Am I the only one noticing a distinct pattern here when it comes to the books I have to read for this Grad Studies in Fiction class I'm taking? Specifically that if I'm not doing something entertaining to keep my mind focused on the book I'm reading, I will very, very quickly lose interest most of the time?
I'm not the only one who noticed that? Okay, good. Then let's continue.
Today I'm reading Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway. Note that there is no period after the Mrs because, well, there's not one. Apparently this was an early 20th century British thing; no Mr., Ms. or Mrs. had periods after them back then. Strange, but okay. No printing of the novel I've seen, PDF or print (I'm reading a PDF of it here on the computer because I can read the book twice as fast compared to reading the actual book in print) have the period. The print version I'm reading and using for/in the class is the most up-to-date Oxford World's Classics edition of the novel from 2009.
I'll begin by saying that I have always had a grand distaste for Virginia Woolf, steeped in being forced to read A Room of One's Own in undergrad and To the Lighthouse last semester -- a novel I altered the cover of on my version to include a comma and the word "Batman."
Get it?
To the Lighthouse, Batman!
Anyway.
I've never been a fan of her work. She writes beautifully and in a very poetic style, but as a high modernist, not a hell of a lot tends to happen in her novels. The classic example of that, of course, is To the Lighthouse, a book where quite literally nothing happens -- a painting is started, the family makes plans to go to the lighthouse by boat, ten years pass, people die without any fanfare, and they finally make it to the lighthouse and the painting is finished, but it's a crappy painting. That's really everything that happens in that book. At least A Room of One's Own has some redeeming qualities as a nonfiction feminist essay.
So, when I sat down to start Mrs Dalloway, I did so with dread and a whiny I-don't-want-to-read-this-fucking-book attitude (a perfect attitude to start a novel with, I know). However, the further I read into the novel, I became drawn in a bit more, and became more interested in the characters' lives and how they intersect. You'll see. For now, we start.
8PM Sunday:
I begin reading Mrs Dalloway after waking from a nap that led me to miss the entire Steelers/Patriots game after the first quarter.
10:15PM:
I'm a good 45 pages into the novel (yes, it took that long, it's dense) and have retreated to my Man Cave to live-blog it. I switch from the print version to the PDF version, and start this post.
Pages 1-45: We're introduced to who appear to be the main characters of the novel and it is implied (and told to the reader on the back cover) that the novel takes place over the span of one summer day in June, 1923. Clarissa Dalloway, our 52-year-old protagonist, is throwing a party that night, and has gone out to get flowers for said party. She is daydreaming about a lot of people and things that have taken place in her past, such as a slightly homoerotic relationship she had with her friend Sally Seton. Richard Dalloway, her husband, works for the British government and has yet to make an appearance in the novel at this point, but he is spoken of. Septimus Smith, and his wife Lucrezia, two other main characters, are suffering a rocky marriage; Septimus married Lucrezia in the war in Italy, and she came back home to London with him after the Armistice. Septimus is shell-shocked and has gone insane, and is having hallucinations -- including seeing and talking to the ghost of his friend Evans, who was killed in the war, amongst other strange apparitions. Because of these things, he immediately becomes my favorite character even though I know his eventual fate (which we'll get to later). Lucrezia is fed up, and wants to send him back to his psychiatrist, Sir William Bradshaw. She stops wearing her wedding ring, as their marriage is effectively over. We're then introduced to Peter Walsh, a lifelong friend of Clarissa's who has returned from a five-year stint in India, and he visits Clarissa at home to tell her he is in love with an Indian girl, Daisy...but also to reveal to some extent that he has loved Clarissa all along, etc etc. His declarations are interrupted by the appearance of Clarissa's daughter, Elizabeth, who he vows to talk to later at the party to ask questions of whether Clarissa is actually happy in her marriage to Dalloway. It is revealed that he wanted to marry Clarissa many years prior, but was rejected by her in favor of Dalloway, and his internal monologue spends several pages in flashback-mode telling the story before he idly stalks a pretty girl through the streets after leaving Clarissa's house and puts off the vibe of being, generally, a creepy-creeper. His internal monologue tells us then that he "made up the tale of stalking the girl" through the streets, or something. It's very existential. Whew. Anyway...
Page 51: Septimus hallucinates more ghosts, and talks to them while Lucrezia is with him. A thoroughly creepy scene that is delightful to read on the night before Halloween. Why can't the entire book be just about him?
Page 52: The novel, abandoning the awesomeness of Septimus Smith's ghosts, takes a sharp turn and weaves back into Peter Walsh's backstory as well as more of Sally Seton's backstory, in an attempt to -- I think -- kill any good thoughts I was having about Woolf's writing ability and fill more pages of a book with words. Wordswordswords. First formal mention/discussion of Hugh Whitbread, a foppish character everyone in the novel seems to think is obnoxious.
Page 55: Peter admits that he is no longer in love with Clarissa anymore and must be focused on Daisy, thereby throwing his entire conversation with her, as well as his oh-so-pining flashback a few pages prior almost completely out the window. Arrrgh.
11PM:
I'm about 1/3 of the way through the book. I'm hoping it moves quickly from this point forward, because otherwise I'm definitely going to lose interest quite quickly once more. I drink a pot of coffee and begin to brainstorm on what I want to write my response paper about for this book.
Page 57:
Peter: Oh, maybe I am in love with her after all, I don't know. It's certain she's in love with me, though.
Me: ARRGHHHH
Peter: Oh, by the way, Clarissa's an atheist, too.
Me: Um...good to know, I guess?
Page 58: Peter reveals he's a"whimpering, sniveling old ass." Like we didn't know. Get to the point, book.
Page 60: We finally move back into the mindset and internal monologue of Lucrezia (or, as the book shortens her name frequently, Rezia), who is taking Septimus to Bradshaw the psychiatrist, as she's had enough of his batty shit for a wife to stand. Finally, the plot begins to move forward a bit more.
Page 62: We're now getting the backstory of the end of the War (WWI) and how Rezia and Septimus met and married, as well as how his mental illnesses developed. Okay. Fair enough. I know already what's going to happen to Septimus (but you don't), so this to an extent makes sense.
Page 64: "Love between man and woman was repulsive to Shakespeare. The
business of copulation was filth to him before the end. But, Rezia said,
she must have children. They had been married five years ... One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that." A beautiful passage.
Page 66: It's revealed for about the 600th time that there's nothing physically wrong with Septimus; it's all psychological. We know this already. Again, get to the point, book. Later on the page, it's told to us that Septimus has kill yourself, kill yourself running through his head at almost all times. Fair enough.
Page 67: The entire monologue and backstory comes full circle when Dr. Holmes tells Rezia to take Septimus to Bradshaw the psychiatrist, as there is little else he can do for him other than drug him to sleep when he goes nuts. So we're back to where we were seven pages ago with no real progression of the story at hand. Also of note: the Big Ben clock strikes noon, which is halfway through the day -- as the story is supposed to take place over the span of one day, it can be assumed that the story at hand is now half-finished. Presumably.
Pages 69-73: Septimus is examined by Bradshaw, and it is recommended that he be committed on what would be the 1923 London's version of a 5150 -- an involuntary psychiatric hold. He sees himself as being on trial for a crime, and begins to hallucinate all sorts of weird-ass things shortly thereafter.
Page 75: Lady Bruton and, finally, Richard Dalloway enters the novel in the present tense, not just in flashbacks. They, along with Hugh Whitbread, talk about Clarissa and Peter in idle chit-chat for three fucking pages, not moving the story forward anymore and, once again, taking us away from the awesomeness that is Septimus Smith.
Page 82: "Hugh was becoming an intolerable ass." I just love that sentence, even though nothing else of import is really happening in the novel right now.
Page 83: Richard knows Peter was in love with Clarissa, and has an inkling that he may still be -- because, otherwise, why would he have come back to her? Richard makes the vow to immediately remind Clarissa how much he loves her. Oooh, drama! Romance! I'll take anything I can get as long as it moves. the story. forward.
Page 86: Everyone is questioning everything! How nice! GET TO THE POINT, BOOK.
Page 88: Elizabeth comes back into the book. Okay. Clarissa is resting. Okay. And now we go into the backstory of Elizabeth and her German schoolteacher, Miss Kilman. Miss Kilman has taken Elizabeth under her wing because she cannot stand how Clarissa thinks about life, what with her love of high society and parties, etc etc.
Pages 88-95: Sigh. For fuck's sake, Virginia Woolf, please, in just one of your books, let there be some action or something that actually moves the story forward, without all this bullshit flashback expository stuff that serves no purpose to the story but to fill more fucking pages I am forced to read. Yes, we get it. Miss Kilman doesn't like Mrs Dalloway. We get it, okay? Say it in a sentence and move the fuck on.
Pages 96-100: Elizabeth seems to aimlessly wander London by bus. What does this have to do with the story at hand, again? Elizabeth Dalloway is a minor character at best. At best. The reader doesn't need to know, or care, through expository mental monologues what she thinks of Miss Kilman, what she thinks of her mother, or what her mother thinks of her. It's fucking pointless.
Page 100: Finally, Septimus and Rezia re-enter the story. Septimus has lost all fear and seems to be ready to commit suicide, and Rezia is distraught that Septimus is being committed. Um...isn't that what she wanted, really?
Pages 101-103: Septimus seems "normal," as in, "not insane for the time being." This doesn't last long, and he soon begins hallucinating again.
Page 106: Dr. Holmes comes, presumably to drag off Septimus to the psych ward. Septimus searches frantically for weapons to defend himself (a bread knife, a razor, etc) before basically saying "fuck it" and jumping out the window to his death.
Page 107: Yes, Septimus is indeed dead, mangled, etc. One of the only major plot points in the book, and Woolf barely spends half a page on it before -- again -- rushing headlong back into the thoughts of Peter Walsh. Again, arrrrrrrrrgh.
Pages 108-114:
Peter: I'm going to pine over Clarissa some more; are you cool with that?
Me: No, no I'm not. You've already done that enough. We haven't forgotten.
Peter: But this time it's different! She sent me a letter! And it's 6PM! I might yet go to her party tonight, but I might not!
Me: Blah, blah, whatever; just shut up, make up your mind on what you want to do and just fucking do it. Spare us your monologues.
Page 115: Peter finally decides to go to the party. This could have been said in one sentence, not seven pages -- yet his internal monologue continues for another three after this, mostly pointlessly and rambling.
Page 118: Lucy enters the picture. Wait, Lucy? Who the fuck is Lucy? Jenny? Agnes? Lady Lovejoy? Ellen Barnet, Miss Alice, Mr. Wilkins...who the hell are all of these people? Why do we care? What the hell is going on here? Oh. Apparently the party is starting. I guess. Now that the novel's most awesome character is dead, I've lost a lot of interest in what's actually going on. It's become yet another novel of pomp-and-circumstance, of women in British high society doing British high society things. Again, SIGH.
12:19AM:
I realize that the book seems like it's going to be painfully, dreadfully boring throughout the rest of it at this point, but I also know there's only about 25 pages left of it. I take a break to ponder what my response paper will be about, and settle on the treatment of mental illness within the novel, specifically with Septimus, especially since he's certifiably insane but for the most part, that's glossed over in an attempt to basically say that because he's insane, he has no place in the high society of Mrs Dalloway's world, and must quickly be written out of the book in whatever way possible. WTF. Something along those lines. I also check my student email and respond to a few students' questions before getting back to work at 12:41.
Pages 119-121: We're getting all sorts of heretofore unmentioned or very, very minor characters entering the novel now as guests arriving at the party. Annnnnnd the novel again comes full circle when we see Peter has arrived to the party, and begins chatting up Richard Dalloway. This should be interesting...
Page 122: Oh heavens, Clarissa isn't enjoying her party. Wah-wah. But wait! Sally Seton comes back and attends the party. In the back of my mind I secretly hope this is going to end in a lesbian lovefest between her and Clarissa. This is dispelled when she states that she's married and has five boys.
1:01AM:
I am distracted for ten minutes by listening to songs from The Simpsons on YouTube. Dammit. Gotta get back into it. Canyonerooooo....
Page 124: It's also revealed that the Prime Minister has come to Clarissa's party as well. Classy. Lots of party talk/monologues going on in these pages. Waiting for the climax of the book as I read.
Pages 125-131: Six full pages of people socializing about the party. Seriously. Most of the novel's minor characters make an appearance, if only briefly. The book has become a scene from Evelina or Madame Bovary, and I am wincing and rolling my eyes, gritting my teeth to get through it. Rezia is noticeably absent from the pomp-and-circumstance of the party.
Page 132: The Lady Bradshaw makes an appearance, the wife of Sir William Bradshaw -- Septimus' psychiatrist. The news of Septimus' death floats about the party, and Clarissa gets offended that someone would talk of death during her party. What a bitch. This (rightfully so) throws a pall over her thoughts, and she realizes how happy she is with Richard -- implying that she is much happier with him than she ever could have been with Peter. Okay. So it serves a narrative purpose, at least. She also basically says "Hey, good on him, it makes him more human."
Pages 133-137: A lot more party talk and monologues, specifically between Peter and Sally on why Clarissa had married Richard instead of Peter, and all sorts of different implications thereof. During all of these party pages, I am much reminded of James Joyce's The Dead, and wonder if he influenced Woolf or vice-versa.
Page 138: Sir William Bradshaw is at the party as well. Still no mention of Rezia or Septimus by name. It is revealed that Sally is 55, with the heart and spirit of a 20-year-old. Peter wants her to meet up with Daisy, his soon-to-be-bride in India (yeah, even though he's been pining for Clarissa for 90% of the book).
Page 139: What. The fuck. Seriously. Read this:
"Richard has improved. You are right," said Sally. "I shall go and talk
to him. I shall say goodnight. What does the brain matter," said Lady
Rosseter, getting up, "compared with the heart?"
"I will come," said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this ter-
ror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me
with extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was.
That's it. That's how the goddamned book ends. No resolution, no after-party, nothing. The clock strikes midnight, signaling the end of the day, the party winds down, and the book ends. And people like Woolf's style of writing why, exactly?
I'm stunned, really I am, though I probably shouldn't be. Woolf is a modernist, and can get away with no real ending to her stories that way. At least this book had more plot and more action than To the Lighthouse (Batman!) did. Still, I want my five hours of reading back. So, so want them back. I mean, the novel's most interesting character killed himself, and then was never mentioned again! His hallucinations were some of the novel's most beautifully-written and altogether creepy passages, and then Woolf quickly offs him. How nice. She could've written that entire novel around him. Oy.
So, that's my live-blogging of Mrs Dalloway. I'm going to write my short response paper on it now for class, shower, and then go to bed. In the morning I have a few little errands to run and some other school-related work to take care of. As I'd actually like to try to get some sleep on Monday night as well, I'll be getting up fairly early (around 9 or so).
'Til we meet again, folks.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Unintended Accomplishments
...there's a title for a book for me, later, that's for sure.
I'll be the first to admit that I didn't get a whole lot done today, to be honest.
To be fair as well, I didn't wake up until around 1PM. Yes, that's right. 1PM. Because on weekends, I can actually sleep. Sometimes. Well, most of the time.
I did, however, write a Shakespearean Sonnet for my Poetry Workshop class/professor, just to prove to him/them that not all of my poetry is freeform and/or without meter. And also to prove that yes, while I may avoid form and meter whenever possible, whether actively or passively, I can write in it.
My writing has been on a high note as of late; I don't know if I've reached that point of the semester where I've come into a groove that lets me produce consistently good work in one form or another (whether that be with my poetry or in my papers/essays/midterms), or if I'm just getting better in general with more practice. I'll probably never be able to tell, to be honest. It's really about finding inspiration more than anything else, I think. I've been examining my surroundings more, whether on purpose or subconsciously, and writing about whatever comes into my head. Keeping my poetry journal on or around my person at any given time helps immensely as well, at least for my creativity -- and I think, perhaps falsely or otherwise narcissistically -- that the vast majority of my new stuff (which, of course, never sees the light of day in workshop, and is either quietly added to my portfolio for my thesis, edited into my book manuscript, or ferreted off to a journal in a packet of submissions) holds up when compared to a lot of stuff I see in issues of Poetry or other journals...if not at times surpassing it.
That's a bold statement, I know. I also know that a lot of what I see published in journals (and sometimes, even collected books like the Best American series), is simply awful or just boring. I've never said my stuff is great, because a lot of it isn't -- and, as I've said before, I consider myself lower-middle-class when it comes to my poetry compared to the rest of our program's writers -- but a lot of it's better than what I see getting published these days. It's frustrating because at least on an unconscious level of some sort, I know I'm biased toward my own work, but I also know that even in our program, in our department at Flat State University, we have a lot of good writers who are getting rejections left and right from journals and other publications -- with very few acceptance letters, if any. There are a few of us who have been lucky enough to be told we're good enough to be published in a journal in the past year or two, but that number is very few in comparison to the number of submissions we've all collectively sent out. Meanwhile, we all look at the shit those journals publish every month and ask ourselves, quietly, How the fuck did this get in? Was someone blowing an editor?
Yes, I realize I am the head nonfiction editor of our school's literary journal, which accepts manuscripts at least nationally, if not internationally. Nobody's blowing me, believe me. What gets in gets in because it's at least marginally worthy of being published, because it's good writing, and at least four other people agree with me that it is when a piece is accepted.
