I hate paying for car repairs

The post title says it all. Apparently, my car has blown its catalytic converter,which must now be replaced at, ahem, significant expense. It's always sobering to be presented with a bill whose cost outstrips my bimonthly paycheck. No help for it, though: the longer I let this go, the worse it will get. (I, uh, might have exacerbated the problem by dawdling in scheduling the maintenance work.  Oops.). 

So now I'm basically trapped at the mall all day today, while the dealership works on my car. This dealer is out in suburban hell, and there's not much here beyond the mall. I'm going a little stir-crazy already, but I'm trying to keep my mind focused on work as a distraction from my boredom and impending wallet-suck. 

At least I'll get paid again at the end of the month. Sigh. 

Barkeep!

The grading is finished! No more papers, no more tests, no grade-grubbers being pests!  TO THE BAR!!!

Making a difference

It's been a heavy day of work over here around CBU.  Since there's something of a rush to get the finals and grading done in order to graduate the seniors on schedule, the administration came up with this cockamamie schedule that only underscores how few fucks they actually give about teaching students to do good work in which the students had one reading day after the end of classes, followed by a day of exams, followed by one more day of reading period, followed by three more days of exams.  For yours truly, this meant that mere hours after my last class, I felt obligated to hold office hours for students preparing for the exam that I had to administer on a motherfucking Saturday morning.  This also meant that I felt obligated to hold office hours today, before I had even finished grading the aforementioned final exam, since my other two classes are writing final papers for me due later in the week.  It's not often that my Saturday turns into a twelve-hour workday, and it's even less often that I wish it were so.

Today, like I said, was also heavy.  Besides finishing the grading of that exam, I saw students working on their final papers.  As it happens, the only students who showed up today were all in the class for which I assigned a final paper with multiple drafts: they had to write the paper, get comments on it, and revise it accordingly for a final draft.  The sessions were a mix of good and bad, although I will honestly claim a bit of optimistic high ground and state that things ended reliably on good notes.  First, the bad:

• One student failed the first draft of the final paper.  It was a total disaster, which zi admitted was due to a catastrophic lack of foresight and planning. 
• Another student earned a D on that same draft, due to a similar set of fuck-ups.  
• One of these students extended hir twenty-minute appointment with me to an hour – as you're about to read, I thought it necessary – whilst detailing not only hir confusion about how to proceed with various technical aspects of the paper, but also whilst explaining to me that this last month has been sort of a disaster for hir after experiencing what I can only describe as an especially violent sexual assault.  (And yes, if you're asking, I understand exactly what that description implies.)  That would certainly explain why one of my most talkative students in class suddenly went almost silent at that time.  Tragically, this fits in all too well with what I know of the campus culture.  Zi has been dealing with some awful shit that I simply never had to worry about when I was a college student.

And now (not a moment too soon!), the good.

• Every student left my office with a clearer idea of how to approach the revised draft of the final, if only vaguely.  (After all, I'm not a damn miracle worker.)
• Both students with the very low grades on the first draft left my office confident that they could write a much better second draft.
• In fact, both of them explicitly stated to me that they were "excited" to write the revised draft.  Excited!!  I cannot help but feel cheered to know that my students are actually looking forward to writing their papers.  In both of those particular cases, I had coached them through a way of looking at the class material that resonated with their personal experiences, and that made them realize one thing or another about their own ontology and how they fit into their web of social relations.  I cannot fully describe the warm fuzzy of hearing and seeing a student visibly excited to go back to the dorm to revise a term paper to account for the breakthroughs they've had in their thinking.

Perhaps you'll understand now why, half in celebration and half in self-medication, I just finished an enormous Manhattan that I mixed after I finished grading the final exam and uploading the grades for Intro to Libel and Slander.  (Last time I have to teach that course for a while!)

I'm going to go enjoy the buzz from the combination of rye whiskey, beautiful vermouth, and a dash of bitters.  And also the feeling that I may have actually made some kind of positive difference in someone's intellectual life.

Wringing out the new: on writing theory

I have a bunch of papers to grade and several lessons to plan, and I haven't looked at any of them yet.  I spent most of the daylight hours yesterday crafting a revised draft of that article that my blog mendaciously tells you is finished.  (I want to put a new meter up for it, but I can't figure out how to track my progress in editing down an article, rather than adding words to an initial draft.)  I sent it out when I started to bleed from the brain, and then set all my work aside to go play with my friends for a little while. 

