, it had begun raining again. Fairly hard. The wind whipped the rain into the kind of nasty, cold mist mixed with big drops that I absolutely haaaaate this time of year.

Let me be clear: I love rain; I love thunderstorms, really I do. But I love them when it's about 70-75 degrees outside. When it's 40 and the wind is blowing, it becomes a sheet of wet coldness that I want no part of, and will soak you to your bones. It, of course, does not help that Wichita's rainy season starts around mid-October and runs through early December, when all of it turns to ice and snow for three months.

But I'm getting to that.

Anyway.

So, after I taught my classes today, both of which I kept in the classroom the entire time -- today was "evaluations day," as well as the day they had a big assignment to turn in and a very long grammar/formatting/quoting lesson to sit through -- I walked outside around 12:20 to see that it was still coming down hard in a windy, wet sheet of everything I hate about fall. Great. And it was coming down harder than before, too. Double-great.

Yes, I know, first world problems. Anyway.

As it was getting much colder at that point (temperatures were dropping like a stone), I feared the changeover to ice and/or snow on my drive home this afternoon, putting me in a similar situation as I was a week ago on Wednesday night. It did not change over to snow or ice on my drive home, but I did notice something really interesting instead, and it's something one of my friends commented about on Facebook -- after this summer of almost no rain at all, it seems that people living in Kansas conveniently forgot how to drive in a rainstorm. So, going north on I-135 at 12:30 this afternoon to get back home, I'm following people going 60. In the fast lane. And not getting over to allow me to pass them. The speed limit is 75 for most of I-135. As I can and do drive safely in the rain, even at 75mph, and as I drive a 215hp sports car, following someone in the fast lane who's going 60 is fucking maddening. Especially when the misty, nasty wake from their car and tires is fucking up my vision no matter how fast I have the wipers running.

Mind you, however, I also know there's no cops on 135 during this time of day (and if there are, they can be seen quite easily from a distance, as between Wichita and Newton it's basically a straight line), and if the weather and visibility are good, I'll drive 90-95 the entire way home. Because that's what speed the Decepticon likes. She rattles between 70 and 80. Slower than that, she's good. Faster than that, she's good.

Anyway. So, I got home, safely, in this incredibly nasty-ass weather that nobody should ever like or want, and though I slept last night, the cold and rain was making me too tired to do anything else during the afternoon hours. I ended up curling up downstairs in bed and sleeping until around 10PM or so.

When I awoke, it was still raining, hard. And it was still cold. I came back upstairs, figuring I'd dick around on the computer for a few hours and see if I was tired enough to go back to bed before the morning, when I saw a status message a friend had posted.

It read, simply, "So the rain has now turned to snow."

I got up, walked to the living room window, and saw that it was still just rain here. I returned to my room and relayed that info.

No more than, oh, three or four minutes later, my news feed on Facebook is flooded with "It's snowing in Newton!" or similar messages.

So I got back up, walked to the living room window again, and...they were right. In that short amount of time, the rain had completely switched over to snow. Hard, heavy, wet snow. Again. But this time it was sticking to everything, including the grass, roads, and my car. Fuck. Really?

By the time the snow stopped coming down so hard (around 11PM or so) there was close to an inch on the ground at my house, and the grass was completely covered for a brief time. It then began to melt as soon as it came, from everywhere but the grass and my car. It is now 1AM, and as I write this the snow has completely melted off of everything, and the weather outside is now calm.

This can, of course, only be a good thing, as six hours from now I'll be making my trek back to campus. By then it should be warmer than it is now (currently a balmy 37 degrees) and it's supposed to get into the 50s this afternoon. And to think, I almost had to break out my famous grey trenchcoat, or the leather motorcycle jacket. Not yet, folks. But wait.

The rest of this week may go quietly for me, but the work is far from over. I once again have two novels to read this weekend, with the added bonus of two presentations I must create and prepare for (as I mentioned here previously). Neither will be too difficult to get through -- at least I hope not -- but it's still a considerable amount of work. Once those two presentations are out of the way I will just have the papers to write and finish (as well as the final exam to take in my Middle Eastern/Asian lit course) before all of my hard work is done for the semester. The presentations represent about half of what I have left to do for my classes, and as you know, I'll be writing/finishing the papers over Thanksgiving week. While there's a lot of work left, the remainder of fall semester should go quickly. The stars are falling into alignment, so to speak, and I can plot out everything that needs to be done and when. For once. This is, of course, a rare occasion for me.

As for my personal life? It's much the same. I'm still budgeting for survival, though the budget situation isn't as bad as I thought it would be at this point in the semester. I'm cautiously optimistic that I'll scoot by just fine until I get the other half of my loan money for this year in the first week of January or so. I say "cautiously optimistic," really, because anything could happen between now and then. I also realize, though, that I won't be spending $30 a week on gasoline for about a month as well, as I won't have to make the trip back and forth for class every day.

