Tumults

Fall semester: day fifty-eight


It's been a really rough past few days, though you wouldn't know if you talked to me. When under large amounts of stress and anxiety, I tend to keep walls up. Thick walls, walls built to keep everyone and everything out. And, additionally, my mind doesn't necessarily work as well as it should. Anxiety and stress begets depression and sleeplessness, and occasionally makes me sick -- it batters down my immune system, as well. Running headlong into Hell Month, as I tend to call November (as well as April, in the Spring semester), this is bad. I have way too much to do, and not nearly enough time to get it all finished. Hence why I'm awake at 3:20 AM on a Wednesday morning working on no less than three different things for my classes.


This week started out with Daisy and I having problems. Mind you, Daisy and I have a wonderful relationship. It's the only relationship I've ever been in -- in my entire life -- where there hasn't been any conflict, there haven't been any real "fights" (disagreements, yes; irritations on both sides, yes; squabbles, yes, but no real fights), and it's the most stable relationship I've ever had. We love each other, we know we love each other, and that's all we need. We've always had our differences, both interest-wise and ethically (read: she's not nerdy in the least, and very staunchly vegan), but these haven't really been huge concerns. We compromise, we realize that each of us is our own person, etc.


I say this now because for about twelve hours between Sunday and Monday, we were broken up. Again.


If it feels like we've been through this twice before, we have. To recap, Daisy and I were officially together for a short time in June. Then again in July, for about the same amount of time. After a few months of trying to figure one another out and mostly succeeding, we got together officially again in the beginning of October and have stayed together since.

You may think that with this rollercoaster of on-again, off-again status, that the statement above about us being stable is laughable. In reality, we needed those times. We needed those back-and-forth scenarios, the on-and-off, to help stabilize us. To let us sort ourselves out. To realize that yes, we're both a little wrecked when it comes to our emotional states sometimes, and that's okay.

I am under a lot of stress and anxiety right now, as I mentioned before. I can keep a cool exterior, and can be relatively laid-back in my day-to-day life, but underneath everything is bubbling. Underneath, everything is ready to boil over. I've got way too many proverbial balls in the air, and way too many things to take care of between now and finals week -- grading two more sets of papers, creating a final exam, scheduling and attending a "reader's theater" for my Playwriting class, giving a presentation in Surrealism, writing a paper for Surrealism, see a play this weekend and write a paper on it, rewriting my own play for Playwriting (which must be done by Monday, and is part of what I'm doing tonight), registering for spring classes, having conferences with my students, and in there somewhere trying to get enough sleep, take care of the household chores/bills/shopping, and trying to spend enough time with Daisy. It's all exhausting, both mentally and physically. I can barely keep up as it is, and every day something else seems to be added to the list of shit I absolutely have to do and can't get out of. And my friends wonder why I never go out with them after class on any given night of the week. I have way, way too much to do.

Daisy, meanwhile, is losing her job. Her last day of work is Saturday. She hasn't been able to find a replacement job as of yet, which severely stresses her out (despite the fact that she tells me she doesn't let stress get to her) and to top all of that off, this afternoon she had to get two new tires put on her car at the cost of about $220 or so, further carving into her finances. Daisy lives with her parents, so she will still have a place to live, but the entire situation is less than helpful, and I know it bothers her more than she lets on. It must.

Because of all of these things, neither of us are in the greatest of mental states at this point. Again, when I'm anxious, I get depressed, and when I get depressed I not only look for things to "go wrong," but I expect them to -- sometimes very vocally. The entire discussion that led to our twelve-hour breakup was basically precipitated by me saying something along the lines of "Don't worry, I'll start to drive you crazy eventually, and sooner or later you'll end up hating me. Everyone else I've ever been with has."

Note: for the most part, this is true. I've been in four serious relationships over the course of my life. Of those four women, Daisy included, two of them now despise me. So it's a decent average, at least. 50/50-ish.

Anyway. That set off a chain reaction of a discussion where all of my fears, apprehensions, and irritations about my relationship with Daisy played out in real-time.

I love you. You're perfect. You're great, she told me.

But really, I'm not. As much as I love Daisy, having her -- or anyone else -- tell me I'm perfect for any reason troubles me. A lot. I know what she means. I know it's a compliment, I know it means she's very happy and content with us. Emotionally invested, in love, everything's good. And I feel the same way about her. But I do have my flaws. I have many, many flaws. I have flaws that she overlooks, that she ignores because she loves me. I know this. Everyone has flaws they overlook in their partner. And I am my own worst critic -- not just when it comes to my writing, but myself as a person. While I do have high self-esteem and a bit of an ego (anyone who knows me well could tell you that), I am also just as critical of my faults. I don't do anything to change said faults, mind you, but I am indeed critical of them. Self-loathing, I suppose you could say. With a dash of "eh, fuck it" thrown into the mix as well, for good measure. And with Daisy, everything has been going so well -- we've been so happy together, so content -- that I subconsciously start looking for cracks at the seams, start looking for signs that everything is too good to be true.

That's where the problems started this weekend, but it goes back much further than that.

I've been hurt a lot, folks. Emotionally and spiritually. Taking a quick browse through my blog posts here over the course of the past year or so will tell you that 2012 has not been the best year on record, and most of 2011 was fucking terrible as well. The hits, as it seems, just keep coming -- in the past six months alone, I've lost one girlfriend, lost my best friend and "sister," ran myself almost completely out of money, had to sell a ton of my possessions (including my beautiful Dean guitar) and get a loan from my parents to stay afloat, and later had to spend $1400 on car repairs and tires just to keep the Monte Carlo on the road. I've been bleeding money like water through a sieve, my last year of graduate school has been less than pleasant so far (for the most part, anyway), and I have no clue where I'm going to be six months from now when I graduate, something that is also incredibly scary to me.

And, somehow, in the midst of this turmoil, I meet Daisy. And we hit it off. And we fall in love, and it's really good. Something inside me was waiting, preparing for the other proverbial shoe to drop, since my luck generally betrays me at some point once I begin to get happy and comfortable in life. Something inside me told me wait for it, Brandon; something bad will happen, something will sour. You're rarely wrong.

So, under stress, I subconsciously started looking for cracks, for warning signs, for red flags. Things which would give me that "a-ha!" moment that would prove to me that somehow, my cynicism was right. When I didn't find any outright, my mind started creating them. She's not nerdy enough. She doesn't share any real interests with me. Her taste in music is frightening. She doesn't get and/or appreciate my sense of humor enough. We don't share the same ethical and health concerns, insomuch that I smoke and am not vegan like she is. Mind you, none of these have been problems in the past -- if anything, they've been minor irritations that I've noted and have mostly gotten over, if not completely, or they're things that we've addressed in compromises and understandings long ago. Yet some part of me wouldn't let it go, some part of my wounded, fatigued and beat down mind told me that these things are important, they're things which will eat at you over and over for the rest of your life -- when, really, they won't. At all. If I had big concerns, I would've voiced them long ago. But I don't. Daisy is wonderful. It's those little things that drove me nuts, the things that weren't even worth getting worked up about. But, in my mental state then, they seemed much larger than they actually are.

Regardless, all of this came to a head on Sunday night. All of my apprehensions, all of my issues exploded forth.

This, of course, was my fault. On Monday morning, with a clearer mind, I apologized, told her I loved her and that I was sorry, and asked for her forgiveness, asked that we let the events of the night before be tossed out the window and be forgotten about. She understood. Of course she did; she's Daisy. She loves me. She doesn't want to lose me any more than I ever want to lose her, no matter what. We were fine again. We were okay again. And I learned a valuable lesson about letting my ragged mind, on little sleep, dictate my thoughts, actions, and impulses. No, I'm not the best man I can be, not for myself or for anyone else -- including Daisy -- but I am learning, slowly, that not everyone is out to get me, and that there are sometimes things or people that are good for me, that sometimes there aren't bad things to be found.

Daisy loves me unconditionally. She doesn't care about the things we don't agree on, doesn't care about my little quirks or my nerdiness, my taste in humor or music, any of it. She loves me for who I am, all of that stuff included. This is unique for me. It's scary for me. Nobody else ever has. There's always been caveats, things not to say, not to talk about, not to ask, not to do. Every other relationship I've ever been in has had set rules. With Daisy? All that matters is that we love each other. Everything else is unimportant. Everything else. And I'm finally realizing that now.

She later asked me, as per a comment one of her friends made, if I'm frightened that Daisy is "the one."

"Yes," I immediately replied. I didn't even have to think about it. Yes, Daisy may be "the one," even though I don't necessarily believe in "the one," and yes, that thought does scare me on some level.

Regardless, we're fine now, and still very content and happy. She's coming in next weekend to see our "reader's theater" performance for Playwriting, which will be on the night of the 16th. The next day, Rae and Jay are planning to come up here to Newton so that we can go out to dinner and go to the discount grocery store here in town that I've brought up numerous times. She wanted to come down this weekend (I wanted her to come see the play all of us have to see and write a paper on, and we're going to the Saturday show) but she can't, as it's her last day of work.

When I leave the house in about 45 minutes, I have a long day ahead of me, as well. I have to grade about five or six papers this morning (the remnants of them, people who turned them in after I'd already gone home from campus on Thursday) as well as do some other around-the-office stuff. It's a Wednesday, so of course I am stuck on campus for fifteen hours. While I did sleep eight hours last night (3PM or so to 11PM or so), I've been awake since, taking care of various tasks like laundry and homework stuff. By the time I get home tonight, I will have been awake for almost 24 hours straight, if not a full 24 hours straight. Despite this, I am fairly energized right now...with only 17 hours or so to stay awake. Am I tired? Yes. I'm always tired. It's part of being a grad student.

But, on the plus side, Obama won the election. This means, as my officemate Zac wrote on Facebook last night, that none of us have to move to Canada for at least four more years. It also means that we won't be under a Mormon Republican dictatorship waging a war against women's vaginas and what they can do with them, amongst many other nightmare scenarios. It also means that hey, we may eventually get universal healthcare in the United States, just like all other first world countries but us already have. While I'm sure the man is fine as a person, I cannot fathom why any intelligent individual would vote him based on his policies. Sorry, Republicans, we need healthcare for everyone. Sorry, Republicans, we need to keep abortion legal, get out of the wars we're in, and make sure separation of church and state is still upheld. Yes, everyone should be allowed to marry whoever they so choose. Yes, we need Medicare, Medicaid, and well-funded public schools -- as well as well-funded and supported programs for the arts and sciences. So, this morning, I am breathing a huge sigh of relief. Let's hope Romney just, well, goes away now.

