Yeau Claire

No sense in quarantining the TP

When I left Lehigh on March 20th, 2020, just before they sealed it up like a giant stone Tupperware, none of us knew how long we’d be gone before things got back to normal. It was my first full-time academic job, as a VAP the year after I’d earned my PhD there. Closing the door on Drown 303 felt like a change, like the end of something, like the beginning of something, like a surreal suspended animation or like I’d walked out into the spring air of an alternate universe—but I didn’t imaging I’d never be back.

Leaving my beloved home on the north side for an academic conference the following summer felt much the same. I packed, blithely told my kitties I’d be back soon, printed out the paper I was giving, and headed up in the general direction of the Mass Pike. It was there that I got an unexpected phone call offering  me a multi-year position eleven hundred miles away—with a catch. I needed to be there in a month.

Thirty-seven days. That’s how long I had to pull up the roots that had been growing for a decade, find a place to live, fly out for three days to attend in-person training and sign a lease, and transplant myself and everything I owned. But the truth of the matter is, I’d been uprooted several times in the intervening fifteen months, even while mostly locked in my cherished 650 square feet of sunny, pre-war space: unimaginable life changes for my beloved that still weigh on me, a failed contract renewal due to Covid, eight and a half months of increasingly debilitating symptoms that took seven infusions (that nearly damn killed me, thank you very much Affordable Care Act for forcing me to use a drug it turns out I'm deathly allergic to) and a surgery that ended up being not nearly as simple as anyone expected. The loss, again, this time irrevocably so, of a dearest, precious friend with whom I had finally been able to make amends, due to things beyond either of our control. An incredibly hard year of online adjuncting, half of it at a school I still haven’t set foot on the campus of. I’m still not entirely sure where it is beyond the exit sign off 22. Five weeks of filling in for parental leave at Lehigh after the Dean managed to screw me with my pants on one last time.

So moving to Wisconsin never felt like a choice. It has always felt, in some ways, like a desperate loss, despite how happy I am here in the larger sense of fulfillment. It still feels like an amputation, a bewildering exodus by night. A flight from something. I still don’t know what. I'm still mourning the old life that I'm just now starting to accept would never have returned even if I had stayed there. 

 

 

I can't believe I get to work here.

 But it's full spring here, finally. I haven't been down to the river since my sister came to visit me in October, when I took this picture, but finals start next week and I have many many riverine plans (not to mention a deep-seated call that I now recognize as not just the Chippewa but also Anishinaabewi-gichigami, Lake Superior), and I'm slowly starting to put down roots here, even if they're mostly just herbs in the window boxes. Part of the joy of my presence here is tempered by the knowledge that I'll be here less than five years. And I think that's part of the problem too. That I forgot that, on top of everything else that's happened in the past two years, my very presence in Doodlehem was always supposed to be impermanent. 

And so I continue in this liminal, limerent space, in this not-quite-reality that I know will end, because everything around me the past two years has pointed towards that in a way that it never has before. And at nearly fifty, I'm not sure how I should feel about that. While Covid cases continue to rise, a recent email from university administration characterized the pandemic as "distracting." Students continue to be exposed but no longer mask. My partner and I continue to be in the holding pattern brought on by both our situations. I plant annuals in the garden, because I know I'll have to dig up anything perennial I want to take with me. I continue to agitate and protest and advocate for BIPOC folks in my community because my students are freaked out and my colleagues and friends are furious, and it matters deeply, and I love them so much--but I also subconsciously know that at some point I'll have to quantify that for my academic future, which is something that feels both totally gross and absolutely necessary. 

I'd stay if you'd have me, but I know that's not how this works.

Into the Great Oh God Now What

I've just submitted final grades at the end of another semester, and after I hit submit on my Hamilton class (another post entirely because omg) I realised I'm seriously feeling a little adrift here. This semester was in many ways like every other semester--I didn't give them as much in-class writing time as I wish I could, multmodal "unpapers" alternately knocked the socks off me (I'm looking at you, "Burr Book." You go, Glen Chlo-Chlo) and bored me halfway to tears (how many PowerPoints can one woman take?)--but in many ways it was also way, way different.

This semester, I finished my dissertation and I'll be awarded my doctoral degree this weekend. I ran another cycle through the job market--rinse and repeat--and have had some interesting results, which I am not currently at liberty to share (more on that soon).

