Spring semester: day seventy-eight
Today is the last day of the spring semester. Technically, anyhow. It's the last day of classes campus-wide. Tomorrow is the students' "study day," and on Saturday morning, finals week starts. As you know, my own students' final is on Monday afternoon.
Not surprisingly, there's a lot going on right now, and a lot has been going on since I came home on Tuesday afternoon -- which a fair amount of I covered in my previous post here. While I am home until Monday morning, I still have a massive amount of things to do over the course of the next few days, things that take time and effort. Because my class is over now, I don't have to be on campus today (I normally would be on a Thursday morning, as you know). This gives me an extra day off to do all of that stuff that I normally wouldn't be able to take care of during any given week, and it's a very necessary day -- I will spend most of today grading through my students' papers. I'd like to finish them today and tomorrow if possible, since Daisy will be sleeping/working for the next week straight anyhow in order to attend my graduation, and those papers are the first thing on my to-do list.
But, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's pick up where I left off from my last post.
Yesterday morning when I got up, it was really sunny and warm (much like it is today, actually). The storms on Tuesday night must not have dropped a ton of rain, as the streets and my driveway were dry -- so, I figured, before it stormed again (or rained for another three or four days straight), it was probably a good idea to gas up the mower and mow the grass before a.) it got too hot, and b.) while I actually had the time to do it. So, I went down to the garage -- putting new oil and coolant into the car when I was down there as well -- and got the mower ready.
It turns out that I have enough gas left in the mower (and in the gas can) to probably last me about four or five more mows. I thought I had much less than that, as I've not filled that gas can since summer 2010 -- yes, it has been that long. This is mainly because summer 2011 and summer 2012 were two of the hottest, driest summers ever, and all the grass died -- which meant that I never had to mow it more than maybe twice each summer. As it's been raining here pretty regularly now, my yard became -- in the course of a month or so -- a fucking jungle, and it desperately needed to be mowed.
Here's the problem when your yard is a fucking jungle and your only mower is a $75 push mower from Walmart -- it's not easy to mow through that. Add in that even though the pavement was dry, the grass wasn't in most places, and you have a horrible mess of exercise, grunting/straining, and getting mild heatstroke on your hands -- not to mention that as soon as I started, my allergies basically exploded and I had to stop no less than five times to go stand in the shade to cool down and stop coughing and sneezing. It took me more than twice as long as it usually does to mow the grass yesterday because of all of these factors, and it didn't help that as soon as the mower went over grass that was too high for it to cut, it would get clogged and shut off (this happened probably twenty times). By the time I was done, I was exhausted, my lungs and nose hurt from my allergies, and I was pretty sure I was getting a low-grade sunburn from the all-of-a-sudden burning, blazing sun. I could've spent another hour doing the trimming and edging, as that looks horrible around the house, but I said fuck it and came back inside to shower. I took a very long, cool shower to cool off.
Twenty minutes after I got out of the shower, really dark clouds moved in, it got really dim and gray outside, and we were put under a Severe Thunderstorm Watch. Really? That couldn't have happened while I was outside mowing in the blazing sun?
Regardless, the mowing was done. Check one more thing off the to-do list. Next time I'll wait until a cloudy, warm day so that I can do the trimming too.
I talked to Daisy for a long time in the afternoon, as she was awake. I told her to tell her mother that I'd purchased a Mother's Day present for her and had shipped it to the house; it is scheduled to arrive tomorrow at some point. It's nothing big, but I hope it's something she enjoys. I also used the remainder of April's Amazon gift card to (finally) purchase a new dehydrator for the house, so that I can make jerky and dried fruit again, and took the one I had on the wedding registry for me and Daisy off there. With the new dehydrator coming, I finally have everything kitchen-wise I need for a while; my parents got me a rice cooker and small crock pot for Christmas, Daisy's mother got me a food processor, and Daisy herself got me a big refrigerator bottle and a Brita water filter kit months and months ago. When we get married, the rest of the stuff we need will be covered by the wedding registry, which is mostly small appliances and kitchen supplies at this point -- though there are still some other things on it (bedding, furniture, dishes, etc).
On Tuesday, Rae let me know that the graduation cap and gown, which I will need to purchase from the bookstore on Monday when I go back to campus, is over fifty dollars. $53, $54, something like that. This is highway robbery, of course. It's a thin layer of nylon and the cap is basically nylon and cardboard. That's it. But, in order to participate in the ceremony, we have to purchase it -- which is why the price is so high. My university's motto should be "Jacking you out of every penny possible, even on your last day there."
"That's ridiculous," I told her. "I don't have $53 to spare right now. Okay, well, I do, but I don't want to waste it on a gown I'm going to wear for two hours and then never, ever use again. That's ludicrous."
Maybe that "hey, we should share a gown" thing Jay had proposed wasn't so farfetched of an idea after all.
I don't really have a choice in the matter; I'll have to go over there on Monday morning and purchase it, as I've already RSVPed for the ceremony. Still, with the amount we pay in student fees (about $400 per semester, which isn't covered by our stipends; that's out of pocket, my friends), and the fact that we had to pay a fee in order to file a graduation application, the fucking gowns should be free.
My mother asked me if there have been any updates on the adjuncting position for the fall, or if there's anything else going on that I might be sticking around for and working here for over the summer. I told her that I don't yet know; again, everyone in the department is crazily running around trying to get stuff done, and I haven't had the chance to have a discussion with the chair about anything as of late because we've both been busy. I'm planning to email him sometime today or tomorrow and tell him I'd like to sit down with him for a few minutes on Monday morning to discuss what's happening along those lines -- I'll be on campus really early Monday anyhow to box up 90% of my office and to go get the aforementioned gown, and our students' exams aren't until 1PM. I know he'll be around at some point; the "Finals Feast" is at noon on Monday, where Pizza Hut caters the event, and everyone shows up for that -- I always help set everything up for it, too, since nobody else does or is there to do so. This year, I'm making a massive tub of vegan Oreo chocolate pudding for one of the desserts, as I've never brought anything else in for it in my three years as a grad student there. I have to get the remaining ingredients for that when I go shopping, actually.
Yesterday afternoon I also had a delightful surprise that raised my spirits somewhat -- my Federal tax refund came in the mail. I'll now be able to cash that check and won't have to worry about money for the trip to Omaha in a week and a half, and will be able to fill Daisy's gas tank for her with ease for her/our trips down here and back. My state refund hasn't come yet, though; since the feds got through mine that quickly (in less than a month), I'm expecting the state refund to not be far behind and to arrive over the next several days. I may wait and cash both checks together, depending on when it comes. Some of that money will also allow me to make a big shopping trip to Walmart as well, to get fruits and meat for the dehydrator, and to get those ingredients for the pudding, amongst other things. Most of it, however, I plan to save in order to use it this summer to get groceries and other necessities with, as after the end of this month I won't be getting paid any more, and my car insurance will be due at the end of June.
Daisy wanted to get me a graduation present; she kept asking me, for weeks, what I wanted. I told her to save her money, as it really wasn't important or necessary, though I did give her a few ideas. I showed her this digital TV hub with a 1TB HD in it that would be really useful to me, but then I bought the $3 TV for the downstairs, and really no longer needed or wanted it with the movie collection I have already, so I told her not to get it. Eventually I told her not to get me anything (especially as that hub was fairly expensive) and that if I found something I liked while we were out gallivanting around Omaha in a few weeks, she could get me something then. Realistically, I don't want anything; anything I'd find would be a luxury item, something I don't need, since my necessities are already pretty well covered. I don't need any luxury items; the ones I have now I barely use (hence why there's an XBOX in the corner of my room mostly gathering dust). The $3 TV downstairs was a luxury item, but it was also three dollars. There's really nothing else I want or need at the moment.
Last night we got some really nasty storms; there were tornadoes popping up all around the area, and golf-ball-size hail was reported less than ten miles from me. I put my car in the garage when they began to roll through, and of course, since I went to the trouble of doing that, all it did was rain hard here and give a pretty show of thunder and lightning before moving off quickly around the time I went to bed. There really wasn't even any wind, and no hail at all. Just hard rain and thunder. Figures. Daisy messaged me this morning to tell me that she has no power at her house in Omaha, and that it's been out since at least three in the morning, but doesn't know if it's storm-related or not -- it stormed up there too, apparently, and the Weather Channel is calling for more storms here this evening and in the overnight tonight.
My plans for the day are pretty simple: I'm going to grade papers. A lot of papers. Then I will pause to eat something and probably take a shower...before going back to grading. It's Thursday, and I have to have all of these papers, nearly fifty of them at 10-15 pages each, graded and recorded by Monday morning -- and I'd rather not spend all weekend slaving over them. I want to get them done so that I can mark one more thing off my to-do list; I have to do laundry and vacuum/clean again before Daisy comes down a week from today, not to mention write out a few bills, and with the way my schedule is set up next week, it's going to be a headache to get all that stuff done if I don't do it ASAP.
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Parallels
Spring semester: day seventy-six
This has been one of the most bizarre days of my entire semester.
But, really, it wasn't bizarre until I thought about it. On the surface, really, it was like any other day.
I will preface this post by saying that I never expect my days to go strangely, and never get a vibe that one is going to, but everything today was just a little...off. Like I woke up in an only slightly parallel universe.
I actually wrote a short story about that scenario once, about a man who wakes up in a different, but only slightly, parallel universe each time he goes to sleep. I should dig that out and revise it; it was very Twilight Zone-esque. Might be publishable somewhere. And it definitely needs a rewrite. Hm. New project for the coming few weeks.
First off, my car is squealing.
No, not in the fun way. And not in the oh-shit-my-differential-is-going-out sort of way. That would be a high, shrieking squeal when the car is started or driving. No, my car is squealing softly, squeaking, in one of the belts or flywheels somewhere, usually when it's first started after sitting for a while (such as all day at school or several days here at home in the driveway). After a few miles, as the car's engine warms up and I drive her around some, it stops. It usually won't squeak at me if I start it again shortly after it was started and driven somewhere, such as when I make a trip to Walmart or something like that, but it's starting to do it a little louder and a little more often now than it used to -- it used to do it maybe once a week; now it's almost every time I fire her up for the first few minutes she runs. Could be nothing; could be just old age and the need for the engine to get up to proper running temperature once she fires up, or it could be a sign that another one of the belts is going out. Who knows. What I do know is that I don't have any loss of power, the transmission is shifting smoothly, and the car is driving fine and normally without heating up any more than normal and without burning any more oil than usual. The heater and vents work, the electronics and lights are normal, the acceleration and brakes are just fine. Therefore, really, it could be anything or it could be nothing. Now, the temperatures and humidity levels have been going up and down a lot over the past few days and weeks, yes, and as I've mentioned in the past, sometimes (briefly) she'll give me a little trouble starting or will do weird-ass stuff like the "Service Engine Soon" light flashing at me for 30 seconds or so, but overall? For a car with almost 230,000 miles on her, she's running really well and really admirably. I don't really have any complaints there, to be honest with you -- the car gets me to school and back with no real issues, and only has to make one more of those school-and-back trips for the rest of the semester -- on Monday, for my students' final exam (on graduation day, we'll take Daisy's car). This is good, because if she acts up badly after that or blows a major part sometime this summer, it's not like there's a massive hurry in spending a ton of money getting her fixed, because it's not like I have anywhere to be on a daily basis after May 17th until I find another place of employment, wherever/whatever that may eventually be. Believe me, if I had reliable summer employment or a good future job lined up and waiting for me somewhere I would have to move to, I'd sell/junk the Monte Carlo and get a used Honda or something. As I don't, well, for now -- as long as she's running -- it's not a major concern.
The last week of classes tends to be a little strange anyhow, or at least a bit out of the ordinary; as I told Daisy this afternoon upon coming home, it feels as if everyone in the department is running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to get everything done or otherwise taken care of before finals week. I seem to be like Neo in the Matrix, calmly traversing all of that, wading through it, walking in slow motion through everyone running around. I'm done, as they say. I've finished my graduate school career. Today, I was just there.
This morning, after getting out of my squeaky car and walking to the building in the misting rain, I found that I still had not been given the list of exam rooms for our students. This is sort of important, as if I don't tell them where the exam is, duh, they won't come to it. We usually have this information before the last week of classes. Well, today was the second day of the last week of classes, and I had no information. It was my last teaching day. I needed to know where my students' exam was going to be held -- so I went to the office to ask. I was informed by the office administration that the rooms were announced via email last week...which surprised the hell out of me, as I never got an email saying anything of that sort. Yet, all of the rest of the department did. Including adjuncts and assistant professors.
This happens pretty frequently for me, actually -- one out of every five or six emails sent to me via the department just disappears into cyberspace, and I never get it. I don't know why. I don't know if I need to be added to some sort of list, if the servers just don't like my address, or what. Needless to say, it causes me some headaches/stress from time to time and makes me look like a complete ass on occasion at best, and inattentive/aloof at worst.
I got the exam room number and the printout which was sent out via the email I never got -- it'll be me alone with my students, not crammed into another room with a bunch of other 102 students -- and is right down the hall from where I teach my 9:30 class. They are, apparently, still finalizing the grading partners for everything; the 102 director confirmed with me once again this afternoon that Suri and I had requested each other for that list, so I'm pretty sure that list is still being made. Again, that's really late in the semester for that to be happening as well; normally we find out our partners and the exam room at the same time on a printed memo that's put into our mailboxes in the department at least a week or two before the last week of classes, not during. However, the department has been a total mess this semester (which I may or may not write about long, long after graduation), so I can sort of understand things going a little more slowly than usual. And, again, remember -- chickens with their heads cut off. All of the important stuff is getting done, so that's all that really matters.
I taught what may very well be my last two classes ever today, in which I collected papers (easily 500-600 pages to read and grade through between now and Monday), told my students the exam room, time/date, grading scale, and went through the stuff they needed -- and I gave my normal end-of-the-semester pep-talk/speech. This time, however, it was more subdued.
"I want you kids to know that today, for better or worse, is the end of my teaching career for the foreseeable future," I said. "I don't know if, in the future, I'll ever teach another class again. I'm graduating in a week and a half, and while many of you engineers may have jobs waiting for you directly out of undergrad with your Bachelor's, the situation is a little more grim for those of us getting English degrees -- even Master's degrees. There's no guaranteed jobs for anyone, and thousands of MFAs graduate every year for every open teaching position at any school. Because of that, I don't know if I'll ever teach again. And I love teaching. Teaching all of you how to write better has been my life for the past three years."
All of them looked at me very seriously, as if they thought I would start crying in front of them, or something like that. I did not. I was not in a crying vein; I was in a serious vein.
"And over those past three years," I continued, "with two full classes each semester, teaching hundreds and hundreds of students, I have seen and I have put up with a deeply impacted ass-full of bullshit in all forms -- I've put up with whining, I've put up with excuses, I've put up with students who didn't listen, didn't care, and didn't do the work, but you know what? In the end, it's all been worth it. And, most importantly, you folks -- you didn't do that. You didn't give me any shit. You're intelligent. You're engineers. You come to class, you ask questions when necessary, you pay attention, and you do your work. Teaching this class has been one of the most fun, most fulfilling experiences of my life. So, to you brave souls, as you venture forward into the rest of your undergraduate careers, I have but one thing to say to you -- thank you."
They sat there stunned. I don't think they knew how to react one way or the other. At least, that's what I thought at the time. Later, a slow realization came over me -- these students never get thanked by anything, or anyone, other than by their own grades. Most of their professors don't care if they learn anything or if they pass their course -- they're just another set of numbers. I've never been like that. I want to see my students succeed. I help them when they need it. I help them when they don't necessarily need it. I don't hold their hands through my course, but I do push them along and make them earn their grades. I, to some extent, teach them how to succeed. I make myself relate-able; I let them know that I was once where they were, that I am still, to an extent, where they are -- as I am a student myself (well, I was until I passed my comps, anyhow). I never claimed to be above them or to be better than them in any way, even as their instructor, and if I made a mistake in something, I admitted my faults. I was human to them in a way most professors aren't.
