The subject line refers to the feeling that I have about this semester's advanced seminar. Truly. Rockin'.
I have 5 students (maybe 6, but I'm actually suspecting that the sixth has absconded). I know them all from previous classes, and have a good rapport with four of them; the fifth had some troubles in my class last semester but has been working hard and seems on board now. So that's a good start. One of my absolute favorite things about Field College is these seminars where I already know nearly every single student; it makes such a difference and we tend to have a lot of fun in class. I'm lucky that I get to teach one of those pretty much every semester.
And I am so excited about the topic--so excited that I might sabotage the course, because I keep thinking up new assignments and cool stuff that we could do, and I'm afraid of overloading them. The topic is related to book history but from a literary perspective; today we spent most of the hour looking at various book-like documents and talking about whether we thought they were books or not, and why. (The answers were complex; there was much disagreement.) I have them performing an experiment wherein they need to observe and document how they read one book--in detail--and how the physical form of the book affects their reading. We're going to read a bit of really tough theory, and an Onion article, and some cool pomo novels. And Chaucer. Of course, Chaucer!
And we have a course blog. (See what I mean about overloading?) It will be awesome. I hope.*
Anyway, I'm pretty thrilled about this class, and we didn't even get through half of what I had planned for today. Less prep for Tuesday--I love being behind!
*If you know me and would like to take a look, email me and I'll send you the link. Sorry to be a little exclusive about this; I'm leery of sending it out to people I don't know, partly because it will reveal my Mysterious Identity, but mainly because my students are on there, too (or will be soon).
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Unplumbed
Conditions:
1. My office is in a pretty neat historic building.
2. Said building, being historic, has no elevator.
3. Nor has it any plumbing.
4. My office is on the third floor.
5. My body carries its anxiety in the digestive system.
6. Although I did not feel nervous this morning, the first day of classes apparently made me anxious.
Result:
No fewer than three dashes from my office, down two flights of stairs, across a green, and into the nearest plumbed building in the seventy minutes before today's first class.
(More than you needed to know, I know. But the mere fact that I'm sharing it with y'all indicates the extremity to which I was pushed this morning.)
1. My office is in a pretty neat historic building.
2. Said building, being historic, has no elevator.
3. Nor has it any plumbing.
4. My office is on the third floor.
5. My body carries its anxiety in the digestive system.
6. Although I did not feel nervous this morning, the first day of classes apparently made me anxious.
Result:
No fewer than three dashes from my office, down two flights of stairs, across a green, and into the nearest plumbed building in the seventy minutes before today's first class.
(More than you needed to know, I know. But the mere fact that I'm sharing it with y'all indicates the extremity to which I was pushed this morning.)
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
The Semi-Annual Time of the New Leaf
Here we go again, here we go again. Classes start tomorrow.
I'm a little shocked by the extent to which this has failed to sink in--as in, I'm not really prepped for my classes, although the syllabi etc. are printed. (And there's a huge giant error on the 36 comp syllabi: I left in a note to myself and forgot to change a due date, so it no longer makes sense. I shall manually correct these tomorrow. I do not want to ask my students to cross out the note to myself.) But, you know, I'm not too worried. Two years ago I was terrified. Last year I was resigned. This year: Hey! I'm teaching a cool new seminar! Comp sort of maybe makes some sense, and I've already written a lot of the prompts! I've done Brit Lit I twice now, and know it pretty well! No worries!
We also have a new dean who seems pretty awesome so far. I think that that will make a difference in the feel of the year. Our (two-day, mandatory) retreat had a much more optimistic feel to it than last year's; I think that even the skeptics, including many of my dear friends, are convinced that things are looking up. There are a lot of cool new ideas bouncing around; I'm having colleagues do guest lecture-type things in all of my classes; the Honors program that I run might get to do some really exciting new stuff. It looks good.
But the real point is that, again, I have pledged to have a sane year. I've changed my blog sub-heading for the first time since I picked this thing up (and this is post no. 400, by the way): Instead of "do thi werk," a quote from The Cloud of Unknowing that sounds rather resigned (although it's not, really, in the original), I am now committed to Living Well with a 4-4 Load. Damn straight, y'all. I'm gonna own that 4-4.
However: I'm not entirely sure what that involves just yet. Eating well. Exercise. Not completing most of my work in a frenzied chaos of panic. Staying on top of things. Taking time off. And finishing that accursed article.
It's going to be a busy year: on top of the usual, I'm giving a major lecture on campus in mid-October and will soon have the book proofs to deal with. (I am blocking the word "indexing" from my mind until the time actually comes to do it.) The aforementioned exciting new ideas will take a good bit of work if they're to get off the ground, too. But, well. I like my work. Maybe if I can just do my work calmly, the rest will follow.
So, it's a new leaf.
I have a memory of making little boats out of leaves when I was a child, and casting them off into the overfull gutter outside my grandparents' house after a storm. The water glinted in the light and swept down the street swiftly and smooth, like a shining ribbon.
Maybe I'm mixing metaphors for no reason, but off we go: the new leaf is about to set sail.
I'm a little shocked by the extent to which this has failed to sink in--as in, I'm not really prepped for my classes, although the syllabi etc. are printed. (And there's a huge giant error on the 36 comp syllabi: I left in a note to myself and forgot to change a due date, so it no longer makes sense. I shall manually correct these tomorrow. I do not want to ask my students to cross out the note to myself.) But, you know, I'm not too worried. Two years ago I was terrified. Last year I was resigned. This year: Hey! I'm teaching a cool new seminar! Comp sort of maybe makes some sense, and I've already written a lot of the prompts! I've done Brit Lit I twice now, and know it pretty well! No worries!
We also have a new dean who seems pretty awesome so far. I think that that will make a difference in the feel of the year. Our (two-day, mandatory) retreat had a much more optimistic feel to it than last year's; I think that even the skeptics, including many of my dear friends, are convinced that things are looking up. There are a lot of cool new ideas bouncing around; I'm having colleagues do guest lecture-type things in all of my classes; the Honors program that I run might get to do some really exciting new stuff. It looks good.
But the real point is that, again, I have pledged to have a sane year. I've changed my blog sub-heading for the first time since I picked this thing up (and this is post no. 400, by the way): Instead of "do thi werk," a quote from The Cloud of Unknowing that sounds rather resigned (although it's not, really, in the original), I am now committed to Living Well with a 4-4 Load. Damn straight, y'all. I'm gonna own that 4-4.
However: I'm not entirely sure what that involves just yet. Eating well. Exercise. Not completing most of my work in a frenzied chaos of panic. Staying on top of things. Taking time off. And finishing that accursed article.
It's going to be a busy year: on top of the usual, I'm giving a major lecture on campus in mid-October and will soon have the book proofs to deal with. (I am blocking the word "indexing" from my mind until the time actually comes to do it.) The aforementioned exciting new ideas will take a good bit of work if they're to get off the ground, too. But, well. I like my work. Maybe if I can just do my work calmly, the rest will follow.
So, it's a new leaf.
I have a memory of making little boats out of leaves when I was a child, and casting them off into the overfull gutter outside my grandparents' house after a storm. The water glinted in the light and swept down the street swiftly and smooth, like a shining ribbon.
Maybe I'm mixing metaphors for no reason, but off we go: the new leaf is about to set sail.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Well, so, the wedding
--was lovely. Truly. Just what we'd hoped for. After a week of anxiety and tension headaches and a variety of things that almost went wrong the day of, including:
The ceremony itself was lovely. I enjoyed it even more than I'd expected; I think that I'd imagined feeling embarrassed and a little uncomfortable, up there in the front of the church, but instead I was just happy. Our friend--who is also an Episcopal priest (but mostly a professor) (this is what you get when you marry a minister, by the way)--performed the wedding itself and did a magnificent job, despite its being her first wedding. It was very hot in the church--no air conditioning--and I could feel the sweat running down my arms and legs; woe betide the men in suits, for I was this warm in only a light cotton dress! But despite the heat, I felt wonderful: strong and confident and beautiful, not at all how I thought that I would feel, as goofily self-conscious as I usually am. Maybe having my sister-in-law and her sister gush over how BEAUtiful! GORgeous! I was for an hour before the ceremony had a salutary effect. TM had tears in his eyes. It was, all told, even more moving and joyous than I had anticipated.
(I was also very pleased with my last-minute bouquet decision: I had bought some gerbera daisies and a few regular, white daisies at the grocery store that morning, and my stepmother wrapped them together with a bit of raffia and purple ribbon. The bright simple colors of the gerberas against my white dress (cotton, as I've said--it was a sundress from J. Crew) looked really nice. I'd also picked out a yellow daisy for TM's boutonniere and wore (fake) yellow and white flowers on a barrette in my hair. In the few pictures that I've seen so far, it was visually all very clean and cheerful.)