I am greatly looking forward to the Winter Break, which for us starts shortly before my birthday (so, a little more than a month from now). While I will probably be cold and lonely as per the usual, I will at least be home all the time with no real responsibility to worry about or any place to be. I also have a stack of movies I purchased well before fall semester started (some of them even before the former girlfriend and I parted ways), and I intend to sit down on the couch in the living room, in the dark with my new LCD HDTV, and watch every single one of them without having to worry that I'm wasting time that could better be spent on homework, lesson plans, or reading. In addition to that, I also have two new (read: purchased months ago) Pokemon games that I haven't touched yet, games that I haven't touched specifically because I don't want to get sucked into them and end up shirking my responsibilities for the remainder of the semester. Because yes, that happens. This is the other reason I want to get everything done this semester as soon as possible. My motivation in doing so really boils down to this: with each successive task I complete, I am that much closer to being able to completely dick off for a month with no repercussions.

I've been trying to see, in a passive fashion at least, if there's anyone I know who would like to visit me over Winter Break. Yes, Kansas is fairly far out-of-the-way for most friends and/or family, but I do have several friends who travel a lot and/or are not opposed to stopping by at some point over the holiday season, including a few in-state (or otherwise relatively local) friends as well. As I've mentioned before, I'd love to fly back home to visit my parents and family there, but it's really not in my budget at the moment, and despite what my parents may say, it's not worth the money for them to fly me out there for a few days. In the past it's been incredibly expensive for them to do so, but they've done it anyway in spite of that fact. Really, if they want to spend that much money on me I'd rather they just drop it in my bank account instead so that I can more easily pay my bills or get my car worked on soon (such as getting it the new tires it needs), and I'll get back out there to visit when I can pay for it myself on my own terms.

For the moment, anyway, the car is running just fine. Hasn't leaked a drop of coolant in over two weeks, and has been performing as admirably as ever. If anything, it seems to like the cool/cold temperatures of fall for the most part. This can, really, only be a plus. The only thing that's popped up with it recently isn't a problem with the car at all, but with me -- I've gotten off my normal schedule of giving it a tank of gas after the week is over, due to some extra driving I had to do a few weeks ago. As I may have mentioned here before, I always get gas around the 150-mile mark, because the gas gauge doesn't seem to be exactly reliable a lot of the time. Usually, it will reach that mark after a full week of class, meaning I can get gas in it over the weekend when I go out to do my weekly shopping or errands, and think nothing of it. Because of the spark plugs/engine misfire, my gas mileage is erratic and hard to calculate -- sometimes it seems like I'm getting 22-25 miles to the gallon, and other times it seems like I'm getting about 15-20. Filling it up when my trip meter reaches 150 is a good way to level the playing field, generally speaking. Because of my extra driving a few weeks ago, however, in which I put a good 30-40 miles extra on the car (if not more; it's a long, embarrassing story I'd rather not tell here), my schedule is skewed, and now I must get gas on Thursday mornings when I leave the house -- as by that point I've reached 150 or have gone over it by several miles. Could I push it and wait until around the 200 mark to get gas? Maybe. Maybe. But I don't want to test it and see, otherwise I might end up on the side of 135 with an empty gas tank on the way to or from school. This is not something I want to deal with, obviously.

Yes, it's a V6, 215hp sports car, and it's old. Those gas mileage figures are accurate, folks.

In other news, I've got at least two surprise packages coming to me this week, out of the blue. My close friends Jane and Brittany have both sent me things. Why they've done so I'm not certain, but I'm certainly not questioning it. Jane made a needlepoint stitch artwork of Charizard (for you laypeople, that's a Pokemon) for me that she's been working on for months and just finished, so I know that's part of the reason she's sending me a package, but I don't know what else is in it. I told her jokingly that I hope she included a Fleshlight Fleshlight in the box, as I've jokingly (okay, only half jokingly) told my friends that could be the best birthday/Christmas present anyone could get me at this point. Brittany, on the other hand? She just sent me a message a few days ago to tell me to expect a package on Thursday, out of the blue, with no clue as to what it could be.

Both Jane (with her husband Wayne, of course) and Brittany have helped me out immensely over the course of the past five months, repeatedly, since the former girlfriend and I broke up, most of the time out of the goodness of their hearts and with no provocation, and I am greatly humbled by that. Jane, amongst other things, bought me a huge knife block set from my Amazon Wish List (now updated with a separate Christmas List!) and sent me two big tie-dye kits to keep my spirits up, and Brittany has sent me everything from a cookie sheet large and heavy enough to kill a burglar with, to silverware, a popcorn popper, and an electric screwdriver set. I haven't the foggiest idea what else either of them could possibly do for me, but needless to say even before they were planning to send these new things this week, I already had packages ready-to-mail to them as well (and in Jane's case, she's already received one of hers).