If I do ever teach again, whether it's for this university or another one, that's not going to change in me. It just won't. It's part of who I am, fundamentally, as a person and as a professor.
My last teaching day ended with a whimper and not a bang. My students took their practice exit exams one by one, turned them in, and left. Suddenly, I was left in my classroom all alone with nobody there and a stack of papers in front of me. I put them in my bag, hit the lights, and left -- it seemed fitting.
My office hours are over and have been over for a week -- all I had left to do was take care of the very few small tasks left I still had around the office, around the department, before I could go home. This entailed working my very last hour ever in the Writing Center. Mind you, this is the last week of classes, and the morning/midday hours are generally the busiest hours of any given week -- but especially the last week of classes. My normal hour in there is supposed to be from 4-5PM on Tuesdays, though I've only worked that hour in there once because I realized what a terrible, horrible, foolish mistake I'd made in scheduling that hour. For one, there are four people on the hired staff working that hour -- I'm usually not needed. For two, after about 3PM on any given day, the Writing Center gets really quiet. For three, getting out of there and trying to leave campus and go home at 5PM on a weekday is an absolute fucking logistical nightmare with Wichita rush hour traffic, which bottlenecks for a span of about two miles or so almost as soon as I get on I-135N. What is normally a 25-minute or so drive can easily turn into an hour-long drive to get home if I leave around 5PM, a stop-and-go, bumper-to-bumper trip all the way out of the city that is not only supremely frustrating to me, but in warmer weather tends to make the car's engine run a bit hot (it being a massive, naturally-aspirated 215 HP V6 and all). Because of these factors, I tend to do my hour in the Writing Center from 1-2, 2-3, or occasionally 3-4 at the latest. Today, everything else was done; I wanted to get off campus and go home, as it was dark and starting to rain. I chose to work the 1-2 hour, and then go home after it was over. I also chose this hour because it was early afternoon during the last week of classes, and figured that they may have been shortstaffed and would need all the help they could get from GTAs like me, especially as half of us tend to blow off the Writing Center during the last week of classes.
I got in there at 1PM to find...nobody. One of the four people on staff was helping a student, who quickly finished her work. Another student (one of Suri's students, actually) was making up a practice final. One of my fellow GTA colleagues was working his hour as well, and had nobody to help. While I was there, a student came in to make up another test and another came in to have someone look over his dissertation -- we directed him to the proper editor(s) for that (as that's not the job of the Writing Center). That's it. What I expected to be a crazy-busy hour in there, especially since they'd already posted on the door that the average wait time was 25 minutes or so during this week, was...completely uneventful.
Again, it's like I was living in a slightly-off parallel universe.
I said my final farewells to the staff for the semester and gathered my things in my office, making sure to put on my field jacket that I've had hanging on the back of the office door for the past month or two (because, as I'd been told, it was raining) before I left. I got in the car, fired her squeally ass up, almost got run over by a pack of Arabic students stuffed into a Jaguar, and finally made my way home. I drove through squalls of heavy rain mixed in with light drizzle and warm winds.
My last day of actual classes and actual teaching on campus is done and over. All that's left to do now is proctor my final, grade my students' papers, post grades, pack up my office, and graduate. I will be home from now until Monday morning, barring a trip or two to run errands (primarily to Walmart and to the Dollar Tree, both of which I have to go to over the course of the next week or so). I'll have to get gas in the car and in the tank for the mower, too -- since as soon as there's a day where it's not going to rain, again, I desperately need to mow the grass. I also want to make sure my car has a full tank of gas so that I won't have to get any more for some time.
I did, however, face a conundrum when I came home. You see, aside from stuff like boxed mashed/scalloped potatoes, mac & cheese, cereal, couscous, and rice, I have little else in the house to eat. I have a ton of "pantry" foods that require cooking, and I have some frozen soup in the freezer, but I really didn't want to do anything. I'd been awake since 5AM. I was tired. I didn't want to go shopping. I didn't want to cook, or make a sandwich, or even stop at Burger King on the way home (though that thought did cross my mind, briefly). I really just wanted to have something ready that I didn't have to work on, something I could put in my mouth-hole and be full of.
Of course, if you know me well, this usually constitutes ordering pizza.
I'd been flirting with the idea of ordering pizza for several days, as you know if you've been reading my past few entries. Neither Pizza Hut nor Papa John's had any good specials going on right now, though. I did have enough points for a free pizza from Papa John's, but getting a free pizza and nothing else is sort of an asshole thing to do, since I still tip the delivery person pretty well.
I found some coupon codes for Papa John's that let me get any large 3-topping for $7.99. That's about half the normal price, roughly. That coupon code also allows me to get as many pizzas of that configuration as I want for the same price. With that and my free pizza coupon code, it was actually worth getting something for once -- so I got two pizzas with the $7.99 code (both of them extra cheese, onions, and hot Italian sausage) and got a free one with the free Papa Points code I had (green peppers, extra cheese, and bacon). I threw in an order of "chicken poppers," which are really just chicken nuggets, and a 2L bottle of Mountain Dew because I wanted some soda, and the grand total came out to $28-something. I put it on my Amazon card and added in a $10 tip for the delivery driver -- this is pretty customary for me regardless of what my order is or how much it comes out to; I usually give them at least a $5-10 tip, and tend to tip more if I'm using my card instead of cash.
I spent the next half hour or so talking to Daisy, waiting for the pizza to arrive. This in itself is nothing unusual, but what happened when it did arrive is.
Near the time the pizza was supposed to be here, I went out into the living room several times to watch for the driver -- at this point, the Papa John's people know me pretty well, they know my address, they know to come upstairs instead of going to the downstairs door (because I'll never hear them knock down there; it's too far away from me up here and sound doesn't carry well through the thick walls and floors of this house). I even have it set up on the delivery order page that I am on "floor two" so they'll come up the stairs to the landing/overhang balcony. Most of the delivery drivers, of which there are two or three who come here on a regular basis, already know this and know me, so this isn't normally a problem.
When the pizza was five minutes late, I went out to the living room to look out the window to see where the driver was. I know they can be late sometimes, especially if there's a train going through town; the train tracks bisect this town into the north and south sides, and go right through the center of it. There are seven tracks. It's a big midwestern hub for freight and passenger trains, and frequently a really long train moving through town can clog up traffic for fifteen minutes or so (I know this because I have had to wait for trains for that long before). So, when I went to the window, I looked out.
There was a car parked at the end of my street with the Papa John's light on top of it. It was empty. Hm.
I stood on the porch for a minute, listening to see if he was coming up the stairs. He wasn't. I walked down the stairs and looked around. Nobody. Nobody anywhere, in fact -- for it being 75 degrees and gorgeous at a time of day when the white trash neighbors' kids are usually running around the neighborhood screaming, not a soul was around anywhere.
"Hello?" I called out. "Pizza person?"
Nothing.
I went back into the house and turned on my phone, still watching out the window. Usually if they can't find me or I don't hear them knocking on the door, they call. Nothing. As I was looking out the bfront window, I heard a pounding...on my back door. As in, the door that leads out to my jungle of a yard, on the back deck that hasn't been cleaned off in two years, where nobody goes ever.
What the fuck, man? Seriously?
The pizza guy, who looked like he was about fifteen, explained to me that he couldn't figure out how to get upstairs to the front door. Uhhh...
It's not hard, I wanted to tell him. See the space between the two sides of the houses, the one with windows and STAIRS in it?
Clearly, one doesn't have to be too bright to become a pizza delivery driver. The guy was still nice, and he thanked me for the gracious tip; I told him I always tip drivers well because I know they need it and know it isn't a fun job.
When I was living in Missouri, I had a friend who delivered pizza for Papa John's. In his mother's car (because his own car had died). He got mugged one night while doing it. It's not a fun or easy job.
I thanked him, he walked back out to his car, and left. He was not one of my normal delivery drivers, obviously -- but do you see what I mean when I say that everything about the day was a little "off"?
Anyway, I ate my pizza, Daisy went to bed later, and so did I. When I went to bed it started storming, finally, though nothing bad. Just some hard rain and a bit of thunder/lightning. Nothing major.
This has been one of the most bizarre days of my entire semester.
But, really, it wasn't bizarre until I thought about it. On the surface, really, it was like any other day.
I will preface this post by saying that I never expect my days to go strangely, and never get a vibe that one is going to, but everything today was just a little...off. Like I woke up in an only slightly parallel universe.
I actually wrote a short story about that scenario once, about a man who wakes up in a different, but only slightly, parallel universe each time he goes to sleep. I should dig that out and revise it; it was very Twilight Zone-esque. Might be publishable somewhere. And it definitely needs a rewrite. Hm. New project for the coming few weeks.
First off, my car is squealing.
No, not in the fun way. And not in the oh-shit-my-differential-is-going-out sort of way. That would be a high, shrieking squeal when the car is started or driving. No, my car is squealing softly, squeaking, in one of the belts or flywheels somewhere, usually when it's first started after sitting for a while (such as all day at school or several days here at home in the driveway). After a few miles, as the car's engine warms up and I drive her around some, it stops. It usually won't squeak at me if I start it again shortly after it was started and driven somewhere, such as when I make a trip to Walmart or something like that, but it's starting to do it a little louder and a little more often now than it used to -- it used to do it maybe once a week; now it's almost every time I fire her up for the first few minutes she runs. Could be nothing; could be just old age and the need for the engine to get up to proper running temperature once she fires up, or it could be a sign that another one of the belts is going out. Who knows. What I do know is that I don't have any loss of power, the transmission is shifting smoothly, and the car is driving fine and normally without heating up any more than normal and without burning any more oil than usual. The heater and vents work, the electronics and lights are normal, the acceleration and brakes are just fine. Therefore, really, it could be anything or it could be nothing. Now, the temperatures and humidity levels have been going up and down a lot over the past few days and weeks, yes, and as I've mentioned in the past, sometimes (briefly) she'll give me a little trouble starting or will do weird-ass stuff like the "Service Engine Soon" light flashing at me for 30 seconds or so, but overall? For a car with almost 230,000 miles on her, she's running really well and really admirably. I don't really have any complaints there, to be honest with you -- the car gets me to school and back with no real issues, and only has to make one more of those school-and-back trips for the rest of the semester -- on Monday, for my students' final exam (on graduation day, we'll take Daisy's car). This is good, because if she acts up badly after that or blows a major part sometime this summer, it's not like there's a massive hurry in spending a ton of money getting her fixed, because it's not like I have anywhere to be on a daily basis after May 17th until I find another place of employment, wherever/whatever that may eventually be. Believe me, if I had reliable summer employment or a good future job lined up and waiting for me somewhere I would have to move to, I'd sell/junk the Monte Carlo and get a used Honda or something. As I don't, well, for now -- as long as she's running -- it's not a major concern.
The last week of classes tends to be a little strange anyhow, or at least a bit out of the ordinary; as I told Daisy this afternoon upon coming home, it feels as if everyone in the department is running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to get everything done or otherwise taken care of before finals week. I seem to be like Neo in the Matrix, calmly traversing all of that, wading through it, walking in slow motion through everyone running around. I'm done, as they say. I've finished my graduate school career. Today, I was just there.
This morning, after getting out of my squeaky car and walking to the building in the misting rain, I found that I still had not been given the list of exam rooms for our students. This is sort of important, as if I don't tell them where the exam is, duh, they won't come to it. We usually have this information before the last week of classes. Well, today was the second day of the last week of classes, and I had no information. It was my last teaching day. I needed to know where my students' exam was going to be held -- so I went to the office to ask. I was informed by the office administration that the rooms were announced via email last week...which surprised the hell out of me, as I never got an email saying anything of that sort. Yet, all of the rest of the department did. Including adjuncts and assistant professors.
This happens pretty frequently for me, actually -- one out of every five or six emails sent to me via the department just disappears into cyberspace, and I never get it. I don't know why. I don't know if I need to be added to some sort of list, if the servers just don't like my address, or what. Needless to say, it causes me some headaches/stress from time to time and makes me look like a complete ass on occasion at best, and inattentive/aloof at worst.
I got the exam room number and the printout which was sent out via the email I never got -- it'll be me alone with my students, not crammed into another room with a bunch of other 102 students -- and is right down the hall from where I teach my 9:30 class. They are, apparently, still finalizing the grading partners for everything; the 102 director confirmed with me once again this afternoon that Suri and I had requested each other for that list, so I'm pretty sure that list is still being made. Again, that's really late in the semester for that to be happening as well; normally we find out our partners and the exam room at the same time on a printed memo that's put into our mailboxes in the department at least a week or two before the last week of classes, not during. However, the department has been a total mess this semester (which I may or may not write about long, long after graduation), so I can sort of understand things going a little more slowly than usual. And, again, remember -- chickens with their heads cut off. All of the important stuff is getting done, so that's all that really matters.
I taught what may very well be my last two classes ever today, in which I collected papers (easily 500-600 pages to read and grade through between now and Monday), told my students the exam room, time/date, grading scale, and went through the stuff they needed -- and I gave my normal end-of-the-semester pep-talk/speech. This time, however, it was more subdued.
"I want you kids to know that today, for better or worse, is the end of my teaching career for the foreseeable future," I said. "I don't know if, in the future, I'll ever teach another class again. I'm graduating in a week and a half, and while many of you engineers may have jobs waiting for you directly out of undergrad with your Bachelor's, the situation is a little more grim for those of us getting English degrees -- even Master's degrees. There's no guaranteed jobs for anyone, and thousands of MFAs graduate every year for every open teaching position at any school. Because of that, I don't know if I'll ever teach again. And I love teaching. Teaching all of you how to write better has been my life for the past three years."
All of them looked at me very seriously, as if they thought I would start crying in front of them, or something like that. I did not. I was not in a crying vein; I was in a serious vein.
"And over those past three years," I continued, "with two full classes each semester, teaching hundreds and hundreds of students, I have seen and I have put up with a deeply impacted ass-full of bullshit in all forms -- I've put up with whining, I've put up with excuses, I've put up with students who didn't listen, didn't care, and didn't do the work, but you know what? In the end, it's all been worth it. And, most importantly, you folks -- you didn't do that. You didn't give me any shit. You're intelligent. You're engineers. You come to class, you ask questions when necessary, you pay attention, and you do your work. Teaching this class has been one of the most fun, most fulfilling experiences of my life. So, to you brave souls, as you venture forward into the rest of your undergraduate careers, I have but one thing to say to you -- thank you."
They sat there stunned. I don't think they knew how to react one way or the other. At least, that's what I thought at the time. Later, a slow realization came over me -- these students never get thanked by anything, or anyone, other than by their own grades. Most of their professors don't care if they learn anything or if they pass their course -- they're just another set of numbers. I've never been like that. I want to see my students succeed. I help them when they need it. I help them when they don't necessarily need it. I don't hold their hands through my course, but I do push them along and make them earn their grades. I, to some extent, teach them how to succeed. I make myself relate-able; I let them know that I was once where they were, that I am still, to an extent, where they are -- as I am a student myself (well, I was until I passed my comps, anyhow). I never claimed to be above them or to be better than them in any way, even as their instructor, and if I made a mistake in something, I admitted my faults. I was human to them in a way most professors aren't.
If I do ever teach again, whether it's for this university or another one, that's not going to change in me. It just won't. It's part of who I am, fundamentally, as a person and as a professor.
My last teaching day ended with a whimper and not a bang. My students took their practice exit exams one by one, turned them in, and left. Suddenly, I was left in my classroom all alone with nobody there and a stack of papers in front of me. I put them in my bag, hit the lights, and left -- it seemed fitting.