But this has been my life for eight years. It has been everything. When Robin died, when shit went to hell and back with M and my mental health....through all of it, school was my constant. More than that, my dissertation was what I had, even in the moments when I thought I had nothing else. To suddenly not have that—even because I’ve seen it through to completion and am about to move on to something bigger, whatever that turns out to be—it’s a little disorienting, it turns out.

I mean, it's not going anywhere. I've written what I hope is a hell of a project, and there are next steps to be taken for sure, but just for a minute, sitting here in my gorgeous blue ikat armchair, gazing at my kitties curled into weird shapes on the couch--seriously, dude, who sleeps like that?--I had a moment of panic, that vertigo that comes at the edges of things, when one is deciding to jump to see if they will fly.

And this time, maybe I will.

Another Exhaustive List

I don't want to come in here and constantly bitch and apologise about the fact that I'm never fucking around. I want to love this as much as I used to. I do love this as much as I used to. But.

Grief is exhausting. Seriously, I was not prepared for how long it would take all my energy just to exist every day, for how hard it would be not to collapse in a slithering wailing heap of bones Robin is dead in front of everyone. My diss advisor. My writing partner. My students. My friends. The mirror. People at the grocery store. Sometimes out of the blue I will be shopping in the cookie aisle at Shop-Rite (as one does), and the goddamn Pepperidge Farm Chesapeake Farmhouse cookies with the dark chocolate and the pecans will attack me from the side and I'll be crying my eyes out before I know it, because we used to wolf them down by the little white sleeve watching 60 Minutes or whatever. Mostly I'm better about this, but everything is still harder than it was.

Grad school is exhausting. I'm pretty sure I don't need to explain that, but just in case I do: OH MY GOD PEOPLE. This whole semester has pretty much been me hanging on by my fingernails, catching up just enough to keep from losing my shit entirely, and waiting for this week to finally arrive when all I have to do is grade finals and calculate grades--oh, and write an entire syllabus for English 1 for the fall, and a course description for the spring catalog for the lit class I have to finish designing that now has to have seven people in it in order to run, and oh hey yeah, how about that dissertation because you're totally fucking on the job market starting last August?

Also, it has been medically exhausting to be me for various reasons every since they decided it would be a good idea to take my gallbladder out before it exploded (which it apparently promptly did, all over the little pan they put it in once they took it out of my abdomen, which is equal parts funny and horrifying and also ew), and apparently now harbouring a case of IBS, which is exactly as unpleasant as everybody says it is. And because I'm in my mid-forties--and can we talk about that for a minute, because how did that happen all of a sudden--and have survived an endocrine cancer, every single hormone in my body has recently begun going haywire all at once, the finer details of which I will spare you, but suffice it to say that I have had no fewer than six gynecological appointments since my spontaneous ten-hour trip to the ER in mid-February and am now on a first-name basis with my uterus. (Actually, it's the fibroids that have names. I call them Snap, Crackle, and Pop. Though "pop" is more accurately a description of the hemorrhagic ovarian cyst that got me sent to the ER in the first place. But I digress.)

It was a long winter. And I'm still trying to get to the bottom of the endless fatigue.

But this guy.

This guy. He is everything. He has been through so much, and he is still so alive and fighting so hard to return to the living, and I could not be more amazed and in awe of him. Twenty years later, we are able to open up to each other with trust in a way that I didn't think was possible, and if this is to be my entire life I will clutch it with both hands and bless it, because it contains him.

I Have Never Read A Single Word of Harry Potter

Furthermore, I never intend to. I am, however, eternally grateful to JK Rowling for addicting an entire generation of kids to the printed word. The weekend the last one came out, I had students who would have normally been out gangbanging waiting in line at the bookstore for their copy.

And then I couldn't give my planned lesson on Monday morning because they were all, "Yo, Miss, can we have free read time, like we used to do in high school? I gots to finish this chapter, man!"

Did I mention? I was their remedial reading teacher. I practically cried. YES. YES YOU MAY HAVE FREE READING TIME. Here. Take it all. Take my heart, you semi-literate thugs. And don't pretend you weren't crying at the end. I saw you wiping tears with your gang-colors bandana do-rag.

Curiosity Killed the FireCat (or, The Post That Goes Just About Nowhere)

My curiosity isn't the kind that electrocutes small children, or poisons household pets, or causes cartoon characters to turn into an animal-shaped pile of cinders. For some reason, I've never been the "what happens if I put the knife into the electrical outlet?" kind of curious, or the "gee, what's this green stuff taste like?" kind of curious, or even the "what happens if I pull this string, Allan?" kind of curious. (The answer to that last question, by the way, is apparently, "My shorts will fall off." I wasn't there at the time, but I heard the story for days afterward.)