I mentioned it before, but in the spare room I have a stack of packages on the desk laying there, sealed and addressed, ready to take to the post office once I can build up a little extra money in my bank account for postage and free up the time to go mail them. Most of the people said packages are addressed to have no idea they're coming, so it's even better.

On that note, it's 2AM. I must go eat something, drink more coffee, take a shower, and attempt to do something productive or otherwise vaguely school-related before I venture in to campus and force myself to stay awake all day and evening. Doesn't look like I'm getting back to bed tonight.

Earthquake My Heart

So. Last night there was an earthquake here.

No, I'm not kidding.

For those of you who live in the midwest along with me, this is probably not news to you at this point. There was a 5.6 earthquake with its epicenter outside Oklahoma City last night shortly before 11PM. There was another one before that on Friday, a four-point-something, late Friday night. That one I did not feel, despite the fact that when it happened (at like, 2AM) I was awake cooking a big pot of soup and frying cheeseburgers.

Last night? Oh yes, I felt it. It was big enough to be felt all over the tri-state area. I'm about 180-190 miles north of Oklahoma City, but my friend Gwen felt it in St. Louis, and other friends felt it in northwestern Missouri.

So here's my story.

I had just finished reading Kenzaburo Oe's novel Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness for my Middle Eastern/Asian lit course, and had also just finished watching college football for the evening (as, at 10:30 or so, it had just wrapped up). I sat down at my desk to check my email/Facebook/Twitter as I'd been on the couch in the living room for the past five hours or so at that point, and Sadie was sitting at my feet.

I'd just gotten a cup of coffee when I felt my chair shaking. I thought it was Sadie trying to climb up onto my chair, as she is wont to do, and that always makes it shake and/or move, but I looked down at her and she was staring up at me wide-eyed and scared, her ears slicked back and flat. I noticed the lighter items on my desk were shaking, as well. As this sometimes happens when I put too much weight on my desk while typing, or when a long, loud train is barreling down the tracks less than a mile from my house, I slowly lifted my hands from my desk and sat very still. Nope, it wasn't me. And it wasn't a train. The house was shaking. As I described to my brother Aaron, the closest approximation I can make as to how it felt was as if I were sitting in a boat on water, and someone was rocking it just enough to make everything sway back and forth a little. Absolutely noticeable, but not violent or trembly. Just rocking.

The earthquake lasted a good, solid minute or so, knocking over a few small boxes on my desk (and a few lighter things on shelves in the house's cupboards) before it slowly thinned out and everything stopped moving. I barely had thirty seconds after it stopped to think to myself okay, seriously, that was an earthquake, right? before my Facebook and Twitter feeds were FILLED with everyone out here reporting they'd felt it -- including Gwen, in St. Louis. I knew when she said she'd felt it that it must have been a big one.

It was; 5.6 is the biggest quake on Oklahoma record, and fucking huge for this area period. I live in Kansas. Tornadoes I'm used to; there's a game plan for those. Earthquakes, however? Those are new.

Although I suppose I can mark another thing off my bucket list, if only half-assedly. I've always wanted to experience a real earthquake. Now I have, even if it was a small one. To a certain extent, all of it was somewhat exciting. Before last night, I figured I would've had to go to California for that. Hah, silly me.

Of course, the news media out here went nuts over it as well; KSN 3 in Wichita had live news coverage of the quake's impact on our area until well after 12:30, with the usual fearmongering of "So there was a 4.x quake last night, and tonight there's a 5.6 in almost the exact same spot...does that mean there's going to be a larger one next? Who can tell? It's possible, right?" And I'm left rolling my eyes, because it's fucking Oklahoma, not California, Japan, Alaska, etc.

There was some minor damage reported here in Kansas in varied areas; one of the dorms at a local community college suffered some damage, etc. No injuries, though. At least not here. I swear, a little shaking and everyone thinks it's the end of the world.

After I went to bed (around 3AM), there were apparently some aftershocks, but I doubt any of them were strong enough to be felt up here. Regardless, even if they could have been felt, I slept through all of them like a rock. I got up shortly after 11, and began my work/football watching for the day. I'm currently more than halfway through reading Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key, and it's been hard to put down all day. It's a fantastic crime/detective novel. For those of you unfamiliar with Hammett's work, he created Sam Spade, wrote The Maltese Falcon, etc. I have to read the novel for my Grad Studies in Fiction class, a course that I am getting increasingly frustrated with (but I'll more than likely cover that in a post all its own at the end of the semester).

Anyway, once I finish reading that tonight, and write a short response paper on it, I'll be unofficially done with my homework for the weekend. I say "unofficially" done because I do have two presentations coming up in my lit courses -- one with Suri, and one solo -- and I'll have to do a few hours' of work on each. Nothing major, though. If I have the time and inspiration, I'll need to start working on them. I've already started my preliminary research.

Other than that? Nothing else going on, really.

Oh hell, these are awesome...

I'm taking a break out of my reading/writing/studying/other bullshit to show you three of the funniest videos I've seen all week, if not in the past year. I will warn you now that they're not necessarily safe for work, unless you have a lenient boss.

Watch this one here first:




And then, of course, watch the other side:




Annnnnd....watch the outtakes.




You're welcome.

Snowstormed and Salmon-ized

Fall semester: day fifty-five

Despite its relative shortness, it's not exactly been the best week in Brandonworld(tm). This is generally par for the course, so to speak; I'll have good weeks, not-so-good weeks, and then absolutely miserable, horrible weeks just like everyone else. This week was leaning more towards the "not-so-good."

For one, it's really cold. When I say that I mean it in a fairly subjective sense, of course. For anyone living in Kansas, weather is a really fickle mistress; there's a saying out here that goes something along the lines of "if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes." While it's not usually that extreme, that's not an incredibly inaccurate statement. Hence why it was 80 degrees on Tuesday, 64 on Wednesday morning when I drove to campus at 7AM, and four hours later it was 35 with a mix of rain and snow.

No, I'm not kidding. Mark the date: November 2 is when my part of Kansas (south-central) got its first snow of the year. Let me tell the story.

As briefly mentioned, by 11-12 or so on Wednesday, it was nasty outside. A huge storm system had swept through Colorado (which, if you know your U.S. geography, is directly west of Kansas) and dumped a ton of snow on Denver and most of the western halves of Kansas and Nebraska. It was tracking north, for the most part, which meant that the worst we were expected to get in the Wichita area was a fair amount of cold and rain, as the temperature was still expected to hang above freezing. Barely, but above it, around 35 or so. So, within the span of four hours or so, the temperature dropped nearly thirty degrees and the rain had started to move in. By noon, it had gotten harder and was starting to mix with a little wet snow. Nothing major, but a stark contrast to the previous day's 80 degrees and sun. Undergrads oblivious to the weather were still in t-shirts and shorts through this, as well, and looked quite uncomfortable. Me? I knew what was coming (because I have no life and constantly monitor the weather forecast), so I had already dressed in layers for the day.

By about 6:30, most of the rain/snow mix had stopped; it was still sprinkling mist from time to time, but with this storm system came 30-50mph north winds, which made everything much, much colder than it appeared. 6:30PM is also the time that I leave campus on Wednesday nights to make my way to wherever we're holding our poetry workshop class that week -- something that I am incredibly opposed to, but of course, no one listens to me about anything (meaning, we have a classroom on campus for class. It's a good classroom, so...what's so wrong with just fucking using it? Almost all of us are on campus on Thursday anyhow). Anyway, for the last few weeks we've been holding it at a reading room attached to a used bookstore in town, a place that's somewhat convenient for the few people who live in/around town or around that area, but a nightmare of traffic to get to for the rest of us, especially in the evenings in the middle of the week in downtown Wichita. I'm not opposed to having class outside the normal classroom, but for fuck's sake, it should at least be held somewhere on campus. There are dozens of meeting rooms in different buildings (such as in the library or some of the lecture halls) that would certainly be available at 7PM on a Wednesday.

Anyway.

Getting there wasn't a big deal on Wednesday night; the weather was not nasty yet. I was also the first and only person there up until about five minutes before the class was scheduled to start, which made me wonder if it had been canceled (because, of course, if it were, few classmates -- if anyone -- would bother to tell me). As I knew what was coming weather-wise for the rest of the night, once the instructor arrived and it was only he and I there, I made the humble request that we get our shit done and get out of there as early as possible, as half of us if not more live outside of Wichita in various cities and towns around the area; I live in Newton (22 miles north), at least one of us lives in Park City (about 10 miles north), another in Maize (around 10-15 miles west) and another in Emporia (about 90 miles north). The rest are either scattered around the city or in the other suburbs within 5-10 miles. Rain and mist was supposed to mix with snow and become all snow around 8 or 9, and class runs until 9:45, so my motion to please-get-our-shit-done-and-leave wasn't just for me, it was for everyone involved in the class that would have to drive any real distance in it. I'll also remind you that at that point, I had not winter-tested the Monte Carlo yet, and had no idea how it handled in nasty weather, snow, and slick roads. I would, ultimately, find out.

So, to make a longer story shorter and to get to the point, our professor agreed and dismissed class around 9PM instead of 9:45. At that point, I had been lucky -- when class dismissed, it hadn't started raining/snowing again yet, but it was getting very cold, and the wind had picked up considerably. I was beginning to think that perhaps the weather forecast had been premature, and that maybe I'd been overreacting to it.

Ohhh no. Hell no I hadn't.

By the time I'd driven from the bookstore to the I-135 onramp (perhaps five miles or so), it had started coldly raining. Hard. I've driven in rain in the Monte Carlo before. Rain's not a problem; I have new wiper blades and a decent defroster/defogger in the car, so I'm not really concerned about that as much.

By the time I'd made it far enough north to Park City (again, about 9-10 miles north of Wichita) the rain had gotten harder and had begun to mix with snow. The winds were blowing very hard, from the north, so I was driving into the wind. This not only made the car sluggish (keeping the pedal down to remain even remotely close to the speed limit) but it cut visibility considerably. I turned the heat/defroster on max to keep the windows from fogging over.

By the time I'd made it three or four miles north of Park City, it was all snow. Hard snow, blowing snow. We're talking near-whiteout conditions here, which isn't pleasant when you just happen to smack into it going 70mph on the interstate in a fifteen-year-old boat-sized car. As the roads were already wet and the ground wasn't frozen yet (remember, 80 degrees on Tuesday), the snow wasn't sticking to anywhere but the roads and to my car. Five or six miles north of Park City is an interstate rest stop. It is exactly eight miles from the rest stop to my house (I've calculated it). By the time I passed the rest stop, full heavy snow was in effect, and the roads were slick and somewhat slushy. The interstate was almost completely empty; smarter folks had either pulled off at the rest stop (which was filled to capacity with every vehicle imaginable) or had deliberately stayed off the roads as much as possible. I did not, unfortunately, have that luxury; I had to get home and go to bed, as I get up at 5AM on Thursday mornings.

By the time I got to Newton, slush was collecting on my hood/lights/edges of my windshield, and my wipers were on full blast. The snow was whipping the town so hard and so fast that when it fell, it didn't have time to melt on the roads. When I stopped at intersections or stoplights, the car rocked in the wind, and the roads were slick enough to where, when the light turned green and I started moving again, my front tires spun a bit. Because I am hyper-vigilant when I drive and know exactly where my car is and how it handles at all times (since, y'know, I've put 2,200 miles on it since June) I was able to make it home safely -- but damn, I wish my hand-me-down digital camera took good night pictures, because that whiteout was something to behold, to be sure. I texted my friend Jay to tell him just how hellish it was once I got home. When I finally went to bed around 11:30 that night, it was still going pretty hard.

When I left the house around 7 on Thursday morning, you wouldn't have known anything had happened. Seriously. Skies were clear, everything had dried up/melted off/what-have-you, and it was just cold. But at least, in my proverbial trial-by-fire Wednesday night, I now know how the car handles in slick, nasty conditions, as well as how it responds to Kansas cold: fairly well for the most part. At least for the moment. This just goes to show you, however, what living in Kansas is like; this will be my third winter here, and it's never fun -- the state's weather patterns seem to have no concept of "autumn"; it's all extremes. Summer one day, then winter the next, continuing until mid-March.

So yeah, that was fun.

Yesterday, as you know, was a shorter Thursday for me; since Tim O'Brien was doing his readings/meet-ups on campus, my evening class was canceled. Aside from the normal weekly meeting with my supervisor and my hour in the Writing Center, I had canceled my office hours and could end my day early if I wanted to. I got held up by a student for a few minutes after leaving the Writing Center, and then talked with Suri and my poetry professor for a while, so I was unable to get to the Tim O'Brien meet-up on time at 2; I gave up on it. I'm not the kind of person who shows up late to such things; I'm either there on time or early, or I don't go at all. So, with the rest of my day freed up, I went home...where, though I was planning to get a jump-start on my weekend work, I summarily passed out after about an hour or so. I didn't wake up until nearly 1AM. Apparently my body was telling me I needed the sleep, and forcefully took it from me.

However, this post wouldn't be complete without mentioning the salmon shirt.

A few weeks ago, when I was using the new tie-dye kits my friend Jane sent me, I had some leftover dye after making a batch of shirts. Since I wear them so frequently in the colder months underneath t-shirts and button-ups, I decided to dye my white thermal (read: long underwear) tops. I made one in blue, one in green, and one in the mix of my last bit of red and yellow, making it orange. Orange. Remember this, it's important.

Today, I wore the orange shirt underneath a t-shirt and didn't think much of it. It was cold, I wanted a thermal top, etc. Except it only looks orange in the lights of my own home and in sunlight. In the fluorescent lighting in all of the buildings at school, however, it's not orange. It is, according to Suri and most of my students, salmon pink, if not outright pink. I will stress, of course, that this is not the case under normal, non-fluorescent lighting. Under regular lighting, it's still orange. Either that or I've gone colorblind. When I washed it in the overnight hours, it's still orange, at least to me. Yet everyone who sees it immediately calls it salmon or pink. This was so not the effect I was going for, and it drove me up the wall today. Hearing it referred to as salmon does not irritate me, really. Pink does, despite the obsession/phase I went through a few years back, during which I loved everything pink (don't ask, it's a long story).