My office hours are over and have been over for a week -- all I had left to do was take care of the very few small tasks left I still had around the office, around the department, before I could go home. This entailed working my very last hour ever in the Writing Center. Mind you, this is the last week of classes, and the morning/midday hours are generally the busiest hours of any given week -- but especially the last week of classes. My normal hour in there is supposed to be from 4-5PM on Tuesdays, though I've only worked that hour in there once because I realized what a terrible, horrible, foolish mistake I'd made in scheduling that hour. For one, there are four people on the hired staff working that hour -- I'm usually not needed. For two, after about 3PM on any given day, the Writing Center gets really quiet. For three, getting out of there and trying to leave campus and go home at 5PM on a weekday is an absolute fucking logistical nightmare with Wichita rush hour traffic, which bottlenecks for a span of about two miles or so almost as soon as I get on I-135N. What is normally a 25-minute or so drive can easily turn into an hour-long drive to get home if I leave around 5PM, a stop-and-go, bumper-to-bumper trip all the way out of the city that is not only supremely frustrating to me, but in warmer weather tends to make the car's engine run a bit hot (it being a massive, naturally-aspirated 215 HP V6 and all). Because of these factors, I tend to do my hour in the Writing Center from 1-2, 2-3, or occasionally 3-4 at the latest. Today, everything else was done; I wanted to get off campus and go home, as it was dark and starting to rain. I chose to work the 1-2 hour, and then go home after it was over. I also chose this hour because it was early afternoon during the last week of classes, and figured that they may have been shortstaffed and would need all the help they could get from GTAs like me, especially as half of us tend to blow off the Writing Center during the last week of classes.
I got in there at 1PM to find...nobody. One of the four people on staff was helping a student, who quickly finished her work. Another student (one of Suri's students, actually) was making up a practice final. One of my fellow GTA colleagues was working his hour as well, and had nobody to help. While I was there, a student came in to make up another test and another came in to have someone look over his dissertation -- we directed him to the proper editor(s) for that (as that's not the job of the Writing Center). That's it. What I expected to be a crazy-busy hour in there, especially since they'd already posted on the door that the average wait time was 25 minutes or so during this week, was...completely uneventful.
Again, it's like I was living in a slightly-off parallel universe.
I said my final farewells to the staff for the semester and gathered my things in my office, making sure to put on my field jacket that I've had hanging on the back of the office door for the past month or two (because, as I'd been told, it was raining) before I left. I got in the car, fired her squeally ass up, almost got run over by a pack of Arabic students stuffed into a Jaguar, and finally made my way home. I drove through squalls of heavy rain mixed in with light drizzle and warm winds.
My last day of actual classes and actual teaching on campus is done and over. All that's left to do now is proctor my final, grade my students' papers, post grades, pack up my office, and graduate. I will be home from now until Monday morning, barring a trip or two to run errands (primarily to Walmart and to the Dollar Tree, both of which I have to go to over the course of the next week or so). I'll have to get gas in the car and in the tank for the mower, too -- since as soon as there's a day where it's not going to rain, again, I desperately need to mow the grass. I also want to make sure my car has a full tank of gas so that I won't have to get any more for some time.
I did, however, face a conundrum when I came home. You see, aside from stuff like boxed mashed/scalloped potatoes, mac & cheese, cereal, couscous, and rice, I have little else in the house to eat. I have a ton of "pantry" foods that require cooking, and I have some frozen soup in the freezer, but I really didn't want to do anything. I'd been awake since 5AM. I was tired. I didn't want to go shopping. I didn't want to cook, or make a sandwich, or even stop at Burger King on the way home (though that thought did cross my mind, briefly). I really just wanted to have something ready that I didn't have to work on, something I could put in my mouth-hole and be full of.
Of course, if you know me well, this usually constitutes ordering pizza.
I'd been flirting with the idea of ordering pizza for several days, as you know if you've been reading my past few entries. Neither Pizza Hut nor Papa John's had any good specials going on right now, though. I did have enough points for a free pizza from Papa John's, but getting a free pizza and nothing else is sort of an asshole thing to do, since I still tip the delivery person pretty well.
I found some coupon codes for Papa John's that let me get any large 3-topping for $7.99. That's about half the normal price, roughly. That coupon code also allows me to get as many pizzas of that configuration as I want for the same price. With that and my free pizza coupon code, it was actually worth getting something for once -- so I got two pizzas with the $7.99 code (both of them extra cheese, onions, and hot Italian sausage) and got a free one with the free Papa Points code I had (green peppers, extra cheese, and bacon). I threw in an order of "chicken poppers," which are really just chicken nuggets, and a 2L bottle of Mountain Dew because I wanted some soda, and the grand total came out to $28-something. I put it on my Amazon card and added in a $10 tip for the delivery driver -- this is pretty customary for me regardless of what my order is or how much it comes out to; I usually give them at least a $5-10 tip, and tend to tip more if I'm using my card instead of cash.
I spent the next half hour or so talking to Daisy, waiting for the pizza to arrive. This in itself is nothing unusual, but what happened when it did arrive is.
Near the time the pizza was supposed to be here, I went out into the living room several times to watch for the driver -- at this point, the Papa John's people know me pretty well, they know my address, they know to come upstairs instead of going to the downstairs door (because I'll never hear them knock down there; it's too far away from me up here and sound doesn't carry well through the thick walls and floors of this house). I even have it set up on the delivery order page that I am on "floor two" so they'll come up the stairs to the landing/overhang balcony. Most of the delivery drivers, of which there are two or three who come here on a regular basis, already know this and know me, so this isn't normally a problem.
When the pizza was five minutes late, I went out to the living room to look out the window to see where the driver was. I know they can be late sometimes, especially if there's a train going through town; the train tracks bisect this town into the north and south sides, and go right through the center of it. There are seven tracks. It's a big midwestern hub for freight and passenger trains, and frequently a really long train moving through town can clog up traffic for fifteen minutes or so (I know this because I have had to wait for trains for that long before). So, when I went to the window, I looked out.
There was a car parked at the end of my street with the Papa John's light on top of it. It was empty. Hm.
I stood on the porch for a minute, listening to see if he was coming up the stairs. He wasn't. I walked down the stairs and looked around. Nobody. Nobody anywhere, in fact -- for it being 75 degrees and gorgeous at a time of day when the white trash neighbors' kids are usually running around the neighborhood screaming, not a soul was around anywhere.
"Hello?" I called out. "Pizza person?"
Nothing.
I went back into the house and turned on my phone, still watching out the window. Usually if they can't find me or I don't hear them knocking on the door, they call. Nothing. As I was looking out the bfront window, I heard a pounding...on my back door. As in, the door that leads out to my jungle of a yard, on the back deck that hasn't been cleaned off in two years, where nobody goes ever.
What the fuck, man? Seriously?
The pizza guy, who looked like he was about fifteen, explained to me that he couldn't figure out how to get upstairs to the front door. Uhhh...
It's not hard, I wanted to tell him. See the space between the two sides of the houses, the one with windows and STAIRS in it?
Clearly, one doesn't have to be too bright to become a pizza delivery driver. The guy was still nice, and he thanked me for the gracious tip; I told him I always tip drivers well because I know they need it and know it isn't a fun job.
When I was living in Missouri, I had a friend who delivered pizza for Papa John's. In his mother's car (because his own car had died). He got mugged one night while doing it. It's not a fun or easy job.
I thanked him, he walked back out to his car, and left. He was not one of my normal delivery drivers, obviously -- but do you see what I mean when I say that everything about the day was a little "off"?
Anyway, I ate my pizza, Daisy went to bed later, and so did I. When I went to bed it started storming, finally, though nothing bad. Just some hard rain and a bit of thunder/lightning. Nothing major.
Monday, May 6, 2013
Occupied
Spring semester: day seventy-five
When I am in a funk, restless, or depressed, as you may already know, I tend to find things to occupy my time to keep my mind working on other things. Sometimes this can be something as simple as taking care of household chores or reading through a long chain of Wikipedia (or, on particularly nerdy nights, Memory Alpha or Wookieepedia) articles. Other times it can be something peaceful or necessary to do, such as going shopping at 4AM or spending a few hours grading through student papers or making new handouts/lesson plans to follow in class -- the latter of which, of course, I won't be able to do anymore after next week.
This weekend, as you know, I've been in a funk. I tried to be social (well, I really tried to get others to be social with me) and failed; Daisy works all weekend, so I can barely get any time with her when we're both awake; I've already done the shopping I need to do for a while -- etc. It's a low-grade depression mixed with boredom and restlessness, which is what creates the "funk." And, of course, in the background (read: all the stuff I can't write about here) everything is still going on, and I've been stressed about that, so eh. Yeah, I get restless and feeling very blahhhh. Yesterday, I spent several hours grading through the rest of my students' rewritten papers, which kept me occupied for a while, and I updated all of their grades on Blackboard.
Last night, I went out onto the Ubuntu Software Center and got myself a no-frills video DVD burning program so that I can start transferring my old archived videos (some of which I've had, on CD-R, for over ten years) to DVD and watch them downstairs in the bedroom on the new TV. That takes time and excites me; it keeps me occupied because I have to dig through my collections and decide what I want to put on DVD and what I don't, and see what I have that I've either not watched in many years or have never watched (because there's a ton of that). Let's just say that I had a group of friends who were very active in downloading things at WVU in the unregulated internet days of 2002-2004 or so, and I bought many a spindle of CD-Rs for copies. I still have all of them. I used to have a VHS-to-digital-video VCR, but it was a long-ago Christmas gift to my ex and she took it with her when we broke up. I might eventually buy another one; I have a ton of old VHS tapes I'd like to transfer to DVD -- stuff taped off TV in the '90s as well as actual tapes of films and/or anime purchased many years ago. I have most of the run of Dragon Ball Z on VHS, for example, purchased in my high school days from used video stores and garage sales. Really, I'd like to eventually do something with that so that the tapes don't take up so much space.
My mother told me that there's going to be some big flea market held at the storage space across the road from their house on top of the mountain starting next month, and that she and my dad plan to start selling a lot of their "junk" there, if possible. I need to do something like this myself, eventually, as mentioned here before -- sometime this summer I need to organize a big yard/garage sale, advertise the shit out of it in the newspaper and via signs around the neighborhood, and begin getting rid of a lot of the stuff cluttering up my house. And it is just stuff -- a lot of it is fairly useless to me and has been in storage for years, or has just been sitting around because I have nothing to do with any of it. Some of it was left here by my ex, some of it is stuff that I thought I would have a use for and never did, etc. A lot of it is books/tapes/DVDs/furniture/small appliances/etc, and it's all taking up space and is stuff that just can't be tossed in the trash or recycling (such as old lamps, unfinished wooden chairs, a weight bench with weights, etc). I have a lot of stuff I need to get rid of before I move out of this town and to wherever I'm going next. Half of it I just want to mark "free" and stick out in the yard during the yard sale just to be rid of it. Sell, sell, sell. I'm hoping that Daisy and I can set up a few days to do this at some point over the summer, and that maybe friends like Parker would be able to come up and/or help out as well. But it definitely needs to be done before I move out of here, otherwise I'm going to have to call the trash people and say something like "So, um, can you drop one of your dumpsters here for like, a week or so?"
Daisy thinks she's getting sick again -- yesterday, she had to work more than four hours' worth of overtime (she went to work at 8:30 PM and didn't get off until around noon or so), and last night when she went back in she was sick and severely sleep-deprived. She thinks she might be coming down with strep or something along those lines, or at least that's what she said. I told her that if she thinks she's getting sick, especially with something that bad, to get to the doctor now; not only does she get sick quite often, but you really can't let strep go, and the last thing I want is for her to come down over graduation weekend -- ten days from now -- and not only be sick, but to make me sick as well. I'm giving her as much downtime/sleep-time as she needs and am trying not to bother her too much in her off hours -- which isn't hard to do, as she generally sleeps all day when I'm awake anyhow, and because after this cycle of days off she has to work something like seven or eight days straight just to be able to come down here for graduation weekend. I was going to surprise her and ask if she wanted to come down tonight, since she won't get to see me until graduation and because she has to work a week straight beforehand -- not to mention that tomorrow is my last teaching day of the semester -- but when she got sick, those plans sort of went out the window.
I still have not mowed the grass, and it desperately needs it -- every day until today, it's either been cold, rainy, snowy, icy, or I've been on campus. For the next four days, it's supposed to storm like hell here, too (the Weather Channel has already mentioned terms like "severe" and "tornado outbreak" for Wednesday and Thursday). If it's not shitty or freezing outside, it's storming like hell. Can't we just have a week of days where it's 80 and sunny? Just one week? Y'know, since it's May and all?
It's supposed to be 75 tomorrow and the storms aren't supposed to start until the afternoon/evening. I am celebrating my last teaching day by wearing a pink/purple tie-dyed V-neck shirt, sandals, and camouflage shorts. Because that's how I roll, son. Let it storm for the rest of the week if it wants to -- I don't have anywhere to go, once I come back home from teaching, until Monday. I can stick my car in the garage and give the weather the finger.
I actually had a dream last night that we got some terrible storms with golf-ball-sized hail, and that I forgot to put my car in the garage beforehand. Premonitions? Who knows. I'm psych-o, not psych-ic.
Generally, anyway.
In other news, I think I found my wedding ring; or, rather, Daisy found it for me:
Tungsten carbide (if you couldn't tell from the inlay). Pretty, inexpensive, and elegant. I don't like gold (of any color, really); Daisy's engagement ring is white gold, but that's because it's her engagement ring. I tend to like the harder, less expensive metals like stainless steel, sterling silver, tungsten carbide, titanium (yes, they have titanium rings, and they're super-inexpensive), etc. I also don't like wearing rings with stones and I don't like rings that have a highly-polished finish for the most part, either. I like the antiqued rings, which basically means "hey, we didn't polish this" or "it's been treated to look older and more matte than metals of this type normally would be."
Rings can be purchased on Amazon very cheaply these days; there's no reason to go to a jeweler anymore unless you want something customized. I bought Daisy a pre-wedding ring with inlaid stones all around it to see how she likes it before I get her real one, and it was, literally, pennies.
"What if I really like that one, though?" she asked me. "You know I don't care about how much the ring costs. It's unimportant."
"If you really like that one, I can get you one just like it and actually get one that will hold up," I replied. "Because the reviews on this one say that the stones eventually start falling out the more you wear it, and that's a bad thing with three cats in the house."
Again, pennies.
I'm also helped by the fact that Daisy does not want a diamond; the stone in her engagement ring is highly-polished Swarovski crystal (and believe me, I looked around for a long time for a ring that wasn't a diamond or CZ, but was unique in its own way), and the stones in the pre-wedding ring are all tiny little CZs in a stainless-steel channel setting. The cost of my own wedding ring pictured above, if I choose that one, is comparable to the cost of her engagement ring -- so it'll balance out in some weird way. There are others I've seen which are more or less expensive, though I haven't yet come across one I like more than that one. Not yet, anyway.
While we know the weekend that we want to hold the wedding, we've still not yet set a formal wedding date; we can't do that until after this summer, roughly, once I figure out what I'll be doing and where I'll be doing it. I need a bit of relative calm and focus in order to bury myself in my work and job applications for places for eight hours a day, and that relative calm won't come until after I return from Omaha after graduation. Daisy is patient with me; there's no rush, of course, but both of us still want to get settled and get on with our lives as soon as possible. As mentioned previously, I've lived pretty frugally all semester long, and with my last two paychecks, my tax returns, and any graduation money yet to come in added to what I already have, I'll have well more than enough money necessary to survive for about six months or so if required, barring any sort of catastrophe. I don't eat much, I don't drive around a lot in the summers (so I won't be filling my car with gas every week) and as long as it stays relatively cool outside for a while, I won't have to run the air conditioner that much, if at all. I have relatively few needs or bills, and tend to stay pretty self-sufficient.