No, mine is the kind of curious that sends one to grad school. Repeatedly. What's with all the little boats in Dante? Is rose a rose a rose? Why can't we, once and for all, decide how to spell the Wife of Bath's name? And for god's sake, will someone please smack Werther upside the head and give him an SSRI? For the good of all Europe? Seriously.

The alarming result of this particular strain of academic curiosity is that--oh God. I'm about to confess this out loud. On the Internet. Ok. The result of this is that I love writing papers.

There. I said it, ok? I love writing academic research papers. Call the ambulance on me, lock me up in an ivory tower, hit me in the face with a waffle iron, do whatever you want, but it's true. Except, mostly, what I like is the research part. I don't necessarily like sitting my arse on the chair and cobbling the pieces together (which is sometimes what it feels like, especially this past semester), but I love logging into JSTOR and following the thread of my ideas and seeing where it leads. This, despite the fact that more than once in the past several months I have typed in literary search parameters and gotten a certain article about White-Faced Capuchin monkeys. I am not making this up.

Presently, however, it has led me to the most frustrating dead end of my life. I've got all these fabulous ingredients, but they don't make soup. They make smoosh. I know it. Chaucer knows it. My cats know it. My rough draft knows it (and, as a result, is being more recalcitrant than usual). Worst of all, the professor knows it. The Scots-English word "fookt" does not even begin to describe my situation here. I am several pages into nowhere, and need to have been finished already by the time I meet the professor tomorrow to discuss possible solutions. This is due to a glitch in the matrix known as "I have a marathon to run out of town next weekend and am not due to return home until thirty seconds before this paper is actually due, and you can't give me an extension because immediately (as in, the four days type of immediately, so, super-immediately) after that is my qualifying exam, for which I still have 200 pages of reading."

Sorry. This isn't really a post about curiosity. This is really a post about sheer, unmitigated panic. But that's what I'm good for right now.

That, and lots and lots of coffee.

At Last! The Shocking Conclusion of the Epic Pus Volcano Chronicles!

It's true. My dentist finally sealed off my root canal this afternoon.

Of course, it couldn't just be a simple post and crown, could it? No. Of course not. Of course, his mainframe had to have died last week, so he's got this loaner unit that mills crowns (yeah, he's all high-tech like that) only apparently? This loaner unit? Is on quaaludes or something.

Because it froze while preparing the image. Twice. Yay.

Ok, I realise this makes mostly no sense unless you've seen one of these in action. It's sort of like auto-CAD for teeth (now there's something you don't hear every day). It takes a before picture, and then after your tooth is ground down and the post is in, it takes an after picture, and then you go in and sort of auto-CAD the patient's tooth until it looks exactly right, and then you hit "ok" and it mills a brandy-new shiny porcelain crown.

Except it didn't.

Twice.

My half-hour appointment? Was three hours. Fortunately I had lots of Dante's Divine Comedy to keep me occupied, but boy was the dentist pissed. And by 2:15, my ass was sound asleep in the chair.

But seriously. Did he really think that anything about this whole procedure was going to happen easily, as planned? Really-really?

Yeah, me either.

Anyway, IT'S OVER. Except when I go back for one more post-op visit to the surgeon at the end of next month. Done done done no more pus volcanoes hooray.

(In other news, apparently my brain has gone on strike because I cannot make myself grade the eight papers I have to turn back tomorrow morning. Cannot. Make. Myself. They've been staring at me all day. And I can't pick up the pen.)

Parenting Strategies in Elizabethan Drama and Its Sources

This was inspired by an email conversation among several colleagues about final paper topics for Shakespeare and His Contexts (the "feckless mice" course).

Parenting rule number one: Do not feed your children to your dinner guests
PR number two: Do not feed their children to your dinner guests
PR number three: Do not have sexual relations with any mysterious, beautiful stranger your child's age. It will turn out to be your child in disguise.
PR number four: Do not leave your children under a rock/on the top of a mountain. This will result in the ultimate violation of rules 1-3 in the distant future.
PR number five: Do not divide your kingdom among your descendants. Most of your children are greedy dirtbags. The only one who really loves you will end up dead if you do this.
PR number six: Do not lock your children up in towers. They didn't do it.
PR number seven: Conversely, do not allow your children to sneak out the bedroom window every night. They are up to no good with your sworn enemy.
PR number eight: Never, under any circumstances, brag that your children are better/prettier/stronger than (insert name of local deity here). It will just end badly.

