The Long, Cold March of Winter, Part II

It is rapidly approaching 3AM on Saturday night/Sunday morning, and I'm still awake.

Why?

Well, aside from the fact that I always sleep weird hours on the weekends anyway, I just spent my last 3-4 hours grading my first class's set of papers. Normally it wouldn't take that long, but as it is their first paper for me, I must go through every one of them and mark every single error. Not only did it take a lot of time, but I used the remainder of my red ink pen and burned through half of a second. Yeah. Not kidding.

This is typical, though, for a first paper from any class I've taught. Because of that, I'm not really concerned.

Sadie, my little Russian Blue cat -- the smallest of my three cats, and by far the dumbest and most skittish -- has been in a tiff with Pete for the past two days; she growls and hisses at him whenever he comes near her, and occasionally they'll get in a knock-down, drag-out rolling furball fight.

This sort of tiff isn't incredibly unusual; it's happened two or three times over the five years I've had the cats and they've all lived together, but usually it's both girls (Sadie and Maggie) ganging up on Pete. After a few days they all snap out of it and get back to normal. I've read up on it and it's a sort of territorial and/or dominance thing, more than likely. This is, however, the first time Sadie has done it by herself, which made me wonder briefly if she was sick or something. She's not; she's generally perfectly fine around her sister Maggie, and she's just fine around me. She's also eating normally and wanting normal attention/love from me. It's just something about Pete that's been pissing her off. However, when she's growling/hissing and pissed off, she'll even growl at me or Maggie sometimes until she calms down again. To a certain extent it's really funny, but to a much larger extent it's fucking annoying, and I wish she'd just get over it already. Pete's not going anywhere, and all three of the cats will still be continuing to share a home for the rest of their lives, so my opinion is that Sadie just needs to suck it up and shut up.

For the record, even if it is a dominance thing, Petey will always be the dominant alpha of the three cats whether the other two like it or not. That's not going to change. I've read all sorts of literature like "anxiety-prone cats, even if they live together for a long time, may stop getting along and permanent separation may be necessary." When I read that, I laughed. No, cats, you're not getting your own special little rooms; you are not unique snowflakes, I thought. You're going to suck it up and continue living together just like you have your entire lives.

I need to go out to Walmart sometime tomorrow, which is a bad thing. It's a bad thing because of three different circumstances:

1.) It's Sunday.
2.) It's two days before Valentine's Day (or, as I'll refer to it this year, Black Tuesday.)
3.) There's a snowstorm primed to hit us tomorrow night.

I could have also added "and I don't get paid again for another week" to that list as well, but for the moment I'm okay with money. I'm not great, but I'm okay. I do have a $316 credit card bill to pay most, if not all of the balance of within the next two weeks, after all.

All the money on said credit card went towards gas for the Monte Carlo, by the way, with the exception of the renewal of my Amazon Prime membership ($39).

The snowstorm is problematic on a few levels. For one, it means everybody and his brother will be at Walmart emptying the shelves of everything possible, which will make the store a madhouse. I only need about five or six different things, but still, I'm not looking forward to fighting everyone off. As is customary in most Walmart stores, the one here in Newton is populated by the dregs of society, all of whom seem to be self-centered, rude white trash. However, if I want to be able to feed the cats and clean their litter box, I have to brave the dregs.

It's also problematic on the level that it's hitting at all. As you know at this point, my car needs new tires. While I can drive in some levels of ice and snow, the +/-3 inches Newton is expected to receive by Monday night isn't necessarily horrific, but it's at right about the level where driving would be iffy if the roads aren't properly treated by Tuesday morning when I have to return to school. Amusingly enough, even though this is the first real substantial snow of the winter that may occur and stick on the ground/roads for a while, the local news channels aren't going nuts about it because Wichita is only supposed to get a half-inch or so, if that. I live far enough north (22 miles north of the city) to where I'll always get more snow than Wichita will just because of the way storm systems tend to travel over the state. At least I can take solace in the fact that it's not hitting during the work week, and that tomorrow I can stick my car in the garage and leave it there again until Tuesday morning.

I sure miss those 70-ish degree days we were having about two weeks ago, though.

I've been having really weird dreams lately, none of which have been good. They're not so much nightmares as they are just strange, and they leave me a little shaken for an hour or so after I wake up. Most of the time they're dreams of things being drastically different in my life than they are now, which is why I think they're so jarring. For example, last night I had a dream that I had married a good friend of mine from back home (whose name I will not state, as I'm sure she's read this blog on occasion even if we don't talk much anymore) and we were happy, and for some reason lived in a cabin in Vermont. Now, how I could come up with a scenario like that is beyond me, but let me tell you -- when I awoke in the same house, in the same bed, with the same cats and same loneliness, that was jarring compared to the life I'd been dreaming. Like I said, when I awaken from something like that and re-enter my real life, I get this deep sense of disappointment and misery for an hour or so because I realize how boring and monotonous my real life actually is on a daily basis. It's a feeling that passes, of course, but still.

I also think it's proof that I need to get out of this state for a few days over spring break more than ever, and that my trip back home to visit my parents and Andrea during that time will be really therapeutic for me, even though it won't last long and I'll return to Kansas shortly thereafter.

The information on next year's department fellowships was sent out to all of us on Friday; the "application" for it (because it's really not much more than a writing contest) is due in about three weeks. I'll have to select my best poetry to apply for it, because this year the competition is much tougher than last year due to a much higher number of quality writers within the department. I'll write more about that as the deadline for it comes closer, of course. Hopefully I'll have a decent shot at winning it, but somehow I doubt it. Still, there's no harm in trying. Fortune favors the bold and all that.

The rest of my weekend, as I'm really only about halfway through it, will be spent grading the rest of my student papers and writing a short essay (one page) for my editing class. Monday, especially if it's really nasty/snowy, will be spent finalizing my taxes so I can call them totally done. Getting those taken care of is really important to my mental state, as it's but one more thing I have to do ASAP. Once I finish them I can renew my FAFSA as well, which should only take a few minutes. And, of course, there's the aforementioned Walmart trip and the paying of the credit card bill. I have to put new gas in the Monte Carlo, as well. Since it's been nut-numbingly cold, I'll be dressing in multiple layers when I have to leave the house. On Thursday, I even wore my leather jacket -- which should tell you how cold it's been as of late. Regardless, I'll still have to get out and do all of that stuff before the snow moves in. Which means, as it's almost 4AM, that I should get to bed soon.

Unexpected Good Things

Spring semester: day twenty

For the haze that my work week usually is (and still is this week), there have been a few unexpected occurrences that I think can be marked down in the "good" category.

For example, surprisingly enough I've been pulled aside on no less than five occasions during the past two weeks by not only my friends and colleagues, but our esteemed professor as well (which is a big deal, yes), to be told that my poetry this semester is really good.

This, as I've alluded to (or outright said) before, is simply shocking to me. While I do take my work seriously, I've never thought I was that great and have fully admitted it in the past -- there are writers in this program who are leaps and bounds more talented than I am, writers who spend hours crafting lines, tone, line breaks, cadence, etc., and it shows in their work, which is always masterfully written and tends to speak to the proverbial soul. I'm not one of those writers. Most of my poetry is generated from a simple idea, off-the-cuff, and is laid out in lines and line breaks as I write it. Even my best poems I generally don't spend more than an hour on. In fact, some of my worst ones (well, "worst" in my opinion, anyhow) I've spent more time on than my good ones. Poetry isn't like fiction writing -- most of the time it doesn't have a plot or a story arc that it has to follow to its eventual end. There's no time or space for in-depth characterization of the speaker. It usually has to be succinct and direct, get to the point quickly, and be relate-able/understandable in some fashion all within the confines of however many lines one wants to write. I've always seen fiction as a scientific sort of art form, and likened it to the school of Arts and Sciences. It takes scientific skill and a scientific mind to write good fiction, fiction that pops. Poetry to me has always been more of the Fine Arts side of that coin -- like painting. We as poets are really painting word pictures, snapshots, in-the-moment mixed media word bursts. So yeah, it's quite different.

Yes, I realize how absolutely pretentious that sounds, though that wasn't really my intention.

But yeah, anyway, apparently a large chunk of the department likes my stuff this semester. Even my latest poem in this week's workshop packet, which -- and I'd like to make this clear -- I hated, and wrote in about ten minutes.

Sometimes I think that this is all some sort of coma dream, and I'll eventually wake up and realize it's still December -- and I'll have to do all of this again.

I do have a new piece I'm working on now, though, and I really like it. That probably means that next week I'll submit it to the workshop and everyone will hate it. Oh well.

At this point, most of us have now met with our visiting writer this semester, a poet about my Dad's age who is also a huge Wilco fan and a blues guitarist. I can dig it. I met with him yesterday for about an hour or so, and will be meeting with him every Tuesday through the rest of the month at 3:45 (it's one of the few times that both of us were available, as both of us have packed/limited schedules). He did a reading at the library and then an informal, open-to-everyone talk yesterday afternoon, but I didn't go. I don't usually go to these sorts of readings or talks on principle -- for one, I'm generally not interested, but for two, I don't really want my opinion of a visiting poet's style or subject matter in his/her writing to subconsciously taint or otherwise subtly influence my thoughts regarding the feedback I would receive from him/her in our one-on-one meetings. With professors or visiting writers I've had who have published books, poetry or otherwise, I try to avoid their work as much as possible until after I've taken a class with them; I want the class environment to be just that -- a class environment. Even with the visiting writer, which isn't so much a class as it is an intensive, one-on-one workshop that lasts for a month.

