Personal Battles

I seriously need to start thinking about the seminar papers that I have to write by the end of the term. And one of the paper needs to be at least eighteen pages long! I have never written a single paper that has been that long in my whole life. In one sense it should be good for me, but in the other sense--Holy Frijoles! What the hell am I going to say for eighteen pages? I've thought about writing about the events surrounding september eleventh and examine how people have created narratives as a way to help them cope, struggle, or overcome the trauma surrounding that day; essentially, this would be cultural criticism. Yet, I don't want to delve into the political issues surrounding that either, so I figure that I'm going to do something on a book about the Vietnam War. If I center it on a book, I will be closer to what I really want to do which is a study of language. But, as this early apprehension is boring you, I'll talk about the class I observed this morning (with no guarantees that it also won't be boring.)

For the most part, the class was a typical college writing course. The students were students, and the instructor was the instructor. I know this is tautology, but if you've been in a freshman writing course, then you'll know exactly what I mean. The one thing that seemed exceptional was a clique of about six guys in the corner who goofed off most of the hour. Yet, in an odd way, because they hated the essay that was assigned, they had the best discussion about it because they had to use critical thinking to pull the thing apart. One of the guys was obviously in the military because he wore a dress uniform--army, I think. I overheard a comment answering another guy's question where a machine gun hangs on your side when you sling it over your shoulder. I wonder if he ever thinks about going to Iraq. Briefly stated, everyone should read about 5 entries of Kevin Site's blog.

That's all for now. These papers are not going to write themselves. Besides if I write another thing today, it will an e-mail to my beautiful girlfriend, who I am looking forward to visiting in the Big City this weekend.

Cafe of Classes

Another study break. Primariliy, this entry will probably function more as a note for myself and as an encouragement to get ahead on all of my work. (But, I guess most of my blogs entries function that way.)

So, while I was sitting in the Library Cafe--a small busy, overpriced, but brightly lighted place--I got a call on my cell phone; the professor that I T.A. for wanted to talk. Holy Crap! What the hell did I do? Was it about the class discussion I missed because I overslept? Was it about the minor struggle we had over the class website? (I figured having one was a good idea, and she, essentially, didn't. She cited the need for personal interaction with the students, to which I reply: hunh?)

I had just finished a half hour meeting with one of her students to discuss revisions to his late paper. Innocently offensive, his paper associated the word "dark" with black people, drugs, and poverty. I had to explain to him and show him how what he meant was not what he wrote. I think he was shocked when I pointed it out to him.

When I told the professor where I was and what I was doing, she wanted to come over to talk in person, maybe even buy a sandwhich. Once arrived, she explained that she wanted to know if I would be able to teach by myself on the last day of class before finals week. There, apparently, is a disabilities conference for literature types, something which is the first of it's kind and is supposed to kick major you-know-what. As this professor has a son with cerebal palsy, she is really excited about going. Another fellow grad. student really wants to go, really wants my professor to go, and encouraged the professor to ask me if I would be able to cover for her. She apparently said, "Ask Zhaf to teach class that day. I've heard him talk in class. He can do it." I suspect half of my professor's excitement stems from the grad. student's excitement. Both have a personal connection to this issue.

Thus, as I am already going to be teaching two writing classes by myself for another grad. class, I am now going to be teaching two literature courses--one with the prof., and another by myself. So, in addition to the major grad. papers I should already be writing on, I am now going to have to teach four classes. As professor Frink would say: Great googly moog! I already don't get enough sleep. There's going to be a lot of pain in the glayving. Yet, it should be a learning experience for me; I just hope it might be for the students as well.

Night of the Living Deadlines

Okay, another quick entry for today. Even though I'm continually being smacked in the head by waves of work, I am managing to get some stuff done, which when I think about it is pretty incredible because I tend to suffer from the soul-sapping despair that accompanies a bunch of work that doesn't seem to have a clear or definite end. I stayed up far too late last night after working on the computer and managed to get four and half hours of sleep before returning to campus to begin the computer work all over again. I'm not kidding when I tell that I slept the sleep of the dead. I half surprised myself by not waking up and moaning "Brains! I need BRAAINS...grlahgggh."

The only thing that hasn't seemed to have worked out is the writing workshop appointments I have made to meet with students to discuss their assignment. I spent--and I am not kidding--about an hour and half nursing an over-priced coffee waiting for the student to arrive. Yet, I wasn't idle; I managed to complete plenty of reading, the sheer amount of which is an utter tyranny. Right now, I am checking my e-mail about once an hour, waiting for replies and confirmations from about five students for other appointments, so I don't have to wait that long again. (I can almost taste the panic expressed in their e-mails about the deadline. Time is devouring their equanimity and the remaining moments they have of non-panicked work on this assignment beast. As a fellow student, I can relate.) Actually, I wouldn't mind spending six or seven hours in the coffee shop, but I wasn't able to checkout a laptop over the weekend as I have been able to in the past, and thus am chained to a desktop computer in the grad. computer lab. Still, the work will continue tonight, and I am seriously looking forward to Tuesday when I can start my next paper which is due the following week: fun! (Feel the irony of last sentence! Taste the excitement of new assignments!)

