Music & lyrics.

If my life of late were put to music, these would be the lyrics:

blah blah blah blah stress blah blah

blah blah blah blah whine blah blah

blah blah stress

blah blah whine

I think I'll find something to buy.

The second verse, similarly, would go something like this:

blah blah blah blah I can't take it anymore

blah blah blah blah I am still on the internet!

blah blah no more

blah blah internet!

now I think I'll bake a cake.

However, in case you are worried that I might run out of rhymes, I discovered this weekend that shopping is a placeholder for other forms of self-care. Also, that I manage my anxiety better when I am writing. I'm still anxious, but I linger there less. So I am currently working on two poems, if by "working on" we mean "thinking about and taking occasional notes." Actually, that is what we mean, and it's acceptable, qua writing.

Also, I am rediscovering, as we speak, the curative powers of cake. Cake still works.

You know what's way overrated?

Formative feedback, that's what.

I had the bright idea recently of asking my class for some formative feedback, midway through the semester. It's the first time I've taught this class, and I wanted to make sure that the students were getting what they wanted. We all are kind of swimming through this together, after all, me teaching it for the first time, them taking it for the first time, and wouldn't it be great to just, y'know, get some comments, some suggestions, some input, some helpful critique? so we could take this good thing, this class, la cosa nostra, this thing of ours, and make it better?

Oh yes. What a great idea. It made me feel super-virtuous and proactive. I asked a colleague to facilitate the feedback solicitation, which is to say, to ask the students to write down their answers to the following questions on a piece of paper:

a. What is going well in the class?

b. What would you like to change or improve?

Then my colleague was to collect the papers, the anonymous papers, and I would read them and ponder them, and this would enable me to improve things.

This improvement would, of course, come after the part where the comments burned a hole into the fabric of my soul for a couple of days. But that's to be expected.

Luckily, I was too busy today to even eat lunch, so there was no time to brood in any concrete way. Only in the lowgrade way, where I felt like I might be coming down with the flu or maybe I would perish from hunger. Either that or maybe I'm a terrible teacher. Probably the latter.

Well, tomorrow is class again, and I will just have to take myself, my books, my (souped-up, post-formative-feedback) preparation and my flu/hunger/I'm-a-bad-teacher ethos into the classroom again. And just try, that's all.

Possibly the laziest person alive?

The work just sits there and sits there and doesn't get smaller; yet somehow my reasons for not doing it alter slightly, flickeringly, chimerical, as the hours pass by and I drift from room to room.

Today, I have, however, read the entire paper, discussed its contents with the historian, gone with him and Bruiser to the dog park, uploaded a ton of photographs to flickr, played with my grandson a little, and pondered my lassitude. Pondered it, I say. Deeply. Penetratingly. As the hours pass by.