I really ought to be grading papers right now

Thirty-eight papers to grade so naturally I'm sitting in my office thinking about going off campus for lunch and a haircut. Just spent a good ten minutes chatting with my colleague's one-year-old daughter, and before that I was trimming dead leaves off my office plants, activities unlikely to assist in the paper-grading task.
 
I read two papers--one per class--so that I can truthfully tell my students that I've started grading their papers but I'm not quite done yet. I've got all afternoon to grade the rest but here I sit blogging instead, and I may suddenly discover an urgent need to walk down to the science buildings to see whether the konjac blossom has opened up yet. I've been parking down on that end of campus all week so I can walk past the voodoo lily every day; when it finally opens and fills the building with the scent of rotting meat, I don't want to miss the show. (And it's kind of hard to miss already since it's close to seven feet tall.)

But that voodoo lily isn't going to grade my papers and neither will my haircutterperson, provided that I go out for lunch and a haircut and maybe even buy some birdseed instead of staying in my office reading thirty-eight papers that will, no doubt, present at least thirty-eight different ways to misuse the apostrophe, if they use it at all. I've read the drafts so I'm certain that I'll find some wonderful papers in the mix along with some relatively okay papers and perhaps a few truly horrific specimens, but frankly, I just don't feel like reading them right now. They're analyzing literature we read weeks ago. I've moved on! And besides, how can I attend to student writing when I can't keep my hair out of my eyes?

Someday some brilliant person will invent the self-grading essay. Until then, I think I'd better just buckle down and read 'em, hair or no hair.

Voodoo lily blossom, ready to unfurl. (Definitely not a student paper.)