The only exception to this rule has been with our esteemed poetry professor, who puts out a new book every year or two. I'd read (and still continue to read) all of his work regularly, as all of us at this point know him on a personal level as well as on an academic level. After my time working with a professor or visiting writer is over, though, I'm generally interested in seeing what they've written. Just not before or during that time.

Another reason I didn't go to the reading/talk was that I had already been stuck on campus for three hours longer than I normally would have been (the journal staff had a meeting I needed to attend), and I really just wanted to go the fuck home afterwards.

Once I got home, I ordered three pizzas, two 2L bottles of Mountain Dew, a big box of chickenstrips and an order of breadsticks from Papa John's -- using my free Super Bowl pizza code as well as a "family meal deal" thing they do -- for $36 total. I now have enough pizza to last me over a week and am considering freezing some of it in Ziploc bags so that I can make it last. This negates any real need for me to go grocery shopping for myself for the next week or so as well, aside from the barest of essentials I might need (i.e. toilet paper, cat food, coffee, cigarettes, etc). Two of the pizzas I haven't even touched yet.

Annnnnnnd the next thing I remember is waking up on the couch at 3:45AM.

Seriously.

On Thursday afternoons/evenings, I get really tired after I come home and eat, regardless of how much sleep I got the night before. Wednesday night I went to bed around 9 (yes, I know, early) and got up at 5, so it's not like I was sleep deprived. Still, there's something in my body/brain chemistry that tells me hey Brandon, you don't have to get up and do anything tomorrow -- it's your weekend, so you're going to sleep. And then I pass out. I do vaguely remember going to lay down on the couch, because Pete (my big male cat) jumped up on my chest and laid down with me. This was, approximately, 7PM or shortly after. This means that I was passed out -- unconscious, dead to the world, and completely un-wake-able -- for almost nine hours. On a small, two-seater loveseat couch from the 1970s, with my feet hanging over the arm on one end. Don't ask me why or how I could do this -- I don't even know myself. It's not exactly comfortable. Being a grad student functioning on short snippets of sleep here and there throughout the work week has apparently given me the ability to fall asleep anywhere, at any time, and in any position -- comfortable or otherwise. I consider this a useful life skill, and/or possibly the most useful thing that I might get out of grad school as a whole.

There have been other good things going on as well, but they're all little things. I did get a load of student papers yesterday, but at first glance the vast majority of them appear to be properly formatted and somewhat intelligently-written, so that's good. It'll save me time grading them this weekend. I've also finished two new poems and have started on a third, so that's good as well. I also think the $8 bottle of high-end, high-mileage engine/fuel system cleaner I used is helping the Monte Carlo as well, as after a week's worth of normal driving she seems to be getting better gas mileage, as evidenced by the fact that this week she only took nine gallons of gas in her tank as opposed to the normal eleven-to-twelve at her regular fill-up time. That means she's getting about 17-18mpg when, previously, it was about 14-15 or so at best.

Yes, I realize that by today's standards, 17-18mpg is almost laughable. Keep in mind that my Monte Carlo is a Z34 -- the sports car version, and that she's sixteen years old and has two bad spark plugs (which causes misfiring engine cylinders = lost gas mileage) and four really old tires that need replaced. With all of those factors against her, 17-18mpg is remarkable, and I'll take what I can get as long as she keeps running. Which, thankfully, she has. Next week she'll cross 220,000 miles.

This weekend will be spent doing some busywork-like homework, grading papers, and finalizing my taxes. I've drafted out my taxes, so I know approximately what I should get back from the feds and the state (about the same as usual, around $1100-1200 total) but until I finalize everything, I won't know for sure. I've got a little more than a month before I fly back to West Virginia over Spring Break to visit my friends and family, so if I want my refunds before then (in order to, y'know, not have to spend a lot of my own money while I'm there) I'll probably have to have them direct-deposited into my bank account -- something I've not done before with my taxes. This will also be helpful, however, because my credit card bill came in the mail this week, and it's not exactly small.

But, things are getting done, good things are happening here and there, and it's the weekend. I'm trying to look on the bright side of things, because this may be the last semester I'm able to do so without being completely swamped with shit to do every waking hour of the day. And that's a good thing in itself.

The Long, Cold March of Winter

Spring semester: day seventeen

Uncharacteristic of me, I actually slept all night last night. Well, sort of. I went to bed around 8PM and got up around 3AM. That's seven hours, and a lot more than I get on any normal weeknight. I'll chalk that up in the "successful night of sleep" category.

Yesterday, it was over fifty degrees and beautiful. I went out in it to run a few errands (the previously-mentioned Walmart and gas trip I needed to do). It was very nice, especially for the first week of February in Kansas. Then again, for the past few weeks the temperature has been flirting with 70 or so on a regular basis.

Not anymore, though. There's rain and snow moving through the area today, and at 43 degrees outside now, that's the warmest it's going to be. The wind is supposed to be pretty strong and nasty too, but that's normal for Kansas in any part of the year. By this afternoon/evening when I come home from class, it's supposed to be a nasty rain/snow mix with the aforementioned shitty wind. Which, of course, is not only normal Kansas February weather, but will be just delightful to drive in. As I told my mother in an email last night, people in Kansas drive like idiots normally, but doubly so when the weather is the least bit unpleasant. At least my car has a full tank of gas and seems to be running normally.

Today, as mentioned before, will be a long day anyway. I'm teaching this morning as per the usual, then holding office hours (at least one of which I have to cancel so that I can meet for the first time with this semester's visiting writer this afternoon), then going to poetry workshop. My poem for the packet this week is truly awful, and I fully admit that -- I'm not planning on workshopping it anyway and just needed something to put into the packet. I've not been as inspired to write as much over the course of the past few weeks as I normally am. I'd blame it on being busy, but I've not been incredibly busy as of late. I've just been...well, uninspired. I've not even been really preoccupied with anything, to tell you the truth. Fatigue's been a big part of it. I'm just tired and want to be lazy, and I'll fully admit that.

However, amusingly enough, when I woke up this morning all of my aches and pains I wrote about in my last post were gone. Well, all of them but the achy muscles in my forearm from bowling this weekend; those muscles are still a little tight and sore, but then again I did bowl almost five games back-to-back. That's to be expected.

At least in my downtime, I'll be entertained; having preordered my copy of Tucker Max's new book, I'll receive it today (which is also its release date). According to the tracking number, it's on its way to my house right now. I also ordered (again, one of the few things I've actually done as of late to treat myself) the first three collections of Space Ghost Coast to Coast on DVD as well, as they were incredibly cheap in the bundle pack, and since I finished the two seasons of Community I had, I desperately need something funny to watch in an episodic format. Desperately. Especially now that I can't even watch football anymore to take my mind off things.

I know this makes it sound like I spend a lot of money frivolously; I really, really don't. The vast majority of my money goes to bills, food, and gas for the car. When I stopped at Wendy's on Saturday night on the way home, that's the first time I've actually "eaten out" since August; the only exceptions to that rule being when I very occasionally (read: maybe once a month, and only if I have some money in my wallet) order a pizza, and the cheeseburger I got at McDonald's about a month ago when I was picking up groceries. I never go out drinking or bar-hopping with my friends; as I've said many times before, to me it's mostly pointless.

Well, that and I'm very rarely, if ever, invited to go out and do such things. It doesn't feel right if I just tag along. I'm pretty sure on Saturday after bowling, a lot of us went out drinking after we finished. When the games were over, everybody got into their little groups and made plans, and I stood in the lobby of the bowling alley alone for a few minutes before I shrugged and thought to myself well, it looks like I'm going home. And that's what I did.

I'm really not looking forward to braving the weather today. It's not that I'm tired (because, for once, I'm not), it's just that I'm impatient for spring to actually get here and stay here. I don't like being cold. I also haven't left the house yet (though I will in about ten minutes or so). The biggest part of my proverbial battle of graduate school is actually forcing myself to leave the house and take care of my daily responsibilities, which is (in case you hadn't guessed) not exactly thrilling or fun most of the time. But oh well.

The Scourge of Becoming an Old Man

Spring semester: day sixteen

You know, if I felt the least bit sick -- at all -- I would at least have something to blame these aches and pains on.

No, seriously.

I'm twenty-nine years old. I'm really not an old man, yet over the past week I have begun to develop what I can only describe as "old man problems."

I mentioned in my last post how I somehow pulled a back muscle while sleeping, and couldn't tell you how (because, frankly, I don't know). Said muscle is, as mentioned before, in my upper back on the right side, located somewhere around the bottom interior of my shoulder blade and/or is attached to the back of my ribcage somehow. I thought it was getting better as of Friday, when I wrote that last post. Well, it's really not. In fact, last night I slept really poorly because my (formerly) most comfortable sleeping positions somehow pull on said muscle, or otherwise irritate it. This means that if I toss and turn in my sleep -- or even moderately move as I sleep to unconsciously get more comfortable, I am jolted awake, quickly, by a bolt of muscular pain.