Yet, I do enjoy my classes and consider myself lucky to have these kinds of opportunities to learn, something which I am indeed doing. The challenge is trying to avoid being zombified, which as reflected in the movies, means more long nights to come.

Work, Work, Work

It seems that I have been having a relatively hard time keeping up with this blog. I must admit that I feel that I am still adjusting to the demands of scholarly life. And yet, I feel that I have more of firm grip on this term than I did the first, even though there is way more work to do. Besides three graduate seminars, I'm apprenticing with a more experienced grad. student so I can learn how to eventually teach freshman writing. Yet, perhaps more importantly, my personal life (read: relationship) has been solidfying into a kind of stability, but with the realization that relationships take an enormous amount of work. It's nothing that can be taken for granted. I'm still pretty much committed to maintaining a daily blog for the forseeable future. Yet, with the amount of reading that I've had to do, with the looming deadlines of seminar papers rising on the horizon, I don't think that I'll be able make it a daily thing. Instead, I think I'll try to shoot for three or four posts per week. I hoping that I can devote more time to the quality of the entries as the quantity may go down. (But as a plea to my handful of readers, don't abandon me yet. There's more to come.)

I don't have much else to say, except that when I think of something I'll try to remember this blog and share it here first.

FSI (Fiasco Scale Index)

Ugh! Today has been nothing short of miserable. Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and Earthquakes all have some particular system of designating how their particular event measures up. For example, a class five hurricane is immensely more destructive than a mere tropical storm, an earthquake that measures 9.0 on the richter scale will level anything standing, while a 1.0 or a 2.0 will be barely felt. Therefore, I propose we develop a system whereby horrible days can be scientifically quantified. A miserable day can either be a mild headache-inducing nuisance (1.0) to a full-blown fiasco (5.0). My day so far ranks between disaster and fiasco, a respectable 4.5.

Furthermore, this has been one of those rare days when a single event cascades beyond your control and spins quickly into a meandering chaos. In brief: I woke up late. Once in my car, I realized that I left my financial aid check at home and had to retrieve it. As I work up late, all of the parking spaces were full; therefore, I spent slightly over an hour following people to their cars imitating a very large vulture. I circled three separate parking lots before fate relieved me from that purgatory. I had to park illegally for fifteen minutes to return the laptop I checked out in order to avoid an automatic twenty dollar fine. (At one point, I seriously considered driving back home so I could take the bus. It would have taken me about the same amount of time to do that as it did to find parking.) To cap things off, even though I rechecked out a laptop from the library, I haven’t been able to find a wireless connection, despite the notices posted everywhere that the area I am sitting in should allow a wireless connection to the Internet. If this recount seems a little tame as fiascos go, it is purely because I couldn’t really detail all of the other minor annoyances that have merged into a perfect storm. I still have about two days of work to cram into a single day (today) and therefore need to bury my head in some books. I sincerely hope that today will be much better.

Theme Song

Another day done, and I admit: I am beat tired. I'm getting to the point where I'm realizing that I can't spend more time doing homework because there is only so much time in a day. Even though I've been working pretty solidly from early morning to late at night, I still have work and tasks that have to be left for the next day. Therefore, it appears that the new challenge is how to be more productive and get more work done in the same amount of time.

I'm not sure how other grad. students feel about it, but it seems that although there is more work to complete this term, psychologically it is not as difficult as the first term. All of the initial adjustments of the first term are complete, and now all that is left here on out is to discover how to embody what one professor has said "grace under pressure." A potentially emotionally draining experience, one has to figure out ways to keep the spirits up. Everyone should have something like this to cheer themselves up. If everyone could have their own theme song, the world would be a perfect place.

Study Break

This is an official break from studying as I am struggling to keep my mind interested in the material that I have to read for tomorrow. The subject matter should be engaging enough, but the presentation has my brain pleading for any kind of respite, hence: the blog. I could tell you about my day, that it has been a full day of non-stop work, that I still have hours of work to do tonight, and that I won't get all of it finished by the end of the evening. But I won't. My mind needs a break from work, so I'll tell you about my school life as a teenager.

Surprising absolutely no-one who knows me, I wasn't exactly the most popular kid in class. If all of your teen-years-life could reduced to The Breakfast Club analogies or comparisons--I was a cross between the Anthony Michael Hall (Brian) and Ally Sheedy (Allison) characters. I had all of the interests and mannerisms of the nerd, artfully combined with the odd creepiness of the freak. (Someone needs to develop a personality test based on that movie if they haven't done so already.) My bushy-Yahoo-Serious hair and weird habit of reading books while sitting on the floor of the hallways were about the only thing that distinguished me to the rest of the student population. Looking back, I have to say that I sort of hated middle school and high school, purely because of the social hell I'm assuming everyone has to endure in their own way. Thank goodness it's all over.

