grading: side effects may include...

OK, I realize I'm basically the only person in the blogosphere who is STILL grading. And it won't even end today when I finish this stack of papers: I give a final exam this afternoon so I'll have that fun to look forward to tomorrow. But exams don't require comments, so it's a much faster process.

And of course I procrastinated on reading the papers, blah, blah, blah, so I'm up against a deadline for returning them. Same old story, familiar to me and my three readers. But this term I experienced a new side effect: last night from 4 a.m. to 6, after waking up to let the Old Girl out, I dreamed that I was grading papers. Not new ones -- the same papers I'd read yesterday afternoon. I regraded them all in my dream. I was actually reading text and thinking about grades. Not at all restful.

kilter

Kilter: Good condition, order; state of health or spirits. Used in the phrases out of kelter, in (good, high) kelter, to get into kelter. [OED] [U.S. form kilter]
But when you look more closely at the examples listed with the definition, the latest example of kelter being used in its positive sense was 1828 -- most of them are 17th century. In recent centuries, and especially in U.S. usage, the negative phrase of something being "out of kilter" or "off kilter" is far more prevalent.

It's often easier to talk about things being out of balance than it is to focus on the things that are in order. It's easier to see what's disordered, to focus on the problems, than to see what's actually working. It's perversely easier to complain than to talk about what's already good.

I've been literally off balance for a few weeks as an ankle injury heals. It's always the same ankle, the one weakened years ago by a bad injury that didn't heal properly, the one pre-disposed by genetics and physical anomalies towards injury. Thankfully I wasn't born into a time and place in which my only function was to sit still and look delicate, since the rest of me doesn't exactly fit the latter requirement, but my ankle would be perfectly happy just flirting under a fan sipping tea and knitting lace. My ankle is a bit of lady - -grafted on top of a leg that's built like most of my ancestors, for peasant work out in the fields. It's only an uneasy truce these warring class factions have been able to negotiate, and the ligaments who police
the ankle treaty are at fault for being too lenient, too flexible.

I'm never a very good patient, for all my attempts to cultivate patience in the rest of my life (my deliberate choice of the slow lane on the freeway, my deep breathing in the grocery store): I hate to be sick or injured and too easily fall into all or nothing doomsday foretellings: if I have a cold, I become convinced that I'll NEVER be able to breathe through my nose AGAIN. If my ankle sprains, I imagine never being able to walk, dance, jump freely. Of course, this is a good reminder to be grateful for what I mostly still do have. This week, as I'm able to return to half of my normal level of activity (with ice and a brace and all the rest) I'm better able to contemplate my good fortune. How good it is that it was only an ankle sprain that has been making me feel so sad, so slothful, so trapped. Something relatively temporary, no matter how long three weeks can feel to my ego, to my fragile brain chemistry, to my waistline.

I'm moving back into kilter. Slowly, slowly, but ever so gladly.

done! or at least semi-done!

I'm done with teaching for the spring term, and I am so happy! This weekend is a nice little happy transition type weekend -- final papers don't roll in until Monday, and then we have this tremendously long exam period -- with my final exams unfortunately not scheduled until the last day, which would be the 10th. So I have two weeks of grading and meetings and graduation hoopla coming up, but I do not have to think about my students at all for the next three days. And that is very nice.

This weekend I plan to do some massive house cleaning -- we have an out of town visitor coming the middle of next week, and my conference trips this month meant that I was just doing basic sweeping and surfaces. So a lot of cleaning, which is not my favorite thing, but it's also kind of therapeutic and part of my transition into summer. Also some sorting and returning of library books, sorting some files, getting things ready for my summer work plan.

I'm really looking forward to the summer - - I've done enough writing and conference presentations this semester that I'm already primed for digging into my research. This is probably why I've been so indifferent to my students this term-- they weren't particularly bad or irritating, and my teaching was OK I think -- but it wasn't where my focus was, and I'm glad to be wrapping it up. My administrative responsibilities lessen during the summer months as well, and that will be a real relief. I'm ready to not have to see my colleagues for a while.