The reception was in my mother's backyard, and we (along with my family, who were enormously helpful) worked all week to get it ready. My brother was the sound and lighting guy; he actually gave us, as a wedding gift, this gorgeous stereo, which he made himself:
He taught himself electronics, a fact that continues to astound me.
The yard itself was very cute, with lots of flowers, white helium balloons, odd sculptural things (my mom's an artist), and prayer flags:
(before)
(during)
We'd had a big pizza dinner the night before, which most of our guests had attended; this took a little of the talk-to-everyone pressure off of the reception itself. Still, my one (inevitable!) regret was that I didn't get a chance to spend as much time with ANYone as I would have liked. Oh well! Now my desires for various trips to visit friends and family is only renewed.
Enough dilly-dallying for the morning: Classes start Wednesday. Am I ready? No! So I will leave you with one picture that will disappear in short order (but it's one of my favorites, so far--we've only seen the pictures that my parents took):
*poof*
- major water-line construction right in front of the church;
- the discovery that, when you enter the church's address into a GPS, it takes you to a town fifteen minutes away; and
- the next-door neighbor's announcement that he had an excavator coming to level his backyard exactly during the time that our backyard reception was going to take place.
The ceremony itself was lovely. I enjoyed it even more than I'd expected; I think that I'd imagined feeling embarrassed and a little uncomfortable, up there in the front of the church, but instead I was just happy. Our friend--who is also an Episcopal priest (but mostly a professor) (this is what you get when you marry a minister, by the way)--performed the wedding itself and did a magnificent job, despite its being her first wedding. It was very hot in the church--no air conditioning--and I could feel the sweat running down my arms and legs; woe betide the men in suits, for I was this warm in only a light cotton dress! But despite the heat, I felt wonderful: strong and confident and beautiful, not at all how I thought that I would feel, as goofily self-conscious as I usually am. Maybe having my sister-in-law and her sister gush over how BEAUtiful! GORgeous! I was for an hour before the ceremony had a salutary effect. TM had tears in his eyes. It was, all told, even more moving and joyous than I had anticipated.
(I was also very pleased with my last-minute bouquet decision: I had bought some gerbera daisies and a few regular, white daisies at the grocery store that morning, and my stepmother wrapped them together with a bit of raffia and purple ribbon. The bright simple colors of the gerberas against my white dress (cotton, as I've said--it was a sundress from J. Crew) looked really nice. I'd also picked out a yellow daisy for TM's boutonniere and wore (fake) yellow and white flowers on a barrette in my hair. In the few pictures that I've seen so far, it was visually all very clean and cheerful.)
The reception was in my mother's backyard, and we (along with my family, who were enormously helpful) worked all week to get it ready. My brother was the sound and lighting guy; he actually gave us, as a wedding gift, this gorgeous stereo, which he made himself:
He taught himself electronics, a fact that continues to astound me.
The yard itself was very cute, with lots of flowers, white helium balloons, odd sculptural things (my mom's an artist), and prayer flags:
(before)
(during)We'd had a big pizza dinner the night before, which most of our guests had attended; this took a little of the talk-to-everyone pressure off of the reception itself. Still, my one (inevitable!) regret was that I didn't get a chance to spend as much time with ANYone as I would have liked. Oh well! Now my desires for various trips to visit friends and family is only renewed.
Enough dilly-dallying for the morning: Classes start Wednesday. Am I ready? No! So I will leave you with one picture that will disappear in short order (but it's one of my favorites, so far--we've only seen the pictures that my parents took):
*poof*
Friday, August 21, 2009
Monday, August 10, 2009
...
Off to get wedded. See y'all on the flipside.
(Tuesday-ish, that is. Just one day before the faculty retreat! Do I know how to do honeymoons, or what?)
(Of course, I may need a therapeutic blog-sesh sometime before the "Big Day" (how I hate that phrase), so this is not set in stone.)
(Tuesday-ish, that is. Just one day before the faculty retreat! Do I know how to do honeymoons, or what?)
(Of course, I may need a therapeutic blog-sesh sometime before the "Big Day" (how I hate that phrase), so this is not set in stone.)
Saturday, August 8, 2009
The Therapeutic Effects of a Blogging Community
Thank you, everyone, for your comments on the last post or two. I am heeding your advice and entirely ignoring the very semi-existence of that accursed article.
And hey! It's quite pleasant. I'm doing the housework and wedding prep that needs to be done, and the rest of the time, I'm doing...whatever I want.
What a funny sort of life this is.
And hey! It's quite pleasant. I'm doing the housework and wedding prep that needs to be done, and the rest of the time, I'm doing...whatever I want.
What a funny sort of life this is.
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