I need to mow this morning, which is actually great news after weeks of drought that painted lawns brown and prevented growth. I'm trying to remember the last time I mowed but it must have been before the Fourth of July weekend. Summer wildflowers are doing well along the roadside--chicory, Joe Pye Weed, ironweed, Queen Anne's lace, jewelweed--but grass has been enjoying a midsummer hiatus. A few days of rain and suddenly it's back in the business of growing.
And I'm back in the business of griping. Don't even get me started. I'm tired of hearing myself complain, but if I keep bottling up all the complaint-worthy issues, they wake me up at 3 a.m. to dance a tarantella in my brainpan. So I'll keep my complaints to myself except for this persistent pet peeve: I'm tired of asking for support on a project only to have new projects piled on my back. The only solution, I'm afraid, is to mess up so spectacularly and publicly that no one will ever again ask me to do anything.
Every time I see tarantella, I think of Verena Tarrant, the impressionable young thing whose life is manipulated by various domineering characters in Henry James's novel The Bostonians. Does it hold up, I wonder? It's been a while.
With August looming in the offing, I need to put some time into fall course preparations. I've been tasked with helping faculty write more effective syllabi, but at the moment my fall syllabi are Frankenstein's monsters of incompatible ideas poorly stitched together with lots of gaps showing. There are not enough weeks in the semester to accomplish everything I need to do in the capstone class, and I keep waffling about the assignment structure in the African American Lit class. More papers = more plagiarism and AI; fewer papers = more exams = more struggles to read students' handwriting. Focus on improving pedagogy or reducing pain? The eternal question.
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