In fact, perhaps it's just best to dispense with this "having children" nonsense altogether. It just leads to too much disruption of your tidy plans for world domination. Become a nun and lock yourself in a convent.

Oh wait. That leads to the same sorts of troubles, doesn't it. Maybe you should just bite off your own tongue and allow yourself to be tortured to death during a play for the royal palace to expose the murder of your sister.

Schadenfreude, darling, Schadenfreude

Oh, no. No no no no no. They didn't.





Well, yes, actually. They did.

When Bad Things Happen to Good Shakespeare Classes

Reason number one why Dr. Glenn should not refer to characters in a play as "feckless mice" in my presence? The following will immediately appear in my notes and set Mark, who sits next to me, laughing so uproariously he almost snorts a Ricola out his nose.



Really, Glenn? You didn't see this coming?

A Brief Note of Explanation

I have not forgotten this blog exists. I am not dead. I am in grad school full time (again). I am still teaching two classes per semester. I have seven more pages on Schiller, Rousseau, and Chateaubriand to pound out before Monday.

I have a death wish, apparently.

If I can make it through the weekend, I'm due for a nice, long post. But how sad is it that my idea of weekend fun includes a movie about John Keats? And this paper's not even about that!

One Man

One of my students invited me to photograph her final project for her Communications class. She and several other students traveled to Center City Philadelphia (an area with which I am only moderately familiar, mostly as home to the Reading Terminal Market and packet pick-up for the Philadelphia Marathon) for an experimental project in nonverbal communication: free hugs. Technically speaking, there was both verbal and nonverbal communication here, as they were both speaking and holding up signs with words written on them, but that wasn't the subject of their experiment. What they were interested in was how ordinary people would react to being offered a hug by a total stranger. Coincidentally, they chose to carry out this experiment on Good Friday.

The title of this post is a homonym for the man who began this campaign in Sydney, Australia--Juan Mann. That is not, to the best of my knowledge, a pseudonym. That is his actual name.

Scenes from the City of Brotherly Love

The free hugs crew sets up outside City Hall.

Bethann bends down for a little stroller action.

Heather gets a surprise!

John from Texas.

Something that doesn't happen nearly enough.

Lennon makes some new friends....

...who borrow our signs....

...and make friends of their own.

Diane and friend.

Bethann and Lennon.

A Delightful Combination of Earnestness and Stupidity

The text of a recent email from a student, who seems somewhat befuddled about the way things work around here:

Is the class(8:30-11 mon) still in room 204? I went last week and ems
people were in there. I can't get into my school email at all so I was
wondering.

My carefully phrased response:

Last week was spring break.

Maybe The Matron is right. Maybe we do need to evaluate whether everyone belongs in college.

And How Does This Advance the Ball for You, Exactly?

This is an actual, verbatim conversation initiated by a student (shades of Minnesota Matron). And all I can think is, "....you're serious? Really??"

From: . [LXXXXXXX.D@xxxxxxxx.edu]
Sent: Sun 12/14/2008 2:44 PM
To: [thefirecat@xxxxxxx.edu]
Subject: please not a C

Hi its Dxxxxx
please not a c. i came to every class and thats my lowest grade this semester and that really brings down my gpa. And the intership i need requires a 3.0 gpa and im sorry for missing the one assingment. how bout i watch a old movie and send you a report on it or go see a play or somthin.


thanks for your time

From: [thefirecat@xxxxxx.edu]
Sent: Mon 12/15/2008 10:57 AM
To: [LXXXXXX.D@xxxxxx.edu]
Subject: RE: please not a C

Frankly it's a little late now to be concerned about your grade. I mentioned after the midterm that people had an opportunity to raise their grades by writing an additional paper; some students took advantage of that generous offer. You chose not to. The one assignment you missed didn't actually factor that much into your grade, especially since you were in class pretty consistently. You got a D on your midterm, a B on your paper on Othello, and a C on the final. That averages out to a C. Sorry.



From: . [LXXXXXXX.D@xxxxxxxx.edu]
Sent: Sun 12/14/2008 2:44 PM
To: [thefirecat@xxxxxxx.edu]
Subject: RE: please not a C


i was probly sleep when it was offerd... but ok :(:::::::


On second thought, I'm tempted to change his grade after all. I'm thinking a D for dumbass might be appropriate. Good thing that takes paperwork I don't have here. I'll have to settle for public, if anonymous, humiliation.

Why I Practice Yoga

What happens next, apparently, is that Bookstore A notices an edition update in my Thursday night textbook. (You know, the class where until now nothing has exploded except the critical mass, since the dean apparently has--and excercises--the power to override class limits.) And fails to notify me, for whatever reason. I suspect it's because they think I didn't hand in my textbook request, a feat which mystifies me since they knew which textbook to update.

Anyway, usually a move from a tenth edition to an eleventh edition means something like "two of the photographs are different" or "we fixed the layout problem so that now page 345 comes between pages 344 and 346 instead of opposite page 19." So I wasn't too worried, expecting that I might have to update a reading or two, and definitely look up the alternate page numbers.

Yeah, fully three-quarters of my assigned readings aren't in there. Looks like I'll be rewriting two syllabi this weekend. Fortunately, with the effects of Tropical Storm Hanna blowing through today, it was a very good day to spend curled up on my bed reading, nestled up against a paranoid, one-eyed cat who thought this was a wonderful idea. Also fortunately, I like most of the new readings better, all things being equal.

Just not enough to have to do any more damn work on it.

Giant Mongolian Clusterfrak: College A Strikes Again

NOTE: This is a continuation of the saga begun in this post. 

College A is going to be the death of me. Just sayin.

Two weekends ago I rewrote a syllabus for a class that turned out to be one of those late-start classes that's condensed into 14 weeks instead of the whole semester. Which I hadn't realized, so the syllabus was all wrong. Remember that? Yeah. So, last week, they cancelled it. Sure. Fine. Whatever. Five classes is way too many when you factor in the commute between colleges (at least an hour, one way, to each). I moved on.

This past weekend I had to rewrite a syllabus that I'd sent in a month ago because they finally got around to reading it and noticed that it didn't jibe with their critical updates. Part was my fault, because I left out that teensy little line on the schedule that says when the third paper was due, so they thought I only assigned three papers, when there are in fact four. Oooops. The other part was their fault, because they couldn't find something that was there. That class was scheduled to have started this past Tuesday evening.

Tuesday morning, as I was drinking my tea and getting ready for classes at both colleges, they called to cancel that class. And called back ten minutes later to offer me three other classes, two of which I couldn't take because of conflicts with College B, whose classes have already started. (And yes, since you asked, it was in fact the ENG210 that I accepted at the last minute that was the conflict. Behold the irony.) The third class was going to be at the same time as the class they'd just cancelled. And it was a class I've already taught a zillion times, and am teaching at another time this semester, and all was cool. I poured most of my now-cold tea out, leapt into some clothes, and fled to College B with my hair still in wild disarray, though I did put on lipstick while waiting at a railroad crossing.

There's more. Of course there's more.

Today I found out that I have to write an entirely new syllabus, because......this is a contract class with an outside company, offsite, and they've always used a different textbook. And they'd like to keep using it please. Fortunately, I already have a copy of this other textbook, because I now have to spend this, my third weekend in a row, writing a syllabus. For a class that isn't supposed to exist.

The class has seven students in it, which is wonderful. Because two drafts each of four papers is much less horrifying from seven students than it is from twenty-eight, which is the normal maximum enrollment.

Until I looked online and noticed that the registrar's office has opened enrollment for this class to the student population. And assigned critical mass as 28 instead of 10. Um, scuse me. And there are PEOPLE REGISTERING. Which means if they don't fix it soon, preferably closer to immediately and retroactively, I am going to have potentially 35 people who think they are in my class. I'm not really okay with this on oh, so many many levels.

And for this? For this I get paid the equivalent of four months' of health insurance payments. Or about two months' rent, were I to manage to escape the sucking vortex that seems to be my life at the moment.

I'd say to stick around for the conclusion, but I'm kind of afraid to find out, myself. So if you know what happens next, drop me a line. I'll be hiding under my desk.

Pop Quiz #2

Today's quiz will be in geography.

From: marketresearch@ets.org
Subject: ETS Invites You To Participate In A Focus Group Session in NEW DEHLI
Date: August 28, 2008 6:39:38 PM EDT
To: THEFIRECAT@xxxxxx.net
Reply-To: marketresearch@ets.org

Educational Testing Service is conducting a series of informal discussion groups with students around the world about their experience taking standardized tests for graduate admissions purposes.

