Transcendent[ly bad] prose

After 45 years of stumbling toward transcendence, I have finally discovered my greatest talent: I have a gift for writing really good bad sentences. It is a difficult cross to bear, but with great power comes great responsibility, so I persevere in my calling.

Today, for instance, I needed an editing exercise that would give students practice in positioning the most important information in a sentence so that it carries the greatest impact, and I came up with this:

Despite his encounters with malaria-carrying mosquitoes, poisonous snakes, and hungry piranha, the intrepid explorer on his first mission into the Amazon without a guide to help him overcome the inevitable obstacles discovered a living pterodactyl dwelling contentedly among the exotic flora and fauna near the confluence of two uncharted rivers.

Earlier, when the class was working on the dangers of overdependence on incompatible adjectives and adverbs, I gave them this:

On the other hand, if they use few adjectives but only, like, make them really incredibly wonderfully awesome, then they will have esoteric, poignant, and just plain neat prose that marvelously overshadows all that high-falutin' gussied-up bullcrap.

My ultimate achievement, however--the epitome of awfulness--occurred in a discussion of faulty parallelism:

Derrida's seminal analysis of Wenbley Weasel's "Unseemly Seeming" suggests that the free play of signification may prove disorienting to readers accustomed to works grounded in linear reasoning, anthropocentric culture, and who don't understand the French language; however, his analysis fails to consider Weasel's seemingly infinite ability to multiply meanings, his concern for non-human ways of knowing, and he translates all the French terms anyway.

"This is awful," said a student.

"Thanks," I said. "It's a gift."

Walk away from the baloney

"The viewer already has a sense of grandeur from the silhouette on the baloney."

This wonderful line from a student paper inspires me to imagine what a wonderful world this would be if every balcony were replaced by baloney. Many ordinary experiences would be altered, from photographing the Pope to buying cheap theater seats to selecting hotel rooms. Would the Marriott charge extra for baloney suites? Think of the lives that would be saved if hordes of students on spring break decided to climb drunkenly from baloney to baloney!

Picture the baloney scene in Romeo and Juliet, in which Juliet pines for a lover who has a first name spelled O-S-C-A-R. And Henry James's The Ambassadors would be an entirely different kind of novel if Lambert Strether took to observing the enigmatic Chad from a perch high atop a baloney!

It could happen. Likewise, an English professor exhausted from reading too many student papers might fall into a fit of despair and develop a sudden urge to fling herself from a great height...but in the absence of baloney, the danger would dissipate.

Just for the sake of safety, someone ought to post a sign declaring every English department a No-Baloney Zone. The life you save may be your own.

Doing the candidate quick-step

Neither snow nor sleet nor dark of night can keep the candidates from coming to campus and running from breakfast to interview to campus tour to interview to lunch with students to interview interview interview to presentation to dinner with the search committee, and if this trial by fire is exhausting for the candidates, it's not much easier on the search committee.

We take our candidates to dinner at the best restaurant in town (where we can rarely afford to eat unless the provost picks up the bill), but soon we find ourselves sated with the town's best cuisine. "I'm tired of that same old ahi," said my colleague last week, so we changed things up and went to the Italian place instead. We enjoy meeting new people and spending time with our departmental colleagues, but eventually we get tired of asking the same questions and telling the same stories--and as soon as we finish up with one candidate, another looms one the horizon.

The good news is that we're almost done. When the moment of decision arrives, we'll say goodbye to all the ahi, the Bob Evans breakfasts, the presentations, interviews, campus tours, and candidates, and say hello to some new colleagues.

Whoever they are, I hope they stay awhile. No one wants to go through all this again!

Lacking lunar energy

Rumor has it that the lunar eclipse was pretty impressive last night. I wouldn't know: anything that happens outdoors when the temperature is 3 degrees Farenheit is a mystery to me. Telescopes were set up on the college mall so students and others could stand out in the cold and look at the moon and stars; meanwhile, I huddled at home in layers of longjohns and sweaters, wool socks and slippers, trying to stay warm enough to concentrate on my reading.

The resident Clevelandman poked his head in the door. "You've got to see this!" he said. "It's amazing!"

"It's three degrees," I said. "Nothing is that amazing."

Which proves, I suppose, that cold-weather wimps miss out on some remarkable experiences. Frostbite, for instance. I've seen lunar eclipses before and they're not very effective at warming my feet, so this time I decided to keep my feet where they could be comfortable: beneath a nice, warm, cozy blanket.

Firing Ice

I've just given up on trying to read the novel Ice by Russian author Vladimir Sorokin, