Angst, insomnia, and grad-school flashbacks

Lately I've had the feeling that I've accidentally slipped back in time to my grad-school days: working long hours in front of a campus computer, coming back to campus to work all day Saturday, forgetting to eat meals and then filling in with whatever junk I can lay my hands on, all for the sake of meeting artificial academic deadlines. This time, though, it's not a class assignment but a publishing project eating up all my daylight hours, and it's even more complicated because this project requires me to engage in the type of assignment I most hated in grad school: group work.

I've mentioned before that I'm editing a collection of essays on using comedy in various teaching contexts, and in many ways it's been a hurry-up-and-wait situation: long stretches of waiting for the next stage in the process to begin followed by sudden flurries of frantic activity. I have no control over when these demands and deadlines will arise, but fortunately I've been able to complete the bulk of the work during breaks from teaching.

Not this time. Here I am teaching four classes in the busiest part of the semester while also attending ridiculously long Faculty Council meetings, and I suddenly have to juggle the needs of various editors and something like 37 contributors. (I could tell you the exact number but I'm too tired to look it up right now.) 

I find great joy in working with fellow academics on a topic so dear to my heart, but apparently I'm not the only one in this situation struggling to meet demands. While most contributors have done their part of the project quickly and without a fuss, others require more hand-holding (often over tech issues I don't know how to solve), and a few haven't responded at all. Here I sit facing a firm deadline and all I want to do is send an excuse saying the dog ate my contributors.

Given the difficulties I'm facing, I could emulate my students and ask for an extension, but anyone who knows me will find this option laughable. Missing a deadline makes me physically ill, even if it's not my fault. I see before me a week full of work, anguish, and insomnia, and I keep returning to the mantra that kept me going back in grad school: Someday this will all be over. 

But first, I've got some work to do. 

Inhabiting an unimaginable future; or, why I can't stop watching rug-cleaning videos

In all those childhood hours I spent glued to the television to absorb Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future on the original Star Trek, I never once saw Kirk or Spock or Dr. McCoy use their sleek hand-held devices to watch videos of total strangers cleaning nasty dirty rugs, and neither would I have imagined rug-cleaning videos playing any part in my own future. And yet here I am all these years later scrolling through social media and getting transfixed by videos of faceless men scrubbing filthy rugs.

In general I have a well-developed resistance to clickbait. I can scroll past all manner of enticing posts without a qualm, and those online ads for arthritis medications, incontinence products, and "fashions for the mature woman" only make me want to run to wherever the immature women are doing their shopping. But show me a video of some random dude shampooing a rug so dirty you can't tell what color it's supposed to be and I'm enthralled.

I don't like cleaning my own rugs and I don't own the kind of equipment these guys use to clean their filthy rugs--and when the rug's true colors finally come to light, I often find them garish or unappealing. Many of these rugs are pulled out of landfills or other unsavory places and then cleaned up to be donated to charity, but if someone tried to give one to me, my immediate impulse would be to burn it. 

But I watch anyway! Can't seem to stop myself, in fact. What is wrong with me?

Recently I realized that I have a very specific anxiety surrounding the prospect of death. I don't fear suffering or death itself, but I am terrified of leaving behind a mess that others will have to clean up. This explains why I've recently updated my will and worked so hard to pay off my debts and why I make regular trips to donate old stuff to the Goodwill. I don't want to involve other people in my messes and I don't want to get involved in other people's messes, so why am I unable to resist watching these filthy rugs getting cleaned?

First I'm lured by the soothing visuals--the rhythmic sweeping and spraying and shampooing, the washing away of layers of grime--and then the suspense as the rug's true colors are slowly revealed. But I think what most satisfies me is the knowledge that even an irredeemably dirty rug can become new again, all its pollution washed down the drain. In the midst of an increasingly messy world, I find hope in rug-cleaning videos.

That's one theory. It's also possible that I have completely lost my mind. But if that's the case, how would I know?

Supply chain problems and a change of plans

Mere minutes after I posted about my busy fall plans, I learned that the carpet that's supposed to be installed in our house today has been held up by supply chain problems. Suddenly I found myself in possession of a commodity in very short supply lately: a whole day with absolutely nothing on the schedule. So I drove north a day early and have been enjoying some time with the grandkids. Fortunately, fall leaves and fun are not subject to supply-chain slowdowns.

 

 

 

A very full Fall Break

And so Fall Break begins: After a nearly three-hour meeting, I arrive home long after dark burdened with a tote bag full of midterm exams and papers that must be graded before noon Monday and facing a full schedule of events that will deeply eat into my grading time. I may not have to teach for the next couple of days, but that doesn't mean I won't be working.