Anyway, yeah. That's my blog post.

And boom goes the dynamite.

The Shitstorm

Fall semester: day fifty-five

Note: most of this was written on Friday; however, I added to it on Saturday morning before posting it.

This week has been nuts.


This is not something I mean lightly. No, really, it's been crazy and busy on multiple levels. Only now, on Friday (my day off) do I have the time to actually breathe a little and decompress.

I've not been sleeping well. All week -- not counting last night, which I'll get to later -- I've slept maybe twelve hours. Maximum. When I have slept, I've been having nightmares. They're nightmares that I don't really remember a whole lot of most of the time, but they're bad enough to where they'll wake me out of a dead sleep and I'll have trouble falling back asleep again, regardless of how tired I am. And, believe me, when one only sleeps twelve hours over the course of any given week, one is tired.

You folks also know how I get when I'm sleep-deprived; yes, while I am still functional, I also lack a lot of ability to retain things and/or remember where I was or what I was doing at certain times, though I can (and do) still perform my job as a student and English instructor in an exemplary fashion as always. I just don't always remember it. I've found pages upon pages of notes in my class notebooks that I simply do not remember writing, yet it's in my handwriting. Stuff like that.

Daisy went to see my play reading on Monday, as planned, and then left on Tuesday morning when I went in to teach my classes. The reading itself...eh. I wasn't exactly happy with it. Aside from the fact that I know I'll be trimming a lot of excess dialogue from the play, the guy who read the part of the play's antagonist (who is a friend of mine and a cool guy) read said antagonist completely differently than I'd intended him to be read. This is actor's choice, actor's interpretation, of course, and it's not the fault of said reader. I'd written said character as a calculating, educated, evil Sideshow Bob-type, or a Heath Ledger-style Joker-type, and my friend read him as a dumbed-down, drunken hick. This was quite different, as you can see and/or guess, from my original intentions.

As an aside, I really don't like the concept of "actor's choice." I've been told to cut out a lot of my adverbs from my stage directions, because how an actor reads a line is supposed to be "actor's choice." No, sorry. The actor is there to perform the part as it is written. That's their fucking job. I've been told to remove directions like "maniacally" or "wild-eyed" from my stage directions for the actors. No, again, sorry. There's a difference between "laughing" and "laughing maniacally." There's a difference between "staring" and "staring wild-eyed" or "staring incredulously." Those directions are in there because they are integral to that character's demeanor in that particular scene. It's not a choice. It's mandatory. I don't give a fuck about an actor's "interpretation" of a character; that's not their job. Their job is to perform said character the way said character is written. This is also why I'm a very large proponent of "writer-director" or "writer-actor" plays and films. Sometimes nobody else can get it right but you.

Still, as I said, I don't fault my friend who read said antagonist's part. As I will be heavily revising some sections of the play anyhow, I will make the character's demeanor more evident. The shame in this is that nobody but my professor will get to read the play or hear it performed ever again, because I seriously doubt that it will ever be produced anywhere. I'm also the sort of guy who won't ever try to get it produced somewhere unless I could direct it myself, not only because I'm picky about the above things but because there's no money in it. I'm no playwright -- I'm a guy who needs to be able to support himself in six months after graduation in any way possible.

So there's that. I don't have to turn in the revision/final draft of the play until a week after I get my professor's commentary back on it, so I've got a little time, at least. On Wednesday, said professor didn't even show up to class -- she told one of her most dependable students that her son had to be rushed to the hospital for some reason, and said student led the class through the reading of the next play on the docket. This means at the earliest I'll have to turn in the final version a week from Monday, and possibly later than that -- Jay hasn't even gotten his play back yet, and it's been almost two weeks since he read it.

As for the visit with Daisy, it went really well. I cooked dinner for us both nights, and she watched almost a full season of Community while she was here. When she went home on Tuesday, I was sad to see her go -- as I always am when she leaves.

That's my profile picture on Facebook right now, by the way.

On Twitter, however, I still have this photo up, which was taken on Wednesday:

This should tell you, in a nutshell, what Halloween was like for me. I wore this all day on campus, despite the fact that I was there for fifteen hours, had office hours and Writing Center to do in the middle of that, and went to two classes as well as a meeting with my advisor while dressed like Superman.

Life, my friends, does not give one many opportunities -- as a grown man, anyway -- to dress up like Superman in public without being looked upon as a complete and total weirdo. When those opportunities come along, seize them.

No, I did not wear the bottom half of the costume; I had normal black pants on. My nerdiness only goes so far, and it does not go far enough to wear blue tights with bright red underwear outside my pants all day long.

As an aside, I am all, ahem, advised now for my final semester of graduate school. In the spring, I will not have to take any real classes at all -- I will simply teach and will sign up for the "visiting writer," which won't count towards my degree or anything like that, but will keep me at full-time status so that I do not have to start paying back my student loans before I graduate. If I slip below full-time status (six hours per semester as a graduate student), that "pay us back now" thing goes into effect. As that would be bad, I am instead paying to take an extra class I don't "need" in order to have a semester that will allow me to not want to slit my wrists because I have no money.

This past week I also received the fateful news that the department has decided to discontinue the Engineering English 101/102 sections for the foreseeable future for a multitude of reasons, but none of which have anything to do with us as instructors/GTAs or with the English department itself. Those of us who have been teaching these sections, with the exception of one of our new GTAs who first started teaching them this semester, have been given the option to teach them for one more semester in the spring if we wish. This option has been extended to us simply because it will mark a full two years of us teaching these classes, and because both myself and the 101 version's primary instructor graduate in the spring (and our former Bosslady didn't want to force us into another class to teach for our last semester as GTAs if we didn't want to; it would create much undue stress).

As I've mentioned before, I am in a unique position within the department; not only am I the only instructor who teaches the class I teach -- Engineering English 102 -- but I am currently the only GTA who doesn't really have to report to anyone within the department on anything regarding my teaching. In the past eighteen months of teaching my class, I've been able to refine and revise my lesson plans a little bit more by the semester, and have now been able to completely streamline everything. This means that next semester will be damn near perfect in regards to timing and/or teaching...and then the class will be discontinued or otherwise no longer offered for the foreseeable future. It also means that of all the GTAs in the department, I have the most autonomy to teach my class however I see fit, to move around due dates and conference times, to schedule out-of-class days (like the "Library Day" I have scheduled for Tuesday) and to generally feel like a real professor in charge of everything he does. This is very, very unique within our department. I'm basically my own boss, and the department chair (and my former Bosslady, his wife) both adore me and what I've done for the Engineering English program, so they trust me in my classroom decisions and lessons. While I don't deviate at all, really, from the original lesson plans I was given eighteen months ago, it is very comforting to know that I'm respected and trusted -- and I've never used that respect and trust as a gambling chip for anything; I wouldn't anyway, and truly, there's nothing about that class or about my status within the department I would change.

Except for one tiny, little thing.

As you know, final exams are coming up soon. I am the only one, as mentioned, who teaches the 102 version of the Engineering English class; there are only two sections of it offered, and I helm them both. This is how it's been ever since I took over those sections from my former Bosslady, who designed those sections and whose lesson plans and final exam essay prompts I follow (and, at times, help create). This creates a problem when final exams occur. You see, all of the other sections of 102 are normal sections of 102. This means that their curriculum and final exam prompts are designed by the regular 102 director, a lady who absolutely loves me and has faith in me as an instructor, but does not control my curriculum. The normal 102 curriculum is completely different than mine. The same structure exists between the two classes -- 1,000 total available points, three large essays and a proposal/annotated bibliography assignment, and a final exam -- but everything else is different. I use different books, I have a different schedule for conferences and outside-of-class days and workshops, etc. The problem is created when I'm assigned a grading partner for the final exams. My final exam essay prompts are drastically different than the normal 102 prompts, and are generally quotes taken from the authors we've read in the class -- though not usually from the articles/books we've read. Regardless, this means that my grading partner I'm assigned is not attuned to the curriculum, and while I may think a student has written a wonderful essay on a prompt, said partner may not be able to comprehend the technical stuff in it and will give it a substantially lower score. Now, following the rules, I would have to take the average of the two scores and would end up giving the student a substantially lower grade than I feel they deserve, which can (at times) make or break their grade in the class if they're on the cusp of a lower or higher letter grade.

I don't like this at all. Aside from the fact that I tend to get paired up with the people who work on bizarre schedules or want to piddledick around and take a week after finals end to grade their partner's essays, this has always been the biggest problem when it comes to grading partners. I was paired up with my officemate Zac for two semesters, and that was fine. He's a nerd and a hard-ass grader, so we could whip through finals like crazy and be done quite quickly -- usually the afternoon that the exam was given most of the time. That has not been the case for the past year or so. So, I did what any rational person who teaches the only class of his sort would do in this situation:

I requested that I grade my own final exams this year.

This is not out of the realm of possiblity; I graded my own students' finals over the summer without a grading partner, as I had the only ten-week 102 course and my curriculum was slightly different because of that. With my normal courses the curriculum is drastically different. So, we'll see what happens. I've been told that the matter will be discussed with the departmental administration, which is only a good thing.


In other news, Sandy, the "superstorm" or "Frankenstorm" or whatever the hell they're calling it royally fucked West Virginia, where all my friends and family are. After being concerned with not hearing from my parents, I called them on Wednesday morning and found that they'd been without power since Monday night. The power is still off there, with an estimated restoration time anytime between now and next week at some point. The damage to lines was so extensive that the county my parents live in (according to the local news channel's website back home) has the most power outages of anywhere in the upper half of the state. When I talked to my parents on Wednesday morning, it had been snowing steadily since Monday night without stopping. At that point, my mother told me that they had about ten inches or more on the ground, but wasn't sure since it's not like they were going to venture out into the tundra any more than they had to.

Let's back this up, shall we? It was October, and my home state (and hometown) got a snowstorm that has crippled them, has dumped feet of snow in places, and has knocked out power badly enough to where my parents may not get it back for well over a week....

...and today is November 2nd, and in Kansas it's 81 degrees.

That's not a joke. 81. Eighty-one. As I just told Zedral, I'm about to go shopping in a tie-dye t-shirt and shorts. In NOVEMBER.

Yep. And some people say "climate change" is bullshit. Suuuuure it is.

[UPDATE] As of Saturday morning, the power companies still don't know when all power will be restored, and it could possibly take as long as the end of this coming week.

Ahem. Anyway.