Again, I will reiterate that I have no clue how I can pull a muscle in my sleep, or why it hasn't healed by this point -- this happened almost a full week ago now.

On Saturday, I went bowling with the majority of our crew of GTAs. There were a few of us who didn't go, but we had a crew of about twenty of us there. It was really fun; over the course of four games, I bowled something like seven strikes. Which, for me, is unheard of. It's probably the best I've bowled in my entire life. I started every game I played with a strike except for the last one (and I still got a spare on the last one). The third game, I got two strikes in a row. Again, unheard of. During the entire time I was bowling, my muscle was hurting, but just barely. It didn't affect how I bowled, which I thought it would.

Yesterday, of course, I woke up and it was aching more than ever -- with a nice, right-arm muscle ache and joint stiffness in my elbow and wrist (from bowling, of course). And, for some reason, my left thigh and hip ached as well. All of them bothered me all day.

Bowling isn't exactly an athletic sport, you know. It's rolling a ball down a wood floor into a bunch of pins. There's no running or exercise really involved. Hell, there's not even heavy breathing involved.

I'm too young for this shit. That's the point I'm trying to make. I take my vitamins daily, I get exercise on a regular basis, and this weekend I've even got a lot of sleep. So, again, I don't know what's wrong with me, and again, if I felt ill at all, I could at least blame it on the possibility that I was getting sick. I'd blame it on my bed were it not for the fact that the bed is the same one I've slept on since I moved to Kansas from Missouri three years ago with no real problems -- the former girlfriend opted to let me keep it and get a new one when we broke up and she moved out. So, really, I doubt that's the problem.

As an aside, I sometimes wonder if my "lifestyle" of sorts is catching up with me. I do drink a lot of coffee, smoke a lot of cigarettes, and spend three to four days a week running back and forth between school and home at full tilt. I also don't eat a whole lot, and when I do, it's not generally as healthy as it used to be. Despite this, I'm still (very slowly) losing weight. Maybe I'm just slowly running myself completely ragged and my body is, in turn, slowly destroying itself. It's as good an explanation as any, I think.

Or, perhaps I have cancer. Who knows. At this point nothing would surprise me. Or really bother me, to be honest with you.

Oh, I have cancer? Yep, that sounds about right. Oh well.

What I do know is that it's 2:30 in the morning on Monday, and this weekend has gone entirely too quickly. I really didn't get a whole lot accomplished. Today, before I return to my work week tomorrow, I must go out to Walmart and purchase some essentials and then replace the gas in my car that I used in my extra trip to Wichita and back on Saturday (lest I get off my normal fill-up schedule, which would screw up my mileage count). I also have to sit down and do my taxes, which (again) I conveniently forgot about after I mentioned them here before.

No, I did not watch the Super Bowl; there are two TVs in my house, and neither one of them was on the entire weekend save for Thursday night, when I watched a few episodes of The Real Ghostbusters on DVD while I was eating dinner. While I may love football, I had no interest whatsoever in any of the Super Bowl or its accompanying festivities -- I am indifferent about the Giants, and outright hate the Patriots with a burning passion. Because of that, until I saw mentions of it popping up on Twitter, I had basically forgotten it was even going to happen today.

Although I will say that as a Papa John's rewards member, I did end up winning a free pizza and a 2L bottle of Pepsi Max because of the coin toss contest they had. For those of you who didn't know, Papa John's did a contest where "America" could pick heads or tails for the coin toss. The voters picked heads, which meant if the coin toss came up heads in the actual game, all rewards members would win a free pizza and 2-liter of soda. It did come up heads, so, free pizza for me. I've been a rewards member almost since I moved to Kansas, since they're really the only people I order pizza from. They do promotions like this a lot; I've arbitrarily won free pizzas from them before (because they're awesome).

Occasionally, however, I will order from Pizza Hut, but that's only because I sometimes want a stuffed crust or a P'zone.

Despite my aches and pains, I did get a few things taken care of today; I paid all the bills, I cooked a small dinner, and I did all of the assignments for my poetry workshop (three in all). I also cleaned the cat room, did all the laundry, washed and replaced the bedsheets, and did a few various other small things. Right now, Sadie (one of my cats) is sleeping peacefully on my foot. It wasn't really a bad day. I've been taking aspirin -- I've found that it's really all I have in the house, apparently -- for the muscle aches, and it works well enough.

This week I have a lot on my plate, or at least a lot coming up. My students' first papers are coming due (small ones, only worth 20 points), which I must spend a good chunk of next weekend grading. I'm also diving into the first unit of my class headfirst, as well, and will be covering the first two of three major texts they'll be writing their first of three large papers on. On Tuesday afternoon (so, tomorrow) all of us taking this semester's visiting writer will meet with him for the first time, when he will introduce himself to us and we'll more than likely schedule meeting times with him for the next month. I also need to collect books to donate to the EGSA's book sale fundraiser, which we'll be holding over the week of Valentine's Day, and there should be another meeting or two on Thursday afternoon with them, the department journal, or both that I'll have to attend as well. And that doesn't even count whatever work I have to do for the other classes I'm taking. The semester is, indeed, ramping up quickly.

I have put in my "application" of sorts (really, it's just filling out a form that says "yes, I'm interested") to teach over the summer. There are but four classes available to be taught by GTAs. Yes, that's right, four. Over the entire summer. The chances that I'll actually get one of the four is really slim, of course, as pretty much every GTA who plans on staying in Wichita over the summer has expressed their enthusiasm to teach one of them. As our first-year class contains at least a few native Kansans who live in/around the area full-time, my chances of getting selected are even slimmer. Unlike most grad students who can and do go home over the summer and live with their parents, I don't have that option -- I'm not going anywhere and will still have three months' worth of bills to pay without a regular paycheck coming in, not to mention another car insurance payment that will be due at the end of June. If I don't get one of the four teaching positions, I'll have to find something that will bring in literally thousands of dollars to live on over those summer months without paychecks, and I will need to find it very, very quickly once school ends. This is not a prospect I look forward to, no, not at all.

But, again, that's something I really can't worry about much at the moment. For now, at least, I have to again focus on the present, and getting the current stuff taken care of.

Strange Week

Spring semester: day fifteen

My week has been a haze of going to and from school, and not much else. In trying to stay awake enough to actually accomplish all of my school-related responsibilities, activities, and assignments, I have run myself ragged most of the time. No longer do I remember even half of what I'm supposed to do/get done without writing it down, and I no longer remember anything discussed in any of my classes. Frequently, after teaching my students, I will either return to my office or return home after class and not be able to remember a fucking thing I just said. It will all be a blank. I'll remember the concepts, sure, and maybe a little of the class discussion, but for the most part it's like I'm on autopilot.

I am convinced that this entire "living in a haze" sort of feeling is because I have some sort of medical problem related to sleep/sleep deprivation. I've not really talked about it much, but I haven't slept on a "normal" sort of sleep schedule for any real amount of time since elementary school, when I had a set bedtime of 9PM. In junior high -- when I first got the internet, in 1995-1996ish -- is when I developed my "night owl" lifestyle, primarily because of the internet. In high school, I got up at 5AM or earlier (much like I do now) because I caught the bus at 6:50. I came home from school, had dinner, and went to sleep around 6PM or 7 at the latest on most nights. In college? About the same, though most of the time I would make my own dinner, go to sleep, and then get up around 2AM. After college it became even stranger; my schedule was constantly in flux when I was working both at the grocery store back home as well as the university on alternating days, and I had to sleep whenever I could. Once I moved to the midwest, of course, I worked overnight shifts at the grocery store in Missouri for three years. For the first few months I was living in Kansas, I wasn't working (read: I slept whenever/however), and then got another overnight grocery store job before leaving that place to work for the newspaper and then attend grad school. My point is that throughout the vast majority of my life, I haven't had the sort of lifestyle that would allow me to do the whole "go to bed at 9PM, wake up at 6AM" sort of thing for any really substantial amount of time. And I think all of the years of being unable to sleep on a set schedule has completely wrecked my body's ability to adhere to any sort of actual rhythm, instead of telling me things like "You. Sleep now. I don't care that it's 9AM/2PM/6PM/etc. It's time for you to sleep, and if you don't comply, you will submit by force."

Metaphorically speaking, of course. That's certainly what it feels like.

Case in point: on Thursdays (read: yesterday) I get done with teaching my classes by 12:15. I set up my schedule to where 90% of the time, unless I have some sort of prior commitment, I can come home as soon as I'm done teaching and start my weekend early. Sometimes I can't do this; I'll have meetings with students or organizations within the department that I am part of, but generally I can come back home when I'm done. Again, I wanted this schedule. I set it up this way on purpose. Yesterday, even though I'd gotten some decent sleep the night before (not a lot, but some) I came home, made a small lunch, and basically slipped into a coma for seven hours straight. I was in bed by 2PM. Seriously.

I've had a really strange week, actually. For example, I saw several people yesterday morning dressed really strangely, including a girl with a pink mohawk much larger than her actual head, and a nun wearing a full habit -- both walking around inside the building in which I work. Living in Kansas and attending a public university with what seems to be low admission standards, however, I've found that these sorts of things rarely surprise me anymore.

I'm not kidding about that last part, either; I just found out this week that the fall 2011 entering class had the lowest test scores on record (I assume said tests were the SAT or ACT tests) allowed for admission to the university. Or something along those lines. This is amusing, because you'd think that's something that, y'know, the university really wouldn't want to be publicized.