Bengal Blindness

I've only a couple of minutes to make a post, but it has been so long since I've been able to write anything here, that I figured it was now or never. I haven't given up on the whole blog thing; it has just been the mere fact that I am still behind on a lot of work that I'm slowly chipping away at to get done. For the curious, there is a major paper that I need to have completely done in the next two or three weeks. Combine that with the several novels I will have to read by the end of the term, and the numerous hours that I will need to log in the library doing research. Neither here or there.

Two things that I figured I would mention here. The first is that I had dream about a tiger--a real Bengal tiger that I was chasing around the northwestern United States train stations. What does this dream mean? I haven't the foggiest. All I remember is that I had to take the train to Seattle to find the tiger there and help people negotiate their way around him. Now that I'm remembering a little bit, I suppose what I was really doing was lecturing them on what do when they encountered a Bengal tiger in the train station--what to avoid when face to face with one, how to know what a tiger will do. (Specifically, never eat a hamburger in front of a tiger. It might make him hungry.) I'm not sure if the tiger got around by using the train itself, but the image a tiger in a business suit taking the six o'clock to Portland or Vancouver is rather funny--at least it is to me.

The other thing is the short non-fiction essay I had to read in preparation for my class. In it, a woman described what it was like to have her eyesight slowly deteriorate from childhood to her present condition as a middle-aged woman. Very nearly blind, she described what it was like to have worn contact lenses for the first time as a teenager, something which was a brand new technology then. Although I am not very nearly blind like she is, I have worn glasses ever since the second grade. I distinctly remember what a revelation it was to see individual trees on top of the distant hills that I frequently looked at--or how crisp and clear the moon was during some of the brighter nights. I had not known that I was missing anything, so to see it for the first time as a seven-year-old or so was truly a shock. Since then, I have a somewhat complicated relationship with my glasses. A part of my personality, they're something that I don't think I'll ever give up for contact lenses or corrective surgery. And I really don't want to.

That's all for now. I have to get to class now. As for future blog entries, I'll try to post more frequently, but I can't promise nothing. To employ a tired cliche, work will have to come before pleasure.

Updates

There haven't been many updates as there used to be. The first, and most obvious, reason for this was the mid-winter break. I did not have regular access to a fast computer, nor could I waste an hour or more of time fooling around on the internet. As a result, even if there was something that I wanted to post, I couldn't. Now, despite easy access to a computer, I need to devote more time to other things. All my intentions to write my blog with some kind of regularity during the school year are melting much like the ice that covers nearly everything outside. I could update the poll, put up the books I am currently reading on the left side bar, and work on the commenting system, but I really have to budget my time, and as far as things go, this blog requires an invest in time that I can't afford right now. Perhaps these updates will occur later.

As a side note, the comments here have really picked up. I wonder just who could possibly be making these insightful remarks providing me with much needed feedback. Whoever this person is, I'm guessing she's female and that she is assuredly much hotter than the surface of the sun--a billion times hotter. But that's just a guess. [As the fellows in Monty Python's Flying Circus might say: wink, wink, nudge, nudge.]

Alice B. Toklas

The midwinter break is over, and I am now once again at the computer lab getting ready for school tomorrow. The break has been tumultuous but not disastrous. Before it had started, I envisioned myself spending at least two weeks on the couch vegetating beneath the cool blue glow of video games and television. That did not happen. But right now, I don't have much time to explain what did happen as there is still much to get done before tomorrow morning--which, by the way, holds the promise of even more snow. Perhaps a school cancellation? I doubt it. (There happens to be slightly over two feet of snow at my parents house, one of the many places I've been these last few weeks.)

What I really want to mention is the odd dream I've had recently where I distinctly remembered the name of Alice B. Toklas. What creeps me out about her name is that I have never heard of her before my dream; yet she is a real person who lived and died well over thirty years ago. What's more, she happened to be a literary figure and therefore falls in the purview of my professional life. I'm not one to usually believe in the paranormal, so I figure her name must have registered in my subconscious somehow and has decided to come out only recently. I have fallen asleep in front of the television a few times which could explain her name lodging in my brain; or else, someone just outside the range of normal conversation had been talking about her and I absently must have absorbed that mention. Yet, I do have a certain, if uneasy, regard for the mystical and spiritual nature of humanity, so I wonder if I should assign some meaning to my fastening onto this name. Should I study Toklas? Will her work figure in mine somehow? Was her name on the handout for the reading group I'm in but don't remember. I'm sure her name will crop up again somewhere, but I'm not sure when.