I have one bottle of brown dye left that I'll never use for anything else; this weekend, in addition to everything else I have to do, I'm letting it soak in the brown dye to either turn it completely brown or to see if it'll morph into a maroon-ish color. The point is, it'll no longer be salmon. And I'm pretty sure brown looks brown in all light.

So that's about all that's going on right now; I have a lot of work ahead of me this weekend, including a lot of grading, reading, and writing. This is also the week I'll need to write out the bills, so any shopping I have to do at Walmart (because, of course, there's always something I need) will be strict, tight, and mercifully short. I'm still good on money for the time being; it'll be around this time next month when I'll be metaphorically sweating bullets trying to budget for all of my expenses, what with the need for an oil change rapidly approaching for the Monte Carlo in the next 1,000 miles or so and my 6-month car insurance payment coming due. Depending on how much extracurricular driving I do between now and the end of the semester, I may not need the oil change until around Christmas or so; I can roughly calculate that I'll drive the car another 700 miles or so over the course of the last five true weeks of the semester, which would leave me about 300 miles to spare. On the plus side, after it got colder outside this past week or so, it hasn't leaked a drop of coolant, and its levels are normal (I checked them yesterday). No more oil problems either. Over the winter (read: Christmas) break, I'll barely be driving the car at all, so it'll get a nice vacation in the garage most of the time I'm on vacation myself.

There are other things happening involving school and my (nearly nonexistent) social life as well, but nothing major to report as of yet. I'm sure I'll cover those things when they come up, if they do. Right now, however, much of the focus of my life must revolve around the work I do for my classes and students. Again, November is rough for all involved, but as long as I properly manage my time and don't procrastinate on things, I have enough wiggle room to get everything done in an admirable fashion.

Two! Minutes! To Mid-niiiiiiiiight!

Fall semester: day fifty-three

I've never been a fan of "your paper is due today" class days. For my own classes, this has never been a problem; when a paper is due, I've more than likely written it well in advance, proofread it several times, and have refined and revised it at least once before turning it in to my professor -- sometimes a week early.

This scenario, of course, is completely different for undergraduates, especially most of the undergraduates that a lot of us GTAs are teaching in the department. They're students that are only taking our classes because they're forced to -- not because they want to. There's a huge difference there. Very few freshmen would take an English Composition course if they didn't have to. Meanwhile, the majority of classes we take as graduate students we take because we want to. Yes, we have our requirements as well, but we also tend to have a bit more variety to choose from when it comes to fulfilling those requirements.

Now, I have good students. In fact, I have great students. They're all either honors students in their respective scientific/engineering fields, or they've otherwise been placed in my class because of their skills and talents. So, when a paper is due, almost all of them (currently 30, down from about 40 or so at the beginning of the semester) always have it done, submitted through SafeAssign, and turned in to me to grade. This is a far cry from the 101 students I taught for my entire first year as a GTA.

Well, most of them, anyway. I had a very large number of super-talented, on-the-ball students in my 101 classes as well, several of whom I have become close friends with after they exited my class.

Is that creepy? Oh well. It's not like I have more than a handful of friends in Kansas anyhow.

Anyway.

Those of you who know me well know that I go far above and beyond the call of duty for my students, and always have. I create a lot more work for myself in doing so, what with making handouts to explain class assignments better, giving them example templates for their paper plans, searching out extra, interesting articles on the web that they can use in their research (and, additionally, as something extra to generate discussion in class), and if that wasn't enough, I tend to spend inordinate amounts of time either emailing them back and forth to answer any and all questions they have or sitting in my office hours with them for hours of one-on-one discussion. I am proud of this work. Even though a lot of other GTAs or professors in other departments may not spend all of this extra time on or with their students to assuage their fears and help them along, I tend to encourage my colleagues to do so as well. Yes, as I said, it's a hassle, and above all, we should be focusing on our own classes much more than the ones we're teaching, and I try to -- but maybe it's easier for me because I have no social life whatsoever outside the fifteen or so free hours per week that I'm on campus, but not teaching or in class.

I have written this long-winded introduction of sorts to explain why tonight, from 10PM until shortly before midnight (when all of my students' papers were due on SafeAssign, as it expired at 11:59PM) I spent all of my time fielding final questions about the aforementioned SafeAssign -- as well as students' grades in my class -- right up until almost the very last minute.

At Flat State University, yesterday (November 1) was the final day to drop a class for the semester with a "W," which basically means you've withdrawn from it. A "W" on a transcript or report card does not affect one's GPA, so this was basically any student's "last chance" to leave a course that they may fail or otherwise will possibly do poorly in. For my classes, as I'm teaching the exact same course next semester at the exact same time (only the building has changed) it presented my students with a unique opportunity, as if they're not doing well this semester, they can simply take it again -- with me -- in the spring. And they already know how I teach. I figured this would get a few of the stragglers or the miss-one-day-a-week (on average) absentees to leave the course before their grades started to seriously suffer.