I have an interesting few weeks ahead of me, filled with a lot of stress and work. The stress is already getting to me and it's making me morose and cranky -- Daisy and I had our first "big" fight last night. I say first because while we squabbled while we weren't officially "together," we haven't really had any disagreements since we have been. However, last night I wasn't in the best of moods, and that mood didn't really improve much before bed. We had an argument over Facebook chat, something I hate in general (I do not like conflict in any form; I grew up with too much of it in my life) and we didn't sort it out until this morning. We're fine now, but already I have a headache today, and I must've slept weirdly on my shoulders and neck, because both are very stiff and achy.

I will spend most of my weekend grading papers; I have about 45 to go through, roughly. In addition to that, I have an entire book of poetry to read between today and Wednesday. Luckily, I will not have to hand my students' papers back to them until Thursday, so what I do not finish this weekend, I can finish during my office hours on Wednesday. Still, I'd like to get as much of that stuff done as possible, as I will not have time to do a lot next weekend -- I have to venture back down to campus yet again on a weekend in order to see the second play for my Playwriting class, some war drama that was written by a Flat State University former student, or something. Hopefully it'll be fairly painless, and all of us grad students in the class can pick a night to do it together just like we did for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It starts on Wednesday, so I may just stick around next Thursday evening and go see it then before I come home. I'm not sure yet.

Next weekend, of course, things ramp up a lot more than they have previously. Rushing headlong into the month of November means that my workload doubles, if not triples, from now until the end of the semester. Next weekend I will not only have to go see the play, but I'll have a stack of Proposal/Annotated Bibliography papers to grade, I'll more than likely be revising my own play, and I will be preparing for a presentation I have to give on poets Ben Lerner and...some other woman I've never heard of (but whose book I ordered from Amazon last night) for my Surrealism class. Afterwards, I'll also have to be preparing for/researching for a rather large paper in that class, which will be due at the end of the semester, and will also have to see about what's going on for the Playwriting "reader's theater" and I'll be going through my students' workshop copies for paper 3 and AHHHHHHHHHH.

Yeah. November isn't pleasant. It looks deceptively short and un-busy, but it's anything but that. What do I have to look forward to? Well, a week off for Thanksgiving, really, during which I will more than likely be working on that massive paper for Surrealism. With the way things are looking, I really don't know if I can go up to Daisy's parents' place in Omaha for Thanksgiving, as much as I'd like to. This semester has turned into a nightmare much like last fall was, except last fall was a nightmare all the way through. This fall has become a nightmare for the month of November, and it's really hard right now to see that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel through all the work I must take care of. I've been so busy and sleep-deprived that I haven't even had the time, or the chance, to begin looking for jobs after I graduate in May, or to look at publishing houses or the like to submit my manuscript to.

I have finalized my reading list for comps, and have submitted it to my thesis director as well as the director of the writing program, who must have a copy of it on file. I have also given written notice that I intend to take my comprehensive exam in Spring, which was also required of me.

Upon looking over my reading list last week, my thesis director told me -- hemming and hawwing the entire time -- said "Hm, I'm seeing something that may be a bit of an issue here. Most of these contemporary poets you've picked, and the ones in the extra section as well...most of them have only published a few books or collections. Some of them only have one or two."

"Yes," I said, completely serious. "...that's the point of picking them."

I like ultra-contemporary work. I like poets who are up-and-coming, who don't necessarily follow the rules or write about dull, trite subject matter that's been covered in every conceivable way before -- or, if they do, they write about it in a different way I've not seen. Most of all, I hate surrealist poets or poets who use the "deep image" all the time. I like to be able to read a poem, understand it, and appreciate it -- it's the kind of writing I myself do. I love narrative poetry. I love lyric poetry, if it's working. I like poetry that has a point, and isn't just a jumble of words on a page that must be decrypted. I'm not a Windtalker; to me, poetry that must be deciphered before it can even be comprehensible is fucking pointless. I like poetry that makes fucking sense. And most contemporary poets writing today, the ones whom I like? They make sense. They don't go veering off the rails into some jumbled abstract universe.

What I really wanted to say to him, though, was something along the lines of "Yes, some of them only have one or two books/collections. That means there's less for both of us to read, and your comps questions on said authors can be specific to a poem or collection instead of on someone who has a body of work of 30 or 40 books. Why would you want to make yourself work any harder than you have to, especially when you hate most of these poets?"

The other reason I picked many of the authors I did is specifically because their works appeal greatly to me, but not necessarily to him. As he's writing the questions, if he must write a question on any of those poets, it will more than likely be a very general question which can be answered in any number of ways, all of them quite valid, because those poets' works (as he's said multiple times about MY OWN works), "do nothing for him." That means that subconsciously, he'll be looking more for an interpretation and explication than anything else.

I'm not stupid; I'm meticulous in my plotting and planning. I've planned this from the beginning like a comic book supervillain mastermind. Less to read means a tighter focus. A tighter focus means specific questions on smaller bodies of work. Works that he doesn't necessarily engage with, but I do, means those questions will be more generalized in nature and therefore easier to expound upon. Everything is planned; everything I do when it comes to my thesis and reading list has been constructed with a specific goal in mind: pass your comps quickly and efficiently, graduate, and then get the fuck out of Kansas.

Through it all, I've been telling myself just breathe, Brandon, breathe. I only have another month of this until my spring semester, in which I graduate, will be filled with adequate sleep most of the time, reading poetry, writing revisions of my poetry, and teaching. And nothing else. Because I don't have any classes to take, and "Visiting Writer" barely counts as a class. As mentioned before, it doesn't count towards my plan of study, either -- it's something I'm taking simply because I want to and because I need to stay full-time.

But for this next month? Holy hell.

Business!

I can take solace in the fact that the semester is entering its final curve, so to speak; a month from now, Thanksgiving will have passed and I will be entering my final week-and-a-half of teaching for the semester. I spent a fair amount of time this morning on revising my students' final timeline, as I'd originally had a few of the dates wrong. The last day I teach will be December 4, and in the interim between then and finals week I will be grading and finishing up my own work for the semester -- that couldn't come soon enough, really.

This weekend has been rather strange. Friday, I took care of the business stuff. I went shopping, and then spent the majority of my afternoon doing laundry, dishes, and grading. I had five or six of my students' rewrites to grade, and a few more of their workshop copies to go through before Tuesday. Yesterday, I completed (in its entirety) my take-home "midterm exam" for my Surrealism class, typing it up so that I could get it all done and call it done. I definitely needed to set aside time for it. It took many hours and was not pleasant. It ended up being six full pages. Single-spaced.

Then Daisy comes down.

Well, she's not here yet. She'll be here in forty minutes or so.

You see, folks, I got an idea while I was writing my last post here a few nights ago. On Monday (read: tomorrow) in my Playwriting class, I will be presenting my play for the entire time we're in there. It is my big day, so to speak. My entire play gets read in the class from start to finish, first page to last. It will obviously have some edits and the like between the reading and the final copy, but to me it's a huge deal. I like being able to have a sort of captive audience because otherwise nobody will listen to anything I have to say (as an aside, this is also part of why I like being a teacher so much). The class seems to like the scenes of mine that they've read so far, and I really can't wait to present tomorrow.

However, as I mentioned before, we don't know when or where the "reader's theater" thing is going to be yet, or how it's going to be conducted. Our professor wants to do it on a weeknight, but that doesn't work for the vast majority of us in the class, including all of us graduate students. It also really doesn't work for Daisy to come down and see it unless it's in the first half of the week, since she works Thu/Fri/Sat, from morning until night. Based on that, I came up with an idea.

"Hey, love, just a thought," I said, "but since you may not be able to come down for the reader's theater thing when we do it, would you like to come down this weekend and come to class with me on Monday to see my full play reading?"

She told me she would love to, and she left this afternoon to come down here. She'll come to class with me tomorrow for the play reading, will get to meet all of my friends and the like, and will then head home on Tuesday morning when I leave the house to go teach my classes. This will be the longest she's stayed down here since we've been together, which is nice. We so rarely get any real quality time together; once every two or three weeks is too little. To prepare, apparently she's bringing a ton of groceries and other stuff (even though I very seriously told her not to; she has no spare money). I know this because she tweeted me earlier and told me that she will need help bringing things into the house. Oy, love. Oy. 

I do appreciate it, of course; she loves "taking care" of me, bringing me new things, bringing food and the like. Being vegan, she's probably bringing a bunch of stuff for her to eat that we can share, and then leave here when she goes home. This is customary for Daisy; last time she brought me lemon bars, pie, marshmallows, and other stuff to cook with, and then we went out and got more groceries to cook/eat later.

On that note, I must go. I have to brush my teeth and tidy up around the house a little before she arrives shortly. I will, of course, update you folks on how the play reading goes tomorrow, because Daisy meeting all of my friends alone will probably make an interesting story.

Archduke of the Mole People

Fall semester: day forty-eight

I am, for lack of a better term (and to shamelessly use a pun), play'd out.

This past weekend, I did little else except work on my plays. I say "plays" in the plural, because not only did I have to cobble together my own full play, edited together from many scenes I'd written for exercises in the class, but I had -- as previously mentioned -- a collaborative ten-page one-act that we were assigned to write with partners. My partner was my friend Ryan, who I chose because he was absent last Wednesday, but also because of all the people in the class (except for maybe Jay), I had the closest thing to a finished play already and knew I would be able to work with Ryan better compared to us each working with someone in the class we didn't know. I gave him the rundown of what the assignment was via a Facebook message, and went about putting together my own play.

When I was done -- about fifteen hours later, give or take -- I had a play from start to finish. Two acts; three scenes in the first, four in the second. Each scene was anywhere between five pages (for the shorter ones) to sixteen (for the longest ones), averaging around ten or eleven. The entire play, as it does not have overall page numbers from start to finish (it has "act-scene-page" numbers like 1-1-1 and 2-2-2) is probably anywhere from 80 to 100 pages. Printed, it's a little less than an inch thick. I don't think it's a great play by any means, but I do think it's good. Well, sort of good. I can't judge my own work. I'm biased against it because I'm my own harshest critic and always have been on anything I write. But, I will say that I like it, and that I'm happy with how it turned out overall. And it does have some really good dialogue, some good action, and a spectacularly-crazy monologue by the play's villain. Daisy wants to read it, but because it's in sections and not in one document (except for the three printed copies I made for the class), it's not like I can just email it to her -- she'll have to wait until the next time she comes down here to read it all.