A two-hour discussion group will be held in the NEW DEHLI area on September 23, 2008. Individuals selected to participate in the group will be paid at the conclusion of the session. Light refreshments will also be provided.

If you would like to participate, you must complete a brief, 10 minute survey. Since space for the discussion group is limited, we encourage you to complete the survey within 24 hours of receipt of this email. The survey can can be accessed by clicking on the following link:

[link removed]

If you cannot access the survey by clicking on the link, please copy the entire link and paste it directly into the address bar of your web browser.

Are they serious?? I can't even fly to the informal discussion group in 24 hours. The only way New Dehli is even remotely close to New Jersey is on an alphabetical list. And even then, New Hampshire, New Hanover, and arguably Newt Gingrich are between them, depending on how you file.

And these are the people who graded the test that will decide where I get my PhD. Shudder.

Living the Questions

A former student was given an assignment by her English 101 professor to ask a teacher the following questions:

1) How do you feel about writing?
2) Why is writing important to you?

Following is my response:

Cess-

Ok, I'm back. Here goes. It gets a little weird, so stay with me. The simple truth is that most people think I am a lunatic when I tell them how I feel about writing. I recognize that normal people aren't wired this way, but I feel about writing the way most people feel about, say, air. Or skydiving. Or the mountains, or hot fudge sundaes, or God. No, not God exactly, but religion maybe. I knew when I was five years old and used to play with my sister's little blue plastic manual typewriter that I was going to be a writer. It's not that it was the only thing I could do (though there were pitiful times in eighth grade gym class when it felt like that) but I always knew that it was kinda my secret superpower. The world could be the most messed up place, my parents could be fighting, the boy I liked could tell me to drop dead, I could have no friends, my cat could barf all over my homework, and when I opened a notebook and wrote about it, everything got ok again. For Christmas in eighth grade, my parents got me a copy of "Writing Down the Bones" by Natalie Goldberg, and it changed my life. Suddenly, I was allowed to write, and allowed to write about anything. My parents, and the book, had given me permission. Writing was comfort at the end of a hard day, a way to keep me sane in school and in my own head as a teenager, and it was freedom. I could be anyone. I could be me (whoever that was). I could try on all sorts of things, and not get in trouble. I could work out all the stupid things that people said and did, and fix them. I could tell a story the way I wanted it to end. I could get the guy, run away from home, climb mountains, hop freight trains, go to college, solve mysteries--all while sprawled across my bed with a black-and-white marbled notebook. (The green ink thing also started in eighth grade, as a way to piss off my English teacher, who already disliked me because I was smarter than she was....but that's another story.)

Writing for me now is a ritual of peace and centering; a way to touch base with myself, my emotions, whatever divinity exists, the world. It's a way to keep track of where I'm going, not to mention where I've been. It's a sort of road map. Still, if the world or my marriage or my health threatens to fall apart, I can open a black-and-white notebook and uncap my green fountain pen, and everything will seem all right. If I didn't have that--and there have been times I have been unable to write, either physically or emotionally literally unable to write, for whatever reason--I would be a most unhappy sight. It's not pretty. If I don't write, I get cranky. My husband once threatened to lock me in my writing room until I had written enough pages that I got out of my funk! (the threat itself made me laugh so hard it did the trick, but I went and wrote for an hour anyway). If I don't write, I can't figure anything out. Why I think something, why I feel a certain way, or sometimes even what I am feeling or thinking in the first place. I am not the world's best debater with the spoken word--my thoughts get tangled up unless I have a pen in my hand. I express myself so much more clearly in writing than I do out loud, in part because I used to be self-conscious about the sound of my voice, in part because you apparently use entirely different parts of your brain to write than you do to speak. Who knew? Sometimes I have to go back to one of my old journals to prove a point in an argument. If I've written about it, I'm usually right (and sometimes I'm word-for-word right, which pissed my husband off no end). If I didn't write about it, I may forget entirely. I probably will, in fact. My brain can be a notorious sieve. Without writing, nothing makes sense. Certainly not this weird life we're in.

This is probably way more than you bargained for, and not even close to what your professor is expecting. But he should have known better--he's a writing teacher, after all.

Be well.

x
FireCat

Operation Alphabet Soup, Fall 2008 Edition

This time last week, I was prepped to teach five classes at two different colleges, and ramping up for my upcoming GRE. I took the GRE once, to get into my MFA program. Fifteen years ago. Since GRE scores are good for a maximum of five years--though some schools have shorter windows, as if our intellect, like sour cream, gets rancid after sitting around unused for extended periods of time--I was due for another set.