My week was punctuated by a few other weird things as well. This is a short list of those things, with the first being a sudden and crippling illness which lasted for less than an hour.

Let me explain.

On Tuesday night, I went to bed fairly early -- around 9:30 or so. I was tired, I'd gotten home from classes around 8, made dinner, and wanted to go to bed, so I did. Around 2:30 AM, I awoke very slowly, a little at a time, because my stomach was bothering me. Sometimes I'll get heartburn in the night, and it sucks, but after a few minutes it tends to go away and I'm able to go back to sleep. This, however -- whatever it was -- wasn't going away. And as I felt more and more sick, I began to wake up fully and realize that no, this wasn't heartburn, it was something else.

Around 2:45, I realized that okay, this is a sort of "you need to vomit" feeling.

Generally, as you could probably assume, this is a really bad sign. Normal, healthy people don't just wake up in the middle of the night and need to throw up -- that's usually something associated with food poisoning or the stomach flu, neither of which I wanted or had time for.

I went upstairs, turned on the hall light (which is one of the fluorescent bulbs, so it's a softer light that won't necessarily blind you) and immediately threw up into the toilet. A lot. Really a lot. Which was surprising seeing as it had been about six hours since I had last eaten at that point.

When I was done, I felt fine. Hm, that was weird, I thought to myself. I rinsed out my mouth, gargled, drank two glasses of water and took some Pepto Bismol, and I went back to bed -- where I was almost immediately able to fall back asleep. When I woke up Wednesday morning, I felt normal, as per the usual. Whatever it was, it was out of my system.

In all of my life I can't recall another time where I was able to rid myself of illness in less than thirty minutes. That was a very, very surreal experience. I felt so normal the next morning I wondered briefly if I'd dreamed the entire thing. I knew I hadn't, but still. I've not been ill since. It must've been what I ate for dinner -- a chicken sandwich -- that disagreed with me.

At some point, I also pulled a muscle in my back while I was sleeping. How I do this on occasion is anyone's guess; I must be special in that regard. Still, it's a muscle on the right side about halfway up my back, and it feels like it's underneath my shoulder blade. It also feels like it's the muscle that connects to the back of my rib cage, so when it hurts it draws up tight and locks -- which is painful enough in itself, but also gives me the added bonus of feeling like I can't breathe. It's slowly getting better, but it still sucks.

Yeah, folks, I've got problems.

In other news, on Wednesday I also received my plane tickets for Spring Break from my mother. I'll be in West Virginia for a little less than five days, which gives me the other days of break back here to do whatever work I need to take care of for school during said time off. Three of those days have already been planned out, actually -- the first I'll be traveling and more than likely meeting Wayne and Jane for a late lunch in Pittsburgh as soon as the plane lands, the second I plan to visit my grandmother, and the third Andrea and I will be spending quality time together as much as possible (read: shopping and galavanting about Morgantown). I've planned nothing further than that, but I'm guessing there will be at least one large family dinner at at least one Mexican restaurant, as is customary for my folks.

I was lucky to get out of class early on Wednesday evening, but due to said luck I also missed the huge, bright and massive meteor that crossed over at least two states and was visible here. A lot of people in Wichita saw it, and apparently it landed (if it did land) somewhere in extreme northern Texas or Oklahoma. Yeah. It was that big. Wichita news websites were going crazy about it, hundreds saw it fall, etc. The link I posted above has a few photos and the one live video I've been able to find of the occurrence, taken from the dash cam of a cop car, but apparently those who saw it even up here said it was spectacular.

As an aside, I've seen some pretty big ones myself in the early morning and/or late night drives I make to and from campus. I just think it's neat. Meteors have always fascinated me.

Today, we (finally) get paid for the first time this semester. This is good, because I'd been living off my loans and credit card for the past few weeks to pay bills and be able to eat/put gas in the car. Now that I'll be getting regular paychecks again every two weeks until the end of the semester, my monetary load will be lightened a bit. Today's check, at least, is a lot larger than the usual, as well (by almost $40). Who knows if that will be a one-time thing, or if we'll be getting larger checks but fewer of them because of the length of the semester. Our salary as GTAs, after all, remains the same.

This weekend I have a few small things to do for my classes/students, but my main task is to do my taxes. Now that I have my plane ticket ready to go, it's imperative that I finish and send off my taxes ASAP in hopes of getting my refund before the trip. If I don't get it before the trip, it's not a huge deal, of course -- I do have some money -- but still, it would be nice.

Sleep and Life Plans

Spring semester: day ten

I hate being awake, generally speaking.

This isn't one of those statements like "oh, I hate soccer" or "oh, I hate guacamole," but I'm being serious when I say this. I hate being awake. I can never get enough sleep, and when I do tend to sleep for long stretches of time, there are always consequences (such as not being able to go back to sleep when I would need to...which is usually something like 2 or 3PM). Plus, all of those pesky responsibilities I have must be taken care of when I'm awake. When I'm asleep, they no longer exist. At least not until I wake up again, anyway.

I had a long conversation with Andrea this afternoon that really put my life into perspective. Andrea is good for conversations like this, but today's was one of the most soul-baring ones I've had in a long time. She's the only person I can really talk to about any of my interpersonal or psychological issues; even my closest friends out here in Kansas don't have time for my bullshit, nor do they particularly care. In general, I don't burden other people with my problems -- whatever said problems may be -- because of two reasons:

1.) I can usually take care of most psychological issues myself (over time, of course), and

2.) I have come across very, very few people in my life who actively, genuinely care about my mental health or general well-being and are willing to burn calories over it. There have been many over the years who've said they cared, but for almost all of them that care/concern has only gone so far, and they gave up after a while.

Again, I don't expect anyone to take care of me, or even want to. Most of the time I don't need it.

There are a few lines in one of my poems that sums up my world view rather succinctly:

When the clock passes 1AM she turns to me and says,
“I have one too many unfixable parts,” before finishing her beer.
"I've never been made," I reply.

Those lines are from a poem I wrote last year called "Her Idea," and to date (as well as for the foreseeable future) they're the only snippet of my poetry I have, or will ever put here on my blog. Ironically, while most of the poetry I write is in some way about my life or my past, this one was purely fictional -- but I think the message in these three lines is totally applicable to my life.

The talk with Andrea was mainly about how things are going, really. When I say how things are going, I mean about how I feel about my life and where it's headed. During our discussion I told her how I've come to the conclusion that, basically, there's no real reason for me to...well, be truly optimistic anymore. Yes, I realize how horrible that sounds, but let me explain.

Andrea, to put it mildly, has had a rough past...oh, eight months or so, give or take. She and her (now former) fiance had a horrible breakup around the same time the former girlfriend and I broke up, and since then her life has been a series of "if it can go wrong, it WILL go wrong" sorts of situations. I love the girl more than probably any other friend I have on this planet; she is truly like a sister to me, and despite all of her own problems, if I've been in a bind or needed help of any sort, she has always been the first to rush to my aid -- she's saved my ass more times than I can count at this point. For example, she's sent me Walmart gift cards when I've been too poor to eat, and has refilled my phone minutes when I was in danger of being completely out of them and desperately needed access to my phone. She's never asked for anything in return or repayment and never would, though regardless of that I always do everything I can to make it up to her when I can do so -- usually in the form of gift cards or my tie-dyed shirts, which she loves. My point is that Andrea is genuinely a wonderful person, and she perseveres even though life has taken a big shit on her as of late.

"I live alone," I told her, "I'm single, with three cats, in a house. I have a car that runs, and (most of the time) I don't have to worry too much about money. I'm independent, I'm getting a higher degree, and I'm happy enough for the moment with where my life is and where it is going. Have I closed myself off a bit from a lot of people? Perhaps, but I'm relatively content."

I told her this because after her own breakup, she's in much the same situation I am now -- though there are a few differences. For one, she's allergic to cats (she has a dog), owns a nicer car than I do, and has a high-paying job. She, like me, lives alone, has few friends in town, and is bored/miserable/lonely a lot of the time. Her financial situation may be a bit better than mine, but we're relatively in the same boat, so to speak.

"Now," I continued, "I do live a solitary sort of life. You know this. There's a balance that I keep in my life, a balance of living it on my own terms without having to worry about interference or problems created by anyone else. Now that I've been single and alone for some time, I am afraid that a relationship with another woman would either disrupt or completely destroy that balance."

I'm relatively paraphrasing myself, of course. I can't remember exactly what it was that I said, but that's what it boiled down to, really.

I do remember saying that I do not expect to, nor can I picture, falling in love again any time in the foreseeable future. With anyone. What may have sounded implied here was that the last one was problematic enough, but that isn't what I intended by saying it -- it's just that I cannot picture myself in a relationship again any time soon, and, more than that, cannot fathom anyone wanting to be in a relationship with me. At all.

It's not that I don't think I'm attractive or that I have an attractive personality -- believe me, I do think those things. I know I'm decently good-looking, at least a 6 or 7 on the classic 1-10 scale. My self-esteem is so high that it flirts with, and sometimes surpasses, the realm of narcissism (ask anyone I know, especially my former girlfriend). It's just that I'm so far removed now (mentally, of course) from a typical "boyfriend/girlfriend" situation that if a woman told me she was attracted to me, my first response would be something along the lines of who, me? Why? You DO know me, right? You really want...this? Seriously? Really, there are better guys out there, you know, guys who aren't in $25k of student loan debt, guys who have their collective shit together. I'd be endlessly intrigued. I'd ask too many questions. I'd examine her attraction to me under a figurative microscope to figure out what the hell was wrong with her.

