Speak Clearly

Of course, there comes a point where the difference between “dead” and “too frigging busy” is, shall we say, difficult to distinguish.

I’ve actually been meaning to post here for… weeks. Months? Yeah, months. I just keep getting distracted by other things.

(And why, Em, are you posting now, at the frog-forsaken hour of 5 a.m.? The answer comes down to this: it’s 5 a.m., I’m up to finish working on a paper, and IJ seems to be down, so I can’t do my normal paper kvetching there.)

There are actually lots of things that I keep meaning to do, but either keep running out of time to do them in or when I do have the time for doing them, I don’t have the inclination. Life’s funny like that, eh?

In the potentially near future, I might put up a picture of all the books that I’ve read this year. I like keeping track of my reading, but I’ve been busy, and haven’t had much time to do it… and a lot of my reading comes from .pdfs and photocopies of journal articles. Those photograph much less impressively, but I reckon I can show you my two (!) binders of secondary-reading doom regardless. Just as soon as I lug them home from my other office, anyway.

(I will never, for the record, get tired of being able to say that.)

The cats continue well; squirrely and over-active and inscrutable in the way only cats can be. Fraser chases his own tail even when he’s not on a catnip high, and Kowalski only drinks water from the bathtub tap. Kowalski also assumes that I cannot use a computer unsupervised for fear of ninja attacks, and supervises my every internet move from a position on my shoulder. He worries terribly when I’m at work and therefore away from his monitoring purr.

Eventually, or so the longer-time residents of the area tell me, it will stop snowing. I look forward to this with anticipation. May’s not too far off, right? Right?

I would tell you more, but it’s going on 5:20 now, and I really should get that paper wrapped up, seeing as I need to get it into my professor’s mailbox before 8 a.m.

You know, I would swear that it was just Monday. Er, last Monday, that is.

Taking three real classes is significantly more challenging than taking 1.5 real classes, which is about what I expected but still has my mind kind of spinning. *rueful* So much reading, so few hours in the day.

Still, I’m not overwhelmed yet, and I figure that if I just make myself stay on task and keep myself from screwing around and procrastinating, I’ll probably survive.

All things considered, the first day of class couldn’t have gone any more swimmingly. I lectured, I swore, I made jokes, they laughed and looked intimidated as seemed appropriate, and I made all the AV equipment bend to my will.

I even have an AV key for the entire semester. (I’m not sure, but I think I may have tempted the program director into iniquity: last semester, she was complaining about not having enough AV keys for the entire department, and how the IT department wants $15 for a single new key, and I said, “What, are they special? Can’t you just go down and get copies made?” And her eyes went big and she said, “Hmmmm.” And suddenly this semester everyone has an AV key permanently.)

*really quite pleased*

Now to go finish writing up assignment sheets and the syllabus, and to get the reading for 580 out of the way.

*glee* Today I got boots and dress shoes (both on sale) and new cookie sheets and a tea-strainer thing for my office and most importantly…

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Mine.

Mineminemineminemineminemine.

I love me a good sale. $150 off the regular price! Free two-day shipping! What’s not to love, I ask you. It’s even in a tolerable color! (I would have preferred dark blue or maybe one of the darker greens, but black with chrome is more than acceptable.)

Purrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

*rubs her dragon paws together and gloats some more*

Yes, I’m still alive. And now that the semester’s over, I even have time to breathe and futz around on the internet.

(Not, mind you, that I wasn’t futzing around on the internet, even in the middle of writing final papers due in three hours, but now I have time to do it without worrying about repercussions.)

Grades came out today, and I managed to come up with As in both of my classes, and satisfactories in the ones that don’t give grades proper. *amused* I really wasn’t expecting an A in one of those classes, given that the final paper reflected that I was writing it at the last minute, but I suppose my high participation grade saved me. I suppose it’s good that I’m just the argumentative sort, because I suppose me arguing with people looks like participation to the professor.

Heh. Shows what she knows.

In any case, it gives me a proper new year’s resolution: stop procrastinating and get to work on those projects early in the semester. Also, outlining and rough drafts are going to be my new best friends. Or something like that, anyway.

In conclusion, a picture:
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Why is the devil in Kowalski?

Why does Fraser aid and abet him?

Why are my cats determined that rolls of toilet paper are the devil, and must be destroyed?

Nadine used me as an example for her class the other day (much like I used her as an example to mine, when I was trying to explain they’re/there/their and shame my students with the fact that people from other countries whose English is a second or third language understand English better than they do).

See, I had emailed my students on a Monday to remind them to bring copies of their rough drafts to our Wednesday class. This information was on the syllabus as well. I added a postscript to the email to tell them that I was serious, and that if they weren’t prepared when they came to class, they would be counted absent.

Well, as I expected, a couple of them showed up without their drafts.

So I sent them home for being unprepared.

Nadine related this story to her class (in a “See? It could be worse, folks.” kind of way) and her students asked for my name, just so they could be sure not to land in my section of 112 next spring, because apparently I am “mean.”

Ah, life is good.

So now they aren’t just maintaining their stop-loss programs, they’re spamming .edu mail accounts.

I just got an email from a gmail domain, from a “lt Smith” telling me all about how awesome it is in the Marines.

Yeah, sorry. I don’t think so, pal. I’ve already reported you as a spammer.

Dear Gubmint:

Maybe, if you can’t get enough warm bodies to go off and die in the Middle East to make your plans to invade Iran feasible, you should rethink the whole thing.

Just a thought.

No love,

Em.

PS. Missing all those gay people you’ve kicked out yet?

Yeah, I’m cranky today. You’d be too, if your students were only half-assing their papers (in spite of being given lots of inclass time to work on them, plus a whole extra weekend).

Grar.

I have a housefly, at least for the next few minutes. The cats are stalking it, with varying levels of success. Kowalski just launched himself off the arm of the couch after it. He had a moment of hangtime, which was just long enough for him to get an expression of, “Oh, shit,” before he hit the floor.

I may have hurt something laughing.

Grad school continues apace; last weekend was fall break and I swear to you that I meant to get more done than I actually did. Grant you, what I did was read Sheri S. Tepper novels all weekend, which does in fact have something to do with my final paper for my literary theory class, so it wasn’t a total waste. This past week, though, which I was supposed to be using to read for the annotated bibliography I’m building for my other final paper… ah, well. That didn’t happen so much. What did happen was a lot of paper-grading and a fair bit of fanfic-writing. The upside to that is I don’t have to grade again till the twenty-second, and I’m in a damn good mood from the writing high. The downside is that I really need to start hauling ass on the stack of reading.

Currently I’m working through Barthes-Baudrillard-Derrida and my mind is being blown by the notion of the death of the author and what that might have to do with fanfic. I’ll have to ponder that some more, once I grok the whole structuralist-poststructuralist-deconstruction thing.

…ah, the cats seem to have caught the fly. They look so disappointed, bless their sadistic little hearts.