At least it's not like the journal at WVU, my undergraduate school, a yearly journal called Calliope. That journal was basically a vehicle for all of the editors to reject everything but one another's works. At least it was when I was a student there, anyway. 90% of what was published in that journal came from someone on the journal's own staff.
For example, I had a story called "Traffic Lights." It was a nonfiction piece. Callope rejected it outright, unceremoniously. It ended up winning the 2005 Waitman Barbe Creative Writing Award for nonfiction -- probably the most prestigious writing award the school gives out to undergraduates in each genre.
Just goes to show you that most journals' staffs have their heads up their asses.
Anyway.
What I'm trying to say is that my writing has hit a good clip, and I'm hoping it doesn't stop anytime soon. While it's going, I'm writing as much as I can, because I know I'll hit a snag or a lull at some point in the future and will possibly need to fall back on some of this stuff.
In other news, it's been a rather quiet and uneventful weekend thus far, and for me it's only half over. I've taken care of all of my "clerical" tasks already (read: all of the work for my students), and all I need to do for the rest of the weekend is read, write a short response paper, and prepare for the shortened week ahead of me. Should be fairly simple enough, really. I'm slowly getting all of my work done for my classes, and it's not yet as hard or rushed as I thought it would be. I may be thinking about that differently in, say, three weeks or so when Thanksgiving week approaches and I'll be writing/finishing my papers as well as grading those of my students', but for right now I'm in a mostly comfortable space. I don't feel the weight of graduate school on me as much as I was expecting to be feeling it at this point of the semester, so that's a plus. No, I may not have gotten a lot done yet this weekend, but at least I actually have the time to take care of a lot of it at my own pace....for the moment, anyway.
I went to Walmart yesterday afternoon, again. Yes, on a Saturday afternoon. I need to learn to stop doing such things, but when I run out of things like cigarettes, bread, milk, cat food, and coffee, it's time to go to Walmart. It's just my luck that I tend to run out of those things on Saturday afternoons, and all (or mostly all) at once.
Still, I live a boring life, folks. Going to Walmart allows me to see the slack-jawed yokels of Kansas in their wild and natural habitat, for better or worse. Sometimes it's the little things in life that amuse me the most greatly. Luckily, I never go shopping without a budget or a game plan (read: I know exactly how much money I'll spend and exactly what I'll need, and rarely deviate from that course).
At Walmart, the Monte Carlo began dripping a little coolant again. Not much, though -- just a baseball-sized spot on the pavement. Looks like I'll have to pour a little more of the stop-leak into the radiator and check its levels again. As it's getting colder now, I'll need to pick up some Heet for the gas tank during one of my upcoming shopping trips and use it every few fill-ups or so. Gotta keep the car in as tip-top shape as possible, of course, until I can get enough money to put some work into it. Maybe run another gas treatment bottle through it on the next fill-up, too; it's been awhile since I put one of those in the car. Staying prepared for nasty weather/cold is key; even when/if I put the car in the garage (something I've done exactly twice since I bought it, both times during hailstorms), it's still cold in there in the winter.
Still, she's treated me pretty good thus far for me putting 150-200 miles on her every week, as well as occasionally driving her up to 103mph. For a car as old as that one is, and for one with 218,300 miles, I couldn't ask anything more out of my low-rent Batmobile.
One of my students (as well as his entire family) collects Camaros; it's all they drive. I made the comment in class this week that the Camaro is the poor-man's Corvette, and the Monte Carlo is the poor-man's Camaro. I own a Monte Carlo. Welcome to my life, I'm double-poor.
As an aside, what I wouldn't give to *collect* Camaros.
On that note, I need to get to bed if I want to get anything accomplished in the morning/afternoon at all. I may still have the second half of my weekend ahead of me, but most of it will be spent working on the stuff I need to work on during that time.
I'll be the first to admit that I didn't get a whole lot done today, to be honest.
To be fair as well, I didn't wake up until around 1PM. Yes, that's right. 1PM. Because on weekends, I can actually sleep. Sometimes. Well, most of the time.
I did, however, write a Shakespearean Sonnet for my Poetry Workshop class/professor, just to prove to him/them that not all of my poetry is freeform and/or without meter. And also to prove that yes, while I may avoid form and meter whenever possible, whether actively or passively, I can write in it.
My writing has been on a high note as of late; I don't know if I've reached that point of the semester where I've come into a groove that lets me produce consistently good work in one form or another (whether that be with my poetry or in my papers/essays/midterms), or if I'm just getting better in general with more practice. I'll probably never be able to tell, to be honest. It's really about finding inspiration more than anything else, I think. I've been examining my surroundings more, whether on purpose or subconsciously, and writing about whatever comes into my head. Keeping my poetry journal on or around my person at any given time helps immensely as well, at least for my creativity -- and I think, perhaps falsely or otherwise narcissistically -- that the vast majority of my new stuff (which, of course, never sees the light of day in workshop, and is either quietly added to my portfolio for my thesis, edited into my book manuscript, or ferreted off to a journal in a packet of submissions) holds up when compared to a lot of stuff I see in issues of Poetry or other journals...if not at times surpassing it.
That's a bold statement, I know. I also know that a lot of what I see published in journals (and sometimes, even collected books like the Best American series), is simply awful or just boring. I've never said my stuff is great, because a lot of it isn't -- and, as I've said before, I consider myself lower-middle-class when it comes to my poetry compared to the rest of our program's writers -- but a lot of it's better than what I see getting published these days. It's frustrating because at least on an unconscious level of some sort, I know I'm biased toward my own work, but I also know that even in our program, in our department at Flat State University, we have a lot of good writers who are getting rejections left and right from journals and other publications -- with very few acceptance letters, if any. There are a few of us who have been lucky enough to be told we're good enough to be published in a journal in the past year or two, but that number is very few in comparison to the number of submissions we've all collectively sent out. Meanwhile, we all look at the shit those journals publish every month and ask ourselves, quietly, How the fuck did this get in? Was someone blowing an editor?
Yes, I realize I am the head nonfiction editor of our school's literary journal, which accepts manuscripts at least nationally, if not internationally. Nobody's blowing me, believe me. What gets in gets in because it's at least marginally worthy of being published, because it's good writing, and at least four other people agree with me that it is when a piece is accepted.
At least it's not like the journal at WVU, my undergraduate school, a yearly journal called Calliope. That journal was basically a vehicle for all of the editors to reject everything but one another's works. At least it was when I was a student there, anyway. 90% of what was published in that journal came from someone on the journal's own staff.
For example, I had a story called "Traffic Lights." It was a nonfiction piece. Callope rejected it outright, unceremoniously. It ended up winning the 2005 Waitman Barbe Creative Writing Award for nonfiction -- probably the most prestigious writing award the school gives out to undergraduates in each genre.
Just goes to show you that most journals' staffs have their heads up their asses.
Anyway.
What I'm trying to say is that my writing has hit a good clip, and I'm hoping it doesn't stop anytime soon. While it's going, I'm writing as much as I can, because I know I'll hit a snag or a lull at some point in the future and will possibly need to fall back on some of this stuff.
In other news, it's been a rather quiet and uneventful weekend thus far, and for me it's only half over. I've taken care of all of my "clerical" tasks already (read: all of the work for my students), and all I need to do for the rest of the weekend is read, write a short response paper, and prepare for the shortened week ahead of me. Should be fairly simple enough, really. I'm slowly getting all of my work done for my classes, and it's not yet as hard or rushed as I thought it would be. I may be thinking about that differently in, say, three weeks or so when Thanksgiving week approaches and I'll be writing/finishing my papers as well as grading those of my students', but for right now I'm in a mostly comfortable space. I don't feel the weight of graduate school on me as much as I was expecting to be feeling it at this point of the semester, so that's a plus. No, I may not have gotten a lot done yet this weekend, but at least I actually have the time to take care of a lot of it at my own pace....for the moment, anyway.
I went to Walmart yesterday afternoon, again. Yes, on a Saturday afternoon. I need to learn to stop doing such things, but when I run out of things like cigarettes, bread, milk, cat food, and coffee, it's time to go to Walmart. It's just my luck that I tend to run out of those things on Saturday afternoons, and all (or mostly all) at once.
Still, I live a boring life, folks. Going to Walmart allows me to see the slack-jawed yokels of Kansas in their wild and natural habitat, for better or worse. Sometimes it's the little things in life that amuse me the most greatly. Luckily, I never go shopping without a budget or a game plan (read: I know exactly how much money I'll spend and exactly what I'll need, and rarely deviate from that course).
At Walmart, the Monte Carlo began dripping a little coolant again. Not much, though -- just a baseball-sized spot on the pavement. Looks like I'll have to pour a little more of the stop-leak into the radiator and check its levels again. As it's getting colder now, I'll need to pick up some Heet for the gas tank during one of my upcoming shopping trips and use it every few fill-ups or so. Gotta keep the car in as tip-top shape as possible, of course, until I can get enough money to put some work into it. Maybe run another gas treatment bottle through it on the next fill-up, too; it's been awhile since I put one of those in the car. Staying prepared for nasty weather/cold is key; even when/if I put the car in the garage (something I've done exactly twice since I bought it, both times during hailstorms), it's still cold in there in the winter.
Still, she's treated me pretty good thus far for me putting 150-200 miles on her every week, as well as occasionally driving her up to 103mph. For a car as old as that one is, and for one with 218,300 miles, I couldn't ask anything more out of my low-rent Batmobile.
One of my students (as well as his entire family) collects Camaros; it's all they drive. I made the comment in class this week that the Camaro is the poor-man's Corvette, and the Monte Carlo is the poor-man's Camaro. I own a Monte Carlo. Welcome to my life, I'm double-poor.
As an aside, what I wouldn't give to *collect* Camaros.
On that note, I need to get to bed if I want to get anything accomplished in the morning/afternoon at all. I may still have the second half of my weekend ahead of me, but most of it will be spent working on the stuff I need to work on during that time.
Friday, October 28, 2011
Spooky, Scary Skeletons
Fall semester: day fifty
If you want to hear a song that'll get stuck in your head all weekend, that's the one.
My Halloween weekend isn't anywhere near as exciting as a bunch of animated skeletons from 1929 dancing in a graveyard. As it is, yes, still fall semester, I'll be reading and writing once again this weekend, making lesson plans and reviewing draft essays (my students' second paper is due on Tuesday) and generally spending the weekend much as I always do: working alone in my house with my cats. As much as I love Halloween, I have no plans whatsoever for it, as I'll be working/reading/etc. The only thing about it I'm looking forward to is 50% off candy at Walmart on Tuesday morning.
As you may recall, last year I went to a Halloween party as Superman. Full costume, tights and all, with a roll of socks stuffed into the red underwear that I called my "super-cock."
I do strange things when drunk.
Yes, there are pictures.
Anyway.
There are some good things to report, really -- it's not always just work-work-work for me. As luck would have it, four good things did happen to me this week:
1.) At long last, I will have my lit-course-free semester. My schedule was approved by my advisor, which means I'll get to take the three courses I planned to take: editing, workshop, and the visiting writer. I've been cleared to register for everything as well, so once November 14 rolls around, I'll be able to sign up.
2.) Tim O'Brien (yes, The Things They Carried Tim O'Brien) is doing a reading and two lectures at my university next Thursday. This is, needless to say, a big deal to the school and to Wichita's literati in general; the city only gets one or two big "literary celebrity" visits per year; last year it was David Sedaris, who did a reading/book signing at Watermark Books. This year it's O'Brien, who is making an appearance at the university, not somewhere outside it. Because his big reading is at 7PM on Thursday night -- the exact time of my Middle Eastern/Asian Lit course -- class has been canceled so that we can go to the reading if we want. Depending on how tired I am and/or how much work I have to do, I'll probably go to it. If not, he's doing a smaller meet-and-greet that afternoon at 2PM that I can go to. Regardless, it means my weekend starts earlier than usual, and that I can relax a bit on my reading for that class since I'll have an extra week to do it.
3.) I got a perfect 15/15 on my midterm exam in that class, and a 14.75/15 on my Midnight's Children paper that I'll be revising/adding to for the end of the semester. This should certainly make things a bit easier as I continue to work on said paper in the coming weeks.
4.) My car has been performing better than ever. It's not leaked a single drop of coolant in a week, and I broke my own personal speed record in it on Wednesday night: 103 mph. She could've gone faster, but I didn't want to press my luck and end up blowing a gasket or something. She likes top gear, though, and it's a shame I don't get the chance to drive that fast more often. I think I could make a good living in life as a street racer.
In addition to all of that, I also got paid today. This is good because I have to pay the electric bill soon, as well as get some minor foodstuffs. Today I made another pot of chicken noodle soup, using the last of the canned vegetables as well as the rest of the pasta I had in the house...so, yeah, I need to replenish that stuff, as my survival as a single man who rarely cooks is on the line, I suppose.
When good things happen, I'm generally put into a better overall mood, and this weekend is no exception thus far, as I was immediately put into a good mood for the day when I woke up and the first news I saw was that WVU has been accepted into the Big 12, starting next year. This is good because it virtually guarantees every WVU football game will be televised out here in Kansas for the foreseeable future, especially when they play the powerful, important teams in the Big 12 (Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas, Texas Tech, etc). They'll more than likely lose, of course, but it's going to be awesome to be able to watch them lose in HD on my flatscreen TV instead of a somewhat-pixelated streaming broadcast on ESPN3's website.
Before you say anything, yes, I did go to WVU. I was born and grew up in Morgantown, and have been a football fan since shortly after birth. But their football program is going to have to bust some ass to get in shape enough to take on giants like those Texas and Oklahoma teams, as well as the ever-up-and-coming, currently-undefeated Kansas State. I've fully resigned myself to seeing a losing season or two before they can get up to speed to be competitive, because they'll have a ridiculously rough football season. Maybe not as rough as they'd have had they joined the SEC instead, but still. Rough.
Anyway, as I'm sure very few readers of my blog are interested in football (Jay is about the only one I know who cares about this sort of thing as much as I do), I'll move forward.
I briefly considered going to a few local fast food places, taking as many ketchup and/or mustard packets as I could and bringing them home....then giving them out to trick-or-treaters. It's dark. It looks like candy. They wouldn't realize the ruse until they got home and dumped out their bags to assess their collective hauls.
I must reiterate again that I am probably a horrible person for devising plans like these. And I'm certainly sure I've not built up enough good karma points to do something so blatantly evil without some sort of retaliation.
Then again, the phrase is "trick or treat." I'm pretty sure that would fall under the "trick" category. Maybe the "evil and cruel trick" category, and probably under the "get my house egged" category as well.
Do kids still egg/toilet-paper houses? Soap windows? Corn people?
Note: for those of you who don't know what "corning" someone is (and I didn't know it myself until I asked my mother several years ago), it's waiting beside a dark road, waiting for a car to pass, and then throwing full ears of corn at the car or its windshield. Apparently it was a big thing in the 70s and 80s, but I've never seen it happen, nor have I ever heard of it happening to anyone aside from my mother.
We're in a down economy -- eggs, toilet paper, soap, and corn are all expensive these days.
Someone could soap my car windows if they wanted to; they actually need a good cleaning. The whole car needs to be taken to the car wash before winter and given a good soapy scrubdown. I haven't washed it since July, and now it's almost too cold to do it again before the snow/ice/shitty fall-and-winter weather hits us here in Kansas.
Could be worse, though -- everyone back home in WV/MD is getting pounded with snow this weekend. Yes, snow. First snowstorm of the year. My parents and most of my friends are supposed to get 5-9 inches tonight and tomorrow.
Again, reason #784 why I never want to live in West Virginia ever again. It was 65 and beautiful here today.
I've been seeing people on Twitter and Facebook talk about their first and/or their favorite Halloween costumes ever. My first Halloween (that I was costumed, anyhow) was 1984. I was Spider-Man. I was 1.9 years old. There are pictures. And I remember it.
Yes, though I was born in December 1982, I was too young to have a costume in October '83, so my parents apparently skipped that year.
I have a few costumes I remember well, mainly because I either spent a lot of time on them or because they were just awesome. There were a few lean years, though, when I had a fairly shitty costume -- such as the Dollar Tree cape-and-Dracula-mask costume, or those $3 cheap vinyl costumes, of which I had at least two -- one Batman, one ALF.
Yes. ALF. I'm not kidding.
I'm pretty sure there was a shitty Superman costume in there somewhere too.
Anyway.
The best costumes I had were always the ones I put together myself. One year in middle school I was taking a Home Ec class, and we were on the unit on "sewing" around Halloween. I was able to raid their fabric closet for pretty much anything I wanted to use to sew with. Instead, I found a ton of fake fur (probably for lining a jacket with, or something), cut sheets of it into shapes I could apply to my body's exposed skin, and bought a werewolf mask. I wore the fur, the mask, and torn pants/torn shirt and was an awesome werewolf. I may have been a horrible student in middle school, but damn was I inventive.
Then there was a hobo costume I got from a garage sale, complete with stick and bindle. I purchased a hobo mask too. I'm sure there are pictures of this somewhere. It may be the most elaborate costume I ever had other than the werewolf.