Let's just point out that it's been twenty years since I've taken a math class, and the last time I took the GRE, I actually had to use a pencil. Needless to say, "ramping up" roughly translates into "experiencing recurring bouts of unmitigated panic".

First I got a mysterious message from College A, from the new department secretary, saying that the new Dean had given her my resume and wanted to know if I was interested in an adjunct position at College A. This mysterious message was quite troubling mostly because last time I checked, I have an adjunct position at College A. In fact, a syllabus from no fewer than three classes was likely in the new secretary's inbox as she dialed. One of them turned out to be utterly useless because COM101-M4 has a late start date, but that's another post altogether, and not worth getting into.

Two days later, one of the part-time assistants from College A also called, wanting to know when I was going to email a copy of my current syllabus to the department. After pointing out that the answer was, indeed, "two weeks ago" I asked to be transfered to the new full-time department secretary. The one who had tried to give me my own job, as if I should be grateful for it.

Eventually, we got things straightened out at College A, blaming most of the kerfluffle on the new Dean.

Then College B called.

College B is notoriously wonderful. It's a small, Catholic college; it engages in service learning on a regular basis in which even the College President participates alongside freshmen and volleyball coaches, bends over backwards to accommodate my particular insanities, and just generally has its shit together on a pretty consistent basis. In short, I often want to kiss College B on the mouth. Sadly, College B was calling to cancel ENG104, my favourite class of all time, for the second consecutive semester due to underenrollment. The department chair and I spoke at length about our desire to see this course fly, and plans are underway to revamp some other things in the department requirements (including a core course that is much less effective than planned) to resurrect this class. Presumably so I can teach it. It is, after all, the class they originally hired me to teach in the first place.

That was Tuesday night at supper. Thursday morning, I was sitting on the front porch drinking an enormous mug of tea when the phone rang again. Again, it was College B. I tensed, thinking they were going to take ENG101 away from me, even though there are 20 students enrolled and no full-time professor in his right mind wants to teach ENG101. That's why there are adjuncts in the first place. Well, that and the lack of office space on campus.

But no. The department chair was calling to see if I could teach ENG210, something I have not only never taught, but haven't particularly studied since I left my undergraduate institution lo these fifteen years ago (see paragraph 1). I allowed has how I really couldn't answer this right away, because I was leaving to take the GRE in thirty minutes, and I can't freak out about two things at the same time, so I was tabling this discussion until later that evening when I could freak out about it properly. In the meantime, could she send me the syllabus and other useful information (like when does this class even meet?) so I could make a more informed, or at least slightly less hare-brained, decision.

By the way, did I mention that ENG210 apparently has no syllabus, just a basic outline of how to teach the entire history of theatre (which is only about as long as the entire history of man walking upright) in fifteen weeks? And that the textbook that was ordered by the professor to take this class in between its original creator and me does not actually match the textbook followed by the syllabus? And that class starts in 72 hours? Yeah. Not kidding.

Still, being a sucker (we are, after all, a service-learning based institution) and intrigued by the glitter and  glamour of getting to teach a 200-level class, and also possibly still riding high on the fact that I had totally rocked the GRE, computer algorithm or no, I caved. Said I would teach it. Even though it now doubles the number of days per week I have to drive to College B, and trebles the number of times I have to commute directly from teaching at College B to College A, which involves driving on an toll road that ends in the word "Turnpike" through a notorious Eastern city in midafternoon.

Now where did I leave those amphetamines?

If I Could Make This Shit Up, I'd Be on Strike in Hollywood.

I had an interview scheduled at a local, unnamed college this afternoon. Or, at least, I used to. I spent the whole morning getting ready. I flossed. I put on a slip. I put on pantyhose, for crying out loud. (The last time I wore pantyhose was at the funeral of a 95-year-old priest. I went bare-legged to my own wedding.) I gathered my portfolio, plundering scattered files and ideas of half-formed lesson plans in an attempt to wow the interviewer's socks off. (At least we could be bare-legged together.) I ate a healthy lunch. I brushed my teeth again, to remove any trace of cranberry mayo. I packed my briefcase, silenced my cell phone, and left early to drive to campus.

Where I was met by several sheriff's deputies and the plentitude of flashing lights that usually indicates major delays on the Turnpike. But this was not an overturned tractor-trailer or a car fire. This, apparently, was an (unspecified) threat that had closed the campus all day.

