Short notes to the very last students.

Dear ante-penultimate student,

Thank you for showing up for your appointment, and thanks for really trying hard all semester long--I observed it, your effort, and it was, in its persistent way, impressive. Inspiring, even. Thank you for saying that the course was 'amazing.' Maybe I needed to hear that, with no matter how many little mental caveats. Maybe I took a little snapshot of that bit of praise, mentally. Okay, maybe an actual snapshot. With my iPhone.

I'm so glad I was your teacher,

htms

k    

Dear penultimate student,

Thank you for being willing to attempt so many different kinds of writing this semester. Thank you, truly, for using the word 'genre' in such a way that I felt you understood what it means. Thank you for appreciating the library databases: it's true, they are a veritable miracle. (My words, but I think that's what you were getting at.)

You are the very reason that teaching feels--at the end of the semester--worthwhile,

htms

k k

Dear last student,

I know that you had an appointment at 8:40 p.m. But that appointment was, actually, for last Wednesday night. A week ago. This is why I wasn't in the chatroom tonight.

I think you see the conundrum, right?

Not holding it against you (much),

htms

k k k

Dear very last student,

I know it wasn't your fault--not remotely--that you had the very last appointment. The very last appointment on the very last day. It's true, then, that I was running on the very last drops of consultational fuel. Fumes, actually, if you want to know the fact of the matter.

So when you didn't show up at the appointed hour, should I feel bad that I felt sneakingly relieved? I was alone in my office. Alone in the chatroom. And I watched the digital timekeeper in the upper right hand corner of my screen tick the minutes off. I watched for new entrants into the chatroom. Nope. And...nope.

Is it wrong that I lifted my arms like Rocky Balboa, after he reached the top of those Philadelphia stairs, and gave a silent cheer?

Well, is it?

htms

Living in the material world, or why I still don't have an oven.

Dear America,

Today when I was driving home from an engagement, I stopped at a traffic light. My phone vibrated. I glanced at the number. It was Lowe's. I thought: my oven! I pressed the button for speaker.

Me: Hello?

Lowe's Guy: Hi, this is Dave from Lowe's. [not his real name.]

Me: Am I ever glad to hear from you!

Lowe's Guy, aka Dave: Well, maybe not.

Me: [pause] Oh, yeah?

Dave from Lowe's: Your double wall oven arrived at our warehouse.

DIGRESSION: The way I remember this part of the conversation, there was terrifying and foreboding music playing, like really really dire Muzak, in the long pauses between these statements.

Dave from Lowe's: But the box was damaged.

[terrifying minor chords with the entire string section, heavy on the bass viols]

Dave from Lowe's: So we rejected it.

[thunderous, cacophonous crash of instruments in a downward slide]

Dave from Lowe's: So you're screwed.

Actually, Dave from Lowe's did not say that. What he said instead was:

Dave from Lowe's: So we've ordered you a new oven. And we put a rush on the shipping. So we should have it in four or five days.

DIGRESSION: The music in between the above statements is cynical. Like, flutes, but a computer-generated flute. It was cynical, with a mean-girl edge.

Me:  .............. [crying on the inside]

Dave from Lowe's: ............... [I hate my job.]

Me: So you're saying--I know you can't promise--but you're saying you'll have it by Friday?

Dave from Lowe's: [beating a hasty retreat] It will be in our warehouse by Friday. We'll have it here--

Me: --in your store?

Dave from Lowe's: --right, by Sunday.

Me: --so that means--

Dave from Lowe's: --we'll give you a call just as soon as it's in the store to set up an install.

Oh, America! Here are the things I am preparing myself for:

1. The oven will not be installed before the wedding.
2. The oven will not be installed before Christmas.
3. What of the cookies?
4. I will possibly live in this existential hell called NO OVEN forever.

Dave from Lowe's thinks I might have the oven installed by Wednesday. That's next Wednesday. But he doesn't believe it enough to actually plan for an install by Wednesday. Everything is contingent. Just like all meaning. The world is a dangerous, unplannable, unpredictable, damaged box place with no ovens, is the conclusion I'm drawing. This conclusion is inescapable, if you happen to live in this cold, lonely, contingent, ovenless, without cookies place, i.e., the Megastore.

In other news, my iPod Classic is apparently broken and Apple will not fix it.

Since life has no apparent meaning, maybe I'll take up a dangerous vocation, like, I don't know, vaping. Or base jumping. There sure as hell aren't any cookies to eat around here, that's for sure.

I am mise en abîme, for real.

htms

A few notes on sleep, sickness, and slow rising.

1. Two successive weekends, I've come up with a little cold to make me miserable.

2. Both of these little colds I can trace to bouts of insomnia, long stretches of not quite enough sleep, plus a magical dose of stress sprinkles.