Nope. Well after midnight on November 2nd, I still have a total of 30 students on my roster, including at least one who has already failed outright for absences and several others who are on their very last day before they fail if they miss another.

Shit, I thought, and I was really hoping to have a fail-free semester this fall, too.

Anyway, yes, even on a night where generally I am asleep at midnight (or, at the very least, I should be), I spent an inordinate amount of time answering student emails with questions, sending out "hey, upload your paper to SafeAssign before 11:59 or it's not going to be graded" emails, and generally trying to be the best English instructor I can be. As I said, I take pride in it.

One of my students told me in class today (and, granted, I hear this at least three times every semester) that my class was the most enjoyable English class he's ever taken, and that he's learning a lot from my lectures. Several other students piped up and agreed with him. I responded with the same sort of response I always use in these situations -- I thanked them and said that as long as my students are learning things, I'll generally try to keep the class as engaging and interesting as possible. I may have to take a hard stance on the rules of the course and what's required of my students work-wise, but for the most part that's because I have to due to department regulations. I don't want the kids to be bored to tears, which is sometimes hard because of the subject matter I cover at times; I want them to learn, I want them to engage with me, their fellow students, and the course materials. It always makes me proud to a certain extent when a student tells me something along these lines, generally because I remember my own experiences as an undergraduate (and, to some extent, a graduate student) taking classes I was wholly uninterested in.

So, it appears I'll have 30 students from now until the second week of December, barring any who stop showing up. It's less papers to grade than I was expecting, to be sure, but still a decent number. Last semester I had a little less than 30 at the end of the semester. In the spring, I would imagine I'll have close to the same amount, as enrollment is usually a little lower.

By the way, it appears that every weekend from now until after Thanksgiving will be spent grading and/or reading/writing. After this coming Thursday all of my "free time" will once more come to an end, and it'll be hardline work all the way through Finals Week, more than likely. This weekend (more than likely starting this morning once I get back to campus) will be spent grading the papers I collected yesterday and reading through two novels. Next week/weekend will be spent grading the Proposal/Annotated Bibliography assignments I assigned today, reading two more novels, and preparing two (yes, two) class presentations, one for each of my lit classes, with the addition of registering for my spring classes on Monday the 14th. Thanksgiving week will be spent revising/adding to my Midnight's Children paper, writing the long paper for my fiction class (12-20 pages), the topic/novel of which is still TBD, and preparing my portfolio for my workshop course.

However, if I get all of that done, the week after Thanksgiving (the 28th through the 2nd) should be relatively quiet -- I'll have workshops in my classes for my students -- and the week after that is the last week of classes before final exams, when I'll collect and grade their final papers and give them the "practice exam" on the last day of class (December 8). If I can get everything written and read in advance, the last two weeks of the semester should be smooth and fairly peaceful. Then again, I can never truly plan anything in advance.

I do have one final exam of my own I must take, for the Asian/Middle Eastern Lit course -- as that professor always gives both a midterm exam and a final in addition to his required papers (I've mentioned this before). After that, aside from proctoring my students' exams and calculating their final grades to report/turn in, I'll be done for the semester. I may be far from being out of the woods, so to speak, but at least I know my plan of attack at this point.

Yesterday, I taught my normal classes and enjoyed the absolutely gorgeous weather before coming home; it had to be over 80 yesterday afternoon, and it was wonderful driving weather. I loved it. I came home, made a late lunch, and did some work here on the computer before taking an afternoon nap (which became my sleep for the night) from 4PM to 10/11 or so.

The weather gods have apparently decided, however, that yesterday was the last day I'll be able to wear shorts again until, oh, spring.

Why do I say this? Well, while it is currently 61 degrees outside (at 2:30 AM in November, mind you), that temperature is supposed to drop steadily all day today, and rain is supposed to move in. By this evening, it's supposed to turn over to a steady snow. Yes, here in the Wichita area. The Weather Channel is calling for at least an inch of snow this evening/tonight for up here in Newton, even. Oh, and we're supposed to have 50mph winds as well.

Again, I will remind you that it was over eighty degrees yesterday.

Will the snow stick if it does begin falling here this afternoon/evening? Hell no; the ground's not frozen. Will it make driving home on wet, snowy roads an absolute pain in the fucking ass at 10PM when I get out of workshop, not to mention driving back in to campus on Thursday morning? Absolutely. I am not looking forward to such a rapid shift in the weather, no, not at all. Also keep in mind that while the Monte Carlo has been a trooper thus far this semester, I have tires that will need replaced soon, and I've never driven it in snow yet. Suffice it to say that I'm not looking forward to my trip back home this evening, or even the trip several miles across town to tonight's workshop class. And, because of the coming cold, it looks like I'll be wearing layers again today.

