No more severed penises! (Made you look.)

I was absolutely delighted this morning to discover that it's Thursday. What a great day! What a wonderful day! What a gift, a blessing, a smack on the lips by a fuzzy puppy! 

What makes this Thursday so great?

1. It's not Wednesday! Wednesday was a pain: two classes, two observations of colleagues' classes, two long meetings, a bunch of short meetings with advisees and panicky students, PLUS horrible dark cold wet gloomy weather. My calendar had exactly one blank spot, a 20-minute stretch I could devote to all my course preps and grading OR put my feet on the desk and relax. Which would you choose?

2. It's not Tuesday! Don't even get me started about Tuesday. Tuesday was a train wreck wrapped in a typhoon bundled up in soggy spinach and left to rot for a week in a Detroit dumpster.  In fact, Tuesday was so awful that all future Tuesdays ought to slink off the calendar and hide in a dark closet trembling in shame. But will they? Probably not.

3. Elvis has left the building! Three of the long meetings that crowded my calendar this week focused on our current Messiah, an external consultant who will produce brilliant results if he can get us to do everything he says he can get us to do, which remains to be seen. It's great to get an outside perspective on every single thing we're doing wrong, but piling all that on top of horrible weather is just gratuitous suffering. Now, though, he's gone away and left us alone to dive right into this huge task of examining data and developing action plans OR putting our feet on our desks and relaxing. Which would you choose?

4. No class observations today! I've been immensely enjoying observing my colleagues' teaching and I've learned something interesting in every class, but if I shove one more commitment into my calendar, it's going to collapse like a house of cards constructed on a camel's back during a sandstorm in the Sahara.

5. No severed penises today! Yesterday I observed a brilliant lecture on the male reproductive system, a highly clinical and scientific presentation accompanied by full-color diagrams and Latin terms, but I was the only non-scientist in the room and perhaps my literary studies have endowed me with an overdeveloped ability to visualize metaphors, so I couldn't help cringing every time I heard a line like "If you cut off the penis right here..." or "Let's take a cross-section of this penis...."

6. It's not Friday! What awaits on Friday? Two classes, one two-hour meeting (important but potentially exhausting), another pile of papers to grade, another round of advisee meetings, AND my final class observation of the week. Tomorrow's topic: the female reproductive system. I'm sure it will be brilliant and enlightening and wonderful and entirely lacking in severed penises, but I'm tired and I don't expect to get any less tired by tomorrow afternoon. So can we just call off Friday and declare a National Napping Day?