Final day of classes for the semester but who has the energy to celebrate? Today my students are submitting papers, viewing the last bits of films, and preparing for final exams, but all I want to do is lie down and sleep for a week or two, which is not consistent with the need to grade all those papers and proctor all those finals.
This has not been the most exhausting semester ever: I haven't been trying to teach while competing for a tenure-track job in my own department or undergoing cancer treatment or serving as faculty chair, nor have I been shackled to Zoom while teaching during a lockdown. It has, on the whole, been a pretty unremarkable semester, with a few difficult spots but no more stress or heartache than might be expected of a normal year. Last year, surviving a full semester under pandemic conditions felt positively heroic; this year it's just business as usual.
But how do we celebrate business as usual? Congratulations on having a mostly unremarkable semester! Hope your next semester is even more unremarkable! I'm just not feeling it. What this semester needs is a theme song:
Call me unremarkable;
call me so forgettable;
and it's unregrettably true
that business as usual won't fit in this meter--boo-hoo!
Yeah, that's bad, but not bad enough to be memorable. Just unremarkable, like this semester, which appears to be winding gently down, going out not with a bang but a yawn.
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