What made me think it was a good idea to pursue a demanding home-improvement project in the middle of a busy semester? Over the summer we painted most of the living areas in our house, and two weeks ago we painted our bedroom. Last week on my I finally painted our bathroom, making no attempt to keep paint off the carpet that will soon be replaced by waterproof vinyl flooring. For nearly 20 years I've wondered who thinks it's a great idea to install off-white carpet in the bathroom, but finally all that mess is going away.

But first I need to get a mammogram--first thing tomorrow. And then I need to finish cleaning out closets in two bedrooms and shifting small movables to make it easier for the flooring dudes to move the big stuff. Yesterday we cleared out both big closets in the guest room, but I still need to move a lot of junk out of the laundry room--and now I'm looking at our big walk-in closet and wondering whether it would be a better use of my time to just burn the place down and start over. At some point I'll need to haul some boxes of stuff to the Goodwill, but that can wait until the dust settles, or the smoke, as the case may be.

Then on Friday comes the good part: the flooring guys will tear the old, stained carpet our of two bedrooms and a bathroom, tear up the nasty old linoleum in the laundry room, and install new carpet in the bedrooms and vinyl tile in bathroom and laundry room.

I know I'll have to distract myself so I don't keep sticking my nose in during the installation process, so I'm thinking that Friday will be the time for grading. Saturday is the time for driving north to see the grandkids, and Sunday is the time for driving home, so I'm not sure when I'm going to get around to putting all the stuff back into the closets and reassembling the rooms after the flooring is done.

So yeah, I'll enjoy my Fall Break, but I doubt that it'll feel much like a break. At some point I intend to sink my bare feet into that brand-new carpet and savor the softness and the absence of stains. But then I'm getting back to work.    

Encounters with brilliance--and its opposite

I remember the first time I read J. Drew Lanham's very brief essay "9 Rules for the Black Birdwatcher" in Orion--I immediately decided my creative nonfiction students had to read it, and then I made them write their own essays in the form of lists, which is not nearly as easy as Lanham makes it look. His nine brief rules beautifully braid together ideas about race, extinctions, expertise, and, of course, birds. I've read other things by Lanham over the years but nothing that made me happier than the news announed this week that he's one of this year's recipients of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant. Sometimes good things happen to good people, and when they do, this makes me very happy.

I didn't feel much like a genius this morning when I showed up to my composition class prepared to discuss the wrong reading assignment. Someone mis-read the syllabus and that someone was me. Oops. Somehow I pulled together a meaningful discussion but if my teaching skills were evaluated solely based on this morning's class, I'd be seeking another line of work.

But I did do one brilliant thing this week: I invited a former student to share his considerable expertise with my Honors Lit students, who are working their way through Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. My former student spoke about Civil War weaponry, using pictures, props, and hands-on activities to help my students understand the experiences of soldiers on the battlefield. It makes me happy to see a former student shine in front of the classroom, so I was grinning my head off this morning. Someone should give that dude a prize! 

Three cheers for an un-cretin future!

I don't know what kinds of stretching I'm supposed to do to prepare for the rigors of painting a room but I didn't do them over the weekend, and neither did I do any kind of prep for the long local-history walk I took with my Honors students on Sunday, with the result that every muscle in my body hurts during a week when I have to attend all kinds of extra meetings and events on campus thanks to Homecoming and faculty governance duties. And none of this is helping my bone spurs!

But do you know what will help my bone spurs? According to my doctor, I should do more walking. Yes: to reduce my foot pain, I need to do more of the exact activity that leads to foot pain. I suppose it can't hurt, except when it does.

But look on the bright side: my bedroom walls look sharp with a nice fresh coat of paint--and since that carpet is getting replaced next week, I painted merrily away without worrying about drips. The barn-red accent wall was fun while it lasted but now that it's white, I can redecorate in cheery shades of blue, which means I get to do some real shopping. And I have just enough paint left to do our bathroom later this week, and if I get sufficiently inspired I'll buy more paint and do the laundry room, although the prospect of moving the washer and dryer is not appealing. After that we will have finished our entire interior house-painting project. That's something to celebrate.

This evening I'll help a retired colleague celebrate his 85th birthday. To entertain him, I'm assembling a narrative from a collection of inane sentences written by past students, including "It is not cretin what our future is," a sentiment that I sincerely hope is true.

Friday poetry challenge: bananas for pawpaws

This week my husband went out into our woods and shook some trees--literally--and a harvest of pawpaws came tumbling down, so today was pawpaw day in my Honors Lit class. We're in the middle of Cold Mountain and I want students to know what kinds of things Inman might have been eating during his long trek through the autumn woods, so pawpaws appropriately enhance the learning experience.