I had a few more interesting ones -- Darth Vader, a wraith (twice), a demon, The Crow, Frank-N-Furter from Rocky Horror, in full drag and makeup, at Morgantown High School (loved that one, but regrettably have no pictures even though some were taken), a ninja, etc. I went pretty balls-out for the Superman costume last year, though, going as far as to sew the cape to the collar so that it looked authentic and not tied-on. This year? I got nothin'. Sitting at home with the cats, like I said, hoping that my friends who are hot women will take a lot of drunk, embarrassing Halloween party pictures of themselves in slutty costumes and post them on Facebook. Yeah. I'm that guy.
On that note, I'm getting off here to take care of some things around the house before bed. So, g'night folks.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Class, or Lack of It
Fall semester: day forty-eight
I returned to campus yesterday morning a little earlier than usual, due to going downstairs a little early to "work" on the car. I put about 1/4 of the bottle of radiator stop-leak into the radiator (that's all it would take, as it tried to overflow on me), checked to make sure the coolant was at its proper levels, and drove to school as per the usual. It didn't leak a drop all day yesterday from what I saw. Not a drop. Impressive. I'll keep an eye on it for a while, but I was satisfied. The "Low Coolant" light is still on as always, but at this point I'm pretty sure that's a sensor problem more than anything else. I'll still keep an eye on it.
When I got to school I noticed that I had some paperwork in my mailbox (as well as a bag of rice cakes from Suri, left for me as a surprise). The paperwork was for class advising for the spring, which takes place this week instead of next week or later. This meant that I had to start prepping for what I'm going to take in the spring, like now. Okay. No biggie.
As part of the delight of showing up super-early to campus on any given day, teaching or otherwise, I tend to have a little bit of time to get extra things done. As I was there early yesterday morning, I pulled out my advising folder (read: the folder that only gets touched twice a year) and opened the online class schedule to start looking things up. Barring any unforeseen changes or requirements, this should be my schedule come January:
1. English 805, Poetry Workshop (the fourth, and last, one I'll have to take), 3 hours
2. English ### , Writer's Tutorial: Poetry (the visiting writer course), 3 hours
3. English 681, Editing American English (with an awesome professor), 3 hours.
Hoo boy, folks, that's a light semester. The only real time-intensive work I'd be doing over the spring semester would be for my own students and possibly for the editing course (which is really, much like the course title implies, editing), which is taught by the same professor I took during fall last year and for whom I was able to write a 20-page paper on Dr. Manhattan's big blue dick.
Workshop should be the same workshop as I was used to before this semester -- our professor poet extraordinare returns to instruct it, and it should be much of a return to form.
The visiting writer is a really unique course; it counts for three hours of credit, but it doesn't begin meeting until April (generally) and it's only a month long. In it, we sit down with a writer who has joined the department for that month and that month only, once a week, and basically talk about our poetry for an hour. That's it. Last spring, we had this guy, and it was an absolute blast. Not only was it fun and very interesting, but it allowed me to really look at my poetry from a different perspective and try to branch out into different styles and subject matter, make different line edits, etc.
I was going to add on the Playwriting course, but it isn't offered in the spring. If I want to use that as my enrichment course, I'll have to wait until fall. Actually, if I want to use anything as my enrichment course, it looks like I'll have to wait until next fall, the first semester of my third year -- unless for some reason I want to take twelve hours in the spring instead of nine...which I really, really don't want to do if I can avoid it.
I did consider it, though; there are a number of courses open that I'm at least passively interested in, but not very many. Not enrichment courses, mind you, but extra courses. The problem is that they're all lit courses, and while I may need one or two more of those before I graduate, that's generally what third year will be used for, for me -- getting my thesis hours and whatever's left to take out of the way, including that enrichment course...unless I'm told otherwise by my advisor. My main point is that I want a semester, just one, free of any sort of lit or survey course where I have to write twenty-page papers. I've got two of those this semester. I don't like it. It's not fun. I actually want some free time again that doesn't occur in the middle of the night between class days. While I may have to write a paper or two for the editing course, my guess is that it's not going to be anywhere near as long, difficult, or time-consuming as my papers are this semester.
The workshop is on Tuesdays from 4:30-6:50. It'll be the third time we've had a day/time change for the workshop -- the first semester here, it was Wednesdays from 7:05-9:45. Second semester, Wednesday 4:30-6:50. This semester it's back to the original night class time on Wednesday again.
The editing course is on Wednesday from 4:30-6:50. The visiting writer course is set on our own time/day for whatever works best with our schedules. I'm teaching Tuesday/Thursday mornings again at 9:30 and 11. This means, if all goes as planned, that next semester I will have much the same daily schedule as this semester, without the late-night classes involved twice a week. Here's a rough outline of how it could, not will, look:
Monday: OFF.
Tuesday: Teach 9:30 and 11, probable Practicum/Office Hours, Workshop 4:30-6:50.
Wednesday: Other Office Hours, Writing Center Hour, Editing 4:30-6:50.
Thursday: Teach 9:30 and 11, then go home, or meet with visiting poet when he/she arrives in April. Possible Thursday afternoon/evening class if I need to take an extra one.
Friday: OFF.
As you can see, there's a lot of wiggle room and leeway in there for adjustments and/or other needed activities. You'll also notice that my Tuesdays and Thursdays, barring any changes, are flipped between this semester and spring. This semester, on Tuesdays I teach, then turn around and come home. Next semester Tuesday is long, but on Thursdays I can turn around and come home to start my weekend early.
It all depends, obviously, if I can get it to work out that way, the way I want it. As mentioned previously, there may be unforeseen complications that I wouldn't otherwise expect. I do think, however, I can make it work -- at least I hope so, anyway, as I need a break from these long, always-constantly-something-to-do semesters of reading tons of books and writing lengthy papers.
Anyway.
It is 2:14 AM. I went to bed around 2PM and got up around midnight, as I couldn't sleep anymore after that point. This is good; it means I have slept a shitload and am now wide awake to take care of my tasks for the day -- tasks which include grading through a stack of quizzes and a few late workshop copies, possibly grading rewritten papers (as I have three or four of those), taking a shower, and readying myself for the day ahead of me. In addition to performing my self-maintenance on the car for the coolant stuff, I also stopped at the gas station on my way home and aired up all the tires a little more, as they were all starting to droop or otherwise look/feel low, so the car is in as tip-top shape as I can make it right now for the time being. Let's hope it can stay that way for a while.
There is something else I forgot to mention in yesterday's post, and that's packages. Over the light(er) weekend of work I had, I did a fair amount more of cleaning, and found a ton of mailing envelopes that either I or the former girlfriend bought long long ago and put away in storage, as well as some other interesting, thoughtful things I had laying around the house that I meant to send out ages ago, or otherwise have no use for (but others will). So, I've assembled about five or six packages that will be going in the mail over the course of the next few weeks to some friends and family members -- two of which, one for my friend Jane and another for my friend Amber -- I won't even have to pay for, as I found an entire sheet of old, unused 37-cent stamps (from like eight years ago) that I can coat their small bubble mailers in. Can't use the stamps for anything else at this point, so why not, right? The first wave of said packages will be on their way in the mail this week, with the other (read: much, much bigger/more expensive-to-mail) ones to be sent off between now and Thanksgiving, roughly, depending on when I have the money and time to take them to the post office. They're like early Christmas presents, as I may not even be able to send cards to half the people I usually do this year due to lack of money.
I like being able to do things for my friends out of the blue and for no real reason. My friends have helped me out in so many ways over the years when I've needed them to, and they help keep me sane when I'm figuratively all alone out here in Kansas. Yes, it does cost me some money to do these sorts of things, but most of the time that's negligible compared to everything my friends have done for me.
On that note, it's time to go take care of business and start my tasks for the day.
I returned to campus yesterday morning a little earlier than usual, due to going downstairs a little early to "work" on the car. I put about 1/4 of the bottle of radiator stop-leak into the radiator (that's all it would take, as it tried to overflow on me), checked to make sure the coolant was at its proper levels, and drove to school as per the usual. It didn't leak a drop all day yesterday from what I saw. Not a drop. Impressive. I'll keep an eye on it for a while, but I was satisfied. The "Low Coolant" light is still on as always, but at this point I'm pretty sure that's a sensor problem more than anything else. I'll still keep an eye on it.
When I got to school I noticed that I had some paperwork in my mailbox (as well as a bag of rice cakes from Suri, left for me as a surprise). The paperwork was for class advising for the spring, which takes place this week instead of next week or later. This meant that I had to start prepping for what I'm going to take in the spring, like now. Okay. No biggie.
As part of the delight of showing up super-early to campus on any given day, teaching or otherwise, I tend to have a little bit of time to get extra things done. As I was there early yesterday morning, I pulled out my advising folder (read: the folder that only gets touched twice a year) and opened the online class schedule to start looking things up. Barring any unforeseen changes or requirements, this should be my schedule come January:
1. English 805, Poetry Workshop (the fourth, and last, one I'll have to take), 3 hours
2. English ### , Writer's Tutorial: Poetry (the visiting writer course), 3 hours
3. English 681, Editing American English (with an awesome professor), 3 hours.
Hoo boy, folks, that's a light semester. The only real time-intensive work I'd be doing over the spring semester would be for my own students and possibly for the editing course (which is really, much like the course title implies, editing), which is taught by the same professor I took during fall last year and for whom I was able to write a 20-page paper on Dr. Manhattan's big blue dick.
Workshop should be the same workshop as I was used to before this semester -- our professor poet extraordinare returns to instruct it, and it should be much of a return to form.
The visiting writer is a really unique course; it counts for three hours of credit, but it doesn't begin meeting until April (generally) and it's only a month long. In it, we sit down with a writer who has joined the department for that month and that month only, once a week, and basically talk about our poetry for an hour. That's it. Last spring, we had this guy, and it was an absolute blast. Not only was it fun and very interesting, but it allowed me to really look at my poetry from a different perspective and try to branch out into different styles and subject matter, make different line edits, etc.
I was going to add on the Playwriting course, but it isn't offered in the spring. If I want to use that as my enrichment course, I'll have to wait until fall. Actually, if I want to use anything as my enrichment course, it looks like I'll have to wait until next fall, the first semester of my third year -- unless for some reason I want to take twelve hours in the spring instead of nine...which I really, really don't want to do if I can avoid it.
I did consider it, though; there are a number of courses open that I'm at least passively interested in, but not very many. Not enrichment courses, mind you, but extra courses. The problem is that they're all lit courses, and while I may need one or two more of those before I graduate, that's generally what third year will be used for, for me -- getting my thesis hours and whatever's left to take out of the way, including that enrichment course...unless I'm told otherwise by my advisor. My main point is that I want a semester, just one, free of any sort of lit or survey course where I have to write twenty-page papers. I've got two of those this semester. I don't like it. It's not fun. I actually want some free time again that doesn't occur in the middle of the night between class days. While I may have to write a paper or two for the editing course, my guess is that it's not going to be anywhere near as long, difficult, or time-consuming as my papers are this semester.
The workshop is on Tuesdays from 4:30-6:50. It'll be the third time we've had a day/time change for the workshop -- the first semester here, it was Wednesdays from 7:05-9:45. Second semester, Wednesday 4:30-6:50. This semester it's back to the original night class time on Wednesday again.
The editing course is on Wednesday from 4:30-6:50. The visiting writer course is set on our own time/day for whatever works best with our schedules. I'm teaching Tuesday/Thursday mornings again at 9:30 and 11. This means, if all goes as planned, that next semester I will have much the same daily schedule as this semester, without the late-night classes involved twice a week. Here's a rough outline of how it could, not will, look:
Monday: OFF.
Tuesday: Teach 9:30 and 11, probable Practicum/Office Hours, Workshop 4:30-6:50.
Wednesday: Other Office Hours, Writing Center Hour, Editing 4:30-6:50.
Thursday: Teach 9:30 and 11, then go home, or meet with visiting poet when he/she arrives in April. Possible Thursday afternoon/evening class if I need to take an extra one.
Friday: OFF.
As you can see, there's a lot of wiggle room and leeway in there for adjustments and/or other needed activities. You'll also notice that my Tuesdays and Thursdays, barring any changes, are flipped between this semester and spring. This semester, on Tuesdays I teach, then turn around and come home. Next semester Tuesday is long, but on Thursdays I can turn around and come home to start my weekend early.
It all depends, obviously, if I can get it to work out that way, the way I want it. As mentioned previously, there may be unforeseen complications that I wouldn't otherwise expect. I do think, however, I can make it work -- at least I hope so, anyway, as I need a break from these long, always-constantly-something-to-do semesters of reading tons of books and writing lengthy papers.
Anyway.
It is 2:14 AM. I went to bed around 2PM and got up around midnight, as I couldn't sleep anymore after that point. This is good; it means I have slept a shitload and am now wide awake to take care of my tasks for the day -- tasks which include grading through a stack of quizzes and a few late workshop copies, possibly grading rewritten papers (as I have three or four of those), taking a shower, and readying myself for the day ahead of me. In addition to performing my self-maintenance on the car for the coolant stuff, I also stopped at the gas station on my way home and aired up all the tires a little more, as they were all starting to droop or otherwise look/feel low, so the car is in as tip-top shape as I can make it right now for the time being. Let's hope it can stay that way for a while.
There is something else I forgot to mention in yesterday's post, and that's packages. Over the light(er) weekend of work I had, I did a fair amount more of cleaning, and found a ton of mailing envelopes that either I or the former girlfriend bought long long ago and put away in storage, as well as some other interesting, thoughtful things I had laying around the house that I meant to send out ages ago, or otherwise have no use for (but others will). So, I've assembled about five or six packages that will be going in the mail over the course of the next few weeks to some friends and family members -- two of which, one for my friend Jane and another for my friend Amber -- I won't even have to pay for, as I found an entire sheet of old, unused 37-cent stamps (from like eight years ago) that I can coat their small bubble mailers in. Can't use the stamps for anything else at this point, so why not, right? The first wave of said packages will be on their way in the mail this week, with the other (read: much, much bigger/more expensive-to-mail) ones to be sent off between now and Thanksgiving, roughly, depending on when I have the money and time to take them to the post office. They're like early Christmas presents, as I may not even be able to send cards to half the people I usually do this year due to lack of money.
I like being able to do things for my friends out of the blue and for no real reason. My friends have helped me out in so many ways over the years when I've needed them to, and they help keep me sane when I'm figuratively all alone out here in Kansas. Yes, it does cost me some money to do these sorts of things, but most of the time that's negligible compared to everything my friends have done for me.
On that note, it's time to go take care of business and start my tasks for the day.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Stir-Crazy, Bored, and Lonely
Fall semester: day forty-seven
It figures that the one night that I should be asleep at 2:30 AM, I can't sleep at all. This is, of course, coming off four days of +/-10 hour nights of sleep, in which I was convinced that there was something wrong with me because I was sleeping so much.
Then again, Monday night insomnia is nothing new to me at this point, and it shouldn't be new to you, either, if you've been reading this blog for a while. I think I'm going to give up even trying to sleep on Monday nights for the most part from this point forward. If it happens, it happens, but it doesn't really tend to matter either way, as on Tuesdays I can come home at noon and pass out if I wish -- and not necessarily have to get up before 10 or so on Wednesday mornings unless I choose to.
I've been asked by some friends and colleagues why I come in to campus on Wednesday mornings at 7:30 when I don't even have class until 1:30. Most of the time, the answer is simple as well as twofold: yes, it's mainly to get a parking spot that I don't have to fight for, but it's also because I can get a lot of work done in and around the office that I don't necessarily have time to do on a Tuesday or Thursday morning -- such as preparing lesson plans or handouts, finishing any reading for my classes, or printing off/making copies of stuff I need to hand out or turn in. It also gets me out of the house for a few extra hours and helps me do something constructive, despite whatever level of sleep deprivation I'm dealing with at the time. I get to be a little more social, I get stuff done, etc. Whatever works; I live a boring life -- any time spent in the real world outside this house and my Man Cave is good, right?
Tonight's insomnia has me in a weird place. I am not in the least bit tired, either mentally or physically, and in fact, once my coffee kicks in I'll probably be actually energetic. Gone is that fatigue I was fighting for the better part of the weekend.
I'm also in a weird place because, for the first time in a long time, I've been able to finish all of my work well ahead of schedule. By yesterday afternoon, I'd finished reading Crime and Punishment (or, at least as much of it as I needed to read to write a response paper on it, which I also did...which means I skipped about 300 pages and read the last forty pages of the book or so to find out what happened). I had also finished all of the house cleaning and laundry I needed to do well ahead of schedule too, as I started the laundry on Thursday night. I read The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, as mentioned before, all in one day. I went out and did the grocery shopping and filled the car with gas yesterday. All of the work for my classes this week was done by Saturday evening, including critiquing my students' workshop essays as well as my fellow poets' workshop poems. I even paid the rent and stuck the check in the mail, as well as sent off a surprise package to my dad.
So, by about 5PM last night, having done everything that I needed to take care of, I found myself in a really weird headspace -- one that I haven't experienced in several months -- I was bored. With that boredom came this weird sense of calm, like the eye of a hurricane was passing over me. I knew that my work wasn't done for the semester, not by a fucking long shot, but for the remainder of the day and for the better part of the next two days, I was free, in a sense.
