Some weekends are just like that, I guess

Really, not productive. So not. At all.

I've read for Survey this week, which means that I've technically finished my class reading for the semester. I do have some optional/recommended stuff to get through (i.e. finishing a novel of which I've only assigned a part, in case the students read all the way to the end, as I know some already have--not a problem, really, since I love this novel), but that's it. And after this week, the teaching itself is minimal: We're watching "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" for my Arthurian seminar next week; there will be exam review and exam in Survey; and "wrapping up" and/or conferences in Comp. So yeah, it's just about done.

Grading, clearly, Is Not Happening this weekend. Feh.

But I have this accursed Presentation. It's for a weekend event at the college, so it's not for students or faculty, and it's on sustainability--a subject in which I am interested enough to agree to do the talk, but on which I am not at all an expert. I'm not sure why my name was suggested to the organizer, but whatever. So I have to give a 45-minute talk, and I'm putting together My First Powerpoint, and I can't wait for this sucker to be behind me. I currently have a fairly long and irritating outline (I don't know why it's so irritating to me, but it is); a couple of books are stacked up on my desk waiting to be incorporated--honestly, I am probably close to finished with this thing, but I am actively avoiding it.

Part of the problem, I think, is that it feels intellectually dishonest, somehow. I'm not putting much work into learning about the subject--I have a general knowledge and I've read some books, so I'm not totally faking it, but neither am I being particularly scholarly. Yesterday I flipped through a book I've read before just looking for interesting facts to drop in. Yeah, I know--it's like the worst undergrad research paper techniques all arising from me at once. I do a Google search and don't even go beyond the first page of results. That kind of thing. Yech. I feel icky.

So, yeah, it'll be adequate, but weak. It's not supposed to be High Scholarly, or anything; this is not an academic audience. (And to be honest I have yet to see anything that is High Scholarly at Field. We do not have specialized lectures hereabouts. Sometimes this makes me sad. And when I actually do some scholarly work of my own--real work, not this lackadaisical halfassery--I realize that I miss using my brain in that particular way, and wonder how long it'll be before I've lost my research chops altogether.)

This post wasn't supposed to turn maudlin or self-pitying. Mostly I wanted to say that I've been a lazy so-and-so for two days, and this week'll consequently be a little stressful, but since it's the last really stressful week for a while (I'm deliberately blinding myself to the busy-ness of the grading-+-Kzoo-preparation period), I'm finding it difficult to alarm myself into activity.

With 8 teaching days left to go

It's a warm and rainy day; the birds sound tropical. If the trees were actually green, it would feel like proper spring--but there is green on the grass and in the bushes, and that's a start.

Instead of grading, or working on my preposterous non-relevant presentation or my conference paper, or even reading for class, I would like to scratch the belly of a slow loris. The Minister thinks that she looks like Studs Terkel:

Such cuteness being out of reach, however, I shall pull up an easy chair by the open front door, wrap myself more securely in my bathrobe, and start reading.

So *that's* why so few girls are willing to stand under me.

Ten facts about Heu Mihi.

1. On average, women blink nearly twice as much as heu mihi.
2. Heu mihi can drink over 25 gallons of water at a time.
3. During World War II, Americans tried to train heu mihi to drop bombs.
4. Heu mihi is the smallest of Jupiter's many moons.
5. Heu mihi will always turn right when leaving a cave.
6. By tradition, a girl standing under heu mihi cannot refuse to be kissed by anyone who claims the privilege.
7. The pharoahs of ancient Egypt wore garments made with thin threads of beaten heu mihi.
8. It is bad luck to light three cigarettes with the same heu mihi.
9. Heu mihi has often been found swimming miles from shore in the Indian Ocean.
10. If the Sun were the size of a beach ball then Jupiter would be the size of a golf ball and heu mihi would be as small as a pea.

Perhaps the best meme ever. I found it chez squadratomagico; you may generate one for yourself right here.

And now, I'm off to the Indian Ocean, where I go to avoid the ancient Egyptian weavers.

Brave New Blogworld

Yesterday I was in a coffee shop in Nominally Ordinary City, about 30 minutes East of here. There was a guy sitting at the table in front of me--blond, early 20s-ish, sort of a lite hippie vibe--working on a computer. His back was to me, so I could see his screen; he was working on a paper of some kind. Grad student, most likely (there was a big university nearby).