Please note that this statement will probably make me sound like I'm severely depressed. I'm not. Seriously. In fact, I feel absolutely awesome most of the time. I'm just trying to examine my thoughts and emotions from a purely scientific perspective, because it intrigues me.

I'm not looking for anyone or anything right now in the relationship world. I'm realistic; I'm focusing on myself. It may sound really, really self-serving and egotistical, but I'm looking to take care of all of the important things in my life, and as you already know, romantic entanglements, infatuations, or other things of that ilk generally tend to keep me from taking care of those things. Or at least I think so, anyway.

Andrea told me that it sounds like I'm taking the easy way out, that these things are just what I'm telling myself so that it doesn't hurt as much to be alone. Maybe she's right, and deep down in my subconscious or unconscious, there's just a little boy who wants to be loved. She said, however, that while I can be realistic about a lot of things, I should have hopes. I should have optimism, especially about love. It's apparently the one thing I should have very high hopes about.

"My hopes revolve around me actually graduating from this program and quickly finding a job somewhere so that I don't end up starving, homeless, and/or living out of my car with $25k of student loan debt," I said.

Those are my hopes. Those are my worries. Compared to those things, not having a woman in my life isn't important to me, nor is it a problem. I have goals, and those goals are not to end up on the street after spending three years getting a degree. I don't begrudge anyone else for wanting to be happy, for wanting to be in a relationship with a loving partner -- least of all Andrea, who deserves such happiness more than anyone I know -- but it's so absolutely not on my list of priorities or must-haves. The most I can hope for is survival and a bit of luck that when I finish my degree, I land somewhere in a job which will allow me to support myself and begin paying those loans back.

Through all of this, of course, I see friends roughly my age who are more or less "growing up"; one of my friends told me this week that she's secretly eleven weeks pregnant, and has been waiting (and will still wait) to announce it for a while. Several more friends have gotten engaged in the past few months, as well. Another friend just bought a new car, and two more friends just bought a house. All of these people are successful and have had their life plans work out in their favor. While I'm not competing with any of them in any way, it would be nice if my own life plans could work out in my favor as well -- so I'm doing everything I can to ensure that will happen. I do have optimism; it's just not the sort of optimism one might expect me to have. If this means I focus on some things more than others, and deem some things more important than others, oh well. It's not like I live a joyless life, just a mostly solitary one.

For the record, it's not like I'd be opposed to a relationship, as I've said before here on the blog numerous times -- it's just that I don't see one happening, am not looking for one, and I'm just, well, apathetic to the concept for the moment. Why this blows so many people's minds is beyond me. It's almost like I'm some sort of asexual alien if I'm not continuously on the prowl. Especially at my age.

I swear, people. I swear.

Night Booms

It's 3:30 AM. The trains running through Newton are very loud tonight; not with their whistles, mind you, but with their coupling/uncoupling of cars. When they do this (frequently, of course, as Newton for some reason is still a major train hub for BNSF railways), it creates a rolling, thunder-like booming noise that echoes across the plains and is very audible within my home about two miles from the train station.

The whistles are omnipresent and annoying as well, of course, but I must remember that living here is much better than when I lived in the former girlfriend's old parents' place, which was not only twenty feet from the train tracks but about 50 yards from an intersection with the road. If you don't live in an area with trains, this probably doesn't sound like a big deal to you until you realize that, by law, a train must blow its whistle every time it crosses through an intersection with a road, day or night, regardless of time or weather.

One doesn't realize how loud a train is, or the vibrations one creates, when one passes by a house every hour or so. When I was living there (for only a short month or two, before we moved to Kansas for school) I had it timed to almost an exact set amount of minutes -- usually 47 to 55 -- between trains. 24 hours a day. It was maddening. As much as I loved that little town, I would never, ever choose to live there (or anywhere else that close to train tracks) again.

Newton, where I live, has the only Amtrak passenger station that I know of between here and Kansas City. There's not one in Wichita, and if there's one in the larger cities to the north like Topeka, Lawrence, or Manhattan, I don't know about it. It's amusing that they'd keep it here, in a town of less than 20,000 people, in the middle of nowhere. Newton is the smallest actual city I've ever lived in, and most people wouldn't even call it a city. Yes, there's a downtown area with a main street, post office, and lots of shops, but it really is a small town with a small-town mentality about it. I'm surprised the newspaper still publishes six days a week (it does) because nothing of importance really happens here. Most of the stories published in it when I worked there were reprints of stories from the Associated Press. Oh, they were new stories, to be sure, but so little happens here that the paper was filled with them on a daily basis.

The point of my writing about the town and about the trains here is because for a lot of us in the department/program who either don't have a really reliable car and/or don't want to drive their car cross-country for incredibly long distances, the train station is their easiest and/or cheapest option for travel. The very notion of traveling by train in 2012 is rather quaint and old-fashioned to me, personally. I would much rather drive or fly. I mean, as I said, it is 2012. If my Monte Carlo were reliable enough to do so (it's really, really not), I'd drive back and forth to visit my parents three or four times a year, as the money factor (read: gasoline) would be about the same cost. However, many of us in the department apparently aren't huge fans of driving long distances, so they take trains to different destinations. At least a handful of them do, anyway.

The AWP conference is a month from today, or at least that's when it starts. For anyone in the writing world, this is (as they say) a big deal. The AWP, or Association of Writers & Writing Programs, is probably the biggest literary organization in the country not just for established authors, but as they say in the name, writing programs. As in, what all of us are a part of at Flat State University. I've never been to it, but it is my goal to attend it next year as a way to put something interesting on my CV and celebrate what may very well be the last year of my college education ever, depending on whether or not I decide to go on to a PhD program. This year, it's being held in Chicago, which is close enough to entice a large number of my fellow graduate students to go (not that they wouldn't have gone anyhow). The route most of them have chosen to get there is by train.

See where this post is headed now? Good.

I have volunteered (or, more appropriately, I have been volunteered) to be the shuttle for what may amount to seven or eight friends in the department to get to the train station here in Newton. How this will work isn't exactly clear as of yet, especially since every single Amtrak train makes its stop in Newton at three in the morning. I'm not kidding when I say that, either -- you want to travel by train? You've gotta take the red eye. Always. As all of us teach or attend classes (at least we will on the day/night they leave, the 28th), this makes the situation interesting. The 28th is a Tuesday, which not only starts my week but is the longest day of it. I now have the responsibility of figuring out how a group of my friends can get up to Newton and on a train to Chicago at 3AM, when I would normally be waking up two hours later to start my Wednesday.

"Can we park our cars at your house?" one of them asked me.

"Well, yes," I said, "but there'll only be enough room for about two of them, max. On-street parking."

This is true; while I have a wide driveway and only one car, it is shared with the neighbors on the other side of my house (it's a duplex) and they have two cars that they park in a staggered fashion because both of them work odd hours and need to be able to get in/out. The street in front of my mailbox (acceptable enough for friends to park in) is only wide/long enough for about two vehicles, maybe three if they're all tiny compact cars and they park with their bumpers almost touching and tires rubbing the curb. Obviously, friends can't park in my driveway or I would be unable to get in/out of it myself.

"Hm, that may be a problem then," he replied.

Like I said, there's a large number of them going, traveling together, etc. I can't do much about that, really. It's not like I can magically create more street parking space, or invade the space of my neighbors on the street.

"Are there any good bars in Newton?" was the next question.

Haha, no. Not anymore, anyway. I must remind you these are graduate students, and -- especially when traveling and/or on vacation -- they tend to drink copious amounts of beer and liquor. Apparently when traveling by train, as well, you can take as much alcohol as you want with you. It's not like an airplane. So I'm assuming that by 3AM when the train leaves, all of my friends will be quite drunk or definitely "on their way there," as the saying goes.

I am aware of but two bars in Newton; both are "cowboy bars," which is a nicer way of saying they're total hole-in-the-wall dive joints that cater to rednecks and white-trash clientèle. One of them is about a mile from my house, give or take, and the other is on main street. The one really nice bar in town, the blandly/succinctly-named Sports Bar and Grill, went out of business and closed down almost a year ago. This, really, is too bad, as they made some of the best bar food I've had in years.

Yeah, like I've said before, this is a boring town in which nothing ever happens and there's nothing to do.

"How far is the train station from your house?" was the next question.

"About two miles or so," I replied, "give or take."

This is true; the train station is in the dead center of town, and the train tracks therefore bisect our town into two sections. There are seven tracks, all laid together, that run southwest to northeast. Crossing said tracks also lets me know just how badly I need new tires and shocks.

"Shit, we could walk that if we had to."