The schedule for that class for the rest of the semester is, as they say, screwed up. Big time. My normal schedule is screwed up enough as it is, what with everything I have to do for the rest of the semester, but that class makes it worse -- we will be presenting our plays to the class one by one, every day, basically from now until the end of the semester. Jay goes first, today. I go on Monday, and then the rest of the class follows up. Each of our plays won't take less than an hour to read; Jay's will probably take almost the entire class this afternoon, as it's very long and dialogue-heavy. That's not a bad thing -- it's a hilarious, well-written play -- but that should give you some idea of how long these plays are, and how long it will take to read through them in class. As mentioned, mine's 80-100 pages, roughly, and at a page-a-minute (which is part of why plays are formatted the way they are), it'll take a long time to get through mine. Yes, for the most part, plays in our class are riveting, but that's a lot of time to just sit there and read. And, again, there's the requirement that we see another play before the semester is over and write a paper on it, and figure out what that "reader's theater" thing is going to entail, because our professor hasn't said anything else about that since last week. Time's a-wastin'.

So, anyway, back to the story. I finished my play and printed it out, and waited for Ryan to finish up his half of our collaboration assignment. He did, and emailed it to me, telling me he'd left it at a cliffhanger to go in any direction with. Okay. So I opened it and began to read.

He'd created a scene with two men trapped in a cave in Missouri. One of them was a businessman, and the other was a freshly-hired tour guide, and they were lost. The businessman gets angry, and throws a big rock at the guide. That's where the scene cut off, where he'd left it as a "cliffhanger" for me, so to speak. Hm. Okay.

The premise was simple enough, obviously; I finish the scene, given this bit of limited-storytelling setting. Ryan, however, is a fiction writer; that's why he's in the program. I'm a poet. I'm not a fiction writer, as I've mentioned many times before. After compiling together my play, and writing the last scene of it, revising a bit here and there as I was going along, I was burnt-out. I had no more brilliant ideas, and two guys trapped in a cave didn't give me a lot of metaphorical "wiggle room," so to speak, especially with the limitations of the stage. I can write dialogue well, however; it's the one fiction-like thing I can do. This comes from watching Kevin Smith movies way too many times while growing up and expecting characters in plays and films to speak in monologues. I decided to do the most interesting thing possible -- somehow, for some reason, I had to come up with a way for these characters to have a dialogue about something; I had to give them something to play off of, something to interact with. This usually involves a third character. While I could have done some sort of Beckett-like, Waiting for Godot metaphysical/metaphorical back and forth discussion between the two characters, I also knew that these would be the plays that would be read/presented in that aforementioned "reader's theater" we're supposed to be doing next month, so I was really of the mindset that hey, the audience can't be bored, they must remain interested in what's happening. And let me tell you, I've not only read, but I've seen performances of Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Endgame, and for all of the brilliant writing Beckett did, both plays almost put me to sleep. So it was around that point where I decided that I absolutely had to add a third character -- but how? The characters Ryan wrote were trapped in a cave far underground. Where would a third character come from?

Then, in a stroke of brilliance, it came to me.

Enter Len-Frew, Archduke of the Mole People.

Yep.

The rest, as they say, is history. What was only supposed to be a ten-minute, ten-page play ballooned to twelve pages. We presented it in class on Monday, going first, to uproarious laughter and applause. Mainly because one cannot write a play involving an Archduke of the Mole People without having it be funny on some level due to its absolute absurdity. Plus, I got to use a Transformers reference. The funniest part was its twist ending, though I won't mention that here, of course, in case the play ever gets produced somewhere. Still, it was fun. Everyone had great ten-minute plays; it was probably the most fun we've had in class all semester, really.

And again, today we do Jay's play, in its entirety. I should probably pee first, because his play is hilarious, and I'd rather not pee my pantaloons laughing.

In other news, I have an incredibly long day ahead of me. I leave the house in about two and a half hours, and will not return home until close to 11PM. I slept a little over nine hours -- from around 3:30 PM until almost 1AM -- and must now be awake and active for the vast majority of the next day or so. Daisy is right when she says I "work hard," but the part she neglects is that said hard work is usually limited to one or two days a week at most, usually Wednesdays. Needless to say, though, I can't wait until I get back home tonight to go to bed. I'll be super-exhausted. I'm already tired again now, but coffee is helping -- and it will help throughout the day, really. I tend to drink about three pots of coffee in the office on Wednesdays. They're four-cup pots, but still, it's the principle of the thing.

I have no lack of work to keep me busy, either -- I have a little under twenty workshop copies for my students that I have to go over before tomorrow morning, and a healthy binder full of poetry and the like I must read for tonight's Surrealism class -- in which we will receive a take-home "midterm exam." So there's something else I'll be doing this weekend. I don't expect it to be overly difficult, but I do expect it to be time-consuming. I'm glad I finished my play beforehand, I'll say that. Tomorrow, I'm on campus two extra hours in the afternoon to work the book sale that the grad students are doing, a book sale that I donated a box of books to. I wanted to donate more, but I'm so swamped with other stuff to do right now that I don't have the time to sift through an entire closet full of books. I'll be lucky enough to get my work done and to remember that I have to do the book sale tomorrow afternoon, really. All I really want to do, though, is curl up with Daisy and sleep. Because of the book sale tomorrow and my really late day today, I probably won't get to talk to her again until Friday, because I would imagine that as soon as I get home tomorrow afternoon, I'm going to pass out -- and at that time, she'll still be at work.

Speaking of Daisy, she wrote a really sweet (and quite apt) description of our relationship in her own blog, which I will not link to here for obvious reasons, but I will quote from liberally. For future reference, as I have the codename of "Daisy" for her here in my blog, she has given me the codename of "Kansas" in hers. Behold:

I'm frankly glad it took us four months to work things out.  I feel like during that time period we worked on figuring out the other person, how to communicate with each other, and how to compromise.  We didn't just jump into anything, we spent hours, days figuring it out.  We learned what was important to the other and we learned how to respect each other.  We've officially been "together" less than a month and to some we might seem too serious, too soon.  But, as Kansas has said, we were together long before we ever made it official. 

This is true. We were, and I made that point to her in probably August or so. We never told ourselves we were together, of course -- in fact, I think both of us avoided bringing up the subject as much as possible -- but yes, it was there, underlying everything else.

I remember looking at him and thinking I didn't want to be without him, but that I wasn't ready to commit either.  Kansas is an I-want-this-to-last-the-rest-of-my-life type of gent.

Sort of, yes. I'll give her that.

 I knew if I consented to a label again with him that would come with planning.  Kansas is a planner.  It's beyond sweet-- to have someone say you're important to them and they want to include you in their plans, that they want to make plans with you, but, it also can be terrifying.  I didn't want to hurt him.  I didn't want to label us and then change my mind.

Unlabeled with him was safe because unlabeled meant no planning.  Kansas, who is a label guy, was surprisingly patient with this.  He respected the fact that I said no when he wanted a label.  He broke his rules, his I-don't-do-causal, and was respectful of the fact that I needed things to be relaxed.

I wouldn't necessarily say that I'm a "label guy," but I will elaborate on this and say that I like knowing exactly where I stand -- in this case, if something was going to come out of "us" or not. As I've written here before, it drove me up the wall not being able to answer that question one way or another.

Now, I'm perfectly okay with things being labeled.  I'm okay with planning.  Kansas is stressed about being done with his master's next semester and I think, "It's all going to be okay.  We'll figure it out together.  I'll be there with you."  I want more than ever to find a better job and work full time so I can save money and move out of my parents.  Kansas is open to moving to Omaha and I'd love to just say, "Don't worry, just move here and I'll take care of you while you look for work."

I am, of course, open to that opportunity. However, with that thought comes a lot (and I mean A LOT) of apprehension. I've done that before; it's how I got out here in the midwest in the first place -- I moved to a new city, a new state, for my ex. That's how I eventually ended up in Kansas, that's how I ended up in Newton, and that's how I ended up back in grad school just to have something to do which would guarantee me a job for three years and another degree. I also remember how much I struggled and floundered to find an apartment for about three months when I moved out here in 2006, how horrible that apartment was, and how I lived in a hotel up until I found it. It was not pleasant, and it is definitely not an experience I can repeat now that I have the cats. I simply cannot go anywhere else until I have secured a job and a home in said place. Period. I refuse to do so. If that means I have to end up staying here longer than I originally intended and working at Walmart or Arby's to pay the bills after I graduate while I search for a job and a place somewhere else, that's what it means. But I'm not just going to up and move again without those two things in place.

And, of course, that whole "move here and I'll take care of you" thing always goes badly. I'll be 30 when I graduate. Daisy is 24. Yes, she's very intelligent, and yes, she's very skilled in her line of work -- but I would never, ever ask her to support me. In any way. I am a man; I am a responsible man who takes care of his own life and his own business except when absolutely impossible. And it takes a lot for "absolutely impossible" to occur. She is a wonderful woman, and I do love her dearly, but I could and would never ask her to "take care of me" like I'm a child. I should be taking care of her; I'll be the one with a higher degree, more experience, and six years on her. Yes, she has a good job now; yes, she has a much, much nicer car than I do. But things like that are fleeting, and it is not her responsibility to mother me or to make sure I'm okay; that's my job. If I can't do it, then that's on me.

I always just assumed I'd end up alone.  As social as I am, I have a very introverted temperament.  I've tended to hold men at a distance, in my own way.  I was okay with the idea of being alone.  But now, I'm also okay with the idea of being with Kansas.

I love that boy.

Lots of really interesting, heady stuff to be going through my mind at 4:50 AM, hm? I just know that I have seventeen hours ahead of me before I can come back home and get a night's worth of sleep again. Luckily, however, I have little to do over the weekend except for that take-home exam for my Surrealism class -- as mentioned, my students will be in the middle of workshops, so I won't have any class prep for them. I will, however, have five or six of their rewrites to grade. And, as I'll be presenting my play on Monday and have already printed/copied it, I'll be able to relax somewhat. It's nearing the end of the month, all of my bills have been paid except for the rent, and I get paid on Friday so I can do that over the weekend as well.

More than anything else, I just want the semester to hurry up and end. I know that November will be hectic, but I also know that it will go really fast. As an aside, Daisy's father has insisted -- not just suggested, but insisted -- that she come down here and get me for Thanksgiving, because he doesn't think I should risk driving the Monte Carlo up there and back with all the problems it's had. While the car is relatively okay now, he's probably right to a certain extent; Daisy's car, on the other hand, is only three years old and looks like it rolled off the assembly line yesterday. It still has that new car smell inside it. I know this because I've been in it a few times.