Then he switches over to the web and I glance up and see that he's on Blogger, editing a post. Hm, I think. I can't make out most of the text on the screen but I manage to get the last two words of his blog title. A little googling--the two words + "blogger"--leads me to a site that has to be his: same number of words in the title, tiny picture of a blond hippie-lite guy in the profile. And so there I am, reading the poem and little reflective essay that this perfect stranger has just posted to his blog.

The poem seems fine--"edgy," you might say--and the reflections smart, engaging a critical dialogue with which I'm not really familiar. (Grad student, I'm pretty sure, now.) I follow a link to the essay he's responding to, but lose interest before I actually read it. Back to work for me.

Was I being invasive? I mean, maybe, although I don't know this guy or anything about him really, and the blog is public and all. Riding subways in various cities I have sometimes imagined that I was a spy, trying to memorize names and phone numbers on slips of papers sticking out of backpacks and brief cases, figuring out as much as I could about the people around me before my stop. We let a lot show, a lot of the time. It is not at all inconceivable that someone in a coffeeshop somewhere has seen me writing and looked up my blog, reveling a little in her secret knowledge of me before clicking away, and getting back to work.

Back in the saddle

Long weekend here--one of the perks of a Christian college, or at any rate this particular Christian college, is getting Good Friday and Easter Monday off. (Is Easter Monday a holiday? I doubt it. I think it's more like traveling-home-from-Easter-dinner Monday. Hey, it's a day off. I do not understand those people--faculty!--who kvetch about odd holidays, like Homecoming. People, I ask. Do you not want to sleep in??) I have a lot to do, and today, Friday, I feel up for it.

(This is my thing--I'm always at my most motivated on the first day or two of a break, because I can imagine how wonderful it will be to get a whole lot done early on and to spend the rest of the weekend reflecting comfortably on how productive I am. Last night I had a dream about going to Chicago with a high school friend and coming back really late on Saturday night; at one point I realized that we wouldn't get home until like 4 am on Sunday, and I have dinner plans for Sunday evening, and so I had lost nearly the whole long weekend! It was almost over! Only a day and a half left, and I hadn't done my grading! It was a dreadful dream.)

First off--well, not really first, but like third off--are the conference paper and upcoming presentation. These must be worked on this weekend,* although, knowing me, I must first do some other, miscellaneous things and thus get a good jump on the to-do list. Luckily, Sisyphus has come through with a helpful challenge. What she's calling The Magical Month of Academic Publishing Challenge 2009, I for my purposes will call The Magical Miscellaneous Writing Project Period of Time 2009, as what I need to write is a long way from publication efforts. Huzzah! Despite the name change, I'll follow Sis's rules: From April 10-May 10 (or actually May...7, because that's the day I leave for Kalamazoo, I think), I will write for 15+ minutes a day. And given that I've done approximately 2 hours of scholarly work this semester, that will be a big improvement.

Other items on the docket, because who doesn't love someone else's to-do list?:

• grade intros for comp
• finish seminar reading for the semester (two weeks' worth of stuff--but it's a totally enjoyable book, so this is no punishment)
• read brand new stuff I've never read before for survey
• read chapter on arguments of fact (??) for comp
• do some prep, blah blah blah
• evaluate recent seminar presentations and email evaluations to students
• make yogurt and granola, as usual
• grocery shop
• make a side dish for Sunday dinner at friends' house (obviously not today)
  
• buy socks and other oddments
• go to a yoga class--maybe even two!
• vacuum the damn house
• pull dead leaves off of plants
• don't I need to write a prompt, or something?
• catch up on email.
  

That's actually not too bad. Am I forgetting anything? Maybe I will have time to work on those papers....

*Note passive voice: Who will be doing the working? I just don't know!

Now is the time on Sprockets when we PHONE IT IN.

Week 12, mes anges.* Thanks to the upcoming four-day Easter weekend, I have only fourteen more teaching days. Only fourteen--and yet fourteen seems so long, when all the resources have been so thoroughly depleted by what is effectively 7.5 months of five-day-a-week teaching (there was a month off for winter break, yes, but when one considers the whirlwind of anxiety that was/is winter break--a week spent grading; then traveling for the holidays, and anxious fuming over interview notes whilst the family drinks eggnog (and yes, a few restful days in there, I admit); then the cross-country swing for the stressfest of MLA, leaving a week to prep three new courses--well, the end of the spring semester is decidedly more exhausted than the fall).