So, cleaning, some moviegoing, some cooking and relaxing. An excellent weekend ahead, to be followed soon enough by two months of relative freedom! No wonder I woke up feeling so happy today!

First Snow

The most interesting moments in First Snow are fleeting ones -- the glint in J.K. Simmons's eye, and the expressions on William Fichtner's face as his character falls into the little brother wannabe role with Guy Pearce's overladen badass character. At its best it's a movie about men's relationships with other men: Pearce tells Fichtner "I love you" twice and his old buddy Shea Whigham kisses him just before blowing his own brain to bits. Despite a steamy bathtub scene with Piper Perabo, it's Pearce's male friends that have the most power over his life. But the movie drags, and by the time Pearce has his paranoid breakdown holed up in a motel room, I just didn't care very much about his existential problems upon hearing from a fortune teller that his days were numbered. The noirish feel was neither fresh nor self-aware -- just a collage of predictable ingredients: highway, liquor bottles, desert, etc etc.

I was interested in seeing this movie, though, because I think it's part of a larger Zeitgeist, a trend I've been noting in recent films that are concerned with epistemological or philosophical "what ifs" -- what if you could foresee the future (Next, Premonition), or what if the future is
just a repeat of the past (Deja Vu, the short-lived TV show Day Break). I think this rash of quasi-fantastical, quasi-realistic stories can be seen as cultural responses to the war in Iraq and the epistemological crises that even the most mainstream newspapers have been recognizing: what if we/they had known then what is known now; what if we could foresee the outcome of our current actions; what if the future is only a doomed repetition of the past.

preparedness

Last night at the keynote speech for the conference I'm currently attending, I was sitting behind a guy whose pen started to leak ink all over his hand. I was so impressed with his calm reaction as he put down the leaking pen, reached into his book bag, and pulled out a moist towlette packet and cleaned his fingers. Then he got another pen and continued taking notes.

Talk about being prepared. Moist towlettes are one of those things I sometimes think it would be nice to have in my bag, or in my car. Occasionally I've purchased some, like before a long road trip. Usually I use a couple, and the rest sit in the glove box for months, until they are so dried out even inside their sealed packaging that when I get grunge all over my hand from airing up my tires, the towlette is useless. Or, I stick a towlette packet in my book bag's zippered pocket and it slowly gets frayed and dusty, until again, by the time I actually need it, it's no good. (The same thing happens with cough drops, except that they have a tendency to go soft and gooey and stick to things-- again a situation in which one would like a towlette, if it weren't caught up in the dust ball of cough drop ooze.)

Basically, I've resigned myself to being somewhat less prepared than I sometimes think I should be. Although it would sometimes be nice to have easy access to a needle and thread, scotch tape, stapler, hole punch, scissors, pliers, flashlight, shoelaces, and of course moist towlettes -- I do not, in fact, carry those items around with me on a regular basis. Some of them can be found in my desk at home or work, and some in my car. But I rarely have all of them at hand at the same time -- or at such a time when they would actually come in handy. If I have my bookbag, I do have nail clippers, ibuprofen, kleenex and probably a paper clip or two, which you can do a lot with. I've also resigned myself to the fact that I don't completely empty all the pockets in my bookbag on a regular basis so as to clean out the no-longer useful or fresh things. My inner safety officer personality is disappointed, but I just can't make that sort of thing a priority.

This prepared guy did have an awfully large bookbag/briefcase with him -- as I sat there I started really wondering what else he had in there, just in case any of the other academic emergencies occurred: paper cut, loose eyeglass screw, coughing fit, malfunctioning projector...

what I got out of last week

• A new model of generational differences in my dept. Forget theoretical modes, or graduate mentors. Here's the distinction that really matters. When searching in the online registration system for information about next year's courses (like time, day, room number) there are those faculty members who see a link around their section number and know (or try) to click on it to get the screenful of detailed info. And then there are those who prefer to send off five emails to two secretaries, one faculty administrator (me!), the chair, and an assistant dean. (And then, of course, there are those who don't even use computers, but we've whittled that list down to just a mere handful and are waiting for retirements to thin their ranks).
• A theory about contemporary film and cultural anxieties about the war in Iraq, based entirely on the previews I've seen for recent movies. I think it holds up but I haven't actually watched any of the texts I'd use as evidence. (But considering that I once had dinner with an Eminent Critic who confessed to only having read the epigraphs to Moby Dick -- a novel he teaches regularly -- I don't feel so bad.)
• New respect from my students because I calmed a yelping student by scooping up a spider in my hands and taking it outside. Who knew it would be so easy to make them applaud?
  