Mind you, as I said before, there is always something else to be done, or at least something else that can be done, sometimes well in advance. For example, I could be reading the next book for either one of my lit courses, if I wanted to do so. Well, I could, provided those books were here at home with me, which they're not. I keep them all on my bookshelf in my office. I could also be working on revising/adding to my Midnight's Children paper, as an expanded version of that will be due in December. However, we've not gotten our grades back for the first paper (read: version) yet, and until that happens I don't want to go around changin' shit. Our professor is a busy man this semester -- he's teaching undergraduate courses as well, and is still in the process of grading our midterm exams that we took almost two weeks ago. I would imagine it'll be another week at least before I find out my grade on the paper, and probably another few days before I find out my grade on the midterm. There's no hurry, really; there may be a ton of work in that class, but as long as we do it, we're usually graded pretty favorably.
This is also the same professor who holds an upscale Christmas party every year for faculty and staff, in the penthouse ballroom of the very nice apartment building he and his wife live (and own their apartment) in. The man's not only super-intelligent, but is incredibly classy. This year it may be the only extracurricular activity I take part in, department-related or otherwise -- and mainly out of respect to that man and the brilliant classes I've taken by him over the past year. This is a big deal, as if you know me, I'm not big on social functions. At all.
As I've been feeling relatively free-spirited all night (for once), I spent a good chunk of my time cooking dinner and watching the World Series game -- a type of relaxation I don't get to do often. The rest of it I spent wandering the house doing various small tasks while listening to podcasts. When I found once more I couldn't sleep, I considered watching a movie, but realized that a) it would probably put me to sleep, and b) that sleep would not be very satisfying compared to just coming home after class and going to bed then. So, of course, I came here.
There's not been a lot going on in my little reclusive world, but then again there rarely is. Yes, in the back of my mind are always my budget woes and my mostly minor car problems, but most of the time I can push those things out of my head and not worry about them too much. The big news tonight was that apparently there's very rare aurora borealis lights and patterns visible here in Kansas, and it's visible as far south as Arkansas as well. I only heard about it on the news; I wasn't intrigued enough to actually go out and look to the northern skies. Let me know when the aliens land, or when the extinction-level-event meteor is about to strike the planet, and I'll go out and look. Anything else is mostly boring to me. Woo, a few red light circles in the sky! Etc.
A few people have asked me why my first book isn't available on Amazon anymore; it's not, that's true. I've taken it off so that I can edit it down and change around the file formatting for the print edition. This will take quite a long amount of time -- possibly as long as it took to put the original book together -- and I probably won't be able to even start on that work in earnest until the holidays. As I've said before, though, it will eventually be available again in one form or another. I just have to put a lot of work into its revision and republication. So, no worries.
At least my classes today should be rather short; it's workshop week, and only about 1/3 of my students even gave the class a workshop draft on Thursday. The rest of them will either come in today, or they won't be workshopped and those students will lose points. The final version of the paper is due on November 1, and with that starts the headlong rush to the end of the semester, full of work and the last large paper/project for my students. I'm hoping today we can get through the workshop copies we have, I can give a short lecture on a few of the things coming up, and all of us can get the hell out of there. By noon I'll be tired, I'm sure.
I just sent my mother a long email that sounded a lot like a "State of the Brandon" address. She's worried about my car as always, which is completely understandable, and told me that my insurance on it would probably be lower if I dropped everything but liability for it. Well yes, she's right, especially for a car that old, but all of the other factors against me (remember, the Monte Carlo is classified as a "sports car" because it's the Z34 model, I have no credit history because nobody will give me a credit card, and I'm a new driver with a new policy) are what keep it at $298 every six months. I know people who don't pay anywhere near that for insurance on their vehicles for a full year, let alone every six months.
In case you were wondering, I have a "medium coverage" sort of policy on that car; it's not full coverage, but it's not just liability either; it's more like liability with a few extras, such as optional, limited roadside assistance and a $50/100k policy on bodily injury/damages. Liability-only insurance, with all the factors against me, would save me a negligible amount of money -- something like $50 each period. Believe me, I checked. It's worth the extra $50 to get the extra coverage, even on a car that old. Perhaps the rate may go down in the future as long as I don't have any accidents, but for now, my 6-month insurance payment is due on December 30, and I have no clue at this point how I'm going to pay it unless I get a ton of money from relatives for Christmas.
This is also why I basically told my mother that anytime she wants to drop a shitload of money into my bank account, believe me, I wouldn't decline or fight it.
At least my electric bill -- which arrived in the mail yesterday -- is only $48 this month. I think that's the lowest electric bill I've ever received. And it's not due for another three weeks, which means I can save up a bit before I have to pay it; I'll get two more paychecks before it's due.
The weather has been gorgeous here for the past few days -- in the 70s or low 80s during the day, which has been nothing short of extraordinary compared to the low 50s of last week and well-below-freezing temperatures at night. Of course, this can't last -- starting tomorrow the temperatures are supposed to drop down low at night again and the highs are only going to be in the 60s again. As it may be the last week I get to wear shorts to school, I'm going to take full advantage of it. I've already broken out my coats/jackets, and have unpacked and readied all of my winter clothing in preparation for the next several months of nut-numbingly cold Kansas weather.
In other news, my former students are awesome. I've mentioned before that a few of my former students, all of them from the first semester I was teaching (strangely enough) have become friends of mine, if not close friends in several cases. One of them found me a case of the Scary Blackberry "Ghoul-Aid" Kool-Aid -- 72 packs in all -- and is bringing it to my office on Wednesday. In thanks, I am giving her (what else?) a pink tie-dye t-shirt I made that she wanted from my collection. I mentioned the Kool-Aid and that she'd found some for me here before, but I didn't go into much detail about it.
As an aside, my lovely friend Shanna back home, a woman that I may very well end up marrying one day (and no, that's not a joke -- but it is indeed a story for another time), found me thirty more packets of it while shopping this past week, and will be mailing them to me soon as well. So, my Kool-Aid search is over for the moment. I'll soon have enough of it to swim in if I so choose.
Another one of my former students, a girl who really needs an eventual codename in this blog because she does factor largely into my life at times (though that factoring comes and goes depending on how busy both of us are) just told me that she's probably going to end up moving to Seattle within the next year or so for a student exchange program. This sort of upsets me because not only is she one of the best undergraduate writers I've ever read, but she's super-intelligent and actually cares about what's going on in my life, stopping by my office a lot to hang out for no particular reason. She's a good friend and I'll be sad to see her go, if she does. On the plus side, however, she also told me that she'd happily come up to Newton and visit me if I get stir-crazy, bored, and lonely. I had to remind her that "stir-crazy, bored, and lonely" has been pretty much my daily life since the former girlfriend and I parted ways. So, perhaps I'll be able to have some visiting company over the course of the next few months at some point. It would be nice.
Before any of you say anything or start arching eyebrows, I will remind you that she is a former student. Emphasis on the former. Get your minds out of the gutter; I'm allowed to have hot nineteen-year-old friends that I'm not attracted to in the least.
Really, right now I'm not attracted to anyone, to tell you the truth. My penis is on hiatus. I may as well be a eunuch at this point.
Wow, there's a poem/book/thesis title for you: My Penis is on Hiatus.
Anyway.
Suri and I are delivering a presentation in two weeks or so on a novel called Comfort Woman or something. Like everything else in all the classes we have together, we're working on it together (mainly because the girl is the closest friend I have in Wichita, if not Kansas as a whole). Anyway, it's apparently a novel that involves a lot of rape, violence, gore, and possible prostitution. I don't know because I haven't read it yet, but when I heard the novel involved those topics/themes, it immediately piqued my interest. This probably means I'm a horrible person, of course, but after reading some of the most boring, long, and/or confusing novels for my lit classes over the course of the semester thus far, I long to read one that I may actually find exciting on some level -- or, at the very least, interesting. I'll be creating a PowerPoint presentation on the history around the novel and the author's background, and Suri will be covering the novel itself and the events that are going on within it. Our objective is to lead an hour's worth of class discussion, which -- knowing how much I like to hear myself talk (remember, I'm a narcissist at heart) shouldn't be difficult.
I also have a 15-minute presentation I have to prepare on a novel called Waiting for the Barbarians as well, and that will happen during the same week -- the day before my presentation with Suri, actually -- a week which will already be loaded for bear with that work, grading, and student conferences occurring. It's also the week before Thanksgiving. As I mentioned before, so that I don't have to waste the time/gas on coming to campus for one day during Thanksgiving week, I've canceled class for my students -- especially since about 80% of them wouldn't show up anyhow, I'm guessing. That gives me a full ten days or so off, during which I'll be doing all sorts of work like writing papers, reading books, and creating my poetry portfolio to turn in at the end of the semester.
On that note, I've been writing here for the better part of three hours, and this post is mammoth and massive, and I'm sure most of you have just skimmed it for any pertinent info. As always, I shall return to the blog once I have more time and more things to report. Until then, friends and readers.
It figures that the one night that I should be asleep at 2:30 AM, I can't sleep at all. This is, of course, coming off four days of +/-10 hour nights of sleep, in which I was convinced that there was something wrong with me because I was sleeping so much.
Then again, Monday night insomnia is nothing new to me at this point, and it shouldn't be new to you, either, if you've been reading this blog for a while. I think I'm going to give up even trying to sleep on Monday nights for the most part from this point forward. If it happens, it happens, but it doesn't really tend to matter either way, as on Tuesdays I can come home at noon and pass out if I wish -- and not necessarily have to get up before 10 or so on Wednesday mornings unless I choose to.
I've been asked by some friends and colleagues why I come in to campus on Wednesday mornings at 7:30 when I don't even have class until 1:30. Most of the time, the answer is simple as well as twofold: yes, it's mainly to get a parking spot that I don't have to fight for, but it's also because I can get a lot of work done in and around the office that I don't necessarily have time to do on a Tuesday or Thursday morning -- such as preparing lesson plans or handouts, finishing any reading for my classes, or printing off/making copies of stuff I need to hand out or turn in. It also gets me out of the house for a few extra hours and helps me do something constructive, despite whatever level of sleep deprivation I'm dealing with at the time. I get to be a little more social, I get stuff done, etc. Whatever works; I live a boring life -- any time spent in the real world outside this house and my Man Cave is good, right?
Tonight's insomnia has me in a weird place. I am not in the least bit tired, either mentally or physically, and in fact, once my coffee kicks in I'll probably be actually energetic. Gone is that fatigue I was fighting for the better part of the weekend.
I'm also in a weird place because, for the first time in a long time, I've been able to finish all of my work well ahead of schedule. By yesterday afternoon, I'd finished reading Crime and Punishment (or, at least as much of it as I needed to read to write a response paper on it, which I also did...which means I skipped about 300 pages and read the last forty pages of the book or so to find out what happened). I had also finished all of the house cleaning and laundry I needed to do well ahead of schedule too, as I started the laundry on Thursday night. I read The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, as mentioned before, all in one day. I went out and did the grocery shopping and filled the car with gas yesterday. All of the work for my classes this week was done by Saturday evening, including critiquing my students' workshop essays as well as my fellow poets' workshop poems. I even paid the rent and stuck the check in the mail, as well as sent off a surprise package to my dad.
So, by about 5PM last night, having done everything that I needed to take care of, I found myself in a really weird headspace -- one that I haven't experienced in several months -- I was bored. With that boredom came this weird sense of calm, like the eye of a hurricane was passing over me. I knew that my work wasn't done for the semester, not by a fucking long shot, but for the remainder of the day and for the better part of the next two days, I was free, in a sense.
Mind you, as I said before, there is always something else to be done, or at least something else that can be done, sometimes well in advance. For example, I could be reading the next book for either one of my lit courses, if I wanted to do so. Well, I could, provided those books were here at home with me, which they're not. I keep them all on my bookshelf in my office. I could also be working on revising/adding to my Midnight's Children paper, as an expanded version of that will be due in December. However, we've not gotten our grades back for the first paper (read: version) yet, and until that happens I don't want to go around changin' shit. Our professor is a busy man this semester -- he's teaching undergraduate courses as well, and is still in the process of grading our midterm exams that we took almost two weeks ago. I would imagine it'll be another week at least before I find out my grade on the paper, and probably another few days before I find out my grade on the midterm. There's no hurry, really; there may be a ton of work in that class, but as long as we do it, we're usually graded pretty favorably.
This is also the same professor who holds an upscale Christmas party every year for faculty and staff, in the penthouse ballroom of the very nice apartment building he and his wife live (and own their apartment) in. The man's not only super-intelligent, but is incredibly classy. This year it may be the only extracurricular activity I take part in, department-related or otherwise -- and mainly out of respect to that man and the brilliant classes I've taken by him over the past year. This is a big deal, as if you know me, I'm not big on social functions. At all.
As I've been feeling relatively free-spirited all night (for once), I spent a good chunk of my time cooking dinner and watching the World Series game -- a type of relaxation I don't get to do often. The rest of it I spent wandering the house doing various small tasks while listening to podcasts. When I found once more I couldn't sleep, I considered watching a movie, but realized that a) it would probably put me to sleep, and b) that sleep would not be very satisfying compared to just coming home after class and going to bed then. So, of course, I came here.
There's not been a lot going on in my little reclusive world, but then again there rarely is. Yes, in the back of my mind are always my budget woes and my mostly minor car problems, but most of the time I can push those things out of my head and not worry about them too much. The big news tonight was that apparently there's very rare aurora borealis lights and patterns visible here in Kansas, and it's visible as far south as Arkansas as well. I only heard about it on the news; I wasn't intrigued enough to actually go out and look to the northern skies. Let me know when the aliens land, or when the extinction-level-event meteor is about to strike the planet, and I'll go out and look. Anything else is mostly boring to me. Woo, a few red light circles in the sky! Etc.
A few people have asked me why my first book isn't available on Amazon anymore; it's not, that's true. I've taken it off so that I can edit it down and change around the file formatting for the print edition. This will take quite a long amount of time -- possibly as long as it took to put the original book together -- and I probably won't be able to even start on that work in earnest until the holidays. As I've said before, though, it will eventually be available again in one form or another. I just have to put a lot of work into its revision and republication. So, no worries.
At least my classes today should be rather short; it's workshop week, and only about 1/3 of my students even gave the class a workshop draft on Thursday. The rest of them will either come in today, or they won't be workshopped and those students will lose points. The final version of the paper is due on November 1, and with that starts the headlong rush to the end of the semester, full of work and the last large paper/project for my students. I'm hoping today we can get through the workshop copies we have, I can give a short lecture on a few of the things coming up, and all of us can get the hell out of there. By noon I'll be tired, I'm sure.
I just sent my mother a long email that sounded a lot like a "State of the Brandon" address. She's worried about my car as always, which is completely understandable, and told me that my insurance on it would probably be lower if I dropped everything but liability for it. Well yes, she's right, especially for a car that old, but all of the other factors against me (remember, the Monte Carlo is classified as a "sports car" because it's the Z34 model, I have no credit history because nobody will give me a credit card, and I'm a new driver with a new policy) are what keep it at $298 every six months. I know people who don't pay anywhere near that for insurance on their vehicles for a full year, let alone every six months.
In case you were wondering, I have a "medium coverage" sort of policy on that car; it's not full coverage, but it's not just liability either; it's more like liability with a few extras, such as optional, limited roadside assistance and a $50/100k policy on bodily injury/damages. Liability-only insurance, with all the factors against me, would save me a negligible amount of money -- something like $50 each period. Believe me, I checked. It's worth the extra $50 to get the extra coverage, even on a car that old. Perhaps the rate may go down in the future as long as I don't have any accidents, but for now, my 6-month insurance payment is due on December 30, and I have no clue at this point how I'm going to pay it unless I get a ton of money from relatives for Christmas.
This is also why I basically told my mother that anytime she wants to drop a shitload of money into my bank account, believe me, I wouldn't decline or fight it.
At least my electric bill -- which arrived in the mail yesterday -- is only $48 this month. I think that's the lowest electric bill I've ever received. And it's not due for another three weeks, which means I can save up a bit before I have to pay it; I'll get two more paychecks before it's due.
The weather has been gorgeous here for the past few days -- in the 70s or low 80s during the day, which has been nothing short of extraordinary compared to the low 50s of last week and well-below-freezing temperatures at night. Of course, this can't last -- starting tomorrow the temperatures are supposed to drop down low at night again and the highs are only going to be in the 60s again. As it may be the last week I get to wear shorts to school, I'm going to take full advantage of it. I've already broken out my coats/jackets, and have unpacked and readied all of my winter clothing in preparation for the next several months of nut-numbingly cold Kansas weather.
In other news, my former students are awesome. I've mentioned before that a few of my former students, all of them from the first semester I was teaching (strangely enough) have become friends of mine, if not close friends in several cases. One of them found me a case of the Scary Blackberry "Ghoul-Aid" Kool-Aid -- 72 packs in all -- and is bringing it to my office on Wednesday. In thanks, I am giving her (what else?) a pink tie-dye t-shirt I made that she wanted from my collection. I mentioned the Kool-Aid and that she'd found some for me here before, but I didn't go into much detail about it.