Students were appreciative, but a few of them made some interesting faces in response to their first taste of that sticky yellow flesh, and of course now the aroma has suffused the entire building. A few students discreetly discarded their pawpaws while others came back for seconds. I was just happy to put part of our harvest to good use, because we can't possibly eat our entire harvest. And besides, eating pawpaws is a cultural experience! It may look like the bastard lovechild of a pear and a potato, but a pawpaw tastes like a walk in the autumn woods.

I'm bananas for pawpaws,
that green, lumpy fruit
that grows in the woods in the autumn.
If you like 'em too,
here's some advice for you:
Just stop by my office--I've got'em.

Surely someone out there can do better than that. Show me some pawpaw poetry!

I need a cure for Three-Hour Meeting Madness

How do you survive a three-hour meeting without going insane?

Especially a meeting that starts at 4 p.m. and is supposed to last 90 minutes but keeps going on and on and on because issues of some importance to the future of the institution are on the table and they deserve full attention but you're having trouble producing coherent thought because you're stuck in a conference room for three hours at your stupidest time of day and you're getting hungry thirsty hangry tired annoyed and whatever you want to call the other symptoms of Long-Meeting Madness?

I sat through such a meeting last week and another is looming this afternoon, but this time I intend to come prepared. A previous provost used to bring M&M's to Faculty Council meetings on the theory that there's no situation that can't be improved by the addition of chocolate, but apparently our M&M budget got slashed so we sit there for three hours succumbing to tedium without food, drink, or rest-room breaks until we're nearly comatose. 

But not today! My personal chocolate budget remains robust, so I intend to stock up before the meeting, and if my fellow Council members are nice to me and don't take my preferred chair, I may even share.

I don't have a problem remaining engaged in discussion on certain topics, but the list of topics on which I am willing to spend an hour debating the finer points is getting smaller by the minute. And then, of course, certain perennial topics keep coming up when they're most likely to distract us from more significant concerns; for instance, every minute we spend debating whether we should have to teach on Labor Day is time we can't devote to advising the Powers That Be on whether retiring colleagues should be replaced by tenure-track faculty members or adjuncts.

But nevertheless we keep spending time drowning in endless debates on matters that fail to register on my Make Me Care meter. It takes every ounce of self-control to sit still and look interested when what I really want to do is poke out my eyeballs with a dull pencil or run to the other side of the building and pull the fire alarm.  

This week, though, I have a plan. When my attention wanders, I'll pop in a chocolate and surreptitiously pen lyrics for a new rap musical based on thick documents we've been asked to peruse. I'll start on the Tone at the Top rap as soon as I come up with a rhyme for no nefarious acts. Throw hilarious facts? Slow injurious yaks? Show me various jacks?

No rush. In three hours I'm bound to come up with a workable solution, which is more than I can say about many meetings.

Surprised by students

Lately I've been surprising my students in ways that surprise me, creating a feedback loop of surprises on top of surprises.  Not a bad situation as the semester moves toward its muddled middle.

Students are surprised that I don't care about staples, and I'm surprised at the depth of their surprise. Apparently they've all encountered the stapler Nazis out there. Sure, staples are nice, but an unstapled paper is not the hill I want to die on. I noticed that more than half of today's homework assignments are stapled, thanks to one generous student who always carries a stapler and will happily share. 

Students in another class were shocked when I told them I don't care where they sit. We were required to use seating charts for the past two years and to limit student movement in the classroom because of the fear of Covid transmission, but this morning they expressed surprise when I allowed some folks to switch seats. I mean, we're not in third grade anymore! Let's move around!

And a student in another class was so surprised that she called me the best teacher ever, an exaggeration for sure but I'll accept applause whether I've earned it or not. All I did was provide full MLA-style citations for required readings in the coursepack. I mean, if I want students to refer to these readings in their writing, they need to know how to cite them, right? Not that big a deal.

Today I plan to surprise a set of students by cancelling Wednesday's class. Giving them a day off probably makes me the worst professor ever pedagogically speaking, but they're turning in a major assignment on that date and I'm not sure they'll be alert enough to attend to any new material I try to introduce. I'm not even going to call it a "research day" and tell them to work where they like. They've worked hard--they've earned a day off.

So, of course, have I. After spending the entire weekend grading papers, I ought to get right down to work tackling the next set, but instead I just might reward myself with an hour of absolute idleness. And that will be the biggest surprise of all.