This may be true as well, but everyone is forgetting that the conference isn't for another month, and we've had a very, very warm and nice winter thus far by Kansas standards, with the temperature reaching almost 70 degrees half the time. That's bound to change. It would not surprise me if the weather took a 180 and we got an absolutely hellacious snowstorm around the time of the conference -- February is not usually the kindest month when it comes to what mother nature can dish out here in the great plains. I will remind you that it was last February when we got a freak snowstorm which, over the course of about three days, dropped a foot of snow on the area, canceled classes at the university for two days in a row, and made the temperature fall to around -5, with -25 to -30 wind chills. Anything can happen in a month. Kansas weather can turn on a dime, folks.

Again, I will remind you that my car desperately needs new tires, and isn't prepared to drive in a foot of snow, even around Newton.

I'm really not sure what the "game plan" for this trip thing will be yet; what will more than likely happen is that I'll end up ferrying two or three people up here in the Monte Carlo (for, even though the car is a land boat, it has a tiny backseat) after class that night and will drop them at the train station (or downtown, so they can drink) when necessary, and the others will probably carpool in a vehicle or two and park on my street for the duration of the trip, then come back and pick up their cars when done, etc. But who knows, really; it's a month away. I'm happy to help, of course, even if it ends up inconveniencing me -- I know they'd do the same for me. The department may be a dysfunctional family at times, but we're still a family -- we help each other out.

Perfectly fitting to end this post, of course, I hear a train whistle in the distance. It's 5AM, and I'm exhausted. It's time for bed. More soon, when I have more to update.

Interesting Things, Good and Bad

Spring semester: day nine

I have been incredibly busy (shocking, I know, as I hadn't expected to be) and very, very sleep-deprived all week. I have come to the conclusion that the only days I can sleep normally and get any real rest -- probably until May -- will be on the weekends and on any other days I may get off during the semester. On weeknights I average anywhere from 2-4 hours of sleep, work through my days like a zombie, and barely remember anything I've said or done by the time I've finished with my day.

This is, of course, problematic on several levels. Unfortunately, I don't have much of a choice in the matter right now. By the way it looks, it'll take me not just one or two but several weeks before my body gets used to going to bed at a reasonable hour and getting up at 5AM again. As it stands, it's already been incredibly hard to function even with copious amounts of coffee.

I was reminded this afternoon that hey, my car still needs work when, out of the blue, it took me several tries to get her started, which in the summer (when it was really hot) wasn't a rare occurrence, but hasn't happened in a while. I'd gone out to get gas and to go to the discount grocery store, and after filling the tank she didn't want to start for a minute or two. This also reminds me that I desperately need to do my taxes soon -- which I've inadvertently been putting off -- so that I can have money to fix her up. She also only has ten miles to go before her scheduled oil change, according to the sticker on the inside of the windshield -- but over the last eight months I've owned the car I've put no less than four quarts of new oil into it when needed (and have two quarts as spares in my garage, ready to go), so I'm guessing I can put that off a little longer if I have to -- though I don't really want to.

This week I learned that one of my many poetry submissions has (finally) been accepted into a rather high-end, fairly reputable literary journal. I'm not going to name the journal or the poem here, because nothing has been finalized yet, but that certainly lifted my spirits a little. It made me feel like I've accomplished at least one little thing in my career as a creative writer. It will be the first and only piece of my creative work that I've ever had published anyplace. Yes, I wrote scores of articles for the newspaper when I was a reporter, and had dozens of bylines and credits, but none of that was my creative work; I was just doing my job, and my job was a newspaper reporter. Having one of my poems published carries a lot more gravity for me. In a way, it sort of validates me as a writer.

And then I realize that thousands of writers get their works published every day, and it knocks me down a peg. It's nice, I'm stunned/humbled/etc., but aside from telling a few friends in the department about it (as well as our esteemed poetry professor), I haven't really spread it around much. I don't want to be "that guy," which I also told our professor. I can be smug and brag about it when I get thirty or forty poems published in different magazines or journals -- but for now, it's really not a big deal. We have a lot of talent in our department; most of these folks have been published in lit mags a lot more prestigious than the one I'll be in. As a writer, believe me, I realize that I still have a long way to go before I can be proud of myself.

In other news, life around the house has been fairly quiet, aside from the dishwasher. The dishwasher is new(ish); my landlord installed it last summer when the old one began leaking all over the floor. Now, apparently the new one's drain line is clogged or something; it will wash just fine for about 20 minutes, then when it hits the rinse cycle (presumably) it will go into auto-drain, or "error mode" and turn itself off, because its sensor realizes there's too much water in the bottom of it, and it takes forever for all of the water (water that's pooled in the bottom of the dishwasher about an inch deep, mind you) to flow down the drain. No leaking or anything, just, well, it doesn't want to wash a full cycle anymore.

No, I don't know how to unclog a dishwasher's drain, or its drainage pipe, and I'm guessing that pouring Drano down the bottom of it would be a bad idea. So it looks like I'm going to do a little troubleshooting online and see if I can figure out what to do with it, and if I can't, I'll have to call the landlord to see if he can get a repairman out here to work on it one day that I'm home. Unless it starts working normally again, of course. What I do know is that if it is a clog, it's between the dishwasher and the sink, because all of the other drains/sinks/toilets in the house are working perfectly fine and draining normally. So, really, it's just strange. Oh well. I don't cook enough to worry about desperately needing the dishwasher on a daily or weekly basis, even; as a single guy in school, it's not like I'm ever home to cook anymore, and even when I am I rarely have the energy or desire to do it.

I've also found that I don't know how to clean the interior of a coffee pot anymore. At least not the one I have. Y'see, I have a Hamilton Beach BrewStation -- you can see it here -- and I've been the proud owner of it for about, oh, four years now. I love it. It's the best (and, as you can see, most expensive) coffeemaker I've ever owned. The coffee is super-hot, and I can push my cup against the button and fill it up at any time during the brewing process. It also has an automatic shut-off after a few hours, so that if I forget to turn it off, it'll turn itself off. In short, it's been pretty effing perfect for me for the past several years.

However.

Over the past few months, no matter how often I clean it, the dispenser nozzle keeps getting clogged. It's the little port at the bottom of the inside of the pot that the liquid coffee exits through that's the problem. It's a little mesh dome (like a miniature filter that keeps any stray grounds out of your brew) that the coffee flows through. And it gets clogged with lots and lots of what can only be described as coffee remnants. Have you ever left a pot of spaghetti sauce on the stove too long and the bottom of the pot gets caked-on, burnt-on sauce stuck to it that needs to be soaked off in the sink for hours? It's like that, but with coffee.

And it's nearly impossible to scrub clean or scrub off, no matter what I do. Usually I'll run it through the dishwasher a few times (the pot comes apart so you can do this) but with the dishwasher being on the fritz right now as well, that's not really an option. So, for the moment, I've let it soak in the sink in scalding hot water and a ton of Ajax dish soap, to see if I can scrub it off later.

Even if I can, it's sort of a moot point at this juncture -- it'll work for another week or so before it becomes clogged up again, and there's not much I can do about that. It sucks so much that I've considered just donating it to Goodwill and getting another coffee pot from Walmart or someplace. I do have an $8 backup coffee pot that I keep in the kitchen on the counter (oh yes, I am so addicted to caffeine that this is a single-man, two-coffee-pot household), but there's something about the way my trusty BrewStation makes coffee -- it's just, well, tastier.

Yes, again, I know -- first world problems.

Anyway.

Because I've made several trips to the discount grocery store here in town over the past few weeks and have bought many, many Powerbars and other energy/protein bars to take to the office and hide in my desk drawer, I've become known as the department's "Powerbar dealer." Like a drug dealer, only less cool (and a lot less profitable). Rae has started a Powerbar fund, which basically means I supply the goods and dollars get put into an envelope in the same drawer as the Powerbars. It's nothing short of hilarious, and sounds like the plot of an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Anytime someone wants to come to my office and give me a dollar for five bars (which is how much I pay for them in the store), they can do so -- whether I'm there or not -- and put a dollar in the envelope. It's a trust-based system; the only people who eat 'em for free are me, my officemate, and occasionally Suri if she wants one or two of them (which tends to be a rare occasion, as she eats super-healthily and brings home-cooked meals to school).

Not surprisingly, as they tend to vanish quickly, I keep a stash of my own special favorites/flavors hidden in the office where nobody else knows they exist.

I had a poem up for workshop this week, as I mentioned here before, and our group tore it apart. Which, of course, I was expecting -- it needed a lot of work if it was going to be properly workshopped, and if I'd had the choice, I wouldn't have workshopped it at all. I'm never nervous for workshop or anything like that -- if I didn't want a piece of mine to be considered for workshop, I wouldn't put it in the packet -- and, really, I immensely enjoy being thrust into the spotlight for an hour or so in the class. Workshop, with our group and with our professor, is the biggest reason I'm a member of this program, hands-down. It's my favorite part of the graduate school experience.

After I got home from workshop that night, I received a text message from Jay. It read, and I quote, "Liked the poem tonight. Don't let those vultures ruin it for you."

Which, of course, I found hilarious, but also humbling.

The next day, our esteemed professor pulled me aside and said "Really, I kind of liked the poem," with a sort of baffled, apologetic tone in his voice. Apparently everyone thought I'd gotten completely shot down and raked over the coals except for me. Maybe I did and didn't really notice it; knowing what that workshop is like, I've had a lot less productive/more vitriolic ones over the years I've been here. I think it's the new room we're in, which allows for a lot more of an intimate discussion than we've had previously.