As an aside, my lovely friend Shanna back home, a woman that I may very well end up marrying one day (and no, that's not a joke -- but it is indeed a story for another time), found me thirty more packets of it while shopping this past week, and will be mailing them to me soon as well. So, my Kool-Aid search is over for the moment. I'll soon have enough of it to swim in if I so choose.
Another one of my former students, a girl who really needs an eventual codename in this blog because she does factor largely into my life at times (though that factoring comes and goes depending on how busy both of us are) just told me that she's probably going to end up moving to Seattle within the next year or so for a student exchange program. This sort of upsets me because not only is she one of the best undergraduate writers I've ever read, but she's super-intelligent and actually cares about what's going on in my life, stopping by my office a lot to hang out for no particular reason. She's a good friend and I'll be sad to see her go, if she does. On the plus side, however, she also told me that she'd happily come up to Newton and visit me if I get stir-crazy, bored, and lonely. I had to remind her that "stir-crazy, bored, and lonely" has been pretty much my daily life since the former girlfriend and I parted ways. So, perhaps I'll be able to have some visiting company over the course of the next few months at some point. It would be nice.
Before any of you say anything or start arching eyebrows, I will remind you that she is a former student. Emphasis on the former. Get your minds out of the gutter; I'm allowed to have hot nineteen-year-old friends that I'm not attracted to in the least.
Really, right now I'm not attracted to anyone, to tell you the truth. My penis is on hiatus. I may as well be a eunuch at this point.
Wow, there's a poem/book/thesis title for you: My Penis is on Hiatus.
Anyway.
Suri and I are delivering a presentation in two weeks or so on a novel called Comfort Woman or something. Like everything else in all the classes we have together, we're working on it together (mainly because the girl is the closest friend I have in Wichita, if not Kansas as a whole). Anyway, it's apparently a novel that involves a lot of rape, violence, gore, and possible prostitution. I don't know because I haven't read it yet, but when I heard the novel involved those topics/themes, it immediately piqued my interest. This probably means I'm a horrible person, of course, but after reading some of the most boring, long, and/or confusing novels for my lit classes over the course of the semester thus far, I long to read one that I may actually find exciting on some level -- or, at the very least, interesting. I'll be creating a PowerPoint presentation on the history around the novel and the author's background, and Suri will be covering the novel itself and the events that are going on within it. Our objective is to lead an hour's worth of class discussion, which -- knowing how much I like to hear myself talk (remember, I'm a narcissist at heart) shouldn't be difficult.
I also have a 15-minute presentation I have to prepare on a novel called Waiting for the Barbarians as well, and that will happen during the same week -- the day before my presentation with Suri, actually -- a week which will already be loaded for bear with that work, grading, and student conferences occurring. It's also the week before Thanksgiving. As I mentioned before, so that I don't have to waste the time/gas on coming to campus for one day during Thanksgiving week, I've canceled class for my students -- especially since about 80% of them wouldn't show up anyhow, I'm guessing. That gives me a full ten days or so off, during which I'll be doing all sorts of work like writing papers, reading books, and creating my poetry portfolio to turn in at the end of the semester.
On that note, I've been writing here for the better part of three hours, and this post is mammoth and massive, and I'm sure most of you have just skimmed it for any pertinent info. As always, I shall return to the blog once I have more time and more things to report. Until then, friends and readers.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Placenta Shampoo
Oh yeah, that's about my mental state tonight. Placenta Shampoo. Look it up.
It's been a strange weekend. Though I've only left the house once -- this afternoon, to get a few groceries -- my mind has been going in all different directions, both firing and misfiring. I'm also sort of afraid that I'm getting sick, as I don't feel bad, but also can't seem to get enough sleep. The past two nights, I've slept for ten hours or more, straight, without waking up, and could've slept for another four or five. There's no way my body needs that much sleep without there being something wrong with me. I've made sure to keep up my vitamin regimen on a daily basis and have added an extra vitamin C pill to it, as well as a daily zinc pill, to stave off anything that may be coming. This is the time I usually end up getting sick during the fall, and this year it's the worst possible time for me to be getting sick -- as I'm only a little more than halfway up the proverbial mountain of work to be done.
The car's thermostat is really going wonky now, and it's dripping out a lot more coolant from the overflow valve than before (previously, it had been only dripping a little, or none at all). If it even is the thermostat, after all; who knows, really. Tuesday morning, when it's light, I'm going to put the stop-leak in it (finally) and refill the coolant tank again, as the stop-leak needs to be put in when the car's going to be driven for at least 15 minutes or so (which would be my trip down to Wichita at about 25 minutes). If that doesn't fix it or at least curb how much coolant it likes to drip, there's not really much else I can do other than keep refilling the fucking tank over and over again until I can actually get enough money to get it worked on, which isn't going to be for a long time. I just don't have the money. Period. No, I shouldn't have to worry this much about a car or about money, but I do. That's just the life I have. As I've said many times before, it sucks. A lot.
Even if it is the thermostat, the stop-leak should seal everything enough to where it shouldn't be dripping as much as it does every time I park it. Sometimes it's a few drops, sometimes it's a big puddle. My driveway is one big stain at this point. If it's not the thermostat and it's a leaky hose instead (or something similar along those lines), then all the better. It's pissing me off enough to this point where I'm really ready to climb underneath the thing with duct tape and seal up anything that doesn't look like it should.
No, I wouldn't actually do that. But the thought has crossed my mind. The damned car didn't leak a drop when I bought it. It only started this shit in August or so, and only occasionally then. It's so frustrating because words cannot express how much I need that car to just work, and just work without costing me any extra money right now, because again, it's money I just don't have. If I were to take that car to a shop, it would easily cost at least $1,000 to fix everything wrong with it. That's so, so much more money than I ever have to spare. Like, five times more money than I ever have to spare.
All I want is for the damned thing to keep running. Nothing else wrong with it is necessarily important. As I've said before, my Monte Carlo is one of the very, very few things I own outright that nothing and nobody can take away from me.
Anyway.
I've been in a half-sleep daze most of the weekend. Fatigue more than anything else, but it doesn't make any sense to me because of how much sleep I've gotten. I can drink full pots of coffee, I can be active around the house (I've been doing chores for the sake of doing them, even if they waste study time, just so that I can stay awake), and I can write here -- none of it helps. I always want to go to sleep. It's 9PM, and I'm making another pot of coffee just so that I can stay up to do more of the work I have to do over the weekend. I still have three rather important things to finish tonight and tomorrow, if possible.
I've been reading The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa for my Middle Eastern/Asian Lit class. It's like reading the translated Japanese version of Finnegan's Wake. Definitely modernist, beautifully written, and almost totally incomprehensible. In those respects, it's very akin to a James Joyce book. I pity the folks who choose to write a long paper on that novel. Good luck, there.
I'm also trying to finish Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment for my Grad Studies in Fiction class. Yes, still. The book is massive, folks. I'm over 200 pages in and barely 1/4 of the way through the version I'm reading. The only reason I'm wasting my time with it is because I need to write a short response paper on it just to get it out of the way. I'll probably end up doing that in my office on Wednesday morning, before class that afternoon. It'll take until then to actually finish the damned book, or at least get close enough to finishing it to where I can just say fuck it, I'll find out what happens in class. Like I said before, it's more than likely going to be the only book this semester that I won't actually finish and may just give up on. I have way too much other shit to do for my other classes (and in general) to read a very wordy Russian novel that I have no vested or otherwise real interest in.
On the plus side, I did write one of my best poems of the semester and/or year this weekend, and I've been working on another. My creative juices have been flowing recently (read: over the course of the past week or two), and as they're about all I have going for me at any given time, when they flow I dive into the stream and see what I can produce. It's always hit-or-miss, but occasionally I can write something good.
As for the poetry book planned for release on November 5th, I'm holding off on it for a while; yes, I could publish it myself and get some money out of it, but it wouldn't be much. Instead I'm going to polish the manuscript as much as possible and submit it to book contests/publishing houses -- as per the advice of our current poetry workshop professor in class last week. While I'm doing that I'll compile the second book and edit it down as well, and for a while I'll have dueling manuscripts floating about. I'm sick of all this "let's try to get published in journals and other publications" bullshit; I'm a book writer, not a single-piece writer.
If all of that fails, I'll either have a hell of a thesis already finished for when I graduate, or I'll publish the book(s) myself at that point through the outlets and options I have. More than anything else, though, I'm going to go balls-out proactive with my writing, as really it's all I have going for me and may eventually be the only thing that saves me from being in totally crippling debt for the rest of my life.
On that note, I need to go see if I can finish The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (about 80 pages or so left, but it reads fast) and take care of the weekly house trash, as it's garbage day tomorrow.
It's been a strange weekend. Though I've only left the house once -- this afternoon, to get a few groceries -- my mind has been going in all different directions, both firing and misfiring. I'm also sort of afraid that I'm getting sick, as I don't feel bad, but also can't seem to get enough sleep. The past two nights, I've slept for ten hours or more, straight, without waking up, and could've slept for another four or five. There's no way my body needs that much sleep without there being something wrong with me. I've made sure to keep up my vitamin regimen on a daily basis and have added an extra vitamin C pill to it, as well as a daily zinc pill, to stave off anything that may be coming. This is the time I usually end up getting sick during the fall, and this year it's the worst possible time for me to be getting sick -- as I'm only a little more than halfway up the proverbial mountain of work to be done.
The car's thermostat is really going wonky now, and it's dripping out a lot more coolant from the overflow valve than before (previously, it had been only dripping a little, or none at all). If it even is the thermostat, after all; who knows, really. Tuesday morning, when it's light, I'm going to put the stop-leak in it (finally) and refill the coolant tank again, as the stop-leak needs to be put in when the car's going to be driven for at least 15 minutes or so (which would be my trip down to Wichita at about 25 minutes). If that doesn't fix it or at least curb how much coolant it likes to drip, there's not really much else I can do other than keep refilling the fucking tank over and over again until I can actually get enough money to get it worked on, which isn't going to be for a long time. I just don't have the money. Period. No, I shouldn't have to worry this much about a car or about money, but I do. That's just the life I have. As I've said many times before, it sucks. A lot.
Even if it is the thermostat, the stop-leak should seal everything enough to where it shouldn't be dripping as much as it does every time I park it. Sometimes it's a few drops, sometimes it's a big puddle. My driveway is one big stain at this point. If it's not the thermostat and it's a leaky hose instead (or something similar along those lines), then all the better. It's pissing me off enough to this point where I'm really ready to climb underneath the thing with duct tape and seal up anything that doesn't look like it should.
No, I wouldn't actually do that. But the thought has crossed my mind. The damned car didn't leak a drop when I bought it. It only started this shit in August or so, and only occasionally then. It's so frustrating because words cannot express how much I need that car to just work, and just work without costing me any extra money right now, because again, it's money I just don't have. If I were to take that car to a shop, it would easily cost at least $1,000 to fix everything wrong with it. That's so, so much more money than I ever have to spare. Like, five times more money than I ever have to spare.
All I want is for the damned thing to keep running. Nothing else wrong with it is necessarily important. As I've said before, my Monte Carlo is one of the very, very few things I own outright that nothing and nobody can take away from me.
Anyway.
I've been in a half-sleep daze most of the weekend. Fatigue more than anything else, but it doesn't make any sense to me because of how much sleep I've gotten. I can drink full pots of coffee, I can be active around the house (I've been doing chores for the sake of doing them, even if they waste study time, just so that I can stay awake), and I can write here -- none of it helps. I always want to go to sleep. It's 9PM, and I'm making another pot of coffee just so that I can stay up to do more of the work I have to do over the weekend. I still have three rather important things to finish tonight and tomorrow, if possible.
I've been reading The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa for my Middle Eastern/Asian Lit class. It's like reading the translated Japanese version of Finnegan's Wake. Definitely modernist, beautifully written, and almost totally incomprehensible. In those respects, it's very akin to a James Joyce book. I pity the folks who choose to write a long paper on that novel. Good luck, there.
I'm also trying to finish Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment for my Grad Studies in Fiction class. Yes, still. The book is massive, folks. I'm over 200 pages in and barely 1/4 of the way through the version I'm reading. The only reason I'm wasting my time with it is because I need to write a short response paper on it just to get it out of the way. I'll probably end up doing that in my office on Wednesday morning, before class that afternoon. It'll take until then to actually finish the damned book, or at least get close enough to finishing it to where I can just say fuck it, I'll find out what happens in class. Like I said before, it's more than likely going to be the only book this semester that I won't actually finish and may just give up on. I have way too much other shit to do for my other classes (and in general) to read a very wordy Russian novel that I have no vested or otherwise real interest in.
On the plus side, I did write one of my best poems of the semester and/or year this weekend, and I've been working on another. My creative juices have been flowing recently (read: over the course of the past week or two), and as they're about all I have going for me at any given time, when they flow I dive into the stream and see what I can produce. It's always hit-or-miss, but occasionally I can write something good.
As for the poetry book planned for release on November 5th, I'm holding off on it for a while; yes, I could publish it myself and get some money out of it, but it wouldn't be much. Instead I'm going to polish the manuscript as much as possible and submit it to book contests/publishing houses -- as per the advice of our current poetry workshop professor in class last week. While I'm doing that I'll compile the second book and edit it down as well, and for a while I'll have dueling manuscripts floating about. I'm sick of all this "let's try to get published in journals and other publications" bullshit; I'm a book writer, not a single-piece writer.
If all of that fails, I'll either have a hell of a thesis already finished for when I graduate, or I'll publish the book(s) myself at that point through the outlets and options I have. More than anything else, though, I'm going to go balls-out proactive with my writing, as really it's all I have going for me and may eventually be the only thing that saves me from being in totally crippling debt for the rest of my life.
On that note, I need to go see if I can finish The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (about 80 pages or so left, but it reads fast) and take care of the weekly house trash, as it's garbage day tomorrow.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Cold, Death, Oil...and Poetry?
Fall semester: day forty-five
The subjects of cold, death, and oil consumed most of my week here in Kansas, though not overly so -- they were just the first things on my mind during what amounted to my two-day work week of Wednesday and Thursday after fall break ended.
Having an otherwise unexpected day off from my normal work week throws everything a bit askew, and/or makes everything else during that week feel really rushed and hectic, even if my work is of the same amount (or even lighter) than it usually is. While it's a welcome break, it is a little jarring in general. I was able to get everything I needed to do done, however, as always -- with a little extra free time and/or breathing space thrown in a bit as well. It was welcome space, I'll tell you that. For example, today I woke up at 1:30 PM. Yes, PM. My Friday so far has been a success -- I'm well-rested (almost 12 hours of sleep), and can relax and breathe just a little bit more this weekend -- with just a bit of work to do this weekend, mainly reading and a little critiquing and writing, I can finally enjoy the majority of a real weekend for the first time in a few months. And it's not like I planned it this way, either. A light weekend is an unexpected present/surprise to me.
This week the temperature dipped well below freezing for the first time here in Kansas. Those of you who know me well know that when it's really cold and I'm really sleep-deprived (as I continually am during the work week, easy week or not) also know that when it's cold and I'm really tired, I can't stay warm no matter what I do. I get chills, my teeth chatter, etc. It just happens until I get somewhere warm enough to where my body will regulate itself again, but usually when that happens my body tells me to go to sleep. Yeah, it's not fun. This is why I rely/depend on caffeine and nicotine to get me through the day -- mainly because they don't hold classes between 1 and 4AM, when I'm naturally at my most awake and productive hours. I'm pretty sure that my brain is wired wrong.
Anyway, on Wednesday morning the temperature was 30 in Newton. Below freezing, but not too bad. However, it was about 60 in the house, and I was forced to turn on the furnace for the first time this fall/winter. I let the house warm up to around 72 before I turned it back down to around 64 or so and left for the day.
My question about whether or not my Monte Carlo would like the cold weather or hate it was answered on Wednesday morning upon my drive down to Wichita. Yes, she fired up normally, and when she did, I turned on the heater. The heater works, and works well. This was a plus.
However (because there is always a however), three things happened that let me know that she doesn't necessarily love the cold weather as much as she'd let on:
1.) On my drive down 135 to school, the "Low Oil" light came on.
2.) The window, which I have to leave cracked when I'm in the car in order to be able to get back out of it, began rattling. A lot.
3.) Apparently when it's cold, the car's deteriorating thermostat goes a little wonkier than usual, and drips more coolant than usual from the overflow valve.
Of all of these, the "Low Oil" light was obviously the most troubling. That light's never come on before, and as I checked the oil about a month ago (and it won't be due for an oil change until around or shortly after Thanksgiving), this greatly concerned me. Oil is pretty important, as you know if you've, well, ever owned a car. The car's also never leaked a drop of oil (to my knowledge) since I purchased it in June, so I didn't know if it was truly low on oil for some reason, or if the sensor was just going wonky because of the cold snap.
As we were holding our poetry workshop yet again at the home of one of our friends and colleagues, I stopped him in the halls on Wednesday morning.
"Between here and your house," I asked after telling the story, "is there anywhere you know of, like an auto parts store or someplace, where I could purchase a few quarts of motor oil?"
"I don't think there's an auto place," he said. "There's a Jiffy Lube, and...oh, there's a gas station right there on the corner of 21st. They'll have motor oil; they're a gas station."