In other news, I was planning to go to Walmart on my way home yesterday afternoon to stock up on discounted Halloween candy, as from all reports they're loaded for bear with it and are slashing prices on it like crazy to get rid of it and make room for Christmas stuff. I did not end up doing this, mainly because there was that little voice in the back of my head that told me you know, you don't really need any candy, and any money you'd spend on it would more than likely be used better on bills, real food, and gas for the car. That little voice is right, to be honest; though my money situation is okay (for the moment), it's not really in my budget to be buying candy, of all things. Not when I have to look to the future of the next two months and plot out, basically, where every dollar I have is going to go. Here's a hint: mostly to rent, bills, food, renewing my car insurance, and gas -- with not a whole lot of wiggle room left over. Again, this is typical of the life of a poor graduate student. Nobody should envy my life or financial situation, trust me.

On the bright side, it could be a lot worse, and I'm glad that at least for the moment that it's not.

There's a lot of people mentioning two things that's going on during November; the first is "No Shave November," which apparently is a thing. Guys aren't supposed to shave during November, grow a beard, etc. To that, I say done and done. I wasn't planning on shaving again until the temperature hits around 70 or so and stays there again. In Kansas, however, that could be next week or it could be April. Who knows. Regardless, over the winter months, the full beard is coming back and will be kept. I may do some trim/upkeep to it, but I'm not shaving it off while it's going to be cold. It's like a hairy scarf.

The other thing that everyone is writing about (pardon the pun) during November is NaNoWriMo, which is short for "National Novel Writing Month." The goal of NaNoWriMo is to start writing and get 50,000 words towards a novel by the end of the month. Everyone, not just writers, is encouraged to do it.

I am one of the very few writers I know who cannot stand the concept of NaNoWriMo and actively fight against its aims.

Why?

Because, really, for one it creates competition in the literary world. If someone who's never written before and never had any experience in writing happens to create an awesome novel during the month of November, it doesn't necessarily make me jealous (mainly because I can't write fiction worth a fuck), but it does piss me off -- mainly because some of those non-writers will get exposure and possible publication of their books. People who have other jobs, other skills, and, y'know, different lives than those of us who have spent our entire lives writing, devoting large amounts of time and education to it and have gotten exactly nowhere.

Permit me to be bitter and frank, but I'm a writer because I have approximately no other marketable life skills. Nothing. I have literally nothing else going for me in my life. This is why I worked at two different newspapers and have gone back to school for an MFA in creative writing -- because it not only provided me with a very low paying job as a GTA, but it allows me to basically write whatever I want with the hope of using my education as stepping-stone into a writing-based field, whether that be writing books or teaching writing. Again, I have no other marketable skills. And I am a mediocre writer at that -- far from the best in the department, let alone far from the best writer I know personally (fiction, poetry, or otherwise).

Now put yourself in my shoes and imagine someone with a very comfortable job, a comfortable living, a nice car and home saying "Hey, I've never written before and have never cared about the literary world, but since my life gives me enough free time to write 50,000 words this month, I'm going to write a novel." And they do, and people like it, and it gets published and they get even richer.

Tell me -- especially if you've made a poor-paying career out of writing and changed your entire life and education to revolve around it -- that hearing a story like this wouldn't make you extremely bitter and pissed off. Especially if journals and other publishers keep rejecting your manuscripts, and you're going approximately nowhere with your choice of career.

That's why I don't support NaNoWriMo and outwardly hate it. Too many of us have been struggling in the literary world -- good writers, good poets -- and are being abjectly ignored. More people writing means more competition for those of us who have made writing an integral part of our lives already. Believe me, we writers already struggle enough; we don't need anything else to keep us down. Especially those of us who, like me, are merely mediocre.

Anyway.

I've canceled my office hours tomorrow afternoon in anticipation of the Tim O'Brien meet-and-greet, as well as the evening reading at 7PM (as my Asian/Middle Eastern Lit course has already been canceled for the day because of said reading). I still have to go in to teach, of course, and will still have my practicum meeting with my supervisor (which may be the last meeting we'll have for the semester, but more on that later) and I'll still work my hour in the Writing Center at 1. After that, though? Who knows. I may go to the O'Brien meeting at 2, but I'm certainly not sticking around until 7 for the full reading/lecture. Any weekday which I can get off campus earlier rather than later I'm going to take full advantage of, especially if the weather is cold and nasty. That means extra time to sleep, extra time to take care of shopping/other around the house stuff, or to finish my grading as early as possible so that I can focus on the rest of my work over the weekend. Those late-night Thursday classes are really what kills my productive streak on Fridays. I get home late, I stay awake until I can wind myself down enough to sleep, and then I sleep until the afternoon on Friday (sometimes mid-afternoon) and end up getting approximately dick accomplished on the first day of my "weekend."

Oh, how thankful I am that I won't have any late-night classes at all next semester.

On that note, it's 3:30 in the morning. I may take a nap until around 6 or so before I must start my day and get to school, dealing with the weather and two Wednesday classes, plus office hours.