I have received my first "graduation present" of sorts -- my friend April, in Portland, sent me a $50 Amazon gift card yesterday. This is incredibly generous of her; April has helped me out a lot over the years. We've had a long, strange friendship that started close to ten years ago now when I was a fan of the radio show she was doing at the time. When that ended when she moved to Portland, she and I became good friends via Facebook and other online means. I've helped to edit her novel for her (something which I will continue to do as long as she keeps adding to it) and provided her with the archive of her radio shows that she'd lost, mainly because back in the day I was one of those nutty people who archived everything, and in turn she has done all sorts of stuff for me -- she got me a knife block set a few years ago when I needed one, she's sent me gift cards for Walmart when I've been really poor, etc. April also probably owns more of my tie-dyed shirts than anyone else, as well -- if she's not outright purchased them from me, I've sent her big care packages over the years containing two or three shirts at a time, I've baked/mailed cookies to her, etc. While we don't talk a lot, I do consider her a close friend, so I mailed her a graduation announcement (since she and her husband are two of about ten friends or so I always mail stuff to, like Christmas cards and the like). I figured it was nice; she graduated from a graphic design program she'd been in for a few years as of late as well, so spread the love, right? I certainly didn't expect her to do anything for me. It was very, very sweet of her -- and it lets me know that yes, there are some people out there who care about me and want to do things for me, even when unnecessary. It really pepped up my mood quite a bit yesterday, and I thanked her profusely. It also reminded me that I have to get more thank-you notes soon as well, for anyone else who does do this sort of thing for me, yet I am not in regular contact with.
I have been obsessively checking my mailbox every day for my tax returns so that I can cash those checks when I get them. I don't know when they'll get here, but as mentioned before, I desperately want them to arrive before I graduate and go up to Omaha so that I have a bit of pocket money to take with me for food, shopping, etc. The mall Daisy took me to when I was there over New Year's was fantastic, even though there wasn't much I could find then that I could afford, and we didn't even hit the gigantic thrift stores up there (which I am absolutely, totally itching to plunder). She told me there's a better mall closer to her house, too, and it excites me. I'm such a woman sometimes -- I absolutely adore shopping and going through thrift stores for clothing and knick-knacks. This is probably why I also adore yard/garage sales. It's all an adventure to me. It gets my blood pumping. There are few things I enjoy more than going through clearance racks and diving into piles of deeply-discounted things. Most of my favorite clothing (the clothing I haven't purchased on Amazon, that is) has been found on clearance racks at JCPenney, Target, Walmart, Kmart, Old Navy, T.J. Maxx, and from many thrift stores. As I have none of those places here in Newton aside from Walmart (remember, in small towns like mine it's Walmart or die), I don't actually get out to do any of this sort of shopping much -- something that is totally commonplace for most other people, especially those folks with a mall or many of these sorts of stores around them -- is almost completely foreign (and exciting) to me now, after living in a tiny town like this one for the past four years. Hence why, if I want or need anything new, I tend to order it from Amazon and cross my fingers to hope it fits or looks good when it gets here. Certain things I can't do that with, though -- for example, my favorite pair of sandals I've ever owned I found by happenstance on a clearance rack in a Macy's store in San Antonio, Texas, in March 2011, when I was there for a conference and the mall was attached to the hotel. I paid four dollars for them and have never seen a similar pair anywhere else since.
Ah, I miss San Antonio. What an awesome town. Lone Star beer, incredible food, the riverwalk was amazing, the weather was gorgeous, etc. I so loved it there for the short four days I was at that conference.
I hear more neighbors outside mowing their grass. Bah. It's only 64; that's still a bit chilly for me to be outside mowing. When I'm inside and my fingers are cold, and I'm still wearing slippers because my toes are freezing, it's not warm enough to mow. I'll give it a few days and let those storms roll through first; once I start mowing, if it keeps raining every few days, I'll have to end up continually mowing the grass over and over and over anyhow.
So, tomorrow's my last teaching day. I don't want to say goodbye to my students; for the most part, they're fun, bright individuals with good futures ahead of them. More than that, I don't want to receive the 500-page stack of papers I'll have to grade through between now and their exam a week from today. I have no doubt that most of them will be well-written papers, but I really am saying goodbye to my teaching career for the foreseeable future. I don't know if I'll be adjuncting or teaching someplace else in the fall, and more than that I don't know if I'll adjunct or otherwise teach a class ever again after tomorrow. It could be a grand ending to my teaching career and I'll not know it.
I can't leave campus tomorrow directly after my classes, however -- I still have to work my very last hour ever in the Writing Center after I'm done with my classes. I would imagine it will be busy, since it's the final week of classes and everyone has papers coming due this week, not just us English professors. It's quite possible there may be a line out the door, a concept which fills me with absolute terror and dread. Because tomorrow is my last day on campus before my students' final exam, I've told friends and colleagues that I'm holding a little coffee-and-chat party in my office from 7-9AM before I have to teach, as it'll be one of the last times I'll be around without anything to do (next Monday morning, when I go in before the final exam, I will be spending all of my time packing up said office as much as possible before graduation, and Daisy and I will be moving all of that stuff out on graduation day). I doubt anyone will show up other than those of us who are there normally on a Tuesday morning, but it would be nice to at least see a few of my friends -- especially because in two weeks, most of them will be gone from town for good.
On that note, I need to get something to eat and possibly get a shower; Daisy will be awake eventually, and I want to find out how she's feeling. I worry about her. Then, later tonight, I'll go to bed to get up and face the world in the morning for my last day as an English 102 instructor.
When I am in a funk, restless, or depressed, as you may already know, I tend to find things to occupy my time to keep my mind working on other things. Sometimes this can be something as simple as taking care of household chores or reading through a long chain of Wikipedia (or, on particularly nerdy nights, Memory Alpha or Wookieepedia) articles. Other times it can be something peaceful or necessary to do, such as going shopping at 4AM or spending a few hours grading through student papers or making new handouts/lesson plans to follow in class -- the latter of which, of course, I won't be able to do anymore after next week.
This weekend, as you know, I've been in a funk. I tried to be social (well, I really tried to get others to be social with me) and failed; Daisy works all weekend, so I can barely get any time with her when we're both awake; I've already done the shopping I need to do for a while -- etc. It's a low-grade depression mixed with boredom and restlessness, which is what creates the "funk." And, of course, in the background (read: all the stuff I can't write about here) everything is still going on, and I've been stressed about that, so eh. Yeah, I get restless and feeling very blahhhh. Yesterday, I spent several hours grading through the rest of my students' rewritten papers, which kept me occupied for a while, and I updated all of their grades on Blackboard.
Last night, I went out onto the Ubuntu Software Center and got myself a no-frills video DVD burning program so that I can start transferring my old archived videos (some of which I've had, on CD-R, for over ten years) to DVD and watch them downstairs in the bedroom on the new TV. That takes time and excites me; it keeps me occupied because I have to dig through my collections and decide what I want to put on DVD and what I don't, and see what I have that I've either not watched in many years or have never watched (because there's a ton of that). Let's just say that I had a group of friends who were very active in downloading things at WVU in the unregulated internet days of 2002-2004 or so, and I bought many a spindle of CD-Rs for copies. I still have all of them. I used to have a VHS-to-digital-video VCR, but it was a long-ago Christmas gift to my ex and she took it with her when we broke up. I might eventually buy another one; I have a ton of old VHS tapes I'd like to transfer to DVD -- stuff taped off TV in the '90s as well as actual tapes of films and/or anime purchased many years ago. I have most of the run of Dragon Ball Z on VHS, for example, purchased in my high school days from used video stores and garage sales. Really, I'd like to eventually do something with that so that the tapes don't take up so much space.
My mother told me that there's going to be some big flea market held at the storage space across the road from their house on top of the mountain starting next month, and that she and my dad plan to start selling a lot of their "junk" there, if possible. I need to do something like this myself, eventually, as mentioned here before -- sometime this summer I need to organize a big yard/garage sale, advertise the shit out of it in the newspaper and via signs around the neighborhood, and begin getting rid of a lot of the stuff cluttering up my house. And it is just stuff -- a lot of it is fairly useless to me and has been in storage for years, or has just been sitting around because I have nothing to do with any of it. Some of it was left here by my ex, some of it is stuff that I thought I would have a use for and never did, etc. A lot of it is books/tapes/DVDs/furniture/small appliances/etc, and it's all taking up space and is stuff that just can't be tossed in the trash or recycling (such as old lamps, unfinished wooden chairs, a weight bench with weights, etc). I have a lot of stuff I need to get rid of before I move out of this town and to wherever I'm going next. Half of it I just want to mark "free" and stick out in the yard during the yard sale just to be rid of it. Sell, sell, sell. I'm hoping that Daisy and I can set up a few days to do this at some point over the summer, and that maybe friends like Parker would be able to come up and/or help out as well. But it definitely needs to be done before I move out of here, otherwise I'm going to have to call the trash people and say something like "So, um, can you drop one of your dumpsters here for like, a week or so?"
Daisy thinks she's getting sick again -- yesterday, she had to work more than four hours' worth of overtime (she went to work at 8:30 PM and didn't get off until around noon or so), and last night when she went back in she was sick and severely sleep-deprived. She thinks she might be coming down with strep or something along those lines, or at least that's what she said. I told her that if she thinks she's getting sick, especially with something that bad, to get to the doctor now; not only does she get sick quite often, but you really can't let strep go, and the last thing I want is for her to come down over graduation weekend -- ten days from now -- and not only be sick, but to make me sick as well. I'm giving her as much downtime/sleep-time as she needs and am trying not to bother her too much in her off hours -- which isn't hard to do, as she generally sleeps all day when I'm awake anyhow, and because after this cycle of days off she has to work something like seven or eight days straight just to be able to come down here for graduation weekend. I was going to surprise her and ask if she wanted to come down tonight, since she won't get to see me until graduation and because she has to work a week straight beforehand -- not to mention that tomorrow is my last teaching day of the semester -- but when she got sick, those plans sort of went out the window.
I still have not mowed the grass, and it desperately needs it -- every day until today, it's either been cold, rainy, snowy, icy, or I've been on campus. For the next four days, it's supposed to storm like hell here, too (the Weather Channel has already mentioned terms like "severe" and "tornado outbreak" for Wednesday and Thursday). If it's not shitty or freezing outside, it's storming like hell. Can't we just have a week of days where it's 80 and sunny? Just one week? Y'know, since it's May and all?
It's supposed to be 75 tomorrow and the storms aren't supposed to start until the afternoon/evening. I am celebrating my last teaching day by wearing a pink/purple tie-dyed V-neck shirt, sandals, and camouflage shorts. Because that's how I roll, son. Let it storm for the rest of the week if it wants to -- I don't have anywhere to go, once I come back home from teaching, until Monday. I can stick my car in the garage and give the weather the finger.
I actually had a dream last night that we got some terrible storms with golf-ball-sized hail, and that I forgot to put my car in the garage beforehand. Premonitions? Who knows. I'm psych-o, not psych-ic.
Generally, anyway.
In other news, I think I found my wedding ring; or, rather, Daisy found it for me:
Tungsten carbide (if you couldn't tell from the inlay). Pretty, inexpensive, and elegant. I don't like gold (of any color, really); Daisy's engagement ring is white gold, but that's because it's her engagement ring. I tend to like the harder, less expensive metals like stainless steel, sterling silver, tungsten carbide, titanium (yes, they have titanium rings, and they're super-inexpensive), etc. I also don't like wearing rings with stones and I don't like rings that have a highly-polished finish for the most part, either. I like the antiqued rings, which basically means "hey, we didn't polish this" or "it's been treated to look older and more matte than metals of this type normally would be."
Rings can be purchased on Amazon very cheaply these days; there's no reason to go to a jeweler anymore unless you want something customized. I bought Daisy a pre-wedding ring with inlaid stones all around it to see how she likes it before I get her real one, and it was, literally, pennies.
"What if I really like that one, though?" she asked me. "You know I don't care about how much the ring costs. It's unimportant."
"If you really like that one, I can get you one just like it and actually get one that will hold up," I replied. "Because the reviews on this one say that the stones eventually start falling out the more you wear it, and that's a bad thing with three cats in the house."
Again, pennies.
I'm also helped by the fact that Daisy does not want a diamond; the stone in her engagement ring is highly-polished Swarovski crystal (and believe me, I looked around for a long time for a ring that wasn't a diamond or CZ, but was unique in its own way), and the stones in the pre-wedding ring are all tiny little CZs in a stainless-steel channel setting. The cost of my own wedding ring pictured above, if I choose that one, is comparable to the cost of her engagement ring -- so it'll balance out in some weird way. There are others I've seen which are more or less expensive, though I haven't yet come across one I like more than that one. Not yet, anyway.
While we know the weekend that we want to hold the wedding, we've still not yet set a formal wedding date; we can't do that until after this summer, roughly, once I figure out what I'll be doing and where I'll be doing it. I need a bit of relative calm and focus in order to bury myself in my work and job applications for places for eight hours a day, and that relative calm won't come until after I return from Omaha after graduation. Daisy is patient with me; there's no rush, of course, but both of us still want to get settled and get on with our lives as soon as possible. As mentioned previously, I've lived pretty frugally all semester long, and with my last two paychecks, my tax returns, and any graduation money yet to come in added to what I already have, I'll have well more than enough money necessary to survive for about six months or so if required, barring any sort of catastrophe. I don't eat much, I don't drive around a lot in the summers (so I won't be filling my car with gas every week) and as long as it stays relatively cool outside for a while, I won't have to run the air conditioner that much, if at all. I have relatively few needs or bills, and tend to stay pretty self-sufficient.
I have received my first "graduation present" of sorts -- my friend April, in Portland, sent me a $50 Amazon gift card yesterday. This is incredibly generous of her; April has helped me out a lot over the years. We've had a long, strange friendship that started close to ten years ago now when I was a fan of the radio show she was doing at the time. When that ended when she moved to Portland, she and I became good friends via Facebook and other online means. I've helped to edit her novel for her (something which I will continue to do as long as she keeps adding to it) and provided her with the archive of her radio shows that she'd lost, mainly because back in the day I was one of those nutty people who archived everything, and in turn she has done all sorts of stuff for me -- she got me a knife block set a few years ago when I needed one, she's sent me gift cards for Walmart when I've been really poor, etc. April also probably owns more of my tie-dyed shirts than anyone else, as well -- if she's not outright purchased them from me, I've sent her big care packages over the years containing two or three shirts at a time, I've baked/mailed cookies to her, etc. While we don't talk a lot, I do consider her a close friend, so I mailed her a graduation announcement (since she and her husband are two of about ten friends or so I always mail stuff to, like Christmas cards and the like). I figured it was nice; she graduated from a graphic design program she'd been in for a few years as of late as well, so spread the love, right? I certainly didn't expect her to do anything for me. It was very, very sweet of her -- and it lets me know that yes, there are some people out there who care about me and want to do things for me, even when unnecessary. It really pepped up my mood quite a bit yesterday, and I thanked her profusely. It also reminded me that I have to get more thank-you notes soon as well, for anyone else who does do this sort of thing for me, yet I am not in regular contact with.
I have been obsessively checking my mailbox every day for my tax returns so that I can cash those checks when I get them. I don't know when they'll get here, but as mentioned before, I desperately want them to arrive before I graduate and go up to Omaha so that I have a bit of pocket money to take with me for food, shopping, etc. The mall Daisy took me to when I was there over New Year's was fantastic, even though there wasn't much I could find then that I could afford, and we didn't even hit the gigantic thrift stores up there (which I am absolutely, totally itching to plunder). She told me there's a better mall closer to her house, too, and it excites me. I'm such a woman sometimes -- I absolutely adore shopping and going through thrift stores for clothing and knick-knacks. This is probably why I also adore yard/garage sales. It's all an adventure to me. It gets my blood pumping. There are few things I enjoy more than going through clearance racks and diving into piles of deeply-discounted things. Most of my favorite clothing (the clothing I haven't purchased on Amazon, that is) has been found on clearance racks at JCPenney, Target, Walmart, Kmart, Old Navy, T.J. Maxx, and from many thrift stores. As I have none of those places here in Newton aside from Walmart (remember, in small towns like mine it's Walmart or die), I don't actually get out to do any of this sort of shopping much -- something that is totally commonplace for most other people, especially those folks with a mall or many of these sorts of stores around them -- is almost completely foreign (and exciting) to me now, after living in a tiny town like this one for the past four years. Hence why, if I want or need anything new, I tend to order it from Amazon and cross my fingers to hope it fits or looks good when it gets here. Certain things I can't do that with, though -- for example, my favorite pair of sandals I've ever owned I found by happenstance on a clearance rack in a Macy's store in San Antonio, Texas, in March 2011, when I was there for a conference and the mall was attached to the hotel. I paid four dollars for them and have never seen a similar pair anywhere else since.