And so I made the decision right then that between school and his house, I'd stop and get a few quarts of oil. I didn't want to spend the money, but it's not like I had a choice in the matter -- the car is important, oil is important, and I wasn't about to drive the car any further than I had to without getting some oil in it as long as that light was on.
I'm not sure how much a quart of motor oil is in a normal store, but at a gas station, everything runs on convenience store pricing -- it was $13 for me to get two quarts of oil for the car. Screw it, I thought, I need it.
Of course, until I got back into the car and fired her up to continue the trip to my friend's house, oil in hand, and the "Low Oil" light had gone off. Fuck. Seriously?
I drove the car over there for workshop, told him that part of the story, and decided to wait on the oil addition. If the light went back off, perhaps it was just the sensor going nuts because of the colder weather. On the plus side, I now had two quarts of oil in case it wasn't just a weird sensor issue.
This, of course, was a short-lived fantasy. When I got back into the car at 10PM to drive home for the night, the light kicked back on a few miles into my drive. As it was dark, and therefore wouldn't be able to see what I'd be doing anyway, I had a choice -- I could either find somewhere with enough light to stop and fill the engine with oil, or I could just hope I wouldn't have any problems until I got home and do it then.
If you know I-135, between Wichita and Newton, once one leaves the city limits of Wichita (and to a smaller extent, Park City), it's dark. It's all dark; nothing but corn and wheat fields on all sides for about fifteen miles. There's a rest stop on the interstate, but it's close enough to home (eight miles out, I've checked) to where I could just wait -- so that's what I did. I drove the car back home, slower than usual and more carefully, fighting a horrific headache I'd had since around 8:30 or so, and pulled into my driveway.
When I got home I opened the garage (for the light), turned on the house's lower outside lights, and went inside to not only let the engine cool a bit but to retrieve my big oil funnel and a rag, and to take off my nice wool peacoat so that if there was any splashback, I could avoid getting it on the coat. So, at 10:45PM, in 30-degree weather with wind, I carefully added a quart of oil to the engine with the funnel. It took it all, and probably could've taken more, but I didn't want to overfill it and/or spill it everywhere to have it burn off the next morning when I would drive back to school. I put the other quart of oil, the rag, and funnel in the back seat of the car, and went back inside for the night, knowing that I'd done what I could do to help the car for the night. By this time, it was almost 11PM, and I was exhausted -- and still had to get up at 5AM on Thursday morning.
On Thursday morning, I got back into the car, said a quick nonchalant prayer to the vehicle gods, and started her up. The "Low Oil" light was off. So, apparently, it wasn't a sensor issue and it genuinely needed some oil. Whether or not it needed more than a quart is debatable -- I'll need to check it this weekend -- but the fact remains that it's received at least one quart more than it had previously.
The light never came back on again, and -- to my surprise -- the drives down to Wichita and back yesterday were two of the smoothest drives I've ever had in that car, a car that usually runs fairly rough. Apparently it needed oil more than it let on; with a new quart of oil in a now well-lubed engine, even with some bad spark plugs and a misfire, the car ran really smooth and fairly quietly (at least for my car, anyhow). This was also surprising because it was 27 in Newton yesterday morning. Hard freeze weather, and colder than Wednesday. The thermostat on the car may still be wonky, but at least I don't have oil issues anymore. At least for the moment. The extra quart, funnel, and rag still remain in the backseat of the car just in case.
"Older cars like that, even ones in good condition, will slowly start to burn off a little oil after a while between oil changes," one of my colleagues told me. "It can't really be helped much, it just happens."
"Yeah, and especially when I put 150 miles on the car every week," I replied.
Said colleague has a '98 Lumina back home, a car built on the same body/platform as my 1996 Monte Carlo, with many of the same parts/electronics/belts, etc. The Lumina has over 310,000 miles on it and is still running with no major problems. This gives me hope that the Monte Carlo will last me a while as long as I take care of it (and have the money to do so). I can't really complain about it too much; after all, it was a $500 car with 216,000 miles on it when I bought it. It has about 218,100 on it now.
It does need new tires, though -- something I won't be able to replace until I get the money to do so, which may be a way off.
The rest of the week fell under the pall of death; one of my close friends had a death in his family, so he had to leave town unexpectedly for a few days. And, of course, yesterday all everyone was talking about was the overthrow/death of Gadhafi in Libya. Even my newest poem -- written about a kid bored and daydreaming while his grandmother is doing needlepoint -- apparently sounded like a metaphor for death according to Suri, due to the imagery of rain soaking through the ceiling within the poem.
"It's depressing," she said. "It has all these overtones of death."
"It's about a boy watching his grandmother do needlepoint and getting bored, so he's daydreaming that the water stains on the ceiling are screaming faces," I said. "That's it. It's pretty straightforward."
I almost wish I'd chosen to workshop that one now. I didn't realize until after I'd written it how many interpretations there could be of the scene at hand. It figures that the poems I write without intending multiple interpretations generate them, and the ones which I want multiple interpretations of, fellow writers see as something completely straightforward. Ah, the joys of workshop.
Still, there wasn't any death intended in it.
My poetry is taking some strange turns lately; I'm still experimenting with different subject matter, different line lengths, different structures. I've never been big on form or setting limitations on myself, and most of the time actively try to avoid it, as all it does is tend to hinder my writing process. When I'm writing poetry all I'm trying to do with it is express an idea on paper. Form, meter, etc. -- those are all the last things on my mind. In workshop this week I had a hard time expressing that idea when asked about my writing style. To some extent I think I surprised my classmates (some of them anyway), and from others it seems that my mindset was met with veiled disapproval, most notably from our instructor.
One of my mantras of being a poet is that everything can be made into a poem. A sentence, a passage, a conversation, an image. Anything can be made to be poetic or at least sound poetic -- if the poet has the talent to make it so, anyhow. The ordinary can become thought-provoking or open to multiple interpretations depending on how words are arranged on a page. Those are the basics of poetry, at least to me.
Anyway.
None of us have yet received our scores for our Asian/Middle Eastern Lit midterm. It will also be another week or so before I receive a grade for either of the papers I wrote last weekend as well, as even though I got them finished early, they weren't even due until Wednesday and last night, respectively. As I mentioned before, I have a light weekend of work this time; I'll read the next novel for the aforementioned Asian/Middle Eastern class (about 200 pages or so), and I'll do my best to finish Crime and Punishment, which I was able to read the first 215 pages of on Wednesday morning in my office -- no small task, I assure you, but still surmountable. As for around-the-house stuff, I have the normal amount of dishes, laundry, and cleaning to take care of as I would during any other weekend. I'll have to go to Walmart again for a short trip on Sunday or Monday for a few things, but other than that I'll be sticking around the house and trying to relax somewhat, if not preparing for the next month's worth of classes I'll be attending as well as teaching.
The subjects of cold, death, and oil consumed most of my week here in Kansas, though not overly so -- they were just the first things on my mind during what amounted to my two-day work week of Wednesday and Thursday after fall break ended.
Having an otherwise unexpected day off from my normal work week throws everything a bit askew, and/or makes everything else during that week feel really rushed and hectic, even if my work is of the same amount (or even lighter) than it usually is. While it's a welcome break, it is a little jarring in general. I was able to get everything I needed to do done, however, as always -- with a little extra free time and/or breathing space thrown in a bit as well. It was welcome space, I'll tell you that. For example, today I woke up at 1:30 PM. Yes, PM. My Friday so far has been a success -- I'm well-rested (almost 12 hours of sleep), and can relax and breathe just a little bit more this weekend -- with just a bit of work to do this weekend, mainly reading and a little critiquing and writing, I can finally enjoy the majority of a real weekend for the first time in a few months. And it's not like I planned it this way, either. A light weekend is an unexpected present/surprise to me.
This week the temperature dipped well below freezing for the first time here in Kansas. Those of you who know me well know that when it's really cold and I'm really sleep-deprived (as I continually am during the work week, easy week or not) also know that when it's cold and I'm really tired, I can't stay warm no matter what I do. I get chills, my teeth chatter, etc. It just happens until I get somewhere warm enough to where my body will regulate itself again, but usually when that happens my body tells me to go to sleep. Yeah, it's not fun. This is why I rely/depend on caffeine and nicotine to get me through the day -- mainly because they don't hold classes between 1 and 4AM, when I'm naturally at my most awake and productive hours. I'm pretty sure that my brain is wired wrong.
Anyway, on Wednesday morning the temperature was 30 in Newton. Below freezing, but not too bad. However, it was about 60 in the house, and I was forced to turn on the furnace for the first time this fall/winter. I let the house warm up to around 72 before I turned it back down to around 64 or so and left for the day.
My question about whether or not my Monte Carlo would like the cold weather or hate it was answered on Wednesday morning upon my drive down to Wichita. Yes, she fired up normally, and when she did, I turned on the heater. The heater works, and works well. This was a plus.
However (because there is always a however), three things happened that let me know that she doesn't necessarily love the cold weather as much as she'd let on:
1.) On my drive down 135 to school, the "Low Oil" light came on.
2.) The window, which I have to leave cracked when I'm in the car in order to be able to get back out of it, began rattling. A lot.
3.) Apparently when it's cold, the car's deteriorating thermostat goes a little wonkier than usual, and drips more coolant than usual from the overflow valve.
Of all of these, the "Low Oil" light was obviously the most troubling. That light's never come on before, and as I checked the oil about a month ago (and it won't be due for an oil change until around or shortly after Thanksgiving), this greatly concerned me. Oil is pretty important, as you know if you've, well, ever owned a car. The car's also never leaked a drop of oil (to my knowledge) since I purchased it in June, so I didn't know if it was truly low on oil for some reason, or if the sensor was just going wonky because of the cold snap.
As we were holding our poetry workshop yet again at the home of one of our friends and colleagues, I stopped him in the halls on Wednesday morning.
"Between here and your house," I asked after telling the story, "is there anywhere you know of, like an auto parts store or someplace, where I could purchase a few quarts of motor oil?"
"I don't think there's an auto place," he said. "There's a Jiffy Lube, and...oh, there's a gas station right there on the corner of 21st. They'll have motor oil; they're a gas station."
And so I made the decision right then that between school and his house, I'd stop and get a few quarts of oil. I didn't want to spend the money, but it's not like I had a choice in the matter -- the car is important, oil is important, and I wasn't about to drive the car any further than I had to without getting some oil in it as long as that light was on.
I'm not sure how much a quart of motor oil is in a normal store, but at a gas station, everything runs on convenience store pricing -- it was $13 for me to get two quarts of oil for the car. Screw it, I thought, I need it.
Of course, until I got back into the car and fired her up to continue the trip to my friend's house, oil in hand, and the "Low Oil" light had gone off. Fuck. Seriously?
I drove the car over there for workshop, told him that part of the story, and decided to wait on the oil addition. If the light went back off, perhaps it was just the sensor going nuts because of the colder weather. On the plus side, I now had two quarts of oil in case it wasn't just a weird sensor issue.
This, of course, was a short-lived fantasy. When I got back into the car at 10PM to drive home for the night, the light kicked back on a few miles into my drive. As it was dark, and therefore wouldn't be able to see what I'd be doing anyway, I had a choice -- I could either find somewhere with enough light to stop and fill the engine with oil, or I could just hope I wouldn't have any problems until I got home and do it then.
If you know I-135, between Wichita and Newton, once one leaves the city limits of Wichita (and to a smaller extent, Park City), it's dark. It's all dark; nothing but corn and wheat fields on all sides for about fifteen miles. There's a rest stop on the interstate, but it's close enough to home (eight miles out, I've checked) to where I could just wait -- so that's what I did. I drove the car back home, slower than usual and more carefully, fighting a horrific headache I'd had since around 8:30 or so, and pulled into my driveway.
When I got home I opened the garage (for the light), turned on the house's lower outside lights, and went inside to not only let the engine cool a bit but to retrieve my big oil funnel and a rag, and to take off my nice wool peacoat so that if there was any splashback, I could avoid getting it on the coat. So, at 10:45PM, in 30-degree weather with wind, I carefully added a quart of oil to the engine with the funnel. It took it all, and probably could've taken more, but I didn't want to overfill it and/or spill it everywhere to have it burn off the next morning when I would drive back to school. I put the other quart of oil, the rag, and funnel in the back seat of the car, and went back inside for the night, knowing that I'd done what I could do to help the car for the night. By this time, it was almost 11PM, and I was exhausted -- and still had to get up at 5AM on Thursday morning.
On Thursday morning, I got back into the car, said a quick nonchalant prayer to the vehicle gods, and started her up. The "Low Oil" light was off. So, apparently, it wasn't a sensor issue and it genuinely needed some oil. Whether or not it needed more than a quart is debatable -- I'll need to check it this weekend -- but the fact remains that it's received at least one quart more than it had previously.
The light never came back on again, and -- to my surprise -- the drives down to Wichita and back yesterday were two of the smoothest drives I've ever had in that car, a car that usually runs fairly rough. Apparently it needed oil more than it let on; with a new quart of oil in a now well-lubed engine, even with some bad spark plugs and a misfire, the car ran really smooth and fairly quietly (at least for my car, anyhow). This was also surprising because it was 27 in Newton yesterday morning. Hard freeze weather, and colder than Wednesday. The thermostat on the car may still be wonky, but at least I don't have oil issues anymore. At least for the moment. The extra quart, funnel, and rag still remain in the backseat of the car just in case.
"Older cars like that, even ones in good condition, will slowly start to burn off a little oil after a while between oil changes," one of my colleagues told me. "It can't really be helped much, it just happens."
"Yeah, and especially when I put 150 miles on the car every week," I replied.
Said colleague has a '98 Lumina back home, a car built on the same body/platform as my 1996 Monte Carlo, with many of the same parts/electronics/belts, etc. The Lumina has over 310,000 miles on it and is still running with no major problems. This gives me hope that the Monte Carlo will last me a while as long as I take care of it (and have the money to do so). I can't really complain about it too much; after all, it was a $500 car with 216,000 miles on it when I bought it. It has about 218,100 on it now.
It does need new tires, though -- something I won't be able to replace until I get the money to do so, which may be a way off.
The rest of the week fell under the pall of death; one of my close friends had a death in his family, so he had to leave town unexpectedly for a few days. And, of course, yesterday all everyone was talking about was the overthrow/death of Gadhafi in Libya. Even my newest poem -- written about a kid bored and daydreaming while his grandmother is doing needlepoint -- apparently sounded like a metaphor for death according to Suri, due to the imagery of rain soaking through the ceiling within the poem.
"It's depressing," she said. "It has all these overtones of death."
"It's about a boy watching his grandmother do needlepoint and getting bored, so he's daydreaming that the water stains on the ceiling are screaming faces," I said. "That's it. It's pretty straightforward."
I almost wish I'd chosen to workshop that one now. I didn't realize until after I'd written it how many interpretations there could be of the scene at hand. It figures that the poems I write without intending multiple interpretations generate them, and the ones which I want multiple interpretations of, fellow writers see as something completely straightforward. Ah, the joys of workshop.
Still, there wasn't any death intended in it.
My poetry is taking some strange turns lately; I'm still experimenting with different subject matter, different line lengths, different structures. I've never been big on form or setting limitations on myself, and most of the time actively try to avoid it, as all it does is tend to hinder my writing process. When I'm writing poetry all I'm trying to do with it is express an idea on paper. Form, meter, etc. -- those are all the last things on my mind. In workshop this week I had a hard time expressing that idea when asked about my writing style. To some extent I think I surprised my classmates (some of them anyway), and from others it seems that my mindset was met with veiled disapproval, most notably from our instructor.
One of my mantras of being a poet is that everything can be made into a poem. A sentence, a passage, a conversation, an image. Anything can be made to be poetic or at least sound poetic -- if the poet has the talent to make it so, anyhow. The ordinary can become thought-provoking or open to multiple interpretations depending on how words are arranged on a page. Those are the basics of poetry, at least to me.
Anyway.
None of us have yet received our scores for our Asian/Middle Eastern Lit midterm. It will also be another week or so before I receive a grade for either of the papers I wrote last weekend as well, as even though I got them finished early, they weren't even due until Wednesday and last night, respectively. As I mentioned before, I have a light weekend of work this time; I'll read the next novel for the aforementioned Asian/Middle Eastern class (about 200 pages or so), and I'll do my best to finish Crime and Punishment, which I was able to read the first 215 pages of on Wednesday morning in my office -- no small task, I assure you, but still surmountable. As for around-the-house stuff, I have the normal amount of dishes, laundry, and cleaning to take care of as I would during any other weekend. I'll have to go to Walmart again for a short trip on Sunday or Monday for a few things, but other than that I'll be sticking around the house and trying to relax somewhat, if not preparing for the next month's worth of classes I'll be attending as well as teaching.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Minimal Breathing Space
Fall semester: day forty-two
Today, as you may already know, is the second (and last) day of Flat State University's "Fall Break." As you also may already know, fall break doesn't affect me too much; all it does is save me +/-5 hours of my normal Tuesday when I'd usually be on campus, and the gas/miles on the car. It's 12:45PM now as I write this, which is right around the time I'd be getting home from campus on Tuesdays anyhow. It does shorten my work week by a day, but as Wednesday and Thursday are my excruciatingly-long, dragging-ass days anyhow regardless of anything else, I'm not sure I'll notice it a whole lot in the long run. When I'm busy and working on a lot of things for school, days pass indiscriminately whether I'm physically on campus or not.