It amazes me that I can be so physically tired out from writing.  I haven't even showered or dressed yet today, and I need to go to the grocery store.  That's the kind of exhaustion I feel.  And yeah, it probably doesn't help that this fucking semester is not yet over, and that just about all of my colleagues are worn down in general.  It should tell you something about my physical and emotional state of mind that I feel the need to go make another pot of chicken soup, even though my allergies have largely receded. 

Writing is hard; no two ways about it.  Writing is even harder when you're trying to push yourself to innovate a theoretical concept.  You and your editor are trying to wring out of your brain something that no one has ever said before, which means that you literally do not know what you're trying to say.  I still find it an odd sensation, and I've been doing this for years. 

I had a moment of "what the hell am I doing here?" yesterday whilst trying to tie up the draft: I was scanning the same three pages of my article over and over, frantically tearing through the pseudology texts I was supposed to incorporate, and a quiet panic began to rise in me.  I have already read these books, I started thinking to myself repeatedly.  I cannot cite them in any other way because I already have elsewhere, and I have already read them, and I already know what is in them, because I have already read them...  You know how it goes.

But then I got hold of myself and reminded myself of the issue at hand: I was developing a new theoretical idea whose contours I only dimly perceive as yet, and this idea meant that I had to go back to the books and speed-read them in a white-hot fury re-read them for a different sort of content than I'd had in mind before now.  The panic didn't exactly recede, but it stabilized at a manageable level.  I didn't entirely feel like a professional, since I was essentially skimming for handy quotations to support my argument – I can remember doing this back in college! – but it yielded usable material that will suffice for the moment, and that can be developed further as I keep up with the project.

There's a bizarre exhilaration to the whole process.  I often feel like I'm right on the edge of discovering that I no longer have anything worthwhile to say, that I'm tapped out.  And even when I don't feel quite that desperate, I frequently have the sensation that I have something worthwhile to say, but I cannot fucking figure out what that might be.  And when I hit upon what it might be, I am humbled by the realization that I barely understand the implications of my own idea.  It'll be back to the books pretty soon, to wring some new insight out of my own mysteriously ordered brain.

Burning midnight oil

Monday was the first day in about a week that I have felt measurably better than crap.  Naturally, I'm risking that precarious degree of recuperation by staying up late to edit my article draft, rather than get extra sleep.  Oh, fuck it, who am I kidding?  I'll get extra sleep anyway, because I'm totally going to blow off my yoga class for the fourth time in a row.  I rationalize this with the observation that there's little point in going to a yoga class when I'm physically unable to breathe through my nose for most of the morning.  So it is that I'm still at the computer at this hour, pounding water, herbal tea, and chicken soup (spiked with dill and cayenne, naturally) to stave off the late-evening discomfort of the stupid cold.

I wanted to have this second draft out the door already, but a week of illness threw off my schedule.  Now I feel the need to hustle, since the whole point of revising the draft was to get a colleague's critique on it in time to incorporate hir suggestions into the final draft I have to submit by the end of May.  I already prepared the quiz for my first class on Wednesday, and I'll be showing a film to the other class that day, so I felt comfortable taking the evening to focus on MY OWN GODDAMN WORK.  Yeah, I said it.

These revisions are kind of a bear, since the essential critique I've gotten so far is to advance the theoretical argument.  It feels much like the diss-writing process, when I'd push my theoretical arguments far enough that my brain felt like a pretzel, only to hear from my committee that I was just laying the foundation and needed to go way further with my arguments.  On the plus side, I'm excited by the direction I'm going in, and I can see dimly ahead some cool intersections with the work of some colleagues I've been dying to cite.  This article is, truth be known, the first really meaningful advance in my analytical thinking since my dissertation.  (The cool stuff that got me the book contract is much more about tangible data than the analysis thereof.)  It's quite satisfying to see a new and unanticipated theoretical intervention taking shape in my work.  That emotional high from crafting something shiny and new is primarily what has given me the energy to focus on my writing after a full day at work replete with irritated sinus membranes and an inexplicable lack of orange juice available for purchase at the café on campus.

But now it is late, and I can feel my brain shutting down for the evening.  I added a good 500 words to the draft, and I think I've figured out a way to answer a thorny potential critique of my analysis, so I'm content to call it a night.  Off to waterboard myself with the Neti Pot, and then to bed.