Ah, I miss San Antonio. What an awesome town. Lone Star beer, incredible food, the riverwalk was amazing, the weather was gorgeous, etc. I so loved it there for the short four days I was at that conference.
I hear more neighbors outside mowing their grass. Bah. It's only 64; that's still a bit chilly for me to be outside mowing. When I'm inside and my fingers are cold, and I'm still wearing slippers because my toes are freezing, it's not warm enough to mow. I'll give it a few days and let those storms roll through first; once I start mowing, if it keeps raining every few days, I'll have to end up continually mowing the grass over and over and over anyhow.
So, tomorrow's my last teaching day. I don't want to say goodbye to my students; for the most part, they're fun, bright individuals with good futures ahead of them. More than that, I don't want to receive the 500-page stack of papers I'll have to grade through between now and their exam a week from today. I have no doubt that most of them will be well-written papers, but I really am saying goodbye to my teaching career for the foreseeable future. I don't know if I'll be adjuncting or teaching someplace else in the fall, and more than that I don't know if I'll adjunct or otherwise teach a class ever again after tomorrow. It could be a grand ending to my teaching career and I'll not know it.
I can't leave campus tomorrow directly after my classes, however -- I still have to work my very last hour ever in the Writing Center after I'm done with my classes. I would imagine it will be busy, since it's the final week of classes and everyone has papers coming due this week, not just us English professors. It's quite possible there may be a line out the door, a concept which fills me with absolute terror and dread. Because tomorrow is my last day on campus before my students' final exam, I've told friends and colleagues that I'm holding a little coffee-and-chat party in my office from 7-9AM before I have to teach, as it'll be one of the last times I'll be around without anything to do (next Monday morning, when I go in before the final exam, I will be spending all of my time packing up said office as much as possible before graduation, and Daisy and I will be moving all of that stuff out on graduation day). I doubt anyone will show up other than those of us who are there normally on a Tuesday morning, but it would be nice to at least see a few of my friends -- especially because in two weeks, most of them will be gone from town for good.
On that note, I need to get something to eat and possibly get a shower; Daisy will be awake eventually, and I want to find out how she's feeling. I worry about her. Then, later tonight, I'll go to bed to get up and face the world in the morning for my last day as an English 102 instructor.
Sunday, May 5, 2013
Abandonment Issues
When I turned six years old, in 1988, my mother held a birthday party for me in the small trailer in which we lived in Morgantown. My birthday is December 20th, five days before Christmas. She baked me a cake, and I still remember it -- chocolate with chocolate icing and red gel "happy birthday" lettering. She invited all of my family and her friends from work and from around town, and all of them said they'd come. Not a single one of them showed up. It was cold and rainy that day, all day long, and my mother and I sat alone at our wood-and-glass kitchen table, on the chairs made of brass piping and wicker, and ate the cake alone, in silence. I was devastated because no one cared enough to come to my party, and that nobody had the decency to tell us. My mother probably doesn't even remember this now -- several years ago I brought it up in conversation and she claimed to have no recollection of it -- but I remembered it. I remembered it well because, for the first time, it really showed me how careless or self-obsessed some people could be. It was a very young age to find out how cold and how unfeeling reality actually is. It had a profound affect on me that would carry itself through the rest of my life, and created a mantra that I follow to this day -- never depend on anything or anyone but yourself.
Apparently, not much has changed over the years.
Upon waking up this morning in preparation for the garage sale raid, I had just one thought running through my head: if you can't go or don't plan to, just tell me, y'know? It's okay. I understand. I won't take it badly.
Mind you, some of my friends did, and gave me their apologies -- of about ten people I asked personally, seven or eight of them were indeed kind enough to tell me that they would be unable to make it or had prior commitments, and I do appreciate that. Amongst those friends were Rae, Jay, and Parker -- with a few others telling me later this morning.
Look, I get it. 7AM, especially on a Saturday, is early for grad students. But I didn't just invite grad students, the semester's almost over, and this is the only get-together I've ever scheduled. I also understand that people are wanting to get rid of stuff before moving out of town after graduation, instead of trying to collect more, but again -- c'mon, I didn't invite just those of us who are graduating, either. I invited twenty-eight people, from all walks of life -- many of them who didn't even have anything to do with the university; some of them were people I worked with at the newspaper, or friends who have already graduated and have stuck around the area. Twenty-eight. Some of them even live here in town.
Of those twenty-eight people, not a single person showed up. The vast majority of them didn't even acknowledge that they'd been invited, and some even actively ignored my invitation. Again, it's okay to tell me no. But please tell me one way or the other. It's common courtesy.
Adding insult to injury, I saw that someone posted a party invite for the end of this month, and had invited 80-90% of my friends in the department -- many of them the same people I'd invited to today's garage sale event -- and ten or more of them had already confirmed that they'd be there and were excited about it.
Do you have any idea how depressing that is? Again, it basically confirms to me that I was actively ignored and blown off completely.
All in all, it's making me feel a bit, I dunno, down. Unimportant. Abandoned. Abrandoned.
I suppose this is sort of a taste of my own medicine of sorts; I never go to any parties or events my (few) friends hold down in Wichita, to the point where most people have stopped asking/inviting me. That's generally because I don't really drink or party, though, and I certainly am not going to drive home in my landboat after drinking at a party, because that's just effing stupid (and I am not a stupid individual). I'm thirty, and for the most part am too old and mature for that drinking and partying shit -- I tend to act my age. The only "party" sort of event I'm attending is the graduation party later this month, and that's mainly only because Daisy will be here, doesn't drink, and we'll be taking her car.
Is it because it was on a Saturday morning and no alcohol was involved? I even asked that question to Daisy this morning, because I couldn't tell you how pissed off and just completely crushed/disappointed I was. Am I an old fart in my thirties trying to get people in their early-to-mid-twenties to hang out with him? I mean, what is it? I'm questioning everything about myself. And this is, really, why I don't do shit like this. I know I'm just going to end up bitter, jaded, and disappointed. Even after all the times my friends have been like "hey, we should come up to Newton and do something" and I've said "that would be great," etc., the only people who have ever come up are Rae and Jay -- and, yes, I do appreciate that, but in three weeks they'll both be gone and I'll more than likely never see them again -- and then, well, I'll really have no one.
I don't know. It just feels like, to some extent, I've been left behind in a lot of ways by those few folks I actually care about and actually want to see/spend time with before graduation. Granted, that's not a lot of people, but still. I put together an event, I put time and hopes into planning for it and getting excited about it, and everyone's like "meh, no." I'm not mad or disappointed with anyone; that would burn unnecessary calories and give me more stress. I'm just sort of disappointed in general because it really does feel like few people care. Hell, few even cared enough to say no; they just ignored the event altogether -- which was, essentially, ignoring me. I'm not the kind of person to jump around and scream pay attention to me, dammit! or throw a poor-me-pity-party, but I am let down by all of this. Especially because there were a lot of people who were gung-ho about it when I mentioned that it was coming up last month. Realistically, I should've realized this is what would happen. Daisy really wished she could come, but she's working tonight and tomorrow night. I won't see her in person again until graduation weekend.
It's not just this; I sent out all of my graduation announcements (the last batch went out three or four days ago now) and the vast majority of them should've reached their destinations by now. The only people who I know have received one are Daisy's parents, as they said they got theirs already -- and I believe theirs was in the last batch I mailed out. I wonder how many people are going to get it, read it and say "yeah, that's nice," and throw it in the trash. Mind you, I really don't care if people do this or not -- the cost in making and sending them was fairly negligible -- but it's the principle, again. Maybe I'm just becoming more bitter and jaded with the world and the people around me; maybe I'm just in a sour mood. Maybe I'm really not that well-liked. Who knows. I don't really expect anything from my graduation announcements; only about five or six of the nearly twenty people I sent them out to will actually care about them, I'm guessing. I just wanted to be able to be proud of something, for once, and to be able to show it. Just like how today, I wanted to be like "hey, look, I'm being social and this will be something fun for all of us to do!" Yeah, blow it out your ass, Brandon -- no one cares.
It's been over three weeks since I finished and mailed my taxes; I'd like to get my returns back soon so that I can cash the checks. While I don't need the money for bills or anything like that (those are, thankfully, already taken care of), I would like to be able to have a bit of spending cash that I don't have to worry about for when I go to Omaha the weekend after graduation. Graduation is two weeks from today. Last year, I seem to remember getting back my returns fairly quickly; my Kansas state return came back incredibly quickly, as I recall. I had to wait longer to file this year because of comps and comps studying, though. My tax returns are the only guaranteed things that I ever look forward to receiving in the mail -- and to a certain extent, that's really sad.
Anyway. I'm getting off track.
When I got up, even if I had to go it alone, I was determined to make a day of this, and to have fun by myself. It would be considerably less fun, of course, and I'd be doing considerably less traversing of the town, but I was determined to make something happen, to go out and try to enjoy myself. I posted a message on the event page on Facebook that said if anyone was coming up (because, at that point, I still had a few "maybes" on the docket) to call or text to let me know -- it was one of the very few times I actually had my cell turned on and charged up -- and if I wasn't home I could get back home rather quickly to meet up with them. Newton's a fairly small town; it's not Wichita by any means, and I know my way around it. Barring having to wait for a train or something like that, you can get from any point in this town to any other point in about five to seven minutes.
I left the house at about 7:20 AM, after sending a few private messages to those friends and colleagues who were still maybes. My first stop was Walmart -- I needed to get cat litter and cigarettes, with the addition of picking up a newspaper to get the garage sale listings and attached map -- plus, I needed to get some cash back to actually be able to purchase stuff at said garage sales. At 7:20 AM, it was cold and misting rain. Not too cold, mind you; it was maybe around 45 or so, and I knew the misting rain would better my odds of finding something good at some of these places because less people would go out, and spend less time out, if the weather wasn't exactly cooperating that well.
There is, however, something I noticed immediately upon leaving the house -- usually, around my neighborhood (in a ten-block radius or so), on city-wide garage sale day there will be a dozen or two different garage sales -- advertised, signs with arrows on every corner, etc. I live in a heavily-populated ten-block radius, and in the past I haven't needed to drive that far to find some awesome stuff. In fact, in the past, most of the time I was able to walk around the neighborhood around my area and follow arrows for a few hours.
Today? Nothing. And I mean nothing. Not a sign, not an arrow, no signs of life, no tables set up on any street, nothing. I looked down every street as I slowly drove the three miles from my house to Walmart. There was nothing set up anywhere. The neighborhoods were dead. This was not a good sign. Even in the somewhat shitty weather, I figured that those people who had paid to put ads in the newspaper (and there are always a ton of those people -- remember, I used to work at the newspaper, and was even the photographer for the city-wide garage sale in 2010) would at least attempt to do something. And, again, there are always those people. Not only did I see no sales, but I also saw no one else driving around looking for sales, either. WTF, man? It wasn't that early. The weather wasn't that shitty.
I got the stuff I needed at Walmart and went looking for a newspaper only to find that the newspaper rack was missing from Walmart. As in, completely gone, not in its normal spot (and yes, I know where its normal spot is -- remember, I go to Walmart a lot). Oh well, I thought. Looks like I'll be doing my searching relying on intuition, past experience, and street signs. I got $20 cash back, in $5 bills, to use wherever I ended up going for yard-or-garage shopping. I originally planned to get $40 in ones and fives, but judging from how I'd seen nothing on my way there, I decided to be more conservative in my estimations of need. When I was done at Walmart, it was nearing 8AM. I had no place to go, no map to guide me, and no friends had called or texted me. So, I decided to do a little exploring of the south side of town, the side I live on. There are some high-end housing developments on this side of town, including some behind Walmart, but I'd seen no signs for any of them anywhere, and wasn't just going to drive around aimlessly through them looking for places -- instead, there were a few places I had in mind, and the first was the indoor church sale that I knew would be taking place, rain-or-shine.
I got to the local Mennonite Church at about 8:05. By then, the parking lot (gravel, eww) was already almost completely full, and people were already coming out carrying boxes, tables and chairs, etc. This gave me hope; I knew I'd find something good there.
This was not the huge church sale I'd been to two years ago; I found this out immediately. I don't remember which one that was, but it wasn't this one. Regardless, I was fine with it; at least I'd found someplace actually doing something this morning. I walked downstairs amidst the crowds and found a great many people and things laid out on tables, but what caught my eye was a massive row of tables from one end of the room to the other with full-size TVs on them -- many of which were marked "free."
Mind you, these were big, heavy, 36-inch CRT televisions, but they were free. Most of them were turned on and were playing the same channel to show that yes, indeed, they were working just fine. If I had a place to put a big 36-inch CRT television, or if I could actually lift it, get it up the stairs, out to my car, and then get it out of my car and find somewhere in the house for it, I would've taken one. But I have none of those things, and have no use for a TV that big, especially because while they were all in really good condition, they all looked to be about ten to fifteen years old. In a row in front of the larger TVs were many smaller ones; 13 to 20-inch ones. Some of these were marked "free" as well, and the rest were marked at the mind-bogglingly cheap price of $3. These were what I was interested in; I'd been looking for a replacement TV for the bedroom downstairs for two years, since when my ex moved out she took her 13-inch TV/DVD player combo with her (I also gave her my old 20-inch TV as well, since I had one her mother gave us many years before; it's the one my XBOX and PS1 are hooked up to in my room behind me). The lack of a TV in the bedroom is what made me set up my old laptop down there to use as a media/movie watching device. Now I stood in front of a row of televisions that were either free or were $3.
I looked through them carefully; some were newer than others. Most didn't have AV inputs, which meant that I would have no use for them -- they'd have to have AV inputs for me to be able to use them for anything -- I can't hook up my DVD player or game system(s) to a TV without them unless I buy some sort of converter plug or box to run them through, which would negate the cost of the TV itself. I finally found a 14-inch RCA Truflat TV in the mix, turned on and working well, for $3. It had two sets of AV inputs -- one set on the side and another set on the back. It also didn't have an antenna hooked up to it and was receiving TV signal in a church basement, which led me to believe that it also had a digital tuner and a strong internal antenna (and thus, wouldn't need a converter box). The remote was taped to the top of it.
"I'll take this one," I said when one of the church workers came over.
"Good," he said. "I want to warn you though, these TVs were donated to us; we haven't checked to make sure all the buttons on the remote are working or anything like that."
I looked at him sort of like he was nuts, though with a smile. "...it's a three-dollar TV," I said. "It's worth it even if a button or two sticks or doesn't work. I'm fine with that."
I paid for the TV and took it out to the car. I had solved my bedroom television problem; I could disassemble the mess of wires, speakers, and chargers I'd taken downstairs along with my old laptop, and put it away. For a CRT television, it was pretty light -- maybe fifteen pounds or so at the most. The remote takes two AA batteries, which I always have on hand. If I find nothing else today, I thought, at least I got a television.
My luck was beginning to look up, which was a plus. However, nobody had called or texted me, it was starting to rain a bit harder, and there was nothing else at the church sale I was remotely interested in -- the only other thing I saw was a PlayStation 2 they had, but someone had realized how much that was worth (unlike the televisions) and they were trying to sell it for $75. Yeah, no thanks -- I can get a used one for maybe $50 on Amazon if I *really* wanted one. Which I don't, really.