I did find the concept of the whole idea amusing and very nice of her father, actually. I still don't know, of course, what I'll have to do over Thanksgiving week, if I'll be able to leave town at all -- depending on how much work I have to do, I may be spending the holiday here in front of a stack of papers, or in front of my computer grading or writing. Sometime in there is the other play I have to see and the "reader's theater" we have to do, as well, so I can't even plan that far ahead yet. That's part of working in academia -- one can only really plan about a week or two in advance at the very most. I can plan my own work for my students, but I can't plan what my own professors will have me do. As you may recall, last fall during Thanksgiving week, I was writing two very long papers and compiling a portfolio for my poetry workshop.

The last week of November is the next workshop week for my students, and then their papers come due and the semester is over, finals week happens, and we're gone until January. Like I said, it all seems so far off, but it goes so incredibly quickly that it's gone before one knows it. This could only be a good thing, really. Having most of December off means that I can sleep for most of it. I'm a big guy -- I enjoy going into hibernation whenever possible.

As for the recovery from being sick, I can once again say that I'm back at 100% and have been for a few days. I took the last of my antibiotic over the weekend, and now that my guts have washed it out of my system, my body and its functions have returned to normalcy once more. Here's hoping that I don't get sick again any time soon, and here's hoping that my immune system builds itself back up to what it once was fairly quickly -- though I'm sure the fact that I barely eat and have to be sleep-deprived a good bit of the time doesn't necessarily help with all of that much.

So that's all for now, really. In about forty minutes, I must hop in the car for a delightful little jaunt to Wichita to start my incredibly long day filled with work, grading workshop copies, reading, and trying not to fall asleep when my body will desperately want to do so around 2PM or so.

Long post, I know.

One Pill to Rule Them All

Fall semester: day forty-five

I have one pill remaining of the clindamycin. I shall take it tonight and be done with that rash-giving, gut-wrecking antibiotic, one whose hold on me has tortured me one way or another for the past thirteen days (when it was only supposed to be a ten-day course).

Daisy has been really sick again as well. I have surmised over the course of our relationship that she doesn't have the best immune system in the world, to put it mildly -- the girl's been sick with something or other for almost two months running now. She was even put on two courses of Bactrim for multiple infections she's had over that time, and her doctor told her to stop taking her allergy meds because they raised her blood pressure. She did that, and coming down off of them has made her basically crash. When she went to the doctor this afternoon, said doctor told her that would happen, with the effect of stopping them being similar to "coming off of taking speed."

Wow, seriously? It's Allegra-D. It's not like it's some sort of prescription allergy med. It's off-the-shelf stuff. But okay. If nothing else, that explains why she and I both have been extremely tired as of late; I took Allegra-D to help my own sinus/allergy woes for a while as well when I was still sick.

This weekend I have a ton to do. A ton to do. So much that I shouldn't be here blogging, but I need some breathing space and some time to not focus on school and school-related issues. For one -- and this is the smallest thing I have to do -- I must prepare another packet of revised poetry for my thesis director to look over at his leisure, and include a few poems by poets I like or who "inspire me," etc. I have to deliver that to him on Monday, and then meet with him on Tuesday the 30th. That means that for the rest of the month, the only day I teach that I'll get to come directly home afterwards is this coming Tuesday -- and believe me, I'll need that time this week. It's getting super-hectic for me at this point of the semester, as it always does after Fall Break comes and goes. It'll get even worse after Thanksgiving week. I am fully expecting to go on about three hours of sleep a night between Thanksgiving and Finals Week, just to be able to get everything done. That includes a long paper for my Surrealism class and a large amount of work for my students that I'll be collecting/grading/etc.

The end of the semester, as alluded to, is rapidly approaching. In our Playwriting class, this means an insane amount of work is coming due. Next week starts our presentations -- presentations of, and I'm not kidding here, our entire play. Because my friend Jay and I have the most "cohesive scenes" thus far (read: we're basically done) we were selected to have our plays read first. Mind you, neither of us want this -- Jay and I are both rather busy with our classes and students, and would have appreciated the time to actually get some stuff done before we had to work on finishing our plays' drafts, but we really didn't get much of a choice. It's also clear that our plays are her favorites out of the entire class's works. You should see the comments she writes on our scenes when she grades them; it's astounding how much she likes our stuff. She doesn't make this a secret in class, either, which I'm sure (on some level) irritates the shit out of the actual Theatre majors in there, most of whom may end up writing plays for a living.

Ironically, neither Jay nor I are fiction writers; we're both poets. My actual "fiction," if you want to call it that, is horrible. That's why I blog; blogging is nonfiction. I'm good at nonfiction. Whenever I try to write fiction, however, it ends up sounding a lot like a soap opera, or something else along those lines. Cheesy and trite. I may have read more fiction than poetry in my years, but I still can't write it worth a damn. This problem, however, apparently doesn't extend to things written for the stage or screen -- in my screenwriting class in undergrad, I produced a 90-page unfinished script that was judged by many (including my professor) as one of the best, if not the best, in the class. Even looking back on it now, almost nine years later, it's still really good. And, of course, it's still unfinished. As for the play I've been writing for this class? I think it's okay; it's not great, but it's not bad. It's a cohesive story with deep, flawed, engaging characters, and it hits all the beats it's supposed to hit within its length. Some of us don't think they're learning a lot from the Playwriting class, but it's the opposite for me -- I'm learning quite a lot about structure, about character development, and about the limitations of writing for the stage. I am really enjoying the class, despite the amount of work I have to do in it and for it.

So, anyway, Jay and I will be hard at it over the next few days cobbling together a finished draft of each of our plays, as the class readings/presentations begin on Wednesday with Jay going first. I'll follow up on Monday. My play is a two-act, with three scenes per act, and will end up being about fifty to sixty pages total. I'll have to print and/or copy at least three, if not four copies of it, because it has three main characters, two secondary characters, and at least two characters who have a few lines each. Before I can do that, though, I have to write the final scene of the play -- it'll be fairly short and basically a wrap-up, but I still have to do it. Once the draft of the play is presented in class, the playwright (read: me) produces a final copy -- a revised, final draft -- to turn in one week later.

This is not all that must be done for the class this weekend, however.

Our final exercise in the class is a collaboration -- meaning, we're writing a play with a partner. The assignment is to create a ten-minute one-act play with a beginning, middle, and end, and write it with one of our classmates. I chose my friend Ryan, as he was absent from class on Wednesday (and I didn't want him to get stuck with someone he didn't know), and the two of us will be working on that over the weekend as well. I've let him create the characters and the setting and write the first five pages, and I will jump in after he's established everything and finish it with the last five pages. I told him that it didn't matter to me which half I had to do; I could just as easily do either. He elected to do the first half since he knows I have to finish and cobble together my full play this weekend, so I'll finish it once he uploads it to Google Docs.

That is not, however, where that exercise ends.

Because four of us in that class are grad students (me, Rae, Jay, and Ryan), we must do some "extra work," as our professor calls it. That "extra work" translates to a "reader's theater" presentation of our plays. Not the big ones we're writing, no, the ten-page ones we're doing for that collaborative exercise. We will all present our plays at one of the concert-hall-like places on campus sometime within the next month or so, and we will bring in readers (if possible) to read them. They won't necessarily be acted out on stage, but they will be read by people other than our classmates if possible. The date for that was originally set, in class, to be November 16 at 7:30 PM. However, on the way back to my office after class ended on Wednesday night, I passed a signboard that advertised Bo Burnham doing a concert in the same venue at the same time that night, and very quickly shot an email to our professor to tell her that the date and/or venue would have to be changed. She replied and said we'd have to figure something else out, so I would imagine that we'll find out this coming week where and when we'll be doing this "reader's theater" experience. Only certain nights will work for us and our fellow students, too, which makes it even harder to schedule something. She wanted to do it on a Thursday night, but our poetry workshop (which Rae is a part of) is on Thursday nights. On Wednesday nights after our class, Rae and I have the Surrealism class, as well. Other nights of the week may be out of the question for Jay or Ryan, not to mention the other students in the class who aren't grad students and/or have other jobs or rehearsals for plays they're in. So something will have to be worked out one way or another.

I've invited Daisy down to the "reader's theater" performance, as it will be an evening in November (at some point) and there's a good chance that it will not conflict with her work schedule. It's so rare that anything like this happens, and I thought that it would be a good chance for her to not only hear/see my work, but to meet said aforementioned friends. But again, it all depends on the date and time we do it.

"Of course I'll come down if it doesn't conflict with work," she told me. "I love you, darlin'. What's important to you is important to me."

Daisy is a good girlfriend. I'm very lucky to have her in my life.

But that's not all, folks, there's more!

I mentioned in my last post that there's a midterm coming up in my Surrealism class, and that it was scheduled to be held this coming Wednesday. This is not the case; we are instead going to be given a take-home midterm so that we can actually do well on it. That adds a bit more work to my already-overflowing planner for next weekend, but on the plus side, it'll be something I can complete at a leisurely pace instead of in-class, under stress.

I've signed up for my final advising appointment for my graduate school career on Wednesday the 31st at noon. For those of you unfamiliar with holidays, it wasn't until afterwards that I realized that I will be sitting in the office with my advisor -- a very formal setting, mind you -- wearing a Superman costume.

This is not a joke. Some people find it difficult to take me seriously as it is; wait until I have to do formal things while wearing a Superman costume. You want Surrealism, folks? That is surreal. No normal human being wears a Superman costume all day long. But then again, since when have I ever been completely normal?

I'm pretty sure that day will involve photos. Note that there are already embarrassing photos of me wearing said costume on my Facebook from two years ago when I wore it the first time. For the sake of everyone's sanity, I'm just wearing the top half of it this year -- I will not sit in my office for fifteen hours on Halloween wearing tights and underwear outside my pants. The lower half of the costume will stay safely within my closet, and I'll wear normal pants that day -- as well as a hoodie, probably, so that I don't look like a complete idiot while walking to and from my classes. Because yes, as Halloween is a Wednesday, I do have classes to attend. The part I don't like about Halloween this year is that I'll be stuck on campus until 10PM, which means I won't even be home to give out candy to the neighborhood kids.

However, I greatly relish the fact that the next day, when I drive into town to teach, I'll be able to come home that afternoon and stop by Walmart to get all of the discounted candy I can reasonably afford and carry home. I can already feel myself getting fatter just thinking about it.