post conference recovery

Well, despite my grumbling last week, our little regional conference was a tremendous success -- all the invited guests were charming and smart, the panels came together well, and everyone had a good time.

It's odd that I enjoy conferences (large or small) as much as I do, given that I'm fairly anti-social and not an academic superstar or anything. But being around people who work on things I'm interested in is very energizing. My day to day experience doesn't really include that kind of intellectual engagement and camaraderie. I had the chance to talk with people whose work I really admire and get some good feedback on my own projects.

The only downside to the weekend was that I. am. so. tired. I mean, really tired. So tired that one of my old crusty colleagues even said something to me today in a meeting about my not looking very chipper. (Why do people think that's an appropriate or nice thing to say?) And for someone like him to notice, I must really have looked like the walking dead.

So I gave up on getting to yoga tonight and came home early to do my reading while lying down. Hopefully I can get some extra sleep tonight. I've got to get my post-conference recovery plan fine tuned, though, because I've got two more conferences coming up this spring. It's a crazy season, but it might actually help me feel more grounded intellectually --even if it means I'm slacking off a bit on my teaching prep.

how did I get here?

So it goes something like this. Someone has an idea, maybe even a good idea, for bringing in a guest speaker. They talk to someone else about finding some funding. The funding has some conditions attached, a particular constituency who needs to be addressed, maybe a particular approach as well. So then one guest speaker turns into two. Then someone talks to someone from another department and finds another source of funding. And now we have a symposium. And then some other people get involved, at least nominally, and it becomes a regional thing, with multiple sessions.

This is all good -- exciting even. But it means that while I'm trying to write my own paper, I'm also dealing with airport shuttles and paper napkins and all of the very non-intellectual details involved in hosting such an event. Next time someone has a good idea, I'm just going to say "yeah, that sounds good" and leave it at that.

dream analysis

Last night I had a dream that I was walking in a large park in my city. And then a wild animal (which happened to be the same one that is my university's mascot) approached. Because it was huge and dangerous, I stood very still hoping that it would pass by. Instead it peed on me.

Now, we have been lately watching the Discovery Channel's impressive new Planet Earth series, which includes dramatic film of all sorts of wildlife. But I have to think that my subconscious might be trying to tell me something?

sweetness

Like people, individual dogs each have their own particular scent, even when they're clean. Our youngest, aka Speedy, actually has two: when her hair gets wet, from rain or from a bath, it gives off an odd, acrid smell that always reminds me of the old-fashioned beauty parlor my mom used to go to and to which I would be dragged along as a child -- full of horrendous chemicals used to pouf up the gray hair of its longtime customers. But when Speedy is dry, she has a lovely faint sweet smell. Best of all is when she's been sitting in the sun for a while -- the dark hair on her head soaking in the sunshine -- she smells a bit like toasted almonds, maybe a hint of banana, with a little dandelion blossom mixed in. It's the smell of sunshine, of relaxation, of the total present-ness that dogs help us share in.

Today I was able to work at home all day, eschewing the office politics for a day of reading and writing (and, yes, some emailing). Best of all, and what I really need to remember so I can get more days like this one: the many breaks I was able to take to play with the dogs in the yard, to sit and eat a snack with them, to snuggle with them on the couch while I prepped for class. And to bend over and kiss the top of Speedy's head and smell that sweetness that always makes me feel calm and happy.

judgment

One of my administrative duties this year involves sitting on the committee that reviews the annual faculty reports submitted by each member of my department. Service on this committee rotates through the department to prevent one clique from having all the power, and of course the Chair can override the decisions of the committee, since he's the one who actually assigns all the merit rankings. Our current Dean doesn't set firm quotas for these rankings, although there is a tacit understanding that there shouldn't be too many people in the top category, and not too many in the lowest. In fact, since an extremely low score triggers a college-level review process, it's pretty unlikely that anyone would receive it -- so a five-point ranking scale becomes a de facto four-point scale. It's not unlike the grades given out for graduate courses, in which a B really means you're substandard, and A, A- and B+ are the only actual grades one can assign.

