Nothing doing

If I could save time in a bottle--and there's an invention that's bound to earn someone a fortune someday--I'd take a solid hour out of this afternoon and mail it to myself about two weeks from now when I'll have a pile of drafts on my desktop demanding immediate attention and no time to attend to them. What is the point of office hours this early in the semester? No one really needs me right now and I'm thoroughly caught up on my work. I even spent some time this morning revising an essay but I still have a full hour to spend in my office waiting for nothing to happen.

Not that I'm complaining. Nothing is not a bad thing to have happening right now, considering all the somethings that could be happening. Hurricanes! The Delta variant! Cleveland Indians players getting injured! I keep reading about academics on other campuses agonizing over the absence of mask mandates and difficult decisions about whether to send their own children to school and I'm thankful for the relative sanity we're experiencing right here.

Not that everything is peachy. My literature classes are much smaller than usual, attesting to the marginalization of literary study in the general education curriculum, and I'm having the usual problems getting students to engage in discussion. I'm spending way too much time reminding first-year students to pull their masks up over their noses, and then I'm getting glares of contempt that make me sympathize with the 88-year-old psychology prof in Georgia who retired in the middle of class when a student refused to put on a mask. We have compliance here, mostly, but masking is another exhausting thing to have to think about all the stinking time.

And don't even get me started on the weather! I arrive here in the morning feeling as if I'm swimming through heat and humidity, and then in the afternoon I drive home through rain so heavy that I can't see the road. Two days in a row I've had to pull over and wait for a pause in the deluge, and tonight we've got flood warnings. I'd better take my laptop home--if our driveway washes out, it could be a while before I get back to campus.

But the fact that I have a whole empty hour this afternoon suggests that things are, on the whole, pretty good, all things considered. We've survived the first week of classes without any major meltdowns and we're well on our way through the second. Last year getting through a week of teaching felt downright heroic, but this year it's just another check-mark on the calendar, just more water under the bridge. (But let's hope it stays under the bridge because I don't have time to deal with a flood right now.)