On that note, folks, there is much to be done, and I must go about a-doing it. I shall update again when I can, and hopefully I'll be able to get some sleep and relaxation time in this weekend at some point as well.

Debts, Redux

Fall semester: day forty-two

After watching a combined two-and-a-half discs of Community (both last night and this morning) and after I spent a good hour or so cooking a huge mass of vegan waffles for breakfast, my lovely Daisy left for home at around 2PM or so. I already miss her quite a lot. The house now feels strange without her here. Empty, unwhole, etc. Things like that.

You know, for all of my solitude, and my love of a quiet, hermit-like lifestyle most of the time, most of that gets completely reversed when Daisy is around. I become relaxed, at ease, at peace. As I've written here before in the past, when Daisy is here it's like everything stops, like nothing else matters for that time but her. I like that feeling. I like it a lot. Because of that, it almost feels cripplingly lonely for several hours after she leaves for home.

I did sneak another tie-dye shirt into her bag for her mother, though. I made sure I didn't tell her that it was in there until she was at least halfway home, too.


While Daisy was here ,we had a wonderful time. I got up early at 8:30, let her sleep for another hour or so, and made the waffles. One of the best things one of my exes did for me was leave her $20 waffle iron behind when she moved out about a year and a half ago, citing that she'd never need or use it. Well, I do. I use it a lot. Waffles are awesome. One cannot argue with that. There are about twenty homemade waffles in my freezer right now, and it only took a half-gallon of almond milk, three tablespoons of flaxseed, and half a box of Bisquick. Vegan. Because, of course, Daisy is vegan. And I'm eating a lot more vegan-like too -- in fact, I eat vegan exclusively when she's here, and definitely have been eating more vegan overall. For example, I have switched (long ago, actually) to almond milk, exclusively. It tastes better and it's better for you. I haven't had real milk in about six months, and don't miss it in the least. I put almond milk on my cereal, in my coffee, and I drink it right out of the carton. It's awesome. And don't get me started on coconut oil. Oh my, coconut oil. Mmm.

Ahem. Anyway.

Once Daisy left, I spent the majority of the rest of the day working on assorted things and projects around the house and for school this week, like putting another quart of oil in my car (I've noticed that since the techs changed it from 10w30 to 5w30 for the winter, it drips a little oil under it when it's parked) and doing an all-around under-the-hood check. My week is severely shortened because of fall break -- yes, I do still have my customary fifteen-hour day tomorrow, as it is Wednesday, but on Thursday all I do is teach and come home, and another weekend starts.

One of the other things I did this afternoon, however, was pay all of my bills. Not only did I pay the cable bill (for my internet; I don't have cable TV), I can now say that my Citi Card that I maxed out this summer just to be able to eat is now completely paid off, which is a huge weight off my shoulders. Not only that, but aside from the gas I've bought with it over the past week or so, my Amazon Chase Card is also paid off, and I have paid my parents back the first half of the money I owed them for this past summer when they loaned me money to live on -- because, as you may recall, I was absolutely destitute and this close to being homeless.

I always repay my debts, whether to friends and family or to big credit card companies. It may take a while sometimes, but I do it. I really don't like letting things hang over my head. I've got enough stress in my life to deal with as it is; having to worry about money (and yes, I do worry about it even now) is something I'd rather not have to do most of the time. There are a lot of things coming up for me in the next few weeks that will require my full attention, and because of that I must take care of the big, important things now. For example, I have a midterm exam in my Surrealism class next Wednesday night, and I have to put together the entire first draft of my play for my Playwriting class by about this time next week. While the latter is really just separating the scenes I've written into acts and writing the play's final scene to tack onto the rest, that in itself will take some time and structuring. Studying for the midterm -- if it can even truly be studied for -- is another matter completely, and I expect to be completely, totally burned-out by the end of the month, so much that I'll be too tired to think straight again. In addition to those things I also must get cleared for spring registration (which basically entails me saying "hey, all I have left are thesis hours, but I'm going to sign up for visiting writer again just so that I can stay a full-time student and not have to start paying back student loans") and meeting with my thesis advisor/director again on the 25th, if possible. It's a lot of stuff to juggle all at once, and definitely a lot of stuff to plan for and think about. This semester will be over before we know it, and then I'll have a few short months before I graduate and, y'know, have to do something with my life. Which is, as you know, terrifying.

I still have another day and a half of the antibiotics to take, and finishing them couldn't come soon enough. As mentioned before, my guts do not like said antibiotics. I'll spare you the details, but it's nothing bad. It's just that I get nauseated a lot, especially if I take them on a relatively empty stomach. As I don't eat a whole lot on a daily basis, this happens frequently -- though I do try to eat something when I take said pills. Again, I really can't wait to be done with them. I'm not sure I've ever had a ten-day course of antibiotics, not even for my worst ear or sinus infections. It's really tedious, but eh. They work. I'm just tired of taking them, and tired of having to remember to take them, etc.

On that note, I'm going to wrap this up and get a shower so that I can go to sleep and get up early in the morning. 5AM comes really fast. I will write more later this week, or perhaps over the weekend, to update everyone on everything that's going on.

Daisy Standard Time

Fall semester: day forty-one

Well, midterms are upon us, folks; the semester is halfway over as of tomorrow (apparently), though it seems like it's passed much faster than that. I calculated my students' midterm grades on Saturday and posted them on the Banner system so that they could see them and so that I could be done with them. Most of my students are doing pretty well. Most. I've already had one student drop my course because she did poorly on her first paper, even though I told her she could use her rewrite on it and told her exactly what to do in order to fix it. Too much effort, I suppose. Oh well.

Believe me, I don't begrudge anyone for dropping my class. Sometimes the papers are just too intricate and too much for people to wrap their heads around. That's what happens when the entire first unit of my class focuses on the benefits and dangers of GNR (genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics) and I ask my students to write a paper arguing their stance on these technologies. Some people find it too complicated or scientific, or they can't form a cohesive argument, or they don't follow my directions, etc. It doesn't really matter, but it does tend to rub some students the wrong way. I can't help that; it's the curriculum I've taught for going on two years now, and it's a class that was designed by my original director and further tweaked by me to make it run more smoothly (read: to make it a little more fun and/or engaging) for my students. If you're a nerd, dork, geek, etc., my Engineering English 102 class is probably the most interesting, thought-provoking class you could take at Flat State University. If you're into those things, of course. If you like talking about robots and virtual reality and video games and how all of this interweaves with ethics and crimes.

Regardless, the more people who drop my course, the less papers I have to end up grading at the end of the semester, so I don't mind at all.

Today is day one of two days of "Fall Break" the university gives us, as I've mentioned before here in the blog. Normally at this time (5PM on a Monday) I'd be half an hour into my Playwriting class on campus. Today, I'm sitting at my computer wearing a pair of shorts (it's 85 degrees outside, no foolin') and a blue tie-dye t-shirt, and I'm waiting for Daisy to arrive.

Daisy and I had planned -- a few weeks in advance, mind you -- for her to visit over these two days I have off, as we rarely get time together. Daisy lives in Omaha, which is five hours from here, so it's a long drive for her to come see me. She doesn't mind (and won't even let me fill her gas tank for the trip back home), but it's a long, long drive. Because of school obligations and because even though I've fixed her up, my car could still count as less than fully reliable most of the time, I've not yet made the trek up to Omaha. Daisy's parents (as well as her sisters and at least two friends) are waiting on me to do so with great anticipation, and unless something changes, I'll be doing maintenance on the car (coolant, oil, etc) to make said trip over Thanksgiving -- barring a huge, huge load of work I'd have to do for school over that week, of course. Because I obviously can't see that far into the future when it comes to my school workload, I cannot yet make any promises to Daisy and her family when it comes to Thanksgiving. But, I will say that I'm planning that trip already if at all possible for me. It's a long drive, but in the colder weather that will inevitably come with the season, I'm pretty sure the car will make it there and back without any major issues. She's been running strong as of late.

Whenever Daisy comes down, I take the timeframe involved with her visit with -- as they say -- a grain of salt. Long ago, back in July when we first got together, I realized that Daisy operates on what I like to call Daisy Standard Time -- meaning, when she leaves she leaves, when she gets here she gets here. This roughly translates to "I'm going to leave three to four hours later than I intended to leave, I'll stop on the trip multiple times for food and bathroom breaks, and I'll arrive when I arrive." Daisy is habitually late for everything she does; she knows this, I know this, and it's okay. I've come to expect it at this point and no longer worry about the girl if she's an hour or two later than she tells me she'll be. To a certain extent, it's endearing, and to her credit she does give me ETA updates via Twitter whenever she stops somewhere, with those updates usually being down to the minute, and those minutes being very accurate.

Over the course of the weekend leading up to today, I have done everything I can do to get all of my coursework done for my classes so that I don't have anything hanging over my head while she's here -- even though that involved staying up late both last night and Saturday night writing things, reviewing lesson plans, reading for my Poetry and Playwriting classes, and doing general upkeep-like things around the house. On Friday night, I went to Walmart at 3 in the morning not because I wanted to, but because I had to -- there was really no other time this weekend I would have been conceivably able to go get the items and groceries I needed for the next week or two, not to mention the ingredients for tonight's dinner (vegan pasta with mushroom sauce and bruschetta). Add to that the cleaning I've done around the house this weekend and I've been pretty busy getting things taken care of on my long weekend, not just because Daisy is coming down.

As for my antibiotics and the rash, well, the rash is gone. It's been gone for a few days now. If you look closely, you can see where it was, but after midweek it faded and disappeared. I still have two days of the antibiotics left, but only because I've forgotten a dose here and there some days. I should finish them up on Wednesday morning or afternoon, depending on if I take them on time and at the intervals I should. Aside from the short-lived rash, I've had no other reactions to them (though they do mess with my guts a little bit) and I am feeling 100% again -- I'm no longer sick in the least. All I've had to deal with in the past few days is seasonal allergies (congestion, sneezing, etc) from the flip-flopping temperatures and weather systems that have been rolling through, which do set me off -- but not enough to make me sick. When the allergies bother me, mostly they just make me want to sleep. And sleep I have been doing, when I have time.

There are a few more things I have to do tomorrow after Daisy leaves in the mid-morning or early afternoon hours, but they're mostly little things. I have to write out a few checks to pay the bills, I'll probably have to put gas in the car, and I'll more than likely be doing a bit more close reading for my Surrealism class, as there's a large chunk of that for this week -- but aside from that, I'll actually get to enjoy my "fall break" a bit. I plan to introduce Daisy to Community while she's here, so that I can get her just as hooked on the show as I am.