But unlike course grades, which are usually determined (however subjectively) by a person who is thought to have more knowledge, education, or credentials than the people who are being evaluated, these scores are determined by peers. It's more democratic than if the Chair alone judged us, but there's something inherently repellent about the process too. There are of course pre-existing affinities and disagreements among the faculty, cliques and feuds, and those often color the judgements that are made. There are some set criteria for how many publications are expected, how much certain kinds of publications should be weighted, and so forth. But things like teaching load and service load are much more nebulous, and can be used either for or against a particular individual.

I think the process is as democratic and as fair as it could possibly be -- and perhaps it is the very collegiality of my department which makes service on this committee an onerous task that few people want to undertake. The meetings in which we decide the scores for our colleagues are incredibly draining. Not because making judgments is necessarily that difficult. But because doing this, commiting to numbers on paper, reminds us that we are always judging each other and being judged. This committee takes its work seriously, and what happens in those meetings is confidential. But gossip and snarky remarks are an unfortunate part of academic life. Who hasn't heard, said, or thought something dismissive about a colleague?

I'm as guilty as the next guy. I really try not to gossip about colleagues (except maybe to my GF who's not an academic). But I don't always cut someone else off from saying things to me, which is the next worst thing. I've certainly thought critical thoughts about some of my colleagues. Plus, I hate feeling that I'm being judged. I know that I could always do more, do better -- I'm a pretty strong critic of myself. I hardly need to feel that people down the hallway are whispering about what I did or did not publish last year.

Buddhist psychology reminds me that the person or thing who irritates me is the person or thing who can best teach me a lesson. So I have many questions to think about as I sit in these meetings. How might we learn to accept one another a little more? How can I learn to be tolerant of those who are intolerant of others? What kinds of judgments are helpful and which are harmful? How might I best judge my own efforts -- through the year and in this judging committee?

teaching eve

Well, among the many wonderful things I did do over spring break, prepping my teaching for this week wasn't one of them. I like my students this term, but my focus really isn't with them. I'm worried that I might even have forgotten some of their names over the past 9 days. I got a few emails from students during the break, asking questions about their next assignment -- each time it was sort of a surprise to me, like "oh, yeah, that other big part of my job." I decided several months ago (even before January) that this semester would really have to be a research-focused semester, as much as I can manage that during the year. And I think I've been more successful at that than ever before. But it's still a weirdly disconnected feeling. And it hasn't helped smooth out my usual night-before prepping mode. No matter how many days ahead I start preparing a class, I still usually do most of the work the night before, or the morning of, depending on the class time.

So I have to skim/reread half of a moderately long novel before tomorrow's class. And transcribe my handwritten reading notes from two years ago into readable typed notes. (I haven't yet figured out a smooth system for typing while actually reading from books.) And figure out class plans for this week. It's all doable. And I like the book I'm teaching. But I'm just not feeling very high energy about the task. I have post-vacation malaise.

What I actually did over my spring break (the reality edition):

• saw three movies in the theater
  
• watched some tv shows on DVD
• redid my study so that it should be more pleasant to work in there now
• cleaned embarrassing amounts of dog hair out of every nook and cranny of the house
• 97 thousand loads of laundry
  
• spent lots of time with GF
  
• bought some new spring clothes
  
• slept a lot
• finished an article
  
• kinda sorta started a conference paper
  

Not quite as impressive as the fantasy version, but mighty nice anyhow. It was a really great spring break, quite possibly the best I've ever had. Now I just have to get through the next 8 weeks until summer . . .

