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.

Mid-Winter Break

This winter break is a glorious respite from the haggard overwork of grad. school life. Not that I don't enjoy school--I really do--but I was certainly on the cliff's dangerous edge for awhile peering over straight into the abyss. Of course, this doesn't mean that I won't return to that edge once break is over, but I'm hoping that I will be more prepared to handle the challenges it will present. Also, the paper that I'm supposed to write over the break has been haunting my mind for the last several days. I haven't written anything more on it, nor I have done any of the necessary reading for it to do a good job.

I have been to the beach on a mini-vacation for three days. Every trip to the beach is far too short. If you are able to spend a week or more at the coast during the off-season, I truly recommend it. Nothing compares to the stormy sea and the wind-tossed galleon-like clouds sailing above it.

I also have seen the third installment of The Lord of the Rings movie, and I must say that I really enjoyed it. In a way, it is a shame that the trilogy is over, but with the smashing monetary success this thing has had at the box-office, it won't take a genius to predict more sword and sorcery movies will be showing up in theatres in the coming year or two. Let's hope these new movies are more like The Lord of the Rings, and less like Legend or that Val Kilmer movie, Willow, entertaining as they are in their own way.

The Restaurant

Today, I was incredibly unproductive. Instead of grading exams like I should have done, or doing the laundry that has been persistently and silently building up in the hallway--a monument to soiled clothing--I spent most of the day watching television and surfing the internet. Most of what was on television wasn't any good, and when I think about the other things I could have done to waste time besides watching the tube--like read a good book, catch up on extra sleep, or even getting out of the house to watch a movie--I sink further into murky swamps of regret. Yet, there's still time to get all of the exams graded by tomorrow, so I'm not terribly worried.

I've been thinking about the last few weeks of grad. school. After the last day of one of my grad. school classes, a student whom I'll call Martha arranged a get-together at one of the local Italian restaurants--a small place with a nice atmosphere, but also obviously trying way too hard to be chic at the same time; it was a little overpriced for what it was. (You can dress a college kid up as a fancy French waiter and make him look like he has all the class in the world, but he is just a college kid after all, and in the presence of other college students like ourselves, he will easily slip into discussions about Spongebob Squarepants and college football.)

To digress for the moment, Martha is the other T.A. for the same ENG104 class that I T.A. for as well. We shared the T.A. workload over the course of the term. Although I envy Martha for her restless energy, it's an energy that she once revealed causes trouble for her. She's one of those women who are always doing three things at once, who always volunteers for too many projects, and cannot say no to people. Consequently, she suffers the physical result of such academic and social super-heroism in anxiety and unexplained night panics. She says that people often praise her for what is, essentially, her inability to relax and take it easy.

I was the first person to arrive at the restaurant, even though, by my watch, I was only five minutes early. I thought Martha would have already been there acting as host. Thus, I identify myself 'Nerd' for displaying typical nerd behavior--I showed up first. However, I apparently wasn't the only to arrive early. Only a minute after I walked through the door, someone else from the class arrived, let's say her name is Michelle. I suspect that Michelle was waiting in her car and must have seen me walk in, inwardly laughing at me for being the Nerd who didn't think to wait in the car like she did. Martha and her husband showed up just a few minutes later, and everyone else drifted in over the next twenty minutes and found their way to our table in a dim corner.

Overall, the dinner was nice and the conversation was okay. People mostly talked about their plans for the winter break; I am practically the only person not leaving the state to visit family. Yet, the part that has been bugging me ever since that night was the feeling like I did not fit in 100%. These students are a diverse group except in one regard--they all come from upper-middle-class backgrounds and have parents with advanced degrees. My background is consistently blue collar, and has been for several generations. Books learning was something to be suspicious of. (My grandfather likes to tell the story about how he quit the ninth grade because he did not want to do a book report. He never returned to school and joined the army instead.) Consequently, I did not have many ways to relate to my fellow students, except to ask if their papers were done, and how the weather was going to be where they were traveling. As you can see, we had scintillating conversation over over-priced spaghetti. (Please note the irony in the previous sentence.) It seemed most people were trying to vie for Martha's attention, or participate in the slightly bawdy conversation at the other end of the table. Whenever the woman directly across from me tried to engage me in conversation, I had the sense she was searching desperately for ways to force a topic of discussion. It seemed I wasn't an interesting enough person to talk to as much as I was a rather boring, slightly challenging, assignment.

I'm not sure why all of this has been pressing in my mind lately, except that I know it has something to do with my feelings toward grad. school. Everything is all jumbled together and I don't know what the connection is. Of course, I also don't want to overthink it either. Without delving too deep, I suspect that it has a bit to with competition. Directly confronted with fellow students having a good time at dinner, who have all the assignments completed, and who, while claiming to have had serious trouble with their assignments during different parts of the term, seem to have it together--the same way sports teams talk about a minor slip-up in the championship game they've won by a landslide.