She has also forbade me from giving her parents any more tie-dye shirts, despite my protests.

"But..but...at this point it's like, a custom," I said. "I do it every time!"

"They have enough," she told me. "Trust me."

I'll probably sneak another one into her bag before she leaves tomorrow, and in the meantime I hope that she doesn't read this blog post while she's here.

So yep, that's my day, folks. I'll update you on the visit tomorrow afternoon or evening, more than likely. For now? It's time for me to take my leave.

The Rash, Part II

[NOTE: Most of this was written on Friday the 12th. I have a bad habit about starting blog posts and then never coming back to finish them.]


Fall semester: day forty

For the first time in over three weeks, I feel normal again. Well, except for the rash, anyway.


I have four days of the antibiotic remaining, and every time I take it I have taken two Benadryl pills as well. Because of this -- or, as I told my mother yesterday morning in an email, perhaps because my body is getting used to it -- the rash is lessening and slowly going away. Yes, it's still a little itchy. Yes, it's still fairly visible. But it's also slowly going away, drying up, fading out. This can only be a good thing. I expect it to be mostly, if not fully, gone by the time Daisy comes down here at the end of the weekend.

Ah, the weekend. As I wrote about previously here in the blog, this weekend starts "fall break" for all of us in academia at Flat State University. I am off until Wednesday, as is the majority of the university's students, faculty, and staff. Surprisingly, I don't have a whole lot of homework or other stuff to do. Not as much as I normally do over a fall break weekend, anyway. I have to calculate my students' midterm grades and post them, as well as do some exercises for my Playwriting class (which was canceled on Wednesday as well, as our professor has strep throat) once they're posted, and some reading as per the usual for my Surrealism class -- but I do have an extra two days to relax a bit and catch up on sleep, do chores around the house, and spend time with Daisy. This is good. I've written on the concept of "breathing space" before, and how I don't tend to get a lot of it -- this little break in the middle of the semester provides a good chunk of it, for once.

To those ends I'm also finding myself trying to catch up with some stuff I've let slide, both business and personal. I've had several friends message or email me in the past two weeks, including Lady and Suri, and I just haven't had much time to reply or to talk to them. I feel like an ass because of that, but also keep in mind that I've also been sick as a dog for a lot of that time and am just now starting to feel better again. This past month or so has been one large blur of cold medicine and lost sleep, of papers to write and grade and driving back and forth. In all of that, any time I've had to do much of anything has sort of disappeared. I've been telling Jay, for example, that I'm going to do a few things on the school journal's website, and it's not that I've been putting it off, but it's that I've been sick, busy, and incredibly sleep-deprived most of the time to even attempt to mess around with settings and HTML code without screwing something up inadvertently. I finally have some time today to look at it and see what I can do, and I told him I'd attempt to work on it. I've also put off a ton of errands I've been meaning to run, like an actual shopping trip (not just one that consists of purchasing the bare essentials to survive for another week) and things of that nature. I haven't done this because, well, you try to stay on your feet wandering around no less than three different stores for a few hours attempting to purchase all of the necessary things you've put off for a month. It's tiring and draining when you're sick, let me tell you.

That being said, I think I've accomplished a remarkable number of tasks and an ungodly amount of decent work over the course of the past month, most of it being while I was still really sick. I'm rather proud of myself for just powering through and getting things done, even if I don't remember a large chunk of said things.

The Rash, Part I

Fall semester: day thirty-eight

Yesterday morning, once I got to campus for teaching, I went to the bathroom. Upon looking at myself in the mirror, I noticed that something didn't look quite right. I was developing a rash on my neck and shoulders.

Hm. That's not usually a good thing, I thought to myself.

I have a mild (very mild, as I told my mother), sometimes-a-little-itchy rash on my shoulders, lower neck, chest, and top half of my back. It has not spread past those areas, and it's not really noticeable unless one is looking for it. My first thought was that my skin was getting irritated from the longjohns I was wearing, as it's been cold and I've taken all of those out of storage this past week. It's been in the 30s and low 40s here in the mornings (right now it's 43 outside), so I have been forced to wear long-sleeved shirts and pants, along with real shoes -- as opposed to my normal flip-flops -- to class, or whenever I leave the house.

Then I remembered something about clindamycin (the antibiotic I'm on) and its side effects, so I went back to my office and looked it up on my laptop. Here's what I found, and most sites say something along the same lines:

Clindamycin is an antibiotic that is often prescribed to treat many different bacterial infections. Unfortunately, some people are allergic to this antibiotic, which can result in a rash. Because this rash is a result to an allergy to a drug that needs to be taken even after the appearance of the rash, the best way to treat this rash is to try to relieve the symptoms and minimize the discomfort.

Stop taking clindamycin only if the rash is serious. If the skin rash is blistering and you are also experiencing a strong headache, have bloody diarrhea, or severe nausea with yellowing of the eyes, this is indicative of a serious reaction to clindamycin. You should stop taking the medication immediately and contact your doctor.

Thanks, internet doctors, for telling me what I already knew, really.

I don't have any of those other symptoms, by the way. Obviously. It's a light rash that's spotty and sometimes a little itchy. To those ends, at Daisy's suggestion (because honestly, I probably wouldn't have thought about it myself because I've been so busy that I don't have time to think), I have been taking Benadryl -- which I have an entire 100-tablet bottle of, luckily. And, as is customary with mild allergic reactions to things, it is helping by leaps and bounds. After taking Benadryl, the rash fades a little and stops being itchy, so I don't even notice it. As I still have five days of the clindamycin left to take, from this point forward, every pill will be coupled with Benadryl until I'm done with it all. As I told Daisy, if that's the only side effect I have to deal with, and it wipes out my infections? I'm happy with that. I'll definitely take a mild, light rash over bloody diarrhea and/or overgrowths of "bad" bacteria in my digestive tract, oh yes. I just find it slightly amusing that yesterday morning I wrote a post here about how I so very rarely have any sort of allergic reaction to anything, and three hours later I develop a rash. Yep. How's that for irony, folks?

Anyway, there's that. If it gets worse, obviously, I'll have to stop taking the antibiotic. I don't want to have to do that, because I'm paranoid that my sinus/ear/chest infection will come back worse, and will be immune to most treatments, but if I have to, I'll have to. I don't expect that to happen, of course, but who knows.

In other news, I can see the light of fall break at the end of the proverbial tunnel. I have my customary fifteen-hour day on campus today, but tomorrow I will just go in to teach and leave, and after that I will be off for five-and-a-half days, effectively. That will give me the rest and relaxation time I sorely need, time to sleep and take care of schoolwork and housework that I don't have time to do any other times -- such as revisions of my thesis and preparations for the second half of the semester. Midterm grading is open as of yesterday, so I'll be calculating my students' midterm grades over the weekend and posting them. That doesn't usually take a long time, but it's still something extra I'll have to do. Daisy is coming down on Monday, as well, so that we can get some time together while I'm off. We so rarely get to see each other that it will be a treat. It also means that I'll have to get almost all of my work done before Monday, as well, so that I don't have anything to worry about or hanging over my head while she's here.

On that note, I'm going to try to get another two or three hours of sleep before I have to get up and go back in to campus this morning -- otherwise I'll be a zombie all day today in my office and in class.

Medicinal Gambles

Fall semester: day thirty-seven
("Thirty-seven!" 
"In a row?")

I would like to start by saying that I do feel mostly better now, and mean it when I say that. The keyword here is mostly.

The antibiotics Daisy sent were clindamycin; the course of them takes ten days. I'd heard of them before (I believe I used them at some point on another occasion, honestly, when I had a sinus or ear infection), so I did a little research before starting them. This is the first thing that popped up:

Many antibiotics, including clindamycin, may cause overgrowth of dangerous bacteria in the large intestine. This may cause mild diarrhea or may cause a life-threatening condition called colitis (inflammation of the large intestine). Clindamycin is more likely to cause this type of infection than many other antibiotics, so it should only be used to treat serious infections that cannot be treated by other antibiotics. Tell your doctor if you have or have ever had colitis or other conditions that affect your stomach or intestines.

You may develop these problems during your treatment or up to several months after your treatment has ended. Call your doctor if you experience any of the following symptoms during your treatment with clindamycin or during the first several months after your treatment has finished: watery or bloody stools, diarrhea, stomach cramps, or fever.

Talk to your doctor about the risks of taking clindamycin.

You've got to be kidding me, right?

See, this is why I don't like antibiotics. This is why I don't get them unless absolutely necessary. It's because of shit like this. Because they could fucking kill me.

That being said, today starts day four of them, and what was previously a sinus infection that was spreading rapidly to my chest (which I noticed on Friday night) and my ears (Saturday morning) is now mostly gone. I am still a bit congested, yes, and my lymph nodes are still swollen, but overall I feel much better than I did before. I'm probably at about 85% of my normal self now, and expect to be fully back to normal as the week progresses. And, for the record, I've not yet had any side effects -- though yes, I am still paranoid about them.

I will also mention that never have I had any digestive side effects, diarrhea or otherwise, from taking antibiotics. Never. As a child, I was given pretty much every antibiotic in the book that could treat ear infections, as I got them frequently. Some of the bigger ones I remember were Augmentin, normal Amoxicillin, and Azithromycin (Zithromax), amongst others I'm sure. I became immune to a few of them over the years, which is why my doctors had to keep switching them around. I did some specialized research on the clindamycin, to make sure I'd be okay (as you can see from the mention of azithromycin, I've been on a few of the -mycin drugs before). Most places said something similar to what was listed above, but said that for sinus infections and other soft tissue infections, clindamycin was about the best antibiotic out there now, especially for those people who had become immune to some other, more common antibiotics.

Hey, that sounds like me, I thought. So I started it.

My mother, always the voice of reason, warned me about it, telling me that I knew better than to take antibiotics prescribed for someone else, and that I should go to the doctor and get my own, or at least get looked at because who knows if I actually had a sinus infection at all -- it could've been something else, etc.