RBOC: Still freaking teaching edition

• Some of my students have begun coming to class barefoot.  I'm accustomed to seeing people take off their shoes during class for comfort's sake, but these people aren't even bringing shoes with them.  We're still getting early-morning temperatures in the upper 30s here in Cornstate.  Why are people doing this?  Is this a thing now?
• I'll give the barefoot people this much, though: they at least look better than all of those guys who walk around wearing this.
  
  (Photo credit: Ryan Dunn)
  I cannot see this combination without thinking of poverty.  This looks like an outfit scrounged from the free bin at the Salvation Army.  Awful.
• In my cold/allergy-induced haze*, I completed flubbed my grading calculations for the test I just gave, and included only 80 points of regular credit instead of 100.  (I meant to make the last question worth double the others, and I just fucking forgot to do it.)  There were some hard questions in there that I anticipated would bedevil a lot of students, so I was relatively generous with the extra credit section.  Now at least half of the little buggers have test scores breaking 100, which will only encourage them to screw around more instead of buckling down and studying for the final.  I FUCKING HATE BEING SICK.
• Speaking of which, I went to my allergist yesterday, and on their recommendation, I picked up a Neti Pot.  So far, I'm not sure this isn't some practical joke at my expense.  All I'm doing is drowning myself in salty, phlegmy water*** while feeling certain that someone is watching me and laughing as they say, "I can't believe that asshole fell for it!"
• A pseudology colleague of mine at another school just walked away from a good tenure-track job.  Zi is now in training for a completely different line of work.  Part of me is impressed that zi knows hirself well enough to recognize that academia is not for hir, and is willing to change course so drastically.  Another part of me is sad that I may not get to see many publications from hir, since zi is brilliant and was, by all accounts, an up-and-coming star.  Another part of me is just annoyed that the person who walks away from a job we're all killing ourselves to get is the one who has already been so blessed professionally.  And a small and very petty part of me is relieved that at least one colleague genuinely better than I am is permanently off the job market.  I'm not proud of this feeling, but it's the truth.
• My Saturday afternoon has been devoted to a load of laundry, a Neti-drowning episode, and about six hours of grading.  I think I'm going to postpone my next dose of decongestant and head to the bar for a beer.  Sigh.

*I can't figure out if this is a cold as I first thought, or a serious allergy attack.  I'm starting to suspect the latter, since a huge build-up of mucus throughout my poor head is really the only symptom**.  Well, that and exhaustion and fuzzy thinking as a result of all the oxygen I'm not getting and the feeling of congestion from blocked sinuses.  
**I know, you really wanted to know that, right?
***See above.

Stuffed-up nose, wounded pride

I have a cold that I caught through some combination of the ever-present miasma of contagions that thrive on college campuses, and the miserable, dragged-out, never-going-to-fucking-end winter that we're having.  (Spring appears to have been a false alarm.)  I have no strength to deal with anything, and I have to go to campus soon because I have multiple student meetings scheduled, to say nothing of my evening class.  I literally no longer care what my students earn for their final GPAs.  Give 'em all As. 
Or Fs. 
Or Cs. 
Or Qs. 
Fuck. This. Shit.

I'm also nursing some sprained pride: it looks like my upper-division topics seminar course scheduled for the fall will be canceled, since exactly one student has registered for it to date.  (SLACs love their small classes, but there's still a minimum enrollment that we have to hit.)  If this happens, the seminar will be replaced in my roster by a second section of the Intro to Pseudology course.  In fact, from an utterly selfish standpoint, that would be a great outcome for me.  I'll be hitting the job market full-time in August, and it would be a relief to have only two preps to teach — and an even bigger relief that the most difficult syllabus to plan and execute would be off my plate.  I suppose I should be pleased at this possibility. 

But it feels like burning down the house for the insurance money; shouldn't I want to teach new courses, stretch myself, and demonstrate my professional versatility?  I also wonder if this doesn't reflect poorly on me as a teacher (and, by extension, my department) that I can't seem to get the measly minimum enrollment.  My intellect tells me that this is not about my poor skills, but about my status as a little-known quantity at CBU: the students are mostly risk-averse, and aren't highly inclined to take a new upper-division course with a professor most of them don't know.  But still, my emotions are stung.  Come on, people.