This may be my last post for a week or more. I'm going on my winter vacation to the coast, where I hope to relax and prepare for the upcoming term. Even though it is cliche to say so, I'll be a little wiser and will have a better idea about what is involved to do well. God willing, it will be a great new start.

The Almost-Last Day

Today is the last official day of the term. The campus has largely emptied of students and faculty, and now is largely haunted by janitorial staff, student workers at the library trying not be bored, and more than a few overworked grad. students haggardly trudging through the darkened hallways of buildings that are the seat of their variously chosen fields. As I am the T.A. for an ENG104 class, I still have about twenty more exams to grade by Monday; Tuesday is the last day for the professor to submit grades. Thus, tomorrow morning, I will be making the trip back to the campus and my office to get them done. My office, a depressing yet workable space suffused with fluorescent light, is less depressing in the morning when there is more natural light. Also, as none of the other four people I share it will be working that day, I'll have it all to myself.

In a desperate frenzy of work (lamentably uncompleted), I have been able lucky enough to have a laptop checked out to me steadily for three days. Three days! Mind you, this is no small feat as one is allowed to check a laptop out only in four hour increments. Thus, I have been at the library checkout desk requesting to extend my time at least four times a day during the second half of the week, the last request for each day being an overnight checkout.

I'm dearly hoping that I'll be able to work out something over the winter break that will allow me to purchase a computer. Even if I lived on rice cakes for the rest of the year, sold my blood every day, and scrounged through all the cushions from all the couches I ever sat on for loose change, I still wouldn't have the money. My only hope is a financial aid program, which more and more seems like a tenuous gamble on my future, the bet being a PhD and a good job against a huge debt that is accumulating as I write these very words. After an essentially demoralizing term, this bet is seeming less like a sure thing.

Beside completing all of the unfinished work that I have to do over the break, I'm intending to spend a lot of time reflecting on what I can do differently to make the next term go much more smoothly. Obviously, the first lesson I learned the hard way is to start much more earlier on the term papers than I did. But, I'm sure there are other lessons that aren't as obvious and are going to take some exploration. Basically, I'm sure it all boils down to learning how to mush! A friend told me that what everyone should understand about grad. school is that on your first day, you're already four weeks behind. He's not kidding.

The Winds of Obsolescence

Most of the computers that I have been using on campus do not have a floppy drive, something that presents a real problem when I need to save my work for another day. In the past, I've e-mailed my assignments to myself through the internet, using internet mail as free storage device. Normally, this technique works pretty well, except I have to spend about five to ten minutes formatting my paper as the email systems not only take out bold, italics, and indentations, but do not even pretend to consider such things like margins or font. When you're an English major and are required to use strict MLA formatting, these picky things become important. While I may not remember the finer points of Husserl's concepts of phenomenology as it relates to criticism, I will always remember basic MLA formatting right until the day I, euphemistically speaking, slip from this mortal coil.

Consequently, I bought myself a jump drive aka flash drive, aka thumb drive, aka usb drive for forty bucks. Probably not a bargain, but a full twenty dollars cheaper than the college bookstore. When initially shopping around for a solution to my storage problem, I was confused by the constellation of names this thing had. (New technology has always had a problem with names, I suppose. Apparently, as a result of the invention of the telegraph and telegram, it was popular to refer to your autograph as an autogram. Not quite the same problem, but close enough to demonstrate the potential for confusion.) I call it a jump drive, as that is what it calls itself when it is plugged into a computer. Not wanting to be insensitive to my drive's preferences, I stick with jump drive.

Actually, I've had the drive for a couple of weeks now, but because my home computer is lamentably obsolete, I wasn't able to use it properly until today. Now, I have a sense of freedom that comes with the knowledge that I will not be subject to an internet connection for the retrieval of my papers. I know this is not a major milestone for most people, yet I humbly give thanks to all that is holy for this small grace proffered by the wizards of technology.

School and the Beach

After my last post, this one will probably seem anti-climatic. Suffice it to say, while I've not completely conquered all of the problems that currently beset me, I'm in much better shape than I was. I have until the end of the week to finish a paper that has been dogging me for far too long. I've got a decent start on it, so if I can finish it and earn a good grade--and I've been pleading with everything holy that I can--then I will have survived my first term of graduate school. One of the things that has been relatively easy to do has been reading How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez for the ENG104 class that I'm a teaching assistant for. It's nice not to worry (or read) about high literary theory for awhile and just enjoy something good to read.

Yet, despite the implication given from my last few blogs, I do have a life outside of school. And, no, I'm not talking about the too much television I've watched over the last two weeks. I'm planning to go to the beach over the winter break. I love visiting the beach during the off season when everything is gray and raining. There are hardly ever any people around this time of year, except when it gets a little closer to Christmas. For some reason, a select group of people love to celebrate the holiday at the coast. As for myself, I'm going to enjoy the atmosphere and the rest. I plan to make a couple of fires right on the beach, and maybe I'll even try to hike a little.