time

I suppose it's because I'm on spring break this week, but I've been having a hard time adjusting to this year's early time change. I spent my childhood in one of the states that doesn't do time changing, so the whole concept of it has always seemed kind of alien to me, though I've been living in all those ordinary states that flip their clocks since I was 17. Especially calling it "daylight savings" -- it's not really saving anything. It's just a big mind game the government makes us all participate in. The sun still rises and sets. Rrrgh. The whole notion that federal authorities should be messing with Time just sets my teeth on edge. And especially this year, declaring that we now have to do the time change early. Because given that we are no longer primarily an agricultural nation, and given that most modern buildings are designed without much attention to natural light, and given that most of us are plugged in a zillion different ways no matter what time of day or night it is -- how the heck is this really going to make any difference in energy consumption. I just don't buy it. So what is it a cover for?

When I'm not feeling paranoid about the feds messing with the clocks, I've been attempting a much more relaxed approach to time than I usually have, since it's spring break. I've been sleeping ridiculous amounts and trying not to feel guilty or anxious about it. Feeling tired often makes me anxious because I'm never too sure whether I'm really tired, or just depressed. This week I think it's actually been tiredness-- I'm still kind of recovering from being sick a couple of weeks ago, which has been very humbling. I started back to yoga last week, and got into the gym a bit too. But I'm not up to my usual every day workouts yet, except for walking.

I've been relaxing, and having a great break -- and also getting some work done. But still, it's Wednesday and I'm starting to feel a little bit sad already about break ending soon. I don't want to see anybody, or even go anywhere -- I just want to hang out in my house and play with the dogs and work on my various projects.

spring break!

Spring Break List -- Fantasy Edition

• write three conference papers
• revise article that came back from editor with comments
• finish massive home workspace reorganization project begun over winter break and then put on hold during the semester (filing & weeding of papers, Endnote updating, furniture moving, general cleanup)
  
• read and prep the 2nd half of the book I'm currently teaching
  
• read the next book I'll be teaching so as to be ahead of the game
  
• clean, clean, clean the house
  
• weed out clothes I don't need/wear
• do my taxes
• research/purchase a new printer
• take car in for maintenance
• do lots of yoga
• take a couple of trips to the dog park
• get back into the gym
  
• read some books for fun
• goalsetting/work planning for the next three months
• prepare faculty activity report
• sleep late
  
• go to the movies
  
• hang out with GF
  
• blog

I've got ten days . . . I just have to figure out the delicate balance between doing things and not doing anything at all. I need some of each. The past few weeks have really thrown me off balance -- my schedule's been weird, I was sick, I've been cranky. So this break is all about getting back to myself.

flu girl watches oscars, health improves

I think I finally turned a corner with the flu (which I keep typing, inexplicably, as "flue") at about 1:45 this afternoon. Last night I sent off a message to my Chair saying I was sick and wouldn't be able to make it to today's horrible meeting -- so I had all of today already clear for getting better. This morning I could do nothing but lie flat in bed, half sleeping. But then something shifted and I am starting to feel a bit more like myself. My fever's much lower, still about a degree left to go, but my brain is starting to cool down and function again. I've been rereading the last half of the book I'm teaching this week, and actually having some good ideas for how I want to wrap it up. So that's all good. Now I just have to finish grading that stack of essays, and I'll be golden. Since I can do that while reclining, it should be feasible, if not enjoyable. Now getting up and out of the house tomorrow may still be a challenge, but I can limit my time on campus to a few hours.