The Mennonite Church is located in one of the better neighborhoods on the south side of town, a neighborhood well known to me at this point for having some of the best yard sales in the entire town. So, I began slowly driving around. I followed signs I saw on poles, most of which led me to several houses who had, apparently, canceled their garage sales for the day (since I saw nothing, even at the addresses listed). I stopped at two other places. One barely had anything -- though they had a gorgeous oak table and chairs set in their garage for $100; no thanks. The other place had a bunch of baby clothes and boxes of paperback books that they were letting sit out in the rain. Again, no thanks. After this, and after seeing nothing else anywhere around me, I took the back way home (read: the long way) to see if there was anything else on the opposite side of my neighborhood, where some of the houses were nicer and where I'd also found a lot of really nice sales in the past -- again, nothing. Not a soul. Signs on poles led me places where nothing was happening. Apparently the shitty, snowy weather earlier this week and the misty rain this morning made everyone cancel their garage sales.
I didn't bother to cross the tracks to the north side of town or venture into the housing developments -- I figured I'd more than likely find much of the same. To make matters worse, by after 10AM still nobody had called or texted me. I decided to go back home, see if Daisy was still awake, make some food and wait for anyone to contact me or for the weather to clear up a bit before venturing out again. I'd only seen three garage sales on my entire side of town, including the church, and I'd stopped at them all. This was all I was willing to do on my own unless the weather got better or unless others came up. I wasn't going to tax my car any more than I had to, and I certainly wasn't going to gallivant around town alone for no reason, spinning my wheels in feckless searching.
I logged back on to my computer and found that two of those "maybe" friends had awakened while I was out and had canceled on me. I talked to Daisy for a while, and we added a bunch of stuff to our wedding registry on Amazon before she had to go to bed for work tonight, and then I canceled the event on Facebook -- nobody cared enough to come anyway, the weather was shitty, and I didn't want to go back out alone, in my own vehicle. I was not in the greatest of moods, to put it mildly. I was really depressed, to be honest with you -- I really, really wanted this to work. I really wanted my friends to come up and spend time with me and to just have some fucking fun for once. But my friends didn't cooperate, the weather didn't cooperate, the garage sales themselves didn't cooperate, and suddenly I was six-year-old Brandon again, eating his birthday cake alone.
And people wonder why I'm basically a hermit and shun most social interaction.
I turned off my phone and went back to bed; I had no more patience for the world or for the rest of the day, and I ended up sleeping until it was almost dark tonight, avoiding my computer for hours after I awakened just so I wouldn't have to deal with the outside world any more than necessary. I probably won't be awake much longer tonight, either -- I have no patience for being conscious anymore. I hooked up my old DVD player to the new TV downstairs, and planned to watch something that will put me to sleep again. Or, barring that, something that would take my mind off things.
After running setup of the TV and hooking up the DVD player (when I found that the TV has three sets of AV ports, not just the two I thought it had), I decided to test it to see what the volume and picture were like...when I found that not only does it have beautiful picture quality, but it has several sound settings including concert and theater. What did I test it with? None other than the first disc of this, of which I own the entire box set:
I am such a nerd.
SHINING FING-GAHHHH
Ahem. Just as good as anything else to test it with, right?
The TV does indeed have a digital tuner, but in my basement, at least, it can't pick up any channels, unlike in the church basement. I don't know how old the TV is; doing some research, I found that most of the models in that Truflat range were made at least up until 2006 or 2007, and some are still available on Amazon or at Sam's Club. A lot of them also have issues after a while as well, apparently, where the TV will decide to turn itself on or off at random intervals. Mine seems to be working fine, though it it does start screwing up eventually? Well, I paid three dollars for it and there's a trash can 30 feet from where it sits on my nightstand.
Friday, May 3, 2013
Dat Disconnect
Spring semester: day seventy-four
It is gorgeous outside this morning, but chilly. I am somewhat detached from it; I am somewhat sleepy, somewhat groggy, and in addition to needing a shower, I have a lot of stuff to do around the house today -- the least of which would be vacuuming, re-cleaning the kitchen (again) and cleaning the cat box/cat room -- especially if some friends may be coming up tomorrow. I am not, of course, sure yet who that may entail, but I'd like to keep the house from looking terrible if at all possible.
Boredom and disillusionment comes with being tired; yes, there are many things I could be doing right now, but I'm in that mindset where I could just as easily go back downstairs, pull the blanket over my head, and sleep away the day. I'm not overwhelmed -- far from it, in fact -- I'm just...ugh. I'm in another one of my moods where the world sucks and I just want to be left alone. I'm not going to go back to bed, mind you, but I'm saying I could if I wanted to. No, I've got the aforementioned chores to do, and I have a stack of new papers and rewrites I could grade through if I wanted to spend time doing something productive. It's just a general "eh" mindset I'm in right now. The laze. Apathy. Sick of daily life. That sort of stuff. Nothing major, really. Normal Brandon stuff.
It's hard to focus on writing, here or anywhere else. This semester, as it ends, is really starting to drag on and on, and even though it's been, quite possibly, the easiest semester of my graduate school career, I again realize just how long it's been. I took my comps a month ago, and it seems like it was years ago. I've been with Daisy almost eleven months (counting the time we weren't "officially" together yet, eye roll), and it seems like I've been with her my entire life. The passage of time affects me greatly; it makes things hard to focus on, makes life really strange for me at times. The cats are six years old. I've been living out here for seven years, almost eight. I've been living alone in this house for almost two years. I can't remember what the house's setup was when I wasn't living alone, because it's been so long. It's hard for me to fathom that there was once a time when I didn't own my Monte Carlo yet, or a time when I didn't have to pay all the bills and rent by myself -- stuff like that. I remember when I had to borrow my ex's car to go shopping if I wanted to, and times when I never went shopping or anywhere else in the middle of the night. Everything has changed so much, and in about two weeks' time, it's going to change a whole lot more. Will I wake up in the mornings after graduation and still feel this sort of malaise, this sort of blah-ness at life? There's a lot of food for thought there. I mean, I've always taken things as they come; as much as I can be uptight about things out of my control, just as often I am laid-back and relaxed, just living day-to-day. I've seen friends, close ones, come and go. I've seen friends die, for fuck's sake. Bills come in and go out every month. Money changes hands. Sometimes it snows in May. Things happen, though I so rarely keep track of a lot of it -- it's all in my peripherals.
I'm hoping that tomorrow's adventures in yard-sale-ing will help snap me out of this funk I'm in. I don't need anything, per se, but there's always a certain joy in the thrill of the hunt. I've not gone to a yard sale in two years; honestly, I should hold one myself at some point this summer to get rid of all of the stuff around the house I don't need and don't want to take with me wherever I go next. It would be a noble venture to try, at least. Maybe I'll see if Daisy can come down for a few days and help me do that at some point. I'm sure I have a few friends who would love to come up and help and/or purchase stuff. Hell, I'd give some shit to those friends if they'd take it away; after all, I gave Jay my bike last semester. That was an $80 bike; I just never used it anymore after I bought the car.
I thought about going to see Iron Man 3 this afternoon on opening day. I thought about it long and hard before I decided that I'd rather just not do it today. If at all. I've not seen a movie in a theater since Green Lantern. It's not fun to go see one alone. And I should be saving my cash anyhow for the yard sales tomorrow. Part of this is lethargy and laziness, yes, but a larger part of it is that I don't like to be that guy going to a theater alone to see a movie alone, without someone next to me to whisper all of the comic-book references to. It's no fun. I'd end up falling asleep.
I set up my poor-man's-home-theater system yesterday, consisting of my reworked Dell laptop and a speaker system for it on my nightstand in the bedroom. I haven't used it yet; the laptop is closed (and it's so big that there's barely any room left on the nightstand for my alarm clock and the speaker configuration). I had to use a speaker system because the on-board sound for the laptop is blown; it does not work at all. I can plug in the speakers, however, and get perfect sound. Luckily, I have a few spare sets of speakers around the house -- two sets of which I've found at, surprise, garage sales around town. And the post comes full-circle.
So much of the stuff in this house has been found at, and purchased from, yard/garage sales. I was trying to, a few days ago, take stock of all of the stuff I had around the house that either came from a garage sale I've gone to, or from one my ex's mother went to:
Etc. There's a lot else I'm sure I'm missing, as well, including a fair amount of stuff in the garage and storage downstairs. My ex used to find a ton of jewelry, purses, and shoes as well. This is why I love that sort of thing -- you never know what you'll find, and most of what you do find you don't really need, but it's good to have around the house. It's about excitement, the call, the thrill. I've never spent less than $40 or so on one of the city-wide garage sale days, and always came home with a full backseat or trunk. It's like the poor-man's mini-Christmas.
Also: the church sales are the best. The indoor church sales are amazing.
Still, I am disconnected from a lot of things going on in the outside world; as I slowly emerge from my graduate school insular bubble, I'm finding myself disillusioned and lost in a lot of the outside world; this is part of why I mostly keep to myself and stay quietly at home -- tomorrow's big event invitation where I've tried to gather my friends for a fun day together is an extreme rarity for me; never have I had more than two or three of my friends at my home at once before, and even that is rare. That may not end up changing if nobody comes up tomorrow, but still. There's never been a desire or reason for it. I'm a pretty solitary person. Give me my cats and Daisy, and that's all I need or want out of social interaction for the most part, as you know -- with the once-or-twice-weekly long conversation I have with the overnight cashier at Walmart, who knows me well at this point, of course.
I'll actually probably see said cashier tonight, to be honest with you -- I need to get more cat litter and cigarettes, and should get some cash back for the aforementioned garage sales.
As for the rest of the day, I should probably start doing something productive; Daisy is asleep (or she should be, by this point, since she has to work tonight) and it's so nice that I opened the windows to let the house breathe a bit. Maybe, later this evening, I'll take a nap. Maybe I won't. Maybe I'll order a pizza and drink some beer. The weekend is just beginning.
It is gorgeous outside this morning, but chilly. I am somewhat detached from it; I am somewhat sleepy, somewhat groggy, and in addition to needing a shower, I have a lot of stuff to do around the house today -- the least of which would be vacuuming, re-cleaning the kitchen (again) and cleaning the cat box/cat room -- especially if some friends may be coming up tomorrow. I am not, of course, sure yet who that may entail, but I'd like to keep the house from looking terrible if at all possible.
Boredom and disillusionment comes with being tired; yes, there are many things I could be doing right now, but I'm in that mindset where I could just as easily go back downstairs, pull the blanket over my head, and sleep away the day. I'm not overwhelmed -- far from it, in fact -- I'm just...ugh. I'm in another one of my moods where the world sucks and I just want to be left alone. I'm not going to go back to bed, mind you, but I'm saying I could if I wanted to. No, I've got the aforementioned chores to do, and I have a stack of new papers and rewrites I could grade through if I wanted to spend time doing something productive. It's just a general "eh" mindset I'm in right now. The laze. Apathy. Sick of daily life. That sort of stuff. Nothing major, really. Normal Brandon stuff.
It's hard to focus on writing, here or anywhere else. This semester, as it ends, is really starting to drag on and on, and even though it's been, quite possibly, the easiest semester of my graduate school career, I again realize just how long it's been. I took my comps a month ago, and it seems like it was years ago. I've been with Daisy almost eleven months (counting the time we weren't "officially" together yet, eye roll), and it seems like I've been with her my entire life. The passage of time affects me greatly; it makes things hard to focus on, makes life really strange for me at times. The cats are six years old. I've been living out here for seven years, almost eight. I've been living alone in this house for almost two years. I can't remember what the house's setup was when I wasn't living alone, because it's been so long. It's hard for me to fathom that there was once a time when I didn't own my Monte Carlo yet, or a time when I didn't have to pay all the bills and rent by myself -- stuff like that. I remember when I had to borrow my ex's car to go shopping if I wanted to, and times when I never went shopping or anywhere else in the middle of the night. Everything has changed so much, and in about two weeks' time, it's going to change a whole lot more. Will I wake up in the mornings after graduation and still feel this sort of malaise, this sort of blah-ness at life? There's a lot of food for thought there. I mean, I've always taken things as they come; as much as I can be uptight about things out of my control, just as often I am laid-back and relaxed, just living day-to-day. I've seen friends, close ones, come and go. I've seen friends die, for fuck's sake. Bills come in and go out every month. Money changes hands. Sometimes it snows in May. Things happen, though I so rarely keep track of a lot of it -- it's all in my peripherals.
I'm hoping that tomorrow's adventures in yard-sale-ing will help snap me out of this funk I'm in. I don't need anything, per se, but there's always a certain joy in the thrill of the hunt. I've not gone to a yard sale in two years; honestly, I should hold one myself at some point this summer to get rid of all of the stuff around the house I don't need and don't want to take with me wherever I go next. It would be a noble venture to try, at least. Maybe I'll see if Daisy can come down for a few days and help me do that at some point. I'm sure I have a few friends who would love to come up and help and/or purchase stuff. Hell, I'd give some shit to those friends if they'd take it away; after all, I gave Jay my bike last semester. That was an $80 bike; I just never used it anymore after I bought the car.
I thought about going to see Iron Man 3 this afternoon on opening day. I thought about it long and hard before I decided that I'd rather just not do it today. If at all. I've not seen a movie in a theater since Green Lantern. It's not fun to go see one alone. And I should be saving my cash anyhow for the yard sales tomorrow. Part of this is lethargy and laziness, yes, but a larger part of it is that I don't like to be that guy going to a theater alone to see a movie alone, without someone next to me to whisper all of the comic-book references to. It's no fun. I'd end up falling asleep.
I set up my poor-man's-home-theater system yesterday, consisting of my reworked Dell laptop and a speaker system for it on my nightstand in the bedroom. I haven't used it yet; the laptop is closed (and it's so big that there's barely any room left on the nightstand for my alarm clock and the speaker configuration). I had to use a speaker system because the on-board sound for the laptop is blown; it does not work at all. I can plug in the speakers, however, and get perfect sound. Luckily, I have a few spare sets of speakers around the house -- two sets of which I've found at, surprise, garage sales around town. And the post comes full-circle.
So much of the stuff in this house has been found at, and purchased from, yard/garage sales. I was trying to, a few days ago, take stock of all of the stuff I had around the house that either came from a garage sale I've gone to, or from one my ex's mother went to:
- My desk, chair, and the spare chair/desk in the spare room
- Bookshelves/racks/storage stands (at least three)
- A great deal of my clothing; my favorite pair of sandals, several pairs of shorts/pants, many dressier shirts, and several pairs of my pajama pants were all garage sale finds for anywhere from a dime to a dollar apiece
- My ten-pound, steel-toed Caterpillar boots ($12, talked down from $20, bought them still in the box with tags on them)
- A PlayStation 1 and several games
- At least ten XBOX games
- A clock radio (now the primary clock in my home office/man cave here)
- My TV antenna
- Many DVDs and CDs I own
- Many books I own, including novels, poetry collections, and cookbooks
- The cats' food dish/self-waterer assembly
- Lots of dishes/glassware/kitchen utensils (most of which are boxed up now)
- Several pots and pans
- Most of the wall art I have in the house
- A spice rack
- At least two of my lamps and fans
- The wire-rack caddy on my bathroom counter
- Two file cabinets
- Assorted small electronics/cables/cell phone chargers
- A really nice wireless router for $2, brand new and in the box (which I've not yet used, even after purchasing it probably three years ago, because I really have no use for it right now)
- At least two of the satchels/messenger bags I've used for school, including the one I currently use
Etc. There's a lot else I'm sure I'm missing, as well, including a fair amount of stuff in the garage and storage downstairs. My ex used to find a ton of jewelry, purses, and shoes as well. This is why I love that sort of thing -- you never know what you'll find, and most of what you do find you don't really need, but it's good to have around the house. It's about excitement, the call, the thrill. I've never spent less than $40 or so on one of the city-wide garage sale days, and always came home with a full backseat or trunk. It's like the poor-man's mini-Christmas.