So what does this mean? Well, for one, it means that I'm stupid. Really. Can't hold a thought. Before class today I had two lovely revelations that I intended to impart in our 75-minute discussion. Easily, I thought, could I draw out the conversation; this was such a rich film, there was so much, my goodness, I'm a smarty. And then what happens? Within five minutes, people, all my brilliance has been scooped by a student--a student who normally sits so quietly, good lord, I didn't know she had it in her. Five minutes! So I'm thinking, fuck, 70 to go, and here I am with one page of notes for God-knows-what-reason (I normally shoot for six, based on a calculation made in like my first week of teaching ever, four years ago. Unexamined assumptions, I heart thee). Managed to get through the class by belaboring issues and asking lots of obscure, needlessly complicated questions that required extensive explanation on my part. Hurrah.

Comp this week: peer workshops yesterday, conferences tomorrow. (Fifteen of them (with a few more on Thursday); God help me.) No class Friday or Monday (Easter weekend!). With permission, stole in an in-class exercise from a colleague for next Wednesday. Can we spend two days the following week doing presentations of research projects? Why not? Why not make it three days, after all? Comp: Done.

Survey? Well, I've fallen back on notes from last year, which I don't much like doing (they're not fresh and just seem so....lame), but So It Goes. After fifteen conferences, I am not going to feel like coming up with a whole new slate of topics over lunch. And prepping tonight = unlikely.

Oh, and then Thursday! Back to the seminar, where I for some reason budgeted two days to talk about the movie that we more or less exhausted in five minutes. After mucking wearily about on the internet in search of some short text or film clip or something (I say to my students at the end of class, "On Thursday, we'll do something else!", and, when pressed, act like it's just a big mystery--little do they know (I hope) that a mystery it is, and to me), I decide that we can talk about the final paper--for I was asked about that today, and goodness, I haven't given it a thought. Some brainstorming, in-class writings, group discussion, blah blah blah. It's all pedagogically sound and more useful than Random Reading No. 5, but I do feel like a cheat when I use strategies like that--especially when I'm so conscious of having lost all track of what the hell I'm doing when I get up in front of a room.

Yeah. I am way tired. Sixteen weeks is a long ass semester. And I've got my dear mother, who is being incredibly helpful with wedding stuff, sending me six panicked emails a day about how we absolutely cannot serve food for under $35 a person, and do I have a musician scheduled yet? And don't get me started on Kalamazoo paper (I just noticed that the draft I'd started in no way conforms to the session topic) or the presentation on a topic that has no bearing on anything I've ever worked on that I agreed to give on Alumni Weekend. Sigh. Or, as I should say, soupire.

*I'm using French because today I successfully arranged for a room for a week in Normandy, over the phone. Victoire!

I kill them with kindness, or, my apology to the rest of the feminists

I just met with a student who's been semi-blowing off my survey this semester. I'd found out that ze's a major and will be enrolling in my upper-level seminar in the fall, so I decided that it was necessary to give hir the ol' beat down. For me, however, the "beat down" consists of lots of gentle reminders that ze can come to me if ze is having problems, that I'd much prefer to work with hir than to simply hand out zeros, that ze clearly has some great things to contribute (which ze does, more or less) and that I would love to hear from hir more.

I was so gentle--which was not my original intention, but I knew immediately that it was how this thing was going to play out. And even then, the tears welled up--several times!--and so I would start asking about what other classes ze was taking, and so forth. When really, I was within my rights to be harsh and stern. What's wrong with me? Or does this work? I hope that it works. I really do. And it seems to have worked, sometimes, in the past: the student realizes that I see hir, that I'm aware, that ze hasn't been working hard enough, and usually improves. Or doesn't, in which case ze's lost my attention.

But then, I'm worried about that damn nurturing stereotype (and I'm not a maternal-looking person, but I'm so exceedingly nice), and it makes me want to apologize to the rest of y'all.

Late for a faculty meeting that promises to be full of rage. Catch you on the flipside.