I felt like replying no, mother, trust me, after having enough of them I know what a sinus/ear infection feels like -- plus, the neon yellow/bright green snot/discharge totally gives it away, but I didn't. Because I'm a good son, and I try not to talk back to my mother. But that also doesn't mean that I don't know when I'm right about what my body is doing to me, and it doesn't mean I always take her advice. The doctor, had I gone to see one, would've looked in my nose and ears with a scope, charged me $100 I don't have to spend (or more, since I no longer have insurance) and I would've been prescribed something similar that does the same thing that Daisy's antibiotics are doing now. So, really, the outcome is the same, and I didn't have to spend money I can't afford to spend when most of my bills are coming due soon (and I still have to pay money back to my parents anyway). If the clindamycin doesn't kick it, I'll be forced to go get something else, but until then I weighed my bets and took my chances on it, and so far it seems to be working, slowly. Right now, that's the best I can hope for, and also hope that I don't start spontaneously shitting blood.

But, again, I've never had any sort of adverse reaction to antibiotics. I get adverse reactions to weird shit, not normal stuff. For example, certain kinds of fabric softener. Corn silk. KFC. Ginger. Weird shit.

None of that's made up, by the way. Corn silk makes me break out in hives. So do certain kinds of liquid fabric softener (though I can't remember now which ones). KFC and ginger both make me violently ill, like projectile-vomiting-for-days ill. Everything else I've been fine with, including antibiotics. Still, there's a first time for everything, and that's why I'll still be a little paranoid throughout the course of my treatment (and apparently for some time afterwards).

Ahem. Anyway.

My Playwriting class was canceled yesterday. I got this info in a text message no more than thirty seconds before I would've left the house, gotten into the car, and (needlessly) driven to Wichita -- so it was sheer luck that I got the text when I did. I promptly returned to my desk, stripped down to my skivvies, and resumed drinking coffee and talking to Daisy. My week has become a day shorter, which is good. Today, as per the usual, I go in to teach my two classes and then return home, but with one big difference -- possibly, by the time I return home between 12 and 1, I may have Pokemon Black Version 2 waiting for me on my doorstep, as I ordered it yesterday and it shipped no more than four hours after I ordered it. Checking the tracking number for it, it's already arrived in Wichita and has been sent out for delivery as of a little over an hour ago.

Those of you who know me well know that I am not really a gamer. Being in grad school means (more than anything else) that I'm poor and don't have time for it, really. I don't and can't keep up with all the news about game systems and games anymore and haven't been able to do so since, oh, 2003 or so (read: the last time I had a system that was actually capable of playing current console games). But I do love myself some Pokemon, and it is the one and only video game vice that I allow myself, even rapidly approaching age thirty. So, there's that.

Daisy and I are doing really well; as mentioned in my last post, as fall break is this coming weekend, she and I will both have a few days off at the same time (the 15th and 16th), so she's coming down for part of it. I've looked ahead in my schedule as much as I can, and as far as I know, I don't have a ton of stuff to do over that time. Or at least I shouldn't, anyhow. That stuff will mostly be crammed into this week and the week after that. The only thing that's going on in the meantime is that I'll have to calculate my students' midterm grades, really.

On that note, I must throw on my jacket and shoes (it's in the 40s outside this morning) and make the delightful jaunt to campus. Oh, happy day.

Take Two

Fall semester: day thirty-five

By my count, there are usually about seventy-five days during any given semester. I cannot recall right now if that includes finals week or not, but seventy-five is about the average. The midterm date is October 16; that would be day forty-two. If I were to not count the week we have off this semester for the combined "holidays" of Fall Break and Thanksgiving week, it would make it about seventy-five, roughly. Something around there, anyway.

My point is that I'm not even half done yet. And that's so cripplingly depressing.

There's no time for anything or anyone anymore. Everything's blurring together. Days blur into weeks, weekends seem to disappear under mountains of work and end before they seem to start, and I sleep when I'm tired and when I can get it -- and if both of those parameters aren't met at the same time, I don't sleep. I can't help it; when you're in grad school and you have work to do, there's no such thing as "stop everything, I must get my eight hours of beauty rest every night." Hell no; that doesn't happen. Things don't just stop because you want to sleep. If I'm lucky, I get four hours a night. If I'm really lucky, I'll get about six, or I'll get a day on which I can come home after I teach and go back to bed.

I collected my students' first big papers on Tuesday. My actual classes with them were exceedingly short -- my first class was 20 minutes long; my second was 22. It was basically a "turn in your papers" session coupled with "here's your next assignment and what we'll be reading on what dates over the next few weeks. Bye." I really just need things to stop for a while. That's why everything's blurring together. I have too many things to do by too many dates and on too many topics. How I got through last fall, which was a much harder semester on me physically and mentally, I don't remember. I'm barely surviving this one. Yesterday's classes took the whole time to teach, as we were covering the first big articles from Unit 2.

I suppose I should mention that for a while, I felt mostly better. I still feel a little better every day, but it's been really, really slow going. Around Sunday night into Monday is when I started to noticeably pick up and start feeling consistently better as the hours and days went on, but it's still slow and I still have my relapses -- some of which are not pleasant at all. I had to take Wednesday off and stay home because my sinuses were going nuts -- as in, I couldn't sleep for more than four hours at a time before my face and teeth would hurt so much that I wanted to cry. I knew I couldn't make it all day for fifteen hours on campus with as little sleep and as much pain as I'd had, so I emailed my professors and told them I wouldn't make it, and emailed my students to tell them my office hours had been canceled. It's the first time I've not gone in to campus because I was sick since my very first semester as a graduate student, when I got the flu about a week before final exams. Up until that point, I didn't think I had a sinus infection anymore. I was wrong. It's still there, hanging in tough. It's not going away. Yes, it may feel okay for a day or two at a time, but then it sweeps back in and crushes me. I have now been sick in some capacity for fifteen days straight. I normally have a fantastic immune system, but for some reason this time around I just can't shake it. Not by myself, anyway.

To those ends, Daisy has mailed me a care package containing sinus infection-specific antibiotics ("We always keep extra antibiotics on hand!" she says) that she never needed or used when they were prescribed back in the spring. It arrives tomorrow. She would normally deliver them herself, but she herself is really sick right now with a sinus infection of her own, a double ear infection, and a throat infection, and this weekend is her mother's birthday (today, actually) so her sister is in town for the weekend. I normally hate taking antibiotics -- not only am I wary of most of them, but most of the time my body can fight off whatever's attacking it pretty quickly. This time that's apparently not the case. As I know I have a sinus infection (oh yeah, it's pretty apparent) and nothing else is working, I don't have much of a choice in this situation but to turn to them and hope they work. If they do, great. If they don't, I'm no worse off than I was before, really. Today I'm sort of relapsing into being really sick -- it's been a week or so since I've felt as bad as I do today.

I also wanted to mention the good news that Daisy and I are officially back together as a couple, and have been since earlier this week. We made the decision to try again (a "take two," as Daisy herself likes to say about many things) and are happy. I was fairly sure this was going to happen again for a few weeks on end; we've been growing ever closer for a long time, despite our little squabbles here and there. Yes, we have our issues with one another, and some of those issues are big things. However, in any relationship, people have to balance those issues and examine them, weigh them against one another and decide what's most important and what can be overlooked. Daisy and I, in our squabbles from time to time, have been doing precisely that. Yes, we're very different people in many different capacities (after all, she is vegan, remember?) but in many others, we're not. We work. We love each other. That's all that matters.

I just had to stop writing for a while because my sinuses/face is in so much pain that I could barely see straight. I hope those antibiotics get here quickly tomorrow. Meanwhile, I'm stuck sitting here cursing my body that it can't just get its shit together and fight this stuff off. I can blow my nose all I want, but nothing comes out -- it's all up inside my maxillary sinuses, in my face, not in my nasal cavity. This is why it won't drain and why my teeth hurt.

Obviously, even though I'm sick and forced myself to have a shorter week because of taking Wednesday off to stay home sick, stuff doesn't just stop for me. I've been forced to power through (or really, limp through) teaching my classes and taking care of stuff around the house, and this weekend I'm basically taking a hiatus from most internet-related activities, as I have two more long exercises to complete for Playwriting and fifty papers to grade. Fifty big, intricate papers, at that. I meant to start grading yesterday after I came back home, but yet another resurgence of pain and sinus pressure knocked me back down for the count again. I don't know about you folks, but when I am sick I get scatterbrained and cannot concentrate on anything for long stretches of time -- it's part of why my posts here have been so sparse as of late. I told Daisy last night that I thought I had a fever while we were talking, and I probably did. I may have a low-grade fever right now, actually.

I will soon get a bit of a reprieve, a bit of things stopping for a few days, when fall break rolls around. I've mentioned it before here on occasion, briefly, but Flat State University does what they call a "fall break" in the middle of October where we get two days off. This is to balance out the paltry three days they give us off for Thanksgiving, so that both semesters of the school year have the same number of days (we get a full week off in Spring for Spring Break, remember). This year, those days fall on the 15th and 16th. They are only two weeks away, but they seem so much further away than that. October is when everything ramps up for us as grad students -- papers start coming due, projects start being assigned, all of our students begin turning in their big papers (like the ones I mentioned above) and everyone starts getting sick and beaten down. At this point, almost everyone I know has been sick to some extent, whether it's been a cold or something worse. There's something in the air with the season change, with the incubation period of a little more than a month of all of us being around our students and one another, and with the fact that Wichita was ranked the #2 city in the nation for horrible fall allergies. I have become weary of everything. Being sick saps all of my energy, and it's not like I have excess energy to begin with. I'm super-miserable, and all I want is to feel normal again.

There are some good things going on this weekend; I get to watch WVU play Texas tomorrow night in a nationally-televised game on Fox, and my assignment for my Surrealism class is to listen to Bob Dylan and The Beatles, analyzing their lyrics. No, that's not a joke. That's the real assignment. Good things like that are few and far between, though. Really, all I want to do this weekend is sleep, yet again, because I'm ill and that tends to make me feel a little better (especially when NyQuil is involved). Since Daisy is sick too, even though we've officially rekindled our relationship and are happy about that, we're both physically miserable. She went to the doctor and got her own antibiotics earlier this week, but she also now thinks she has bronchitis as well, and can barely speak -- she frequently loses her voice. As her job requires her to use her voice almost exclusively, she's called in sick the past two days of work in an attempt to recover. However, as I mentioned to my mother in an email earlier this week, Daisy acquired her sickness from being around sick children last weekend, so she can't blame it on me. She hasn't been down here to visit since mid-September, which was a few days before I became sick myself.

As for me, I just told Daisy that as I am feeling worse than I've felt in over a week, I am going to shun everyone and everything for the rest of the night and try to get some sleep. Yes, I know, it's only 6PM. I don't care and can't help it. I feel absolutely awful.

Please, immune system, just do your job and do it now. Please.