If you have to have the flu, there might as well be a tv-fest like the Oscars on. I wasn't too surprised with how things turned out (I don't expect my favorites to match the Academy's) -- except perhaps for Little Miss Sunshine for best screenplay -- sure, it was funny, quirky in that mainstream-indy way. But it wasn't interesting writing, originally structured, etc. That seemed a very odd choice, especially given the other nominees in that category. I hope that Ryan Gosling's nomination will at least get more people to see Half Nelson, and get him some other interesting roles -- it was one of the films I saw last year that stuck in my mind. I didn't for a minute think he'd get the award, but sometimes that's ok or even better for someone's career. Helen Mirren was fantastic in the Queen, but you should rent Shadowboxer as a wicked-delicious double feature to really see how amazing she is. I'm hoping that the foreign language award for The Lives of Others will bring it back to our theatres, since I missed it due to my work crunch of the past couple weeks. I really wanted to see it, and I much prefer to watch subtitles at the theatre. I haven't seen Dreamgirls yet, so I don't have an opinion about Jennifer Hudson (except that she shouldn't put her hands in the pockets of her evening gown while talking to reporters on the red carpet), though I was hoping Rinko Kikuchi would get the award. Babel seemed surprisingly overlooked, given the number of nominations. I also thought Children of Men should have gotten something -- cinematography or adaptation -- it was such a powerful and beautiful film. I thought it was way better than Pan's Labyrinth. But apparently no one else agrees with me. Totally appropriate that Marie Antoinette's costume designer won -- and how fabulous that she was wearing a tux!

During my flu, in addition to the home-repair shows on tv, I've been watching things from our shelf of DVDs for crappy days: Valley Girl, which is my all-time cheer-up movie, and many episodes of Freaks and Geeks, which is perfect medicine for whatever ails ya.

101.6

That's the number of the day, which has remained fairly consistent. But never dropping lower than that. Since my normal temp is about a full degree lower than "average" that's still a considerable fever.

And I am So. Over. Being. Sick. Yes, universe, I am grateful that this is a virus that has not involved the expulsion of gross bodily fluids. I am grateful that I came down with it just before the weekend. I am grateful that I sent off my article before getting sick. I am especially grateful for the Dish tv we got a few months ago. If one has to be sick once a year, this is not so bad.

I am trying to relax and rest and get better -- and certainly the weak state of my fevered brain means that I can't really do anything else. My eyes have been affected by the fever too, so I can only type this because I have the font set to humongous -- I can't read a book, for instance (which makes me sad since I even have some fun reading on hand from the public library).

But can't help myself from thinking about the work that needs to get done, the prep for next week, the conference paper I need to write. Will I be better for Monday's gruesome hiring committee meeting? (though, come to think of it, having a high fever as an excuse to miss that bloodbath might not be a bad thing) Will I get all the papers graded for Tuesday and teach a brilliant lively class so as to dispel all lingering questions about my abilities and commitment? Will my brain ever be back to normal?

ok, now I'm exhausted. Time to turn back to the 5 million home design/rip up your house shows I've been watching on tv. (Not that we are buying, remodeling, or flipping a house, or even own our house -- but it's fun to see how horrible most people's houses look. And I've seen a couple of neat tricks. )

fevered teaching

I'm home sick today, having been hit by one of the many evil viruses making the rounds at work. My fever is hovering between 102 and 103, so I'm really not trying to do anything more strenuous than change channels on the tv and skim a few blogs. I started feeling the onset Wednesday afternoon, but I didn't have any fever then, and kept trying to convince myself that it was just tiredness or allergies or some other non-sickness condition. But it soon became clear that I was actually coming down with something, and that I wasn't going to be able to finish grading all of my students' essays to hand back in class on Thurs. (Of course, if my psychic abilities were good enough to let me predict who would actually show up for class that afternoon, I could have just graded those students' work -- but that's not really my strong suit.) I feel genuinely sorry for my students, some of whom are anxious to learn their grades, and I hate feeling like one of those professor cliches. So I was heading into Thursday's class feeling bad about letting them down, and also just feeling plain bad physically: my head ached, I was coughing, and I could feel the fever beginning to burn.

So I was upfront with my students: I explained that I was coming down with something -- this was of course pretty obvious, since my voice had dropped two octaves and I was coughing. And then we did a small group activity in which I assigned each group a section of the text, and some focus questions based on the previous day's lecture, asking them to discuss it, and come up with some specific passages to present to the class. They spent 20 minutes in their groups, then the rest of class was a moderated discussion with their presentations and my expanding on what they pointed out, and bringing up some additional passages.

Yes, this activity was easier for me to manage, given the state of my voice that day and my low energy level. But it was also the group activity I usually do with this particular novel at about this point in the text. I would have done a similar activity in any case, sick or not. There's no way to make that clear to my students, although we've done group work before in class. I'm sure some of them assumed I did the group work because I was sick.