3. A pause to note that there are so many more, and much worse, problems in the world that I am truly sorry that this is what I have to write about tonight. But there you are. I am on the upswing from Little Cold #2, but my eyes still feel hot and I took a nap of necessity this evening, which on the one hand felt like a commandment from on high, and on the other hand is now making me nervous that I might not be able to fall asleep in an hour when I will want to be able to fall asleep.

4. Reiteration: other people have much worse problems. I know.

5. The other day, I wanted to say, when I was talking to my friend Kati, that I no longer stay up late or get up super early for things like grading or other projects. I wanted to say this, but let facts be submitted to a candid world:

• I stay up late, like, all the time. ALL the time.
• I never get up early to grade, NEVER, but I happen to have arisen super early to finish that talk I gave this past week. Stayed up late AND got up early.

So, in other words, I could not say this to my friend Kati. I had to admit that I am a serial stay-up-late-r, and that means I often don't get quite enough sleep.

6. Medicine. Naps. Dragging around. Feeling all hot-eyed. Etcetera. Staying home when the rest of the world is seeing movies. 

7. In a related matter: I hate getting out of bed like a shot, full of zip and ginger, ready to take on the world. In my ideal world, getting up would go like this:

• alarm goes off.
• I contemplate it.
• my eyes open, one at a time, then close again. For, like, a half an hour.
• I think about things while dozing. I think/doze.
• a half hour after the original alarm, I open my eyes again, one at a time. Depending on how that goes, I might keep them open, or I might close them again. For, like, fifteen more minutes.
• In the interim, I will have considered not working out, like, a dozen times. 
• But when I actually do get up, I put on my workout clothes and get it done.

8. In conclusion, waking up slow is the best and waking up like a shot is the worst. I would say this is a winter thing, but it's really applicable all year round. A slow wake up allows you to put your hands on your will to live. You really don't want to be walking around before you are fully situated vis a vis your will to live. You could hurt yourself, and that's a fact.

Just write.

The wreckage is such that it's hard to feel like saying anything is worth the words. Except that I wish there were something I could say, something I could threaten to withhold, some enactment, some words, some display, some theater, that would change it. All there is are the things that seem so paltry: write, email, call, connect. Just keep saying it. Just keep saying, we need meaningful gun control. Control, some system of controls.

This.
This.
This.


To the Honorable Representative Love, Senator Hatch, Senator Lee:

I am writing to express as clearly as I can my strong belief that we must:

1. establish universal background checks for people who want to purchase guns
2. establish much more serious and meaningful gun control efforts
3. allow the CDC to research the most effective kinds of gun control.

The gun lobby is a pernicious influence on policy related to gun violence in this country. It is unacceptable--it has never been acceptable, but it grows more intolerable by the day--that we allow, by our cynical indifference, mass gun violence to be perpetrated.

Please do not write and tell me that the second amendment protects the rights of individual people to own guns. Please do not write and tell me that the fetishization of the gun is what makes America America. Instead, please write to me and tell me that you are willing to do what is hard and courageous, and work on fixing this terrible failure of public policy. We can effectively end most gun violence by doing some fairly straightforward things. Other countries have done so. Please work on doing these sensible things, I beg you.

Lisa Bickmore
West Jordan

Done and done. And not quite done, actually.

M A N !!! has this semester been a whirl. I know, I know, all semesters are a whirl, but some are whirlier than others.

(p.s. did you know that autocorrect does not believe that 'whirlier' is a word? but 'whirler' is? well, aren't you fancy, autocorrect, with your auto-correcting ways. I'll show YOU a whirler, that's what.)

Anyway. Today at my work, at noon, I gave a little talk and it went well, I thought. And then we bound a dozen of those handmade books I can't stop talking about

w  a  i  t      I'll show you:

and then I came home and made brussels sprouts and purple potatoes hash, which is weird sounding but tasted super good, and THEN I consulted with one two three students and was stood up by a fourth and fifth W O E.

I would thrill you with the story of my daredeviltry in preparing the talk, but basically it involved not enough sleep for the second night in a row, plus additional risky decision making including last minute slides. BUT. The point is? I am now officially delirious, and I have this announcement to make:

[announcement:]  I AM DONE WITH ALL THE BIG DEAL STUFF FOR THIS SEMESTER.

And yet.

And yet?  I have, over the past three days, assembled a twelve-item list--that I am not sure is actually complete--of the things I still need to do before the end of the semester, and this list does not include the word 'grading.'

So, you know. Finished and yet not finished. Which is basically the semester and, as it turns out, life. Until, you know, you're dead. And I'm not dead yet. Ergo: twelve item list.

But now I really, really, really am going to bed,  THE END.

(sorry for all the shouting.)