I was able to get a lot of things done over this "long weekend," of course, as you know. I finished the Madame Bovary paper, I re-read/revised my Midnight's Children paper and emailed it off to my professor (as that's how he collects them), and I wrote out every lesson plan I'll be covering with my students from now until Finals Week, in addition to plotting out the class schedule from now until then. I also critiqued my fellow poets' poems, wrote a new one of my own (not for workshop, of course; I've been up for workshop almost every week recently), and read more than the first half of The Holder of the World, a book I hope to finish tonight and over the course of the next two days or so.
What I have not done: read Crime and Punishment, the largest/longest book that we're covering in my Grad Studies in Fiction class for the next two weeks. I keep looking at the cover, and realizing just how much time it will take to read. While I do have a paper copy of it, I also have a PDF of it (public domain FTW), because I can read faster on the computer than I can in a book. Still, I've not touched it. There's something about that book, no matter how good people say it is, that just fills me with dread, that makes me think yep, that's going to be a massive time-sink, time that could better be spent getting more important things done. I don't like shirking responsibility for my classes and try to avoid it in every possible way/scenario I can, but I'm rapidly reaching that point in the semester where I'm getting really burned-out by everything I have to do. Last year, I didn't reach that point until almost a month later than now, around Thanksgiving week -- and at that point I could just power through things and hope the proverbial walls held together until after finals week was over. This semester I have the same amount of work, if not a lot more, and I'm getting burned-out now. Keep in mind this year over Thanksgiving week I also have to write at least two long papers again -- one for the aforementioned Grad Studies in Fiction class, a 12-20 page research paper with a minimum of five sources, and the second a revision/addition of the Midnight's Children paper that will take it up to around 17-20 pages from its current 10.
If that wasn't enough, I'll also more than likely be grading things, reading books (though, thankfully, much shorter ones than the first half of the semester), and finishing up my "portfolio" for poetry workshop as well -- which also contains a short reflective essay to write.
Yeah. I'm not going to sleep much from now until shortly before Christmas, I fear.
I had a conversation last night with Shanna, one of my close friends from back home, about the Monte Carlo and the cold/snow/ice. The temperature is supposed to drop below freezing here for the first time tomorrow night into Thursday -- the times I'll be driving the car the most (Wednesday night, driving it home and Thursday morning, driving it back in) this week. While it's not supposed to snow or ice on us -- highs are going to be in the 60s/low 70s for at least the foreseeable future -- the times I'll be driving the car will be cold ones, and it occurred to me that as I bought the car in June, during our 110-degrees-every-day summer, I don't know how well it will respond to cold. The coldest it's ever been while I've been driving it on a regular basis is 45 degrees or so. And I know how Kansas weather works -- we get about three weeks of fall-like temperatures and weather before winter kicks in full-force and sticks around for three to four months with its snow, ice, and -20 wind chills.
That's not really an exaggeration, by the way -- try living here for a while. It's only been in the 50s here during the day for the past several days, and the temperature in the house is now hovering around a flat 60 degrees. I've fought with myself several times not to turn on the furnace.
While the Monte Carlo seems to drive better (or at least it acts like it enjoys driving more) in cooler weather, the fact remains that I don't yet know how much or how little, as the case may be, it will enjoy the harsh Kansas winter. What I do know is that it will need new tires within the next few months or so, something that I don't have the money to currently afford (and won't until mid-January or so). I'm also glad that the former girlfriend left a bottle of Heet here at the house when she moved out, as that's something I'll more than likely need soon if it keeps getting colder and colder faster and faster. It's an old car; I have to keep pouring things into the gas tank to keep it up to speed, so to speak.
On the plus side, if it gets colder, it shouldn't be burning off as much antifreeze/coolant. The engine shouldn't get hot enough to do so. It's been pretty good about that over the past few weeks, too, which is a plus. I really just want the engine and tires to hold out until I can get it/them fixed and/or replaced. As for snow, I'm not particularly worried about it -- I've had a lot of experience driving in snow, not only with the former girlfriend's Contour but in general over the years. The Monte Carlo is bigger, heavier, and has a much wider wheelbase/tires. It's a pretty well-balanced vehicle. It's also a land boat. As for ice? Well...let's just hope the car has a good heater/defroster, as I've never yet had to use it. Ice is unpredictable. What little experience I have driving on ice has been nerve-wracking, and if we get an ice storm that freezes the doors/windows shut on the car, I'm pretty much screwed.
Because of that and the upcoming cold, today when I do my shopping at Walmart I'm looking for one of those suction-cup handles (normally used in bathtubs by old people) for the inside of my driver's side window, as to get out of the car once I'm inside, I must open the door from the outside -- the interior door handle is broken. Yeah. That's my car, folks -- a busted-ass, brokedick land boat. But I love it.
I do still have to put gas in the car today and do my shopping at Walmart, shopping I've put off for several weeks not only to save money, but because I've been so busy. It has now, however, gotten to the point where I've run out of almost everything in the house that I need on a daily basis, like the basics of food (bread, milk, butter, meat, fresh vegetables and fruit), as well as other things like cat litter and a few of my vitamins. It's not pleasant, but to stay on a budget I pretty much have to not shop until it's absolutely necessary.
On the plus side, there's a rack of boneless ribs in the freezer that I'm more than likely going to end up using to make BBQ pork sandwiches with. It's the only meat I have left in the house other than a few slices of turkey.
So, yeah, I have a little bit of breathing space right now. It's not much, as there's always something else to do (or something else I should be doing), but it's better than nothing. Having those first two papers done, as well as having taken my midterm exam I wrote about here previously, takes a huge weight off my shoulders. Now it's headlong into the rest of the semester.
Today, as you may already know, is the second (and last) day of Flat State University's "Fall Break." As you also may already know, fall break doesn't affect me too much; all it does is save me +/-5 hours of my normal Tuesday when I'd usually be on campus, and the gas/miles on the car. It's 12:45PM now as I write this, which is right around the time I'd be getting home from campus on Tuesdays anyhow. It does shorten my work week by a day, but as Wednesday and Thursday are my excruciatingly-long, dragging-ass days anyhow regardless of anything else, I'm not sure I'll notice it a whole lot in the long run. When I'm busy and working on a lot of things for school, days pass indiscriminately whether I'm physically on campus or not.
I was able to get a lot of things done over this "long weekend," of course, as you know. I finished the Madame Bovary paper, I re-read/revised my Midnight's Children paper and emailed it off to my professor (as that's how he collects them), and I wrote out every lesson plan I'll be covering with my students from now until Finals Week, in addition to plotting out the class schedule from now until then. I also critiqued my fellow poets' poems, wrote a new one of my own (not for workshop, of course; I've been up for workshop almost every week recently), and read more than the first half of The Holder of the World, a book I hope to finish tonight and over the course of the next two days or so.
What I have not done: read Crime and Punishment, the largest/longest book that we're covering in my Grad Studies in Fiction class for the next two weeks. I keep looking at the cover, and realizing just how much time it will take to read. While I do have a paper copy of it, I also have a PDF of it (public domain FTW), because I can read faster on the computer than I can in a book. Still, I've not touched it. There's something about that book, no matter how good people say it is, that just fills me with dread, that makes me think yep, that's going to be a massive time-sink, time that could better be spent getting more important things done. I don't like shirking responsibility for my classes and try to avoid it in every possible way/scenario I can, but I'm rapidly reaching that point in the semester where I'm getting really burned-out by everything I have to do. Last year, I didn't reach that point until almost a month later than now, around Thanksgiving week -- and at that point I could just power through things and hope the proverbial walls held together until after finals week was over. This semester I have the same amount of work, if not a lot more, and I'm getting burned-out now. Keep in mind this year over Thanksgiving week I also have to write at least two long papers again -- one for the aforementioned Grad Studies in Fiction class, a 12-20 page research paper with a minimum of five sources, and the second a revision/addition of the Midnight's Children paper that will take it up to around 17-20 pages from its current 10.
If that wasn't enough, I'll also more than likely be grading things, reading books (though, thankfully, much shorter ones than the first half of the semester), and finishing up my "portfolio" for poetry workshop as well -- which also contains a short reflective essay to write.
Yeah. I'm not going to sleep much from now until shortly before Christmas, I fear.
I had a conversation last night with Shanna, one of my close friends from back home, about the Monte Carlo and the cold/snow/ice. The temperature is supposed to drop below freezing here for the first time tomorrow night into Thursday -- the times I'll be driving the car the most (Wednesday night, driving it home and Thursday morning, driving it back in) this week. While it's not supposed to snow or ice on us -- highs are going to be in the 60s/low 70s for at least the foreseeable future -- the times I'll be driving the car will be cold ones, and it occurred to me that as I bought the car in June, during our 110-degrees-every-day summer, I don't know how well it will respond to cold. The coldest it's ever been while I've been driving it on a regular basis is 45 degrees or so. And I know how Kansas weather works -- we get about three weeks of fall-like temperatures and weather before winter kicks in full-force and sticks around for three to four months with its snow, ice, and -20 wind chills.
That's not really an exaggeration, by the way -- try living here for a while. It's only been in the 50s here during the day for the past several days, and the temperature in the house is now hovering around a flat 60 degrees. I've fought with myself several times not to turn on the furnace.
While the Monte Carlo seems to drive better (or at least it acts like it enjoys driving more) in cooler weather, the fact remains that I don't yet know how much or how little, as the case may be, it will enjoy the harsh Kansas winter. What I do know is that it will need new tires within the next few months or so, something that I don't have the money to currently afford (and won't until mid-January or so). I'm also glad that the former girlfriend left a bottle of Heet here at the house when she moved out, as that's something I'll more than likely need soon if it keeps getting colder and colder faster and faster. It's an old car; I have to keep pouring things into the gas tank to keep it up to speed, so to speak.
On the plus side, if it gets colder, it shouldn't be burning off as much antifreeze/coolant. The engine shouldn't get hot enough to do so. It's been pretty good about that over the past few weeks, too, which is a plus. I really just want the engine and tires to hold out until I can get it/them fixed and/or replaced. As for snow, I'm not particularly worried about it -- I've had a lot of experience driving in snow, not only with the former girlfriend's Contour but in general over the years. The Monte Carlo is bigger, heavier, and has a much wider wheelbase/tires. It's a pretty well-balanced vehicle. It's also a land boat. As for ice? Well...let's just hope the car has a good heater/defroster, as I've never yet had to use it. Ice is unpredictable. What little experience I have driving on ice has been nerve-wracking, and if we get an ice storm that freezes the doors/windows shut on the car, I'm pretty much screwed.
Because of that and the upcoming cold, today when I do my shopping at Walmart I'm looking for one of those suction-cup handles (normally used in bathtubs by old people) for the inside of my driver's side window, as to get out of the car once I'm inside, I must open the door from the outside -- the interior door handle is broken. Yeah. That's my car, folks -- a busted-ass, brokedick land boat. But I love it.
I do still have to put gas in the car today and do my shopping at Walmart, shopping I've put off for several weeks not only to save money, but because I've been so busy. It has now, however, gotten to the point where I've run out of almost everything in the house that I need on a daily basis, like the basics of food (bread, milk, butter, meat, fresh vegetables and fruit), as well as other things like cat litter and a few of my vitamins. It's not pleasant, but to stay on a budget I pretty much have to not shop until it's absolutely necessary.
On the plus side, there's a rack of boneless ribs in the freezer that I'm more than likely going to end up using to make BBQ pork sandwiches with. It's the only meat I have left in the house other than a few slices of turkey.
So, yeah, I have a little bit of breathing space right now. It's not much, as there's always something else to do (or something else I should be doing), but it's better than nothing. Having those first two papers done, as well as having taken my midterm exam I wrote about here previously, takes a huge weight off my shoulders. Now it's headlong into the rest of the semester.
Monday, October 17, 2011
Live-Blogging my Madame Bovary Paper
...because this is the only way I can remain interested in writing it and/or keep doing so.
Let me explain.
As you know, I have a 5-to-8-page analytical paper I have to write for my Grad Studies in Fiction lit course. We've read four books in there thus far -- Moll Flanders, Evelina, Persuasion, and Madame Bovary. All of them, as you can see, are "classic" novels. And, as you probably guessed through my writings here in recent weeks, I also hated all of them, and have no literary interest whatsoever in any of them. However, I was presented with a dilemma -- I must write a paper on one of them for the first of two papers in this class, both of which are worth a large number of points. Because of this, I have to pick the one I understood the most and/or hated the least. This just happened to be Madame Bovary.
Don't get me wrong; I still hate Madame Bovary. I love the writing style, but I hate the novel and I hate the same old boring, tired, Victorian-era story it tells, even if the title character kills herself near the end (spoiler alert). As you know if you read my post here when I was live-blogging the reading of it, for a book labeled "the most scandalous novel of all time," it left me quite disappointed and bored for the most part. While it may have been shocking or graphic in the 1860s after its original publication, it's certainly not in 2011.
It is a book, though, that I read in the span of one day -- from early afternoon until the nighttime hours -- and thus know the ins and outs of, however they may bore me, so it became over the course of the past week, the ideal candidate to write about. After trying to figure out a topic or angle, I looked at the syllabus again to see exactly what the paper's requirements were. He wants a paper that involves close analysis of one of the novels in some way, as long as it responds to "the class focus on narrative. Sources are not required."
So, basically, it's a formalist, or new critic's paper. Okay. I can do that. Me and the text. And it has to involve narrative in some way. Well, the novel has a very strong focus on narrative, as its omniscient narrator basically lets us into (or otherwise leaps into) the head of every character and paints the entire pictu....hey, there's a topic! Omniscient narration and how it functions!
With that settled as my topic, I drafted out a five-body paper plan. I tend to be good at this; I can't write a paper without some sort of plan or template to follow, otherwise its organization will be all over the place and the paper's overall quality will suffer. I need to know where I'm going from the start, what I'm going to do within the paper, and how I'm going to wrap everything up. This is usually the hardest part of writing a paper for any class. The plan for this paper took over an hour, and I did it while I was installing/reinstalling/upgrading my OS on my computer Saturday night.
I did not, however, start writing the paper until last night, Sunday night. Here, folks, is how the process went:
10:40PM Sunday:
Created Works Cited page for the paper, listing both the eBook version and the print version of Madame Bovary I used for the class. Found that there's no set way to cite an eBook version without a listed translator or publisher. Winged it, listed it as a web source, cited the website and provided a link.
11PM:
Added an Annotated Bibliography after the Works Cited page, even though it's not required or requested, to explain the citation problems of the PDF eBook I used for the class and will cite in the paper, in hopes that my professor will see it as "good enough."
11:40PM:
Created the paper itself, including proper layout and title: "Unsatisfactory Lives Discovered: The Revelations of Omniscient Narration in Madame Bovary." Begin writing introduction.
12AM Monday:
Almost completely change introduction from what I've written in my original paper plan. Continue writing it.
12:40AM:
Discover mind is fuzzy and it's hard to concentrate, more than likely due to the amount of work I've been doing all day. First time I debate going to bed for the night.
12:45AM:
Saying "screw it," I crack open a Mountain Dew Game Fuel and unwrap a new pack of cigarettes. It's on.
1:25AM:
I finish the introduction. It fills the full first page and bleeds two lines onto the second. Technically, I'm 20% done with the paper if I decide to write the bare minimum of five pages only.
1:31AM:
I realize that I have no discernible thesis statement and have no clue what exactly I'm going to write for one.
1:56AM:
Mountain Dew emptied, on cigarette number three, I have written three different thesis statements and scrapped them all. I have not had this much trouble starting or writing a paper in a very, very long time.
2:01AM:
I finish my thesis statement. It is somewhat vague and specific at the same time. I delete a few sections of a few lines from the intro to make said lines flow better, and tack them onto the thesis.
2:05AM:
I completely finish the intro and thesis statement after multiple small revisions. I am 1/4 of the way down page 2, but rapidly running out of steam for the night. I consider giving up for the night and going to bed a second time. Deciding against it, I begin drinking coffee and start on body section one, which discusses the character of Emma (Madame Bovary herself) and how she benefits from the omniscient narration of the novel, as well as briefly mentions her husband Charles as the novel starts in first person with his narration.
2:13AM:
I realize I left the link to the Mountain Dew Wikipedia page open (the one I linked to above) and become sidetracked by reading it for a few minutes. Everything else on the internet is so fucking interesting when there's work to be done. Debate a third time on whether or not I should just go to bed, and decide this time that I probably should.
2:14AM:
I save my work and log off the computer for bed, intending to finish when I wake up.
2:14PM:
Exactly twelve hours later (I couldn't have planned that better, actually), and after a full night of sleep, half a pot of coffee, and several cigarettes, I am cold and irritable, and open up my paper again to begin work on it -- with the intent of finishing said paper this afternoon. I'm becoming increasingly more frustrated that words aren't coming to me as easily as they do normally when I'm writing a paper. I send an email to Suri about it, as the woman remains my one and only true confidante (and I know she's having similar problems).