Also: the church sales are the best. The indoor church sales are amazing.
Still, I am disconnected from a lot of things going on in the outside world; as I slowly emerge from my graduate school insular bubble, I'm finding myself disillusioned and lost in a lot of the outside world; this is part of why I mostly keep to myself and stay quietly at home -- tomorrow's big event invitation where I've tried to gather my friends for a fun day together is an extreme rarity for me; never have I had more than two or three of my friends at my home at once before, and even that is rare. That may not end up changing if nobody comes up tomorrow, but still. There's never been a desire or reason for it. I'm a pretty solitary person. Give me my cats and Daisy, and that's all I need or want out of social interaction for the most part, as you know -- with the once-or-twice-weekly long conversation I have with the overnight cashier at Walmart, who knows me well at this point, of course.
I'll actually probably see said cashier tonight, to be honest with you -- I need to get more cat litter and cigarettes, and should get some cash back for the aforementioned garage sales.
As for the rest of the day, I should probably start doing something productive; Daisy is asleep (or she should be, by this point, since she has to work tonight) and it's so nice that I opened the windows to let the house breathe a bit. Maybe, later this evening, I'll take a nap. Maybe I won't. Maybe I'll order a pizza and drink some beer. The weekend is just beginning.
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Its Ugly Head
Spring semester: day seventy-three
There is but one week remaining in the semester. And I have but one class left to teach, on Tuesday, before my teaching career as a GTA comes to an end. One week from today, the semester ends -- Friday, the 10th is the campus-wide "study day," during which no classes are held, and finals week starts the next day (yes, there are Saturday finals at my university; some of my students have to take them).
This sort of realization, in the midst of everything else going on right now, is bittersweet -- I love teaching. I really do. It's all I've known of life for the past three years, and now, suddenly, I'm at my last class for the foreseeable future. I don't know if I'll be teaching in the fall. Hell, I don't know if I'll teach ever again after Tuesday. The future is one large, unknown expanse ahead of me with little reassurance about what may happen at this point. There are givens, of course; I will have to get some job in order to pay the bills and keep surviving, for example -- but the realization that this may be the last time I ever teach a class is rather humbling and sort of sad. While I am glad that I have finished my degree and will be moving on in life, it will be somewhat frustrating knowing that I may not continually have a classroom full of students to enthrall, enlighten, and command. I tell my students what to do, and they do it. That gives me a sort of power that I've seen many professors abuse, yet I never have. My students respect me, they look up to me, they come to me for guidance. I can't even get my cats to do what I tell them to do most of the time. As I've mentioned before, I take a lot of pride in my work -- I feel, and have always felt, like I am making a difference in my students' lives. And to some extent that has always made up for the rather shitty pay, the student loans I have to live on, and the long, slogging hours through the work I had to accomplish to earn my Master's degree.
And yet, like so many others who have gone before me, I will become another faceless name mentioned or talked about less and less frequently, for a semester or three, before my name is never uttered again within the department -- and even my former students forget I was there. I know this; I've seen this. Even the best professors and GTAs our department has ever had fade away once they graduate, retire, or otherwise move on. They're mentioned from time to time, briefly if that, and after a while, the generations move through year after year, and soon no one has known us but the administration -- who also gets a fresh crop of students every fall, and even the most memorable ones fade from memory after a few years.
Does it matter to me in the long run? I don't know. I know there are a few people who I've made lasting impressions on, for better or for worse, but to dwell on it more than that seems narcissistic or self-centered.
And, after all, nobody said a graduate degree in English -- any field of English -- would guarantee any of us success.
There is but one week remaining in the semester. And I have but one class left to teach, on Tuesday, before my teaching career as a GTA comes to an end. One week from today, the semester ends -- Friday, the 10th is the campus-wide "study day," during which no classes are held, and finals week starts the next day (yes, there are Saturday finals at my university; some of my students have to take them).
This sort of realization, in the midst of everything else going on right now, is bittersweet -- I love teaching. I really do. It's all I've known of life for the past three years, and now, suddenly, I'm at my last class for the foreseeable future. I don't know if I'll be teaching in the fall. Hell, I don't know if I'll teach ever again after Tuesday. The future is one large, unknown expanse ahead of me with little reassurance about what may happen at this point. There are givens, of course; I will have to get some job in order to pay the bills and keep surviving, for example -- but the realization that this may be the last time I ever teach a class is rather humbling and sort of sad. While I am glad that I have finished my degree and will be moving on in life, it will be somewhat frustrating knowing that I may not continually have a classroom full of students to enthrall, enlighten, and command. I tell my students what to do, and they do it. That gives me a sort of power that I've seen many professors abuse, yet I never have. My students respect me, they look up to me, they come to me for guidance. I can't even get my cats to do what I tell them to do most of the time. As I've mentioned before, I take a lot of pride in my work -- I feel, and have always felt, like I am making a difference in my students' lives. And to some extent that has always made up for the rather shitty pay, the student loans I have to live on, and the long, slogging hours through the work I had to accomplish to earn my Master's degree.
And yet, like so many others who have gone before me, I will become another faceless name mentioned or talked about less and less frequently, for a semester or three, before my name is never uttered again within the department -- and even my former students forget I was there. I know this; I've seen this. Even the best professors and GTAs our department has ever had fade away once they graduate, retire, or otherwise move on. They're mentioned from time to time, briefly if that, and after a while, the generations move through year after year, and soon no one has known us but the administration -- who also gets a fresh crop of students every fall, and even the most memorable ones fade from memory after a few years.
Does it matter to me in the long run? I don't know. I know there are a few people who I've made lasting impressions on, for better or for worse, but to dwell on it more than that seems narcissistic or self-centered.
And, after all, nobody said a graduate degree in English -- any field of English -- would guarantee any of us success.
It's just a bit disheartening, that's all. I know I may very well be in the department -- perhaps even in the same office -- next fall as an adjunct, if I'm needed. I also know that I may be somewhere completely different, doing something that right now, I can't even comprehend because I just don't know. As far as I know, my last departmental paycheck is May 24th. That's a week after graduation. I will more than likely use the entirety of that check to pay my rent for June, leaving my savings, tax return, and any graduation money I get to live on for the summer and/or fall months (if necessary). I'm not poor; I've saved my money well this semester, even with my grocery shopping and ordering stuff from Amazon on occasion. I will be able to live comfortably -- even more so once I don't have to put $30-40 of gas in the car every week.
All around me, my friends who aren't graduating this semester are busied with their end-of-semester work, and I don't/can't blame them; up until this semester, I was always swamped myself during this time. Frequently, the department has become more of a ghost town during the mornings when I'm there, and I barely even see anyone when I'm there in the afternoons for short periods of time, aside from maybe a stop-in at a colleague's office for a few moments. All schedules clash with mine now -- I was lucky to see Rae and Jay on Tuesday, as I usually don't, and I am thankful I get to hang out with Parker for a bit on most mornings when I'm there. I am like a ghost in the night; in and out on my own hours, working at my own tempo, moving to the beat of my own proverbial drum. I don't expect a big turnout, if a turnout at all, for the City-wide Garage Sale get-together on Saturday. I've already made the decision that if nobody comes, I'll go it alone -- at least through parts of the town, anyhow. Maybe I'll be able to find something good. Maybe not. But it'll get me out of the house, even if it's in the 40s and possibly rainy (read: the forecast for Saturday).
The weather people weren't lying about the shitty weather today, either -- when I got up this morning, there was ice in the grass and it was pouring rain. When I left Newton to drive to campus, that rain had turned over to ice again -- little shards of wet ice that were collecting on everything. A quarter of the way to Wichita, it was rain again. By the time I taught my first class at 9:30, ice and strong winds again. By the time I taught my 11AM class? Snow. Big, big snowflakes.
I will remind you, yet again, that it is Thursday, May 2.
None of it stuck, of course; it was 73 here yesterday before the temperature began dropping, and it was 85 on Monday and Tuesday. It's not like it was going to stick around. Still, basically everywhere north/east/west of here got hammered pretty strongly; Daisy told me that there's a few inches in Omaha, something like that. Photos from Kansas City show that everything there is snow-covered. So, we got off light here. But still. Snow. In May. May. Climate change in action, folks.
I told my students this morning that if this means we'll get a summer where it's not 110-115 degrees every day, I'll take it. Fuck, it could snow every other day all summer if it wants to; I'll so take that over sweating out of every pore and paying $200 a month electric bills just to run my central air in the mornings and overnights to avoid heat-induced death.
I have now had three students request an alternate, make-up final exam for my class; two have already taken the exam, and the third will take it tomorrow afternoon. It is now past the date of no return -- my students can no longer schedule an early make-up exam, and no make-up exams are given after the actual exam takes place, mainly because I am getting the fuck off of campus and up to Omaha after I graduate. Again, Suri and I partnered up to grade the exams because we both possess a similar mindset about them -- get them graded, get them turned in, get the grades posted. ASAP. That day, if possible. I have always done my best to get all of the exams graded and turned in before the office closes on the exam day. Only once have I been forced to wait an extra day or two to finish everything. Waiting any longer than I have to rubs me the wrong way.
I'm not a patient person.
Because of the way the rest of the semester is set up, I only have to be on campus three more days over the entirety of the month of May -- Tuesday (for my last classes), Monday the 13th (exam day) and Friday the 17th (graduation day). And then I'm done. Again, this isn't something I fully realized until tonight. I have a ton of stuff in my office that needs to be dismantled/taken down/cleaned out; I'm guessing the bulk of that will occur on the morning of the exam, when I'll be the only one in the department for hours. We haven't been told anything about the exam rooms, either, much less what they call the "Finals Feast," a Pizza Hut-catered luncheon for all of us grad students an hour before the exams are given. This happens every semester, and as all of us are grad students, we so don't pass up free food when it's offered. There hasn't been a word about it thus far, which is a bit of cause for concern on all fronts. I'll probably be packing up the office on the 13th, but Daisy will help me move the bulk of it out on graduation day -- since I'd rather not move anything I don't have to all by my lonesome (read: there's a lot of shit I've accumulated in my office over the past three years there). The end of the semester rears its ugly head, and that head is the swath of stuff that I've heretofore neglected to do.
The best part of the end of any given year, though, is that the graduates tend to get rid of almost anything in their offices/department that they don't want, can't take with them, or just plain don't have room for in their homes/cars/etc. I've seen massive stereo systems and televisions sitting in the department lobby with "free to a good home" signs on them, along with books, CDs, sometimes used computers or other electronics, etc. The department becomes a swap meet, except nothing is swapped -- it's all "please, just take it, I can't move it." Now, this time around, I'll be the one with an abundance of stuff to give away -- mostly books and posters, and a big bag of Powerbars and granola bars. Yeah, I could take those home, but eh. Let someone who needs them have them. I also have three or four PlayStation 1 games, an extra controller, a set of speakers, a CD player, an extra set of work clothes, a huge box of teabags, and other odds and ends that I have to get out of that office as well. So many things. Maybe it will be a swap meet after all; get rid of some of my stuff, take some other unwanted stuff. Who knows.
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Updates, Part II
Spring semester: day seventy-two
As the semester winds down and comes to a close, my work levels tend to ebb and flow heavily based on any given day. Sometimes I'm really busy and crazily overwhelmed with stuff to do, other times I'm not. Today is Wednesday -- my day off -- and I have two late workshop copies to look through and a few student emails to reply to as well as a reminder announcement to post for my students, but my schedule is otherwise relatively free. I need to spend most of the day, in fact, cleaning up the house and taking care of various chores that I've let fall to the wayside over the course of the past two or three weeks. It's supposed to be cooler today with a lot of rain and possible thunderstorms, and then tomorrow (and, apparently, Friday now) we're supposed to get "Winter Storm Achilles" which is so named because they've gone through the 26 letters of the alphabet already and they had to start over again. There's not supposed to be any measurable snow for this area, mainly because it's been 85 degrees and hot for the past two days (driving home yesterday afternoon was sort of brutal in a black car with black leather interior) and the ground's not frozen, but it's possible the area could see some snow/sleet/ice over the course of the next 48 hours or so.
Parker, who is supremely excited about this, started another "donut bet" with me, taking the high end again of 0.5 to 1 inch of snow accumulation at the Wichita airport. This is totally not going to happen, and we both know it; I'm pretty sure he just wants to buy donuts and bring them in again before the semester is over, and wants a valid excuse to do so. If, however, by some freak of nature's wrath that Wichita does get that snow, I'll be more than happy to appease the donut gods myself -- especially as it will be a record. Wichita, in all its existence, has no snow totals for May because it's never fucking happened before. If it snows a measurable amount, however, I'll be happy to buy the donuts, especially if said snowfall is a harbinger of a much cooler, more mild summer instead of the 110-112 degree days we've seen for the past two years over the summer months here.
Daisy is not so lucky, by the way -- in Omaha, the Weather Channel has predicted a possible 3-5 inches of snow, depending on how the storm tracks. No, that's not a joke. I just watched the weather forecast this morning. Daisy also goes back to work tomorrow night for her normal overnight shifts. On the plus side, she has relatively new tires on her car (she got them shortly after we got together) and just had an oil change done on Monday.
I got gas in my car yesterday morning, and all day yesterday, back and forth she ran really, really well and happily. The Low Coolant light will occasionally kick on and off, but I'm almost certain that has to be a sensor going out -- until I got the car worked on and had the system flushed in September, the light was almost always on, no matter how much coolant the car had in it. It also no longer leaks coolant, as they replaced the seal that was leaky before -- so anything that it's losing, it's slowly burning off and/or evaporating. That'll happen; the car is old, and as mechanically sound as its engine is most of the time, it's old and beaten down. I don't think it really needs it, as I just put some into it like three weeks ago, but I plan to put more coolant into it over the weekend anyway just to be safe, as she's running a little hotter (but still fine and within expected parameters) than usual because of the spike in temperatures over the course of the past few days. Shouldn't have to worry about her heating up tomorrow morning when it's only going to be in the 40s.
I don't yet know what's going on for the City-wide Garage Sale on Saturday -- it's supposed to be chilly and windy, which may scare away some of my friends who originally thought they'd be gung-ho and would come up for it. Rae and Jay may still come up for it, as may Parker, but I'm pretty sure if it's cold and nasty, nobody else will want to. I'll drive around and do a bit of "shopping" myself regardless, but it is quite possible that I may end up doing that alone, and won't be covering as large of a chunk of the town as I normally would. I sorted out my change today, and I have about eight bucks in quarters, dimes, and nickels, and have about the same in actual dollar bills in my wallet. That alone can get you a lot of stuff, depending on where you go and when, with a little luck. I may stop at Walmart on the way home tomorrow or go there in the overnight hours tomorrow or Friday to buy a few things and get some cash back in ones, but that also depends heavily on the weather and on whether or not a bunch of us are actually going to make the excursion up here. I created an event for it on Facebook and invited 25 people, roughly, most of them from the department, though I don't know how many will actually want to attend (I'm guessing less than half that, really). As this weekend is really the last weekend I have where I won't be swamped with stuff to do or will otherwise be busy until Memorial Day, it's about the last time I'll be able to do anything really fun before the end of the semester, or until the summer gets into full swing.
This weekend: Garage Sales, nothing else (not really, anyway)
Next weekend: Grading final papers before the final exam on Monday the 13th
The weekend after that: Graduation, graduation party, going up to Omaha
The weekend after that: Coming home mid-week, Memorial Day weekend, last paycheck of the semester (from what I've been told, at least).
May is going to be a busy, tumultuous month for me, it seems. Lots of life-changing things going on. Lots of rushing around, finishing things up, and travel taking place.