Either way, the poem in question needs a rewrite and edits anyhow if I ever want to do anything with it; it was one of those poems I wrote just to have something to put in the packet. Maybe if I were more invested in it, I would've been offended. Somehow, though, I doubt it.

The former girlfriend, by the way, is "sitting in" on the workshop with us, as it's her last semester as a student here. This isn't a problem, or anything; in fact, of everyone I've ever had workshop with, she tends to give some of the best criticism on not only my own work, but everyone else's. Enough time has also passed since our breakup for everyone else in the program to realize that hey, the two of us are still friends, still social, and it's not awkward. Which, truth be told, was something a lot of our mutual friends were probably quietly worried about.

The rest of this weekend will be focused on trying to relax and catch up on sleep somewhat, as well as taking care of a few odds-and-ends errands (I have to pay the rent, etc). Remarkably, I don't have any homework this week for my editing class, and have very little to do for my students, so the plan is mostly to decompress for the next three days and to watch a movie or two. I purchased Kevin Smith's newest film, Red State, on Blu-ray last week, and I haven't had the chance to watch it yet -- so that's probably on the docket. If I'm bored enough (or actually remember to do so) I may draft out my taxes before formally doing them. Shouldn't take too long, really. Other than that? Normal stuff like laundry, dishes, and cleaning awaits me.

Hopes and Dreams

Spring semester: day six

Longtime readers of this blog know that I always suffer from insomnia, sometimes worse than others, on Monday nights during the semester. This is because, as you know, I have Mondays off -- it's like another little "weekend day" for me. I've never taught on a Monday, and haven't had a Monday class since my very first semester as a graduate student eighteen months ago. Therefore, it's very hard for me to sleep on Monday nights because, really, I'm required to get up on Tuesday morning at 5AM regardless of when I go to bed. If I've slept until noon on a Monday (as I did today), it's rather difficult for me to go to sleep ten or eleven hours later most of the time. My body tends to function on a "sleep ten hours, stay awake for 24 or more" sort of pattern if left to its own devices, something that graduate school throws a huge wrench into. Graduate school and my responsibilities within it makes my sleep schedule really erratic -- sometimes it's more along the lines of "stay awake for 36 hours, sleep for five or six, repeat" sort of erratic.

I can't really complain, though; I am on campus only three days a week, which is really two-and-a-half days most of the time, as on most Thursdays I can leave and come home shortly after noon when I'm done teaching. This semester I've found that it's imperative that I get to campus ASAP in the mornings, as for some reason parking on campus as well as interstate traffic has been worse on a day-to-day basis than I've ever seen it. This means I'm out the door by around 6:30 every morning now when I would normally leave 20 or 25 minutes later.

I have, however, worked my schedule around most of this; yes, I may be tired in the mornings, but I can force myself to trudge upstairs, make coffee, shower (if I didn't the night before) and wake up before my drive. The time spent in my office between about 7:15 and 9:10 with another pot of coffee also allows me to continue becoming super-alert, and powers me through my teaching that follows thereafter.

Theoretically, if I wanted to, I could stay up all night tonight and all day tomorrow, but by the time I got home a little after 7PM I would be a total zombie, running on 30-32 hours straight of being awake, and an incredibly large amount of coffee. If I can't force myself to sleep tonight, that may be the only solution. After all, I can always crash when I get home and sleep until 5AM the next morning if I need to. I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be a problem, really. The problem is actually staying awake that long and being functional while teaching/taking my own classes without becoming delirious.

Today was spent answering a few student emails and making a shopping trip to Walmart for the week. I've lost two more students who I had last week, and gained one more, in the past 24 hours. Yeah, it looks like the next week or so is going to be really sort of shaky before my roster settles down. I now have 18 students in one class and 22 in the other, and hope the proverbial smoke settles soon before we really get into the hardcore lessons and readings later this week.

The trip to Walmart was fruitful, at least, without being incredibly expensive. I got a few extraneous items (more shirts to dye, a Blu-ray copy of V for Vendetta to replace the one the former girlfriend took with her when she moved out), but mainly I got the essentials for around-the-house cooking, cleaning, and cat care.

I'm up first for workshop tomorrow night in our poetry class. The poem in the packet that we'll be workshopping isn't one that I'm particularly proud of, or even one that I was really planning to eventually workshop; it was, really, just one that I threw together (albeit a new one) to have something to provide in the packet. Because of the way our professor's workshop functions, we generally get to pick any poem we've submitted over the course of the semester when it's our turn, and he goes in alphabetical order down the roster to pick who's "up" for the week. This time, he decided to do it in reverse alphabetical order, and I'm the last one on the list alphabetically...so, of course, I go first. As we've only submitted one poem thus far this semester -- last week's poem on the first day of class -- that's the one that I'm getting workshopped.

The one I'm bringing in tomorrow is actually a poem I'm quite proud of, written about the murder-suicide death of a close friend's fiance (no, I'm not kidding). It's actually a poem that I would want to workshop, but alas. I may do it the next time around, but maybe not. It depends on whether I can write some more worthwhile work this semester in the meantime.

I've become rather lax about my actual writing work; I've been so uninspired as of late. I haven't sent out any new submissions to magazines or journals since November (I checked), and the only time I've been writing anything new since around that time has been for the workshop class itself -- so, really, it's not been much. I can't seem to hit a stride or catch a proverbial foothold upon which I can anchor myself and write some really good work. I wouldn't call it writer's block; I'd call it a general mindset of blah, what's the point sort of feelings.

There have been times where I've briefly questioned, internally, why I'm in the program. Not in a good lord, your work sucks, why are you here sort of sense, but in more of a what are you accomplishing with your life sort of sense. I've mentioned before that being in the creative writing program at Flat State University is a very insular environment, and I must keep reminding myself that my education is not real life, it's not anything close to real life -- it's school, it's a community of like-minded individuals who are killing time and burning money just like I am, a community of people who may or may not "make it" in the real world after all of us graduate, despite our best hopes, dreams, and plans. Rae got me thinking about this subject tonight after reading one of her own blog posts, but let's face facts, people -- five years from now, when all of us are done with our MA and MFA degrees, all forty or so of us in the department, mind you...maybe ten of us, if that, will actually be working in any sort of field that we enjoy, or that we even went through the program for in the first place. I'm sure I don't have to tell you that there are many more MA, MFA, and even PhD graduates out there than there are jobs in their fields to employ them.

This reminds me of a conversation I had about six years ago with one of my regular customers when I was working at the grocery store back in West Virginia. I told her that I had a Bachelor's in English, but I was working in a grocery store for very little money (about $6k a year at the time, $5.40 an hour, not kidding) because I'd applied for over 500 jobs -- yes, I kept count -- for everything from clerical/secretarial work to laboratory work (I had experience in both), and couldn't get more than four interviews, all of which rejected me.

"Look at me," she said, holding up her EBT card, "I have two MBAs, and I'm on foodstamps."

This conversation has stuck with me for many years not because it's heartbreaking (though it is), but because it taught me a valuable lesson: sometimes there's just not a place out there for YOU as a person to be able to survive, no matter what hopes, dreams, education, or degrees you have. I'm sure that very, very nice lady had hopes and dreams too, just like the rest of us -- but she couldn't make them come to fruition, and was instead forced to stay living in West Virginia, stuck there, needing desperately to be on foodstamps just to be able to eat.

I've never had a job that's paid over $9 per hour, and never expect to find one that pays that well ever again, regardless of the fact that in a little more than a year, I'll be graduating with my MFA. The closest I ever got to my "dream job" was when I was a reporter/webmaster for the local newspaper. I got to live my Clark Kent fantasy for a little over a year, minus the alter ego. Still, I have friends who have graduated from much better schools than I have who are making a fair amount of money in the newspaper business even now. They'll be the first ones I call when I graduate if I can't find any work.

The rest of us? I'm sure several of us will find work adjuncting for either our own school or some others, or going into junior/community colleges to teach classes. Some others will go into the publishing business, some into editing, and a few will probably find a job that is somewhat close to what they wanted to do with their lives in some respects. Some of us may even be able to make a real living by becoming full-fledged-and-semi-famous popular, published authors. Being realistic, however, most of us will be down and out, looking for work anywhere we can get it, and if we can't get it, moving onward to work towards a PhD (provided a school accepts us and/or we have the money to do so). That's just the facts. That's what writers have to deal with in their chosen profession, and it's something a lot of people who aren't writers will never understand -- we either "make it" or we don't. If we don't, we either go back to working in retail or some other equally awful job in order to pay back our student loans, or we rack up more and become "professional students," moving forward with a PhD or even post-doctoral work in a school someplace else, living a year at a time and hoping something will change and/or fall into our collective laps.

I make no bones about it -- as much as I would absolutely hate to do it and want to kill myself every night after I got home from work, I am fully prepared to go into working in retail or in a grocery store again if it's that or being homeless/starving. I have bills to pay, I have cats to feed, and I own a car that needs gasoline in it if I ever want to be able to leave the house. My point is that in a program like ours, which is so incredibly insular, I think a lot of us are living on false hopes and dreams and are not going to be prepared in the least to enter the real world after graduation. It's sad to say that, but I really do think it's true. Most of these kids are just that -- kids. Most of them have never been out of school for any length of time or forced to live in a real world environment. These are kids who have gone straight from high school into undergrad, and then straight from undergrad into graduate school, all on the assumptions that once they finish their Master's degree of whatever they're studying, the world will be throwing jobs at them like they're Bon Jovi and jobs are panties. Let me tell you, this does not happen.

