The ordeal.

It's Tuesday, it must be time to whine.

1. Why is it that getting up in the morning--and by getting up, I mean getting going--is such a project for me? Once last semester, I think it was, I thought I was going to get an 8 a.m. teaching slot by virtue of some evil shenanigans inherent in the scheduling process, and I was all, SERIOUSLY, you guys, that is a terrible idea. And it's not because I'm lazy--although it's possible that I am--it's because 8 a.m. does not AGREE with me. As in, 8 a.m. wants to pick a fight with me, if I try to do something serious instead of, say, think about what outfit I might wear, or contemplate taking the dog for a walk in an hour, or thinking about breakfast. Which is to say, I can think, the people, but I cannot do.

2. Yes, shut up, I know, I would not last one minute in a job in the so-called real world. Which is why, the people, I am not there. And also, I am not teaching at 8 a.m., ever. My chair said, "But you'd do it if the program needed you to." And I said, "Sure," by which I meant, "Not even if you promised me the world in the form of a banana split with all the shoe money in China: in other words, hell to the no."

3. So, by the time I am in shape to actually do stuff, the morning feels frittered away. Even though I have decided on an outfit, taken the dog for a walk, and eaten breakfast. Gaaa.

4. After all that productivity GOSH I get started on my grading. Thanks to my colleague for her excellent presentation on audio grading! I launched into some fine commenting on student work on Audacity, which was great, but then Bruiser started barking his ferocious there's-a-gangster-at-the-door bark, which meant, of course, that the postman was drawing nigh, with a package from the Beijing University of Language and Culture for running son--a package of very very important papers. So: dog barking in the background of the student comments; containing the Big Bruise from enthusing the postman to death; and now, figuring out how to get an expeditious student visa for running son so he can go abroad. Again.

5. Off to school. Successful consultation with a student. Successful kvetching with a colleague. Successful meeting with a VP. Successful run-in with another of my students. Off to a big fat meeting. Survived it.

6. Sitting in the busy student center, I attempt, with my headset, to comment on a couple more student drafts. But my laptop doesn't want to locate the LAME file which turns Audacity files into mp3s. Woe. Another student lingers, then says, "I recognize your voice." Turns out he's another of my online students. That is a weird, but increasingly common, phenomenon--they hear your voice, they know you.

7. Another meeting, a dinner meeting.

8. In a race against time, I finish writing and producing another screenr presentation, with a fair amount of gnashing of teeth. I draft a piece on shared governance. I draft an agenda for a meeting tomorrow. I draft an e-mail. I locate many, many attachments to attach to the e-mail. I send it. Somewhere in here, I watch The Good Wife.

9. At 11:55 p.m., I begin thinking about possible outfits for tomorrow, because there is an 8 a.m. Board of Trustees meeting.

EIGHT A.M.

Woe.

tags: whiny whiners and the people who tolerate them

Oh, SURELY. Absolutely! Surely!

Back when I proposed my sabbatical, I said this:

Because the process of submitting this manuscript [my other manuscript] has been lengthy—which is not unusual in the unfathomable world of poetry publishing—I have also been writing new work, which I now have compiled into a rough manuscript that I have been tentatively calling Surburban Ode or Suburban Elegy or Imploding Elegy.  I plan to use the time during the sabbatical to revise and shape this next manuscript.  The poet Jane Kenyon once said, “Poetry has an intensity about it, which is one of its loveliest qualities, but that’s also the thing that fatigues you when you’re working on it.  There’s a pitch of emotion in poems that you must rise to.  Every time you work on the poem you must rise to it again” (in The Language of Life, ed. Bill Moyers, 224).  The open space of a sabbatical surely offers a writer a wonderful circumstance in which to prepare to rise to that pitch of intensity.

May I just say that my new work, rough manuscript, big pile o' writing, whatever you want to call it--nightmare? arrgh?--is flummoxing me.  I need an extremely large table, and better judgment than I actually have, I think. Yes, a large table, exquisite judgment--or else a match.  A match! That's the ticket!

That "surely" in the last sentence of that proposal--that kind of sounds like bullshit to me.