2:34PM:
Halfway down page 2, I'm getting into body section one pretty deeply. Words start coming a little easier. I relax a bit.
2:38PM:
It occurs to me that based on the paper I'm writing, I will more than likely have to change the title, thesis statement, and introduction around a bit more once I'm finished.
2:41PM:
Page 3 is breached, still on body section 1. Technically, I'm more than halfway done with the bare-minimum requirements for the paper, and begin to realize that it may take me the full 8 pages to make my points.
3:08PM:
Sadie meows at my door to be let in to sleep on my feet. I am three lines into page 4, and am finally wrapping up body section 1. It sounds good. Better than I expected it to sound.
3:11PM:
Sadie wants to be my lap kitty for a while. I take a break and hold her for a few minutes. She purrs hard. I read a story about someone writing an "official" sequel to Pride and Prejudice and post it to Suri's Facebook wall, as I know it will at least mildly interest her.
3:16PM:
I open my Works Cited page file again, and edit out the PDF edition of the book, as well as delete the (not required) annotated bibliography I included. The parts of the novel I'm paraphrasing/quoting/citing are coming directly from the 1965 Paul de Man translation of Madame Bovary, and though said translation is awful, it at least gives me a frame of reference and a clear way to cite things. It also simplifies the paper greatly.
3:22PM:
I wrap up body section 1 and move on to body section 2.
3:27PM:
I go back and add/edit a bit of the end of body section 1 to make it flow better into body section 2. My confidence in my writing abilities is slowly returning, and I'm beginning to see the whole picture a bit clearer and how I'm going to accomplish the writing of the rest of this paper.
3:34PM:
Sadie lays on my feet. I'm getting hungry. I take a break long enough to make a bologna sandwich and eat it -- using, in the process, the last slice of cheese I have in the house -- and I am reminded that I still have to go grocery shopping either tonight or tomorrow. Fuck. I'm cold. I look at the thermostat, and find that it is 64 degrees in the house, and 68 in my room.
3:45PM:
I begin work in earnest on body section 2.
4:05PM:
I'm lost. I'm at the bottom of page 4, about 1/3 of the way through body section 2, and I'm lost. I light a cigarette and run my hands through my hair, trying to figure out a) how I can make this paper go where I want it to go, and b) how I can do that without horribly overshooting the number of pages required and thus making more work for myself. I'm tired, worn down, and burnt-out, and realize that I've been working on this paper for almost two hours now. I stand up and stretch, pace around the room.
4:11PM:
I resume work on body section 2. I realize that this will be the longest section of the paper, but I have to get through it -- I know where body section 3 and the conclusion will go already. Getting through section 2 is the hardest part.
4:13PM:
Sadie, who left my room when I took a break to eat, is now meowing to get back in. I tell her to go away, through the door, as having her constantly meowing at me distracts me.
4:25PM:
I have once more hit my stride and am now halfway down page 5, moving at a good clip.
4:30PM:
I get to use the tongue-twister of a phrase "a moral dilemma for Emma, a dilemma..." in a sentence. It sounds awesome when read aloud over and over.
4:39PM:
Page 6 breached. Only halfway through body section 2. The paper will easily be ten pages long, I'm sure -- there's no way to avoid it.
4:58PM:
I finish the most difficult part of body section 2, and take a break. I put on a pair of pajama pants to retrieve the mail and the garbage cans from the driveway. It is cold. Very cold, and windy. The Weather Channel says it's 56 outside, but I somehow doubt it's that warm. I also see that the low temperature on Wednesday morning is supposed to drop below freezing, to 30. I hope, aloud to myself, that the Monte Carlo has a good heater and/or defroster, as I've never had to use it.
5:06PM:
I continue with the rest of body section 2.
5:14PM:
Bottom of page 6. Again moving along at a good clip.
5:25PM:
1/3 of the way down page 7, beginning to wrap up body section 2.
5:34PM:
Body section 2 finished, I realize that body section 3 will need to be a bit longer than I originally intended it to be. I am halfway down page 7, with expectations to take the paper to around page 9 before the conclusion. That's at least a page longer than the original assignment called for. I'm hoping that it means I'll get a better grade on it, especially if my professor sees it as well-written.
5:41PM:
I begin work on body section 3, the final section of the paper which will lead up to Emma's demise (again, spoiler alert) and the purpose of omniscient narration in the novel after that point.
6PM:
I have breached page 8 and am currently entering the final throes of the paper. Pun intended, as the final section of the paper is all about how the omniscient narration made Emma's death not only predictable, but inevitable -- and the different way that narration functions after her death.
6:11PM:
Halfway down page 8. Oh yeah, folks, it's sounding good. Really good.
6:26PM:
I have been writing this paper for over four hours now, almost nonstop. I am at the bottom of page 8, therefore fulfilling not only the minimum requirement of an analytical paper for the class, but reaching the maximum estimated length with ease. I probably have at least half to 3/4 of a page to go on body section 3 before the conclusion, which means the paper should top out around a flat nine pages.
6:36PM:
Finally beginning to wrap everything up and draw everything back together, halfway down page 9. Feeling victorious, like I just slayed a dragon.
6:57PM:
At the top of page 10, I begin my conclusion.
7:02PM:
Draft of conclusion finished. I basically copy it word-for-word from my original paper plan. I compare it to the introduction to make sure they don't sound too alike, and begin necessary edits.
7:03PM:
I change the title to "Discovered Lies and Intentions: The Revelations Provided By Omniscient Narration in Madame Bovary."
7:06PM:
Massive edits of the introduction begin taking place, to better the flow into the rest of the paper.
7:10PM:
Conclusion fleshed out a little more in order to make it all-encompassing.
7:17PM:
I go to pee, Pete follows me back into my room and jumps on my lap. I am currently typing this with a massive black butthole of a cat attempting to sleep against my stomach and chest as I work.
7:20PM:
Final typing and additions of the paper finished, I begin my readthrough/proofreading/editing session of it before I call myself finished, all with a purring, nuzzling cat on me.
7:42PM:
Paper is completely finished, saved, and closed. Altogether it was nearly 11 pages, and took me around nine-hours-ish total. Not bad.
Now I think I'll have a beer.
Let me explain.
As you know, I have a 5-to-8-page analytical paper I have to write for my Grad Studies in Fiction lit course. We've read four books in there thus far -- Moll Flanders, Evelina, Persuasion, and Madame Bovary. All of them, as you can see, are "classic" novels. And, as you probably guessed through my writings here in recent weeks, I also hated all of them, and have no literary interest whatsoever in any of them. However, I was presented with a dilemma -- I must write a paper on one of them for the first of two papers in this class, both of which are worth a large number of points. Because of this, I have to pick the one I understood the most and/or hated the least. This just happened to be Madame Bovary.
Don't get me wrong; I still hate Madame Bovary. I love the writing style, but I hate the novel and I hate the same old boring, tired, Victorian-era story it tells, even if the title character kills herself near the end (spoiler alert). As you know if you read my post here when I was live-blogging the reading of it, for a book labeled "the most scandalous novel of all time," it left me quite disappointed and bored for the most part. While it may have been shocking or graphic in the 1860s after its original publication, it's certainly not in 2011.
It is a book, though, that I read in the span of one day -- from early afternoon until the nighttime hours -- and thus know the ins and outs of, however they may bore me, so it became over the course of the past week, the ideal candidate to write about. After trying to figure out a topic or angle, I looked at the syllabus again to see exactly what the paper's requirements were. He wants a paper that involves close analysis of one of the novels in some way, as long as it responds to "the class focus on narrative. Sources are not required."
So, basically, it's a formalist, or new critic's paper. Okay. I can do that. Me and the text. And it has to involve narrative in some way. Well, the novel has a very strong focus on narrative, as its omniscient narrator basically lets us into (or otherwise leaps into) the head of every character and paints the entire pictu....hey, there's a topic! Omniscient narration and how it functions!
With that settled as my topic, I drafted out a five-body paper plan. I tend to be good at this; I can't write a paper without some sort of plan or template to follow, otherwise its organization will be all over the place and the paper's overall quality will suffer. I need to know where I'm going from the start, what I'm going to do within the paper, and how I'm going to wrap everything up. This is usually the hardest part of writing a paper for any class. The plan for this paper took over an hour, and I did it while I was installing/reinstalling/upgrading my OS on my computer Saturday night.
I did not, however, start writing the paper until last night, Sunday night. Here, folks, is how the process went:
10:40PM Sunday:
Created Works Cited page for the paper, listing both the eBook version and the print version of Madame Bovary I used for the class. Found that there's no set way to cite an eBook version without a listed translator or publisher. Winged it, listed it as a web source, cited the website and provided a link.
11PM:
Added an Annotated Bibliography after the Works Cited page, even though it's not required or requested, to explain the citation problems of the PDF eBook I used for the class and will cite in the paper, in hopes that my professor will see it as "good enough."
11:40PM:
Created the paper itself, including proper layout and title: "Unsatisfactory Lives Discovered: The Revelations of Omniscient Narration in Madame Bovary." Begin writing introduction.
12AM Monday:
Almost completely change introduction from what I've written in my original paper plan. Continue writing it.
12:40AM:
Discover mind is fuzzy and it's hard to concentrate, more than likely due to the amount of work I've been doing all day. First time I debate going to bed for the night.
12:45AM:
Saying "screw it," I crack open a Mountain Dew Game Fuel and unwrap a new pack of cigarettes. It's on.
1:25AM:
I finish the introduction. It fills the full first page and bleeds two lines onto the second. Technically, I'm 20% done with the paper if I decide to write the bare minimum of five pages only.
1:31AM:
I realize that I have no discernible thesis statement and have no clue what exactly I'm going to write for one.
1:56AM:
Mountain Dew emptied, on cigarette number three, I have written three different thesis statements and scrapped them all. I have not had this much trouble starting or writing a paper in a very, very long time.
2:01AM:
I finish my thesis statement. It is somewhat vague and specific at the same time. I delete a few sections of a few lines from the intro to make said lines flow better, and tack them onto the thesis.
2:05AM:
I completely finish the intro and thesis statement after multiple small revisions. I am 1/4 of the way down page 2, but rapidly running out of steam for the night. I consider giving up for the night and going to bed a second time. Deciding against it, I begin drinking coffee and start on body section one, which discusses the character of Emma (Madame Bovary herself) and how she benefits from the omniscient narration of the novel, as well as briefly mentions her husband Charles as the novel starts in first person with his narration.
2:13AM:
I realize I left the link to the Mountain Dew Wikipedia page open (the one I linked to above) and become sidetracked by reading it for a few minutes. Everything else on the internet is so fucking interesting when there's work to be done. Debate a third time on whether or not I should just go to bed, and decide this time that I probably should.
2:14AM:
I save my work and log off the computer for bed, intending to finish when I wake up.
2:14PM:
Exactly twelve hours later (I couldn't have planned that better, actually), and after a full night of sleep, half a pot of coffee, and several cigarettes, I am cold and irritable, and open up my paper again to begin work on it -- with the intent of finishing said paper this afternoon. I'm becoming increasingly more frustrated that words aren't coming to me as easily as they do normally when I'm writing a paper. I send an email to Suri about it, as the woman remains my one and only true confidante (and I know she's having similar problems).
2:34PM:
Halfway down page 2, I'm getting into body section one pretty deeply. Words start coming a little easier. I relax a bit.
2:38PM:
It occurs to me that based on the paper I'm writing, I will more than likely have to change the title, thesis statement, and introduction around a bit more once I'm finished.
2:41PM:
Page 3 is breached, still on body section 1. Technically, I'm more than halfway done with the bare-minimum requirements for the paper, and begin to realize that it may take me the full 8 pages to make my points.
3:08PM:
Sadie meows at my door to be let in to sleep on my feet. I am three lines into page 4, and am finally wrapping up body section 1. It sounds good. Better than I expected it to sound.
3:11PM:
Sadie wants to be my lap kitty for a while. I take a break and hold her for a few minutes. She purrs hard. I read a story about someone writing an "official" sequel to Pride and Prejudice and post it to Suri's Facebook wall, as I know it will at least mildly interest her.
3:16PM:
I open my Works Cited page file again, and edit out the PDF edition of the book, as well as delete the (not required) annotated bibliography I included. The parts of the novel I'm paraphrasing/quoting/citing are coming directly from the 1965 Paul de Man translation of Madame Bovary, and though said translation is awful, it at least gives me a frame of reference and a clear way to cite things. It also simplifies the paper greatly.
3:22PM:
I wrap up body section 1 and move on to body section 2.
3:27PM:
I go back and add/edit a bit of the end of body section 1 to make it flow better into body section 2. My confidence in my writing abilities is slowly returning, and I'm beginning to see the whole picture a bit clearer and how I'm going to accomplish the writing of the rest of this paper.
3:34PM:
Sadie lays on my feet. I'm getting hungry. I take a break long enough to make a bologna sandwich and eat it -- using, in the process, the last slice of cheese I have in the house -- and I am reminded that I still have to go grocery shopping either tonight or tomorrow. Fuck. I'm cold. I look at the thermostat, and find that it is 64 degrees in the house, and 68 in my room.
3:45PM:
I begin work in earnest on body section 2.
4:05PM:
I'm lost. I'm at the bottom of page 4, about 1/3 of the way through body section 2, and I'm lost. I light a cigarette and run my hands through my hair, trying to figure out a) how I can make this paper go where I want it to go, and b) how I can do that without horribly overshooting the number of pages required and thus making more work for myself. I'm tired, worn down, and burnt-out, and realize that I've been working on this paper for almost two hours now. I stand up and stretch, pace around the room.
4:11PM:
I resume work on body section 2. I realize that this will be the longest section of the paper, but I have to get through it -- I know where body section 3 and the conclusion will go already. Getting through section 2 is the hardest part.
4:13PM:
Sadie, who left my room when I took a break to eat, is now meowing to get back in. I tell her to go away, through the door, as having her constantly meowing at me distracts me.
4:25PM:
I have once more hit my stride and am now halfway down page 5, moving at a good clip.
4:30PM:
I get to use the tongue-twister of a phrase "a moral dilemma for Emma, a dilemma..." in a sentence. It sounds awesome when read aloud over and over.
4:39PM:
Page 6 breached. Only halfway through body section 2. The paper will easily be ten pages long, I'm sure -- there's no way to avoid it.
4:58PM:
I finish the most difficult part of body section 2, and take a break. I put on a pair of pajama pants to retrieve the mail and the garbage cans from the driveway. It is cold. Very cold, and windy. The Weather Channel says it's 56 outside, but I somehow doubt it's that warm. I also see that the low temperature on Wednesday morning is supposed to drop below freezing, to 30. I hope, aloud to myself, that the Monte Carlo has a good heater and/or defroster, as I've never had to use it.
5:06PM:
I continue with the rest of body section 2.
5:14PM:
Bottom of page 6. Again moving along at a good clip.
5:25PM:
1/3 of the way down page 7, beginning to wrap up body section 2.
5:34PM:
Body section 2 finished, I realize that body section 3 will need to be a bit longer than I originally intended it to be. I am halfway down page 7, with expectations to take the paper to around page 9 before the conclusion. That's at least a page longer than the original assignment called for. I'm hoping that it means I'll get a better grade on it, especially if my professor sees it as well-written.
5:41PM:
I begin work on body section 3, the final section of the paper which will lead up to Emma's demise (again, spoiler alert) and the purpose of omniscient narration in the novel after that point.
6PM:
I have breached page 8 and am currently entering the final throes of the paper. Pun intended, as the final section of the paper is all about how the omniscient narration made Emma's death not only predictable, but inevitable -- and the different way that narration functions after her death.
6:11PM:
Halfway down page 8. Oh yeah, folks, it's sounding good. Really good.
6:26PM:
I have been writing this paper for over four hours now, almost nonstop. I am at the bottom of page 8, therefore fulfilling not only the minimum requirement of an analytical paper for the class, but reaching the maximum estimated length with ease. I probably have at least half to 3/4 of a page to go on body section 3 before the conclusion, which means the paper should top out around a flat nine pages.
6:36PM:
Finally beginning to wrap everything up and draw everything back together, halfway down page 9. Feeling victorious, like I just slayed a dragon.
6:57PM:
At the top of page 10, I begin my conclusion.
7:02PM:
Draft of conclusion finished. I basically copy it word-for-word from my original paper plan. I compare it to the introduction to make sure they don't sound too alike, and begin necessary edits.
7:03PM:
I change the title to "Discovered Lies and Intentions: The Revelations Provided By Omniscient Narration in Madame Bovary."
7:06PM:
Massive edits of the introduction begin taking place, to better the flow into the rest of the paper.
7:10PM:
Conclusion fleshed out a little more in order to make it all-encompassing.
7:17PM:
I go to pee, Pete follows me back into my room and jumps on my lap. I am currently typing this with a massive black butthole of a cat attempting to sleep against my stomach and chest as I work.
7:20PM:
Final typing and additions of the paper finished, I begin my readthrough/proofreading/editing session of it before I call myself finished, all with a purring, nuzzling cat on me.
7:42PM:
Paper is completely finished, saved, and closed. Altogether it was nearly 11 pages, and took me around nine-hours-ish total. Not bad.
Now I think I'll have a beer.
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