Bad blogger

My cold is gone, but I am inexplicably weary--yet I do feel that I should post something, if only so as not to grade/prep/think about conference papers. So I'll ramble about here for a minute and then go take out my contacts, or something.

Today launches us into Week 5. Spring break is in less than a month. And, although my conference papers have yet to manifest (where the hell are they?), it's been a productive 4+ weeks. I shall regale you with a list of my accomplishments:

• assisted (albeit somewhat minimally) in the revamping of our comp sequence, which, as I mentioned, passed at the last faculty meeting;
• entirely rewrote Field's academic dishonesty statement. My version has passed my peeps in the Humanities, but won't come up before faculty until next month, and I anticipate contention. Why this should be a controversial issue is beyond me. All I'm trying to do (with the endorsement of the dean) is to articulate the guidelines that we're supposed to follow when we catch plagiarism and suggest--not require!--that strong measures (i.e. failing) be taken. I'm already anticipating the opposition. Sigh;
• finished the Incomprehensible Chart of Alien Timesuckage;
• met with all (7) juniors in the Honors program to discuss theses and substantially helped a thesis advisee with her latest chapter;
• taught a bunch of stuff--some new, some old, mostly new;
• practiced yoga nearly every day (accursed cold!); and
  
• written not a damn thing that wasn't a) in my diary b) online c) work-related.

Other than the last point, I'd say I'm doing all right.

That last point, though--oy. I am feeling radically unmotivated when it comes to my work, and I keep putting it off. The current plan is to read ahead all week so that I can take the weekend to outline the Kalamazoo paper and revisit the texts it's on. I am stupid, though, in that I proposed a paper on two really fucking long books [medievalists: think of 2 of the longest canonical texts out there, other than the Divine Comedy--one's in French, one's in English--I'll leave you to sort it out and gloat over my stupidity], neither of which I've actually read in a long time. I can rip the framework for the paper out of my dissertation, but I won't feel intellectually honest unless I look back over said long books. Damn me and my intellectual honesty! Why can't I just slap some rambles together and get on with my life? I'm sure I wouldn't be the first.

One Good, One Bad

The Good:

I've started the project with my comp classes. Introduced it, anyway. To set the thing up, I had them poke around on No Impact [Fellow]'s blog, and next week we'll be reading selections from Judith Levine's Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping. I'm not sure that this all quite qualifies as "good" yet, seeing as it's far too soon for any results, but I was greatly heartened by an email from a student this morning. Granted, she's a very bright and lefty sort of student, but nonetheless it cheered me. She was emailing me her assignment re. NI[F] because she was sick, and she wrote--to paraphrase--that she is so interested in his experiment that she couldn't stop reading his blog and has convinced her roommate to do an experiment next year to see how much a pair of students living in a dorm can reduce their negative environmental impact. Since the merest glimmer of evidence of an activist sensibility in my students delights me, this pretty much made my day.


The Bad:

I have a Committee Assignment, which is not, in itself, particularly onerous. However, this is the year in which the English department's relationship to this area must be Assessed--or start to be Assessed, for this is a three-year process--and it must be Assessed in accordance with State Standards. (For some reason euphemism sends me into eighteenth-century habits of capitalization.) So my job, this semester, is to work out which of our courses address which of approximately 8 billion indecipherable criteria.

On Wednesday night, when I, exhausted, was shouting furiously and shaking my wineglass at my computer screen, an apt description of this project occurred to me. I was inspired--I saw it perfectly: It's as though a patently crazy person, perhaps one with severe paranoid delusions, had contrived an elaborate and patently crazy scheme, and I was being forced to carry it out. Yes. This is exactly what it's like.

Fortunately, my little breakdown and shouting fit seemed to have shaken something loose, for later that evening I was able to approach the document with a sanguine calm hitherto unknown to the process. Perhaps I will actually get it done.

{The picture strikes me as doubly appropriate: Even as I scheme to impose my elitist liberal values upon my students, so does the madman of the State compel me to carry out his preposterous directives.}