Okay, so now my dungeon is an island. The best thing about living in the basement has always been the colleague in the next office, but this morning she moved to the great big corner office to serve as department chair, so until some new hires arrive this summer, I'm surrounded by empty offices. Great. Fine. I'll just sit over here in the corner and molder away all by myself. (Can you hear the tiny violin?)
I shouldn't say this out loud but I'm actually caught up--on everything. Well, everything capable of being caught up on. (Caught-up-on-able?) But I can't leave because I'm showing a film this evening, so I need to stick around campus all day long. I would go out and enjoy the lovely spring weather--except that's SO last weekend. Yes, it's snowing. And cold. And gray, damp, and dungeonlike, even outside.
Tomorrow everything will change, except maybe the weather. Thanks to an excess of really horrible planning, I'm requiring all of my students to turn in papers or drafts this week, which means that starting tomorrow I'll have to entirely give up sleep or else learn to respond to drafts while eating, driving, and showering. ("This paragraph is all washed up, but the soap-bubble thesis is a novel idea.") I wish I could use my entirely afternoon today to read some of those drafts, but I can't read 'em until students submit 'em.
If my poor syllabus planning is putting a squeeze on my schedule, it's positively brutalizing the student who is enrolled in three of my classes. She'll be writing papers for me while eating, driving, and showering, and sleep is just entirely out of the question. Two more weeks and this will all be over! Until next fall, of course, when I'll welcome a new colleague into the office next door. I'll probably still be grading papers by the time he arrives. I'll just hand him a stack and say, "Mind the soap. They're slippery."
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