I always give very clear directions for group projects, and make it clear how that work relates to the rest of the class (in this case it was about developing close reading skills). That, and doing lots of different kinds of things in the classroom, are part of my approach to making my pedagogy visible to my students.

Although I don't think I could or would have done anything differently, I'm still thinking it over. Earlier this term, I made the mistake of looking myself up on ratemyprofessor because one of my students said he'd enrolled in class because my ratings were good -- to me they don't seem that good, but maybe I don't know what ratings my colleagues get. In any case, there was a vicious comment from a student last semester (a term for which I have not yet seen my official evaluations) about how I was lazy and did group work because I didn't feel like teaching. I know that the negative comments always ring louder than the positives, and I also know that each semester I have a couple students who dislike an active-learning, discussion based approach. They would rather sit and listen to a lecture. Because that's not the way I teach, they're never going to be happy, and I can assume that the complaining student was probably one of that group.

I don't need every student to be happy all the time, but I also don't want my class to think I was lazy. Plus, I made myself kind of vulnerable to my students by revealing my sickness. I was honest in telling my class that I was sick. To pretend otherwise would have been stupid. But I fear that it might have seemed manipulative, like I was asking for sympathy. I suppose I feel a little odd because, in fact, several of my students were sympathetic. One offered me cough drops and another sent me an email hoping I get better soon. It's a weird position to be in with my class.

out of the rabbit hole

I'm back! My knees are scraped and my fingernails are dirty from clambering out of the perversely magical rabbit hole that dropped me into WritingWorld, and my pinafore got a bit mussed too, but I'm all back to my own true size and promise I won't ever eat any of the mushrooms again . . .

I just sent off Big Article! and am deliriously strolling around the internet, which has been Off Limits except for committee- or student-related emails for about 10 days. Luckily my caffeine intake won't wear off for a while, since I do actually have to attend to a pile of essays that I all-too-optimistically suggested to my class that I'd have ready to hand back tomorrow. That was back when I thought I'd be able to email Big Article out of my life on Friday. What is it now? Monday night (at least it was when I started typing this post). The past six days are just a big fuzzy blur, especially once Thursday night rolled around and I no longer had to go to campus. I was sleeping polyphasically and only leaving the house to walk the dogs. Wearing the same soft baggy clothes nonstop. Rarely showering. Eating salsa at 10 in the morning, and carbs late at night.

Basically, in other words, I did every single thing that Boise and other experts tell you not to do. I binge wrote. I binged, and binged, and binged some more. And in the process I found my way to an argument I'm happy with, and some really sleek paragraphs (and some that are just plain and functional). This is the way I've always written and I'm familiar with its strange rhythms, the bursts of elation and the 4:30 a.m. breakdown, the snoozing at the keyboard and footnoted dreams.

It's not how I want to live the rest of my life, or even how I want to write the next piece I have due in a few weeks. It's just really hard for me to change. But I'll worry about that later. For now, I think I'm going to go stretch out on the couch and see what's on tv.

10 things I could have blogged about

1. how enjoyable my teaching is this semester
2. how morale in my department is plummeting
3. how exhausting job searches are from the department's perspective
4. how I haven't been sleeping enough
5. how I am writing something for a deadline and am feeling anxious
6. how my career is all just a series of accidents and I'm really a fraud
   
7. how crappy the weather has been this winter
8. how Speedy tore her dewclaw and is now stoned on doggie painkillers
9. how I'm a pathetic excuse for a blogger
10. how fantastic a mate my GF is: happy anniversary to us today!
    

if I were the Emperor of everything

Three simple rules that would have improved this week, were they followed:
(1) No meeting should be three hours long. Ever.
(2) Faculty who don't come to any of the job talks, job candidate interviews, or faculty get-togethers should not be allowed to pontificate in the hiring meeting about candidates they never met. They shouldn't be allowed to vote either.
(3) Mel should get 8 hours of sleep every night. Or at least seven.