Is it me, or is this the second time in eight months that I've been escorted off a small-town community college campus because of a bomb threat? I'm starting to wonder if maybe I should take this personally.

Currency

We've been talking a lot about money in a couple of my classes the past few weeks, and we're only just getting started. First of all, I've always found the concept weird. Maybe that's because I'm an artist, a poet, and the idea of spending umpteen hours a week doing something in which I am uninterested at best so that I can earn what are essentially numbers on a piece of paper just seems so....irrelevant much of the time. I participate in direct deposit whenever and wherever it is offered to me, so most months I don't even see a paycheck. Or cash, considering I have a bank card. It's all done on computers. And the transactions have gotten so convoluted that they no longer make any sense to me.

I'm not suggesting by any means that a subsistence living is better, or that direct trade in goods would solve everything (for one thing, I'm not sure I'd want to be the guy whose value is computed in eggplants, or bathroom cleanser, or--god forbid--gym socks). So on a certain level I understand the need for currency, the need to give everyone equal access to things, by giving them instead access to what those things represent, which is of course, "value."

And that's another fucked up concept. Value. Consider: I get paid less than most janitors. For spending three hours per day in a car, four hours per day in front of a classroom, at least one to two hours per day prepping for being in front of the classroom (and that's a rough average that also covers weekends and vacations) and at least another fifteen hours per week grading papers. Usually more. And I love what I do. Except for the commuting part, which frankly I could do without, although it does give me an excuse twice daily to not be grading papers at that moment. (There have been times when traffic is so bad going in towards the Lincoln Tunnel that I've actually been able to grade papers while commuting, but that's neither here nor there.)

In a nutshell, in a perfect world, I teach people to tell the world what they feel and think about things. I teach them to look, to listen, to react in a thoughtful way rather than just a kneejerk reaction that's probably been trained into them by others. With a little luck, I teach them to read, and I teach them to write. And for this, to do this sixty hours per week at three different schools, I am compensated at a rate that puts me below the local poverty line. It puts me right in the same economic class as many of the students I teach, in fact. The ones who can't get ahead. The ones who are searching for jobs that will allow them to leave the ghetto and make something of themselves, and have realized that education is really the only way to do this. I have the education. I have twice the education many of them will ever have. And were I not living in my parents' house at the moment, I'd be living in the ghetto with them. I can't get ahead, either. Education and the economy are funny things. The current administration pretends to have acknowledged the irrevocable link between them, by instituting No Child Left Behind, but that's frankly just a publicity stunt that's doing more damage than it is good. Anybody who works directly in schools knows that. Twenty years after the Jersey City Public School system was taken over by the state, it was given back this summer. I guess they couldn't figure out what the hell to do with it, either.

So how do we determine how much value something has? How do we assign a price tag? Why are the most crucial and worthwhile pursuits the ones that pay the least? Why are poets, teachers, inventors, artists, social workers, nurses, mothers, and midwives struggling to exist while salesmen, advertising executives, stockbrokers, TV stars, pop singers, and real estate moguls have so much money they can't even figure out how to give it away? Why is that? Why does a librarian make $12 an hour if she's lucky and lives in a mid-sized city, and a personal injury lawyer live in an opulent million dollar home? Why do some of my students have to drop my class because they have to work 50 hours a week just to be able to afford to pay the tuition to take my class? Why can't we educate the children of the world because we can't find the $8 billion it would cost to put them all in primary school, but we can spend $40 billion a year on golf?

I guess the real question is what's wrong with not just the economy of the world, but the value system? There's a person in my community who drives her Hummer H3 to the local independent organic foods co-op. What the fuck part of the equation is she not getting? And why isn't she getting it? Why do we buy half-million dollar homes for our families and then work 80 hours a week to be able to afford them, so we can't spend time with the other people who live in them with us? My husband and I often worked opposing schedules because our respective trades required it. The month after we were married, we pretty much only saw each other awake on weekends, when we were both cranky and pressured. When I lost my contract at the end of the year, I tried to cancel Christmas. My husband, hurried home by his manager who was wise enough to hear the anxiety in my voice, curled up next to me on the couch and reminded me what I had forgotten: We may never have any money, he assured me, but we will always be rich. Those twelve words are words I still cherish more than just about anything, even now that he is gone. Because, more than he knew it, more than he wanted to admit, he was right. We were rich. We had each other.

And how the hell do you put a dollar value on that?