Weeks of Change

I imagine that one day I will look back on this period of my life and recognize it as one of the handful times, less than five or six, where the decisions I have made have significantly shaped my future. I'n twenty five years or so, I'm sure I will have forgotten about this blog, I will not remember my address at the apartment where I currently live, but I will remember these last few weeks as one of my lowest ebbs, the consequences of which will last for a long time.

I apologize if this sounds a little dramatic; it's not meant to be. It's my way of verbalizing a recognition I've been slowing coming to for the last couple of weeks. I'm sure that I'll overcome these present difficulties eventually. The next two weeks will be pivotal.

The Horror

The first major part of my assignment is complete, but only twenty nine pages later. (I managed to turn it at the last possible minute, just barely). Never have I written anything so long in my entire life, never have I come so close to cursing out my computer printer to verbal oblivion, or been so close to moving deep into the woods to spend the rest of my word-wearied-life living at the top of large fir tree with my imaginary animal-friend Bob, the blue budgie. Like Mr. Kurtz in Conrad's story, I came this close to the edge and saw "the horror--the horror."

Of course, it's not yet over, I still have the second part of the assignment to write. After a few days of Thanksgiving holiday stuffing myself with turkey, I'm hoping that I've replenished the mental and physical capacity to handle it. Tomorrow will be a full day of work, from early morning to late night (possibly early morning again). I'm hoping the second part will come easy, but I'm trying not to be delusional. Blog entries may be sparse again for next couple of weeks.

The 8-Ball Blues

No, I haven't disappeared; I've been really busy, and okay, I'll admit it, a little depressed. The main reason for the blues, but not the only one, is that I've missed some real important due dates for the work that is currently on-going. And, as these things somehow always tend to coalesce into a personal fiasco, much like a tornado that spins everything into a blustery chaos, I've been taking the edge off these blues by watching television--precisely the absolute wrong thing to do with work pressing. As I say, a fiasco. Still, there's hope; I'll admit that too.

This certainly has been an interesting first term. While I'm usually not one to make predictions, a lesson I learned early on from the magic eight ball (After all, there's a reason why it's an eight ball and not, say, an eleven), I think the next term will go much more smoothly. I continue to hope so anyway.

Mental machinery

None of the gears in my brain appear to be willingly turning for me at the moment, and, thus, it is a challenge to think straight for more than few minutes at a time. Of course, I've no-one to blame for this condition except myself. You see, I only had two hours sleep last night because I absolutely had to have all of the ENG104 essays that have been oppresses my spirit for the past two weeks graded by this morning--which, fortunately, they were all graded by 5:00 a.m. However, I was only able to nap for two hours before going to that same class to hand them out.

Recently, I spoke with a friend, someone who has been through the grad. school experience, who told me that thing that you need to know is this: "On your very first day of class, you're already four weeks behind." That sums up my experience these last eight weeks rather well. The instructor for ENG104, who is very sympathetic and treats me and the other T.A. as (pseudo) colleagues, says that the work never really lets up the whole time you're in grad. school; the trick is to not stress out too much about it, and to try and do all of the work as it comes to you.

Since grading essays no longer burdens me, I can now focus my attention on the seminar paper that I need to have written by this Wednesday. So, it's back to the mind factory to browbeat masses of my brain cell into producing more thought from increasingly worn out mental machinery. C'est la vie!

Scholar Squalor

Alas, the work continues, and like the famous Frost poem, "I've miles to go before I sleep." Fortunately, one of the things that is helping me get a handle on the work is my discovery of the laptop loan program operated by the University's library. As a result of easier computing, Zhaf and his Cellar has a little more portability. Now, I can write and read from the comfort of my best study spot -- my own couch.

My main project continues to be the seminar paper that wil will be due in a couple scant weeks. I've not started writing it, but it is becoming clearer as a result of the research that I've been doing. Essentially, I'm trying to combine Mikhail Bakhtin's perspective of narrative discourse on a Tim O'Brien short story in his work "The Things They Carried." At this point, a reference to the Simpson's might be instructive.

Groundskeeper Willy: Hie ye hence from me heath!

Bart: Huh?

Groundskeeper Willy: What a'matter! Can't you understand English?

Like Bart, I'm still struggling to understand some of the jargon and terminology that is often used in academic writing. Even though it appears to be English, I begin to have my doubts. When Derrida writes about the "Heidegerrean destruction of meta-physics, of onto-theology, of the determination of Being as presence," I feel as if my head will explode. When De Man, trying to employ and Archie Bunker analogy (really, no kidding) writes, "it is a de-bunker rather than a 'Bunker,' and a de-bunker of the arche (or orgin), an archie Debunker such as Nietzche or Jaques Derrida for instance, who asks the question 'What is the Difference'," I feel as if I have completely slipped off the edge of the Earth and am spinning through a cold and inky space towards the twisting red eye of Jupiter.