My close friend Suri, who I barely see anymore (but have mentioned here on the blog extensively in the past) and I set it up yesterday so that we'll be grading partners for the final exam. Suri graduated last year; she was an MA student, and is now an adjunct teaching four classes. Three of those classes are 102 classes, like I teach. Despite the fact that my 102 class is an Engineering English 102 course, the final exams are the same -- primarily because I teach the only sections of that course, and there's no reason to create a completely different exam unless there are at least two instructors teaching it. Suri and I wanted to do our grading together because we're already good friends, but also because she and I both have the mentality of let's get this shit done and get the hell out of here, which isn't always the case if I'm partnered with someone random (as I have been, occasionally, in the past). The downside to this is that Suri has about 75 students in her 102 courses, while I have less than 50. My actual count is something like 46. This doesn't bother me, really; the exams grade very quickly, and if it means I'm guaranteed to be done that afternoon or evening instead of having it all up in the air, I'll be happy. The sooner I can be done with my entire grading process, the better. Believe me. That's all I've got left and will be the capstone/icing on the cake of a finished graduate teaching assistant career.
None of us have gone over to get our caps/gowns yet for the graduation ceremony; all of us who are graduating this semester got an email yesterday about the final date for RSVPing our attendance to the ceremony and a little more information on the caps/gowns themselves (they'll basically be available until five minutes before the ceremony starts, pretty much). Depending on when/whether they're there, and depending on the weather, I may see if Rae and Jay want to go over to the bookstore with me tomorrow afternoon before I come home just to get the stuff and get it out of the way.
"We could share a gown, you know," Jay said to me yesterday. "Sit next to each other at the graduation and then, when we're called up there, take off your gown, I'll put it on and wear it up there, and vice versa."
For a moment, as he was explaining this, I thought he meant that we'd be shuffling around, both of us under the same gown. Which is a hilarious thought, to be sure.
"You know that since we have different builds, the gown will look really strange on one of us, right?"
Because of this, not to mention that we don't exactly know how the ceremony is going to take place; we don't know if we're going to be assembled or seated alphabetically, we don't know what the floor plan is going to look like, etc.
"You're actually going to walk?" Suri asked me yesterday. "Yuck, why? I haven't attended or taken part in a graduation ceremony since eighth grade."
"I don't really want to," I said, "but it's the last time I'll get to take part in something like this. I didn't walk at my undergrad graduation."
This is true; when I graduated from WVU in 2005, I went to my departmental graduation breakfast that morning, had some pictures taken, and then came back home and went back to bed.
"Do you have family coming, or anything like that?" Suri asked.
"Just [Daisy]," I replied. "My parents can't make it, and neither can hers -- but I'll see her parentss the day after graduation anyhow when we go back up to Omaha, and apparently they want to do some sort of dinner or something for me then."
"It's not a huge deal; I went to [mutual friend's] graduation last year and it's just boring; two hours of sitting there to walk across a stage and get a scroll that isn't even your real diploma -- they mail that to you later."
It really is a sort of pointless ceremony, all pomp-and-circumstance that doesn't really mean anything. I have already technically graduated; passing the comps and turning in/getting my thesis approved and bound means that it's done. That's all that's really important to me. Yet, there's a part of me that wants to get in the gown, do the walking, get those photos taken -- it's almost as if in doing so, I'll prove that I existed at that school, that I was there, that I was present. On some level, it's also a tactic for closure, to close the book on a chapter of my life.
Anyway.
I'm pretty sure I've done my RSVPing for the ceremony (I think I did it when I filed my application for graduation) but I'll have to double-check it when I get the chance just to make sure. If I haven't? Then that would be my last chance to check the "not attending" box and bypass it. I have thought long and hard about that, actually -- I really want, on some level, to just say "fuck it" and not go. But I won't. I'll go. I'll do it. If Daisy weren't able to come down for it, I more than likely wouldn't do it and would just sleep until noon that day. Or later. And then go see the new Star Trek movie, since it opens the same day.
Priorities, folks.
I planned to mow the grass this morning -- my neighbor mowed his yesterday while I was on campus and teaching, making mine look like an unkempt jungle by comparison. However, it's been raining on and off all day today, and the cold front that's bringing the snow/ice/sleet/etc is beginning to sweep through the area this afternoon; the temperature has gone from 73 to 56 in a matter of two hours or so. Screw it; if it's warm on Sunday or Monday, I'll do it then. I want it to stop snowing for good before I mow the grass, because I might end up killing all of it if I don't wait and it snows again. I also can't believe I'm saying that in the month of May, and that again tomorrow I will more than likely be wearing layers to school.
Correction: 73 to 49. Over the span of three hours. I do not like this.
My neighbors across the street have visitors of some sort -- there is a massive, beat-up 1980s-ish RV parked on the street in front of their house, and it just appeared there this morning. I'm not exactly a fan of these people; they're the ones who already have two or three kids who run around the neighborhood screaming at all hours of the day and into the night, which -- as you know -- is incredibly fucking irritating to me, and the woman of the couple is heavily pregnant, yet she still sits on the front porch and chain smokes for hours every day, even when it's cold. Maybe I'm becoming a crotchety old man, and far be it from me to criticize anyone about smoking, but there's a difference when you're heavily pregnant and when you can't (or don't care to) control the kids you already have. Also, I'm pretty sure that about 80% of the people who live on that side of the street are on drugs or are selling drugs.
Mind you, I live in a nice neighborhood -- anyone who's been to my house could tell you that. No, it's not the most gorgeous neighborhood in town, but it's a relatively nice one, a quiet one. Or at least it used to be quiet until the white trash took over. Again, far be it from me to call anyone white trash based on the car I drive, the beer(s) I like, and a lot of the music I listen to...but at least I'm a college professor.
Yeah, I can say that now, since, technically, I am one.
On that note, I'm going to go make some dinner and shower before I head to bed fairly early tonight.
As the semester winds down and comes to a close, my work levels tend to ebb and flow heavily based on any given day. Sometimes I'm really busy and crazily overwhelmed with stuff to do, other times I'm not. Today is Wednesday -- my day off -- and I have two late workshop copies to look through and a few student emails to reply to as well as a reminder announcement to post for my students, but my schedule is otherwise relatively free. I need to spend most of the day, in fact, cleaning up the house and taking care of various chores that I've let fall to the wayside over the course of the past two or three weeks. It's supposed to be cooler today with a lot of rain and possible thunderstorms, and then tomorrow (and, apparently, Friday now) we're supposed to get "Winter Storm Achilles" which is so named because they've gone through the 26 letters of the alphabet already and they had to start over again. There's not supposed to be any measurable snow for this area, mainly because it's been 85 degrees and hot for the past two days (driving home yesterday afternoon was sort of brutal in a black car with black leather interior) and the ground's not frozen, but it's possible the area could see some snow/sleet/ice over the course of the next 48 hours or so.
Parker, who is supremely excited about this, started another "donut bet" with me, taking the high end again of 0.5 to 1 inch of snow accumulation at the Wichita airport. This is totally not going to happen, and we both know it; I'm pretty sure he just wants to buy donuts and bring them in again before the semester is over, and wants a valid excuse to do so. If, however, by some freak of nature's wrath that Wichita does get that snow, I'll be more than happy to appease the donut gods myself -- especially as it will be a record. Wichita, in all its existence, has no snow totals for May because it's never fucking happened before. If it snows a measurable amount, however, I'll be happy to buy the donuts, especially if said snowfall is a harbinger of a much cooler, more mild summer instead of the 110-112 degree days we've seen for the past two years over the summer months here.
Daisy is not so lucky, by the way -- in Omaha, the Weather Channel has predicted a possible 3-5 inches of snow, depending on how the storm tracks. No, that's not a joke. I just watched the weather forecast this morning. Daisy also goes back to work tomorrow night for her normal overnight shifts. On the plus side, she has relatively new tires on her car (she got them shortly after we got together) and just had an oil change done on Monday.
I got gas in my car yesterday morning, and all day yesterday, back and forth she ran really, really well and happily. The Low Coolant light will occasionally kick on and off, but I'm almost certain that has to be a sensor going out -- until I got the car worked on and had the system flushed in September, the light was almost always on, no matter how much coolant the car had in it. It also no longer leaks coolant, as they replaced the seal that was leaky before -- so anything that it's losing, it's slowly burning off and/or evaporating. That'll happen; the car is old, and as mechanically sound as its engine is most of the time, it's old and beaten down. I don't think it really needs it, as I just put some into it like three weeks ago, but I plan to put more coolant into it over the weekend anyway just to be safe, as she's running a little hotter (but still fine and within expected parameters) than usual because of the spike in temperatures over the course of the past few days. Shouldn't have to worry about her heating up tomorrow morning when it's only going to be in the 40s.
I don't yet know what's going on for the City-wide Garage Sale on Saturday -- it's supposed to be chilly and windy, which may scare away some of my friends who originally thought they'd be gung-ho and would come up for it. Rae and Jay may still come up for it, as may Parker, but I'm pretty sure if it's cold and nasty, nobody else will want to. I'll drive around and do a bit of "shopping" myself regardless, but it is quite possible that I may end up doing that alone, and won't be covering as large of a chunk of the town as I normally would. I sorted out my change today, and I have about eight bucks in quarters, dimes, and nickels, and have about the same in actual dollar bills in my wallet. That alone can get you a lot of stuff, depending on where you go and when, with a little luck. I may stop at Walmart on the way home tomorrow or go there in the overnight hours tomorrow or Friday to buy a few things and get some cash back in ones, but that also depends heavily on the weather and on whether or not a bunch of us are actually going to make the excursion up here. I created an event for it on Facebook and invited 25 people, roughly, most of them from the department, though I don't know how many will actually want to attend (I'm guessing less than half that, really). As this weekend is really the last weekend I have where I won't be swamped with stuff to do or will otherwise be busy until Memorial Day, it's about the last time I'll be able to do anything really fun before the end of the semester, or until the summer gets into full swing.
This weekend: Garage Sales, nothing else (not really, anyway)
Next weekend: Grading final papers before the final exam on Monday the 13th
The weekend after that: Graduation, graduation party, going up to Omaha
The weekend after that: Coming home mid-week, Memorial Day weekend, last paycheck of the semester (from what I've been told, at least).
May is going to be a busy, tumultuous month for me, it seems. Lots of life-changing things going on. Lots of rushing around, finishing things up, and travel taking place.
My close friend Suri, who I barely see anymore (but have mentioned here on the blog extensively in the past) and I set it up yesterday so that we'll be grading partners for the final exam. Suri graduated last year; she was an MA student, and is now an adjunct teaching four classes. Three of those classes are 102 classes, like I teach. Despite the fact that my 102 class is an Engineering English 102 course, the final exams are the same -- primarily because I teach the only sections of that course, and there's no reason to create a completely different exam unless there are at least two instructors teaching it. Suri and I wanted to do our grading together because we're already good friends, but also because she and I both have the mentality of let's get this shit done and get the hell out of here, which isn't always the case if I'm partnered with someone random (as I have been, occasionally, in the past). The downside to this is that Suri has about 75 students in her 102 courses, while I have less than 50. My actual count is something like 46. This doesn't bother me, really; the exams grade very quickly, and if it means I'm guaranteed to be done that afternoon or evening instead of having it all up in the air, I'll be happy. The sooner I can be done with my entire grading process, the better. Believe me. That's all I've got left and will be the capstone/icing on the cake of a finished graduate teaching assistant career.
None of us have gone over to get our caps/gowns yet for the graduation ceremony; all of us who are graduating this semester got an email yesterday about the final date for RSVPing our attendance to the ceremony and a little more information on the caps/gowns themselves (they'll basically be available until five minutes before the ceremony starts, pretty much). Depending on when/whether they're there, and depending on the weather, I may see if Rae and Jay want to go over to the bookstore with me tomorrow afternoon before I come home just to get the stuff and get it out of the way.
"We could share a gown, you know," Jay said to me yesterday. "Sit next to each other at the graduation and then, when we're called up there, take off your gown, I'll put it on and wear it up there, and vice versa."
For a moment, as he was explaining this, I thought he meant that we'd be shuffling around, both of us under the same gown. Which is a hilarious thought, to be sure.
"You know that since we have different builds, the gown will look really strange on one of us, right?"
Because of this, not to mention that we don't exactly know how the ceremony is going to take place; we don't know if we're going to be assembled or seated alphabetically, we don't know what the floor plan is going to look like, etc.
"You're actually going to walk?" Suri asked me yesterday. "Yuck, why? I haven't attended or taken part in a graduation ceremony since eighth grade."
"I don't really want to," I said, "but it's the last time I'll get to take part in something like this. I didn't walk at my undergrad graduation."
This is true; when I graduated from WVU in 2005, I went to my departmental graduation breakfast that morning, had some pictures taken, and then came back home and went back to bed.
"Do you have family coming, or anything like that?" Suri asked.
"Just [Daisy]," I replied. "My parents can't make it, and neither can hers -- but I'll see her parentss the day after graduation anyhow when we go back up to Omaha, and apparently they want to do some sort of dinner or something for me then."
"It's not a huge deal; I went to [mutual friend's] graduation last year and it's just boring; two hours of sitting there to walk across a stage and get a scroll that isn't even your real diploma -- they mail that to you later."
It really is a sort of pointless ceremony, all pomp-and-circumstance that doesn't really mean anything. I have already technically graduated; passing the comps and turning in/getting my thesis approved and bound means that it's done. That's all that's really important to me. Yet, there's a part of me that wants to get in the gown, do the walking, get those photos taken -- it's almost as if in doing so, I'll prove that I existed at that school, that I was there, that I was present. On some level, it's also a tactic for closure, to close the book on a chapter of my life.
Anyway.
I'm pretty sure I've done my RSVPing for the ceremony (I think I did it when I filed my application for graduation) but I'll have to double-check it when I get the chance just to make sure. If I haven't? Then that would be my last chance to check the "not attending" box and bypass it. I have thought long and hard about that, actually -- I really want, on some level, to just say "fuck it" and not go. But I won't. I'll go. I'll do it. If Daisy weren't able to come down for it, I more than likely wouldn't do it and would just sleep until noon that day. Or later. And then go see the new Star Trek movie, since it opens the same day.
Priorities, folks.
I planned to mow the grass this morning -- my neighbor mowed his yesterday while I was on campus and teaching, making mine look like an unkempt jungle by comparison. However, it's been raining on and off all day today, and the cold front that's bringing the snow/ice/sleet/etc is beginning to sweep through the area this afternoon; the temperature has gone from 73 to 56 in a matter of two hours or so. Screw it; if it's warm on Sunday or Monday, I'll do it then. I want it to stop snowing for good before I mow the grass, because I might end up killing all of it if I don't wait and it snows again. I also can't believe I'm saying that in the month of May, and that again tomorrow I will more than likely be wearing layers to school.
Correction: 73 to 49. Over the span of three hours. I do not like this.
My neighbors across the street have visitors of some sort -- there is a massive, beat-up 1980s-ish RV parked on the street in front of their house, and it just appeared there this morning. I'm not exactly a fan of these people; they're the ones who already have two or three kids who run around the neighborhood screaming at all hours of the day and into the night, which -- as you know -- is incredibly fucking irritating to me, and the woman of the couple is heavily pregnant, yet she still sits on the front porch and chain smokes for hours every day, even when it's cold. Maybe I'm becoming a crotchety old man, and far be it from me to criticize anyone about smoking, but there's a difference when you're heavily pregnant and when you can't (or don't care to) control the kids you already have. Also, I'm pretty sure that about 80% of the people who live on that side of the street are on drugs or are selling drugs.
Mind you, I live in a nice neighborhood -- anyone who's been to my house could tell you that. No, it's not the most gorgeous neighborhood in town, but it's a relatively nice one, a quiet one. Or at least it used to be quiet until the white trash took over. Again, far be it from me to call anyone white trash based on the car I drive, the beer(s) I like, and a lot of the music I listen to...but at least I'm a college professor.
Yeah, I can say that now, since, technically, I am one.
On that note, I'm going to go make some dinner and shower before I head to bed fairly early tonight.
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