There are only a few of us in the program who are my age or older. All of us of that age are in the program because we want to be, yes, but because we also know that at the time we joined it, it was probably the last, best option for us to actually further our collective educations and find a way to pay the bills by teaching at the same time. Of those of us who are older, all of us have spent time in and worked in the real world in some fashion or another and know what it's like.

As Ray said in Ghostbusters, "I've worked in the private sector. They expect results."

I've worked a plethora of jobs over the years. I've been a cashier, stocker, or both for four different grocery store chains. I've worked as both a laboratory assistant (mostly clerical work and cleaning) and as a laboratory technician (mixing formulas, making mediums, and doing other technical/mechanical stuff to keep a fully-staffed microbiology laboratory running). I've been a newspaper reporter for two different newspapers, as well as a webmaster/layout designer for the last one. Since 2005 I've also been running several online businesses printing/selling t-shirts with designs and art on them. Now I'm an English instructor and graduate student -- and a damned good one -- but being able to say that, or anything else about what I've done over the years doesn't guarantee me any degree of success after I graduate. There are no guarantees of anything, and there's a much greater possibility that some of us, regardless of age or experience, may have no hope whatsoever after graduate school, especially in this state and with the economy as bad as it is.

These are all frightening thoughts, to be sure, but for now all of them are out of my hands as well as everyone else's hands. This is why I live in the moment. This is why I'm able to remain calm and laid back about most situations -- I don't worry about things I can't control, and likewise I don't try to control those things either. I deal with problems as they come up, and deal with them in the most efficient, all-encompassing ways possible. Why plan ahead? Why worry about the future? The stress will give you high blood pressure and/or a heart attack, and you'll die an early death all miserable and alone.

I've always followed some version of this life perspective since I was a child, and even more so now that I've been single for almost six months. I focus on the present, on the day-to-day. Am I able to plan ahead for some things? Yes, of course. But in the vast majority of my daily life, I just tend to wing it. You can't plan everything. I know I can't. If you try to plan too much, or think too far ahead, you'll go insane. Is anyone's life stable enough to plan a year ahead anymore? Even six months? I know mine's not. And I bet yours isn't either. So live in the moment. Are things good for you right now? Do you have a home, a car that runs, a job to go to and someone (in my case, three little furry someones) who is happy to see you when you come home? Today, do you have enough food to eat, running water, and electricity? If you answered "yes" to all of these questions, then don't worry about what's going to happen a year from now, or five years from now, or what-have-you. Focus on your life now, because it could be much worse. Focus on the people in your life who care about you. Follow your dreams, yes, but take care of the important stuff too. Realize that the "big picture" is not set, and, in fact, is ever-changing. But most importantly, realize that things may not work out the way you want them to, and if they don't, oh well -- that's down the road, and out of your control until you get there. Trust me, living life on your own terms, taking things as they come day by day is a lot less crazy and hectic than planning for every little eventual detail.

On that note, I'm going to attempt to sleep for a few hours before I start my day at 5AM. Hopefully this post, however, helps you deal with your life a little better than you did before you read it.

Smoke and Fire

Spring semester: day five

There are few things I appreciate more than having Mondays and Fridays off, especially in the winter. When it's nice outside I don't really appreciate it as much, but when it's cold/windy/rainy (as it was for most of the day yesterday) I really do. I haven't driven in torrential rains or snow for a while, but let me tell you (in case you don't do it yourself very often) it's not exactly the most pleasant experience in the world. Especially in a car which needs new tires.

No, I've not yet replaced the tires. It's on my to-do list, though, along with the oil change. I have to do some "shopping around" first though, especially for tire prices. It's not going to be cheap; as I've mentioned numerous times here in the blog, the Monte Carlo is a land boat. It's a fast land boat, but it's huge, and likewise it has huge tires and rims. It also may still have the same tires on it from the factory when it rolled off the assembly line sixteen years ago, which isn't a good thing for a car that's driven 150 miles every week as we head into Kansas winter.

I've been putting the gas for it on my Amazon credit card, as gas purchases award me extra rewards points for use on the site, and it prevents me from having to pay for gas little by little every week. Because of this, however, I can't put new tires on said card until I pay it off at the beginning of next month. And this time, now that I have some money again, it will be paid off completely. It's really all I've used the card for since my loan money dropped. It took over 11 gallons of gas yesterday, and tends to be averaging about 15-18 miles per gallon. This gives me between 165 and 198 miles before I have to fill it again, though I always fill it up around the 150-155 mile mark (I use the trip meter; it's incredibly useful for these calculations).

The weekend was spent much as expected -- taking care of schoolwork and running errands. I've had three more students join my classes in as many days, one of whom dropped last semester and is retaking it with me (which is good, because he knows the drill already at this point). There are still a few things I have to do today before I go back in and teach tomorrow, but the majority of my work is done and has been for a day or two.

I found out from Rae last night (and then shortly thereafter via email from other editors) that the department journal's launch party -- a journal for which I am one of the five big editors -- was Saturday night from 6-8. Of course, I found this out at approximately 5:40PM that night, when I was in the middle of baking my second of four batches of cookies for poetry workshop tomorrow afternoon. I wouldn't have known at all had I not texted Rae to tell her I'd found a present for her and the other two lovely ladies in her office while I was out shopping, and she replied asking me if I were going to be there.

Well, I'm sure I would've found out eventually, but I wasn't around my computer to check my email until later. I had some sort of vague idea about the release party going on, I just didn't know/remember exactly when it was. Our first staff meeting of the semester is on Thursday afternoon, which means I'll be sticking around a few extra hours to attend it. While I happily do all the work I need to do as an editor, it's equally important to at least attempt to keep up appearances within the journal's hierarchy as well.

As I said before, my mind's been pretty scattered recently, running in a million different directions and trying to figure out when/how I can get everything done without forgetting anything. There's really not a ton to do, but my mind tricks me into trying to take care of all of it at once, at least for the moment. I'm not completely sure my brain is completely wired into the spring semester yet; it may need another week or two to really fall into the groove of it.

Tonight, I decided to take care of that by baking the last two batches of cookies for my fellow students in poetry workshop. I'm in charge of the treats this week, and my standby has always been 2-liter sodas and Little Debbies/pretzels/chips, etc. I just wanted to get out of that groove this time around, so I decided to do something different. When I went back to the discount grocery store this weekend to load up on more Powerbars for my desk drawer at work, I saw all sorts of cookie mixes and decided to do that instead -- it would also let me use the oven for some actual baking again, something I've barely done since the former girlfriend and I broke up. So, I made the first two batches (oatmeal and oatmeal chocolate chunk) on Saturday night, and finished it up with two batches of peanut butter cookies tonight.

However, it would not be a Brandon baking experience without problems.

Before I go onward, I want to mention that the oven here in the house has had a history of going on the fritz from time to time. It's not an old oven, but it's not exactly new either. I'd say it's probably about ten to fifteen years old, and is in relatively good condition...but occasionally it will, well, overheat. I'm not sure how to describe it other than that, but what it does is get way hotter than the set temperature is supposed to be, and ends up burning whatever's inside it within the timeframe of a few minutes. It's done this two or three times in the three years I've lived here, which is a pretty good track record for an oven that sees daily use (or at least the stovetop does, anyway).

So, tonight, I'm halfway through my first batch of peanut butter cookies and am mixing up the second when, after being in the oven for only five minutes of the fifteen required to bake the cookies, I smell smoke. Strongly. The oven beeps at me and flashes some sort of error code on the LCD screen (which, upon researching later, I found just means that the oven's temperature is too high), and my peanut butter cookies are glowing -- they're literally seconds from bursting into flame inside the oven.

I throw open the door, the kitchen fills with the smoke of burnt cookies, cookies that should have had ten more minutes of baking time, and I empty the cookie sheet into the sink, running cold water over them to put out the fire. WTF, oven? WTF.

I turned the oven off, opened the window and turned on the fans, and vented the smoke out. After waiting about fifteen minutes for it to cool down, I baked another pan of cookies and the same thing happened again.

Okay, seriously, I thought, it's 11:30 at night, I'm tired, I don't want to have to reset the fucking circuit breaker for the entire kitchen just to bake a pan of cookies.

I've found that when this happens, turning off the kitchen breaker and then turning it back on -- giving the oven a "hard reset," so to speak -- usually fixes the problem.

Instead, I waited another half hour to let the oven cool down completely, door open, and then cautiously baked another pan of cookies, watching it the whole time. It worked fine. I was able to finish my batches of cookies, safely seal them away inside a big pot with lid to take to school tomorrow, and turned off the damned thing.

I swear.

Anyway, at least the cookies are baked, so that's another one of those errands taken care of.

In the morning, I must get up at a decent hour and go to Walmart for some groceries, coffee, and cigarettes. I didn't go yesterday because I figured a Monday morning or early afternoon would be one of the quietest weekday times to do shopping at Walmart, really. If I weren't so exhausted (and if I didn't have to go to bed soon to stay on a relatively normal sleeping schedule) I would go now, in the overnight hours, as I like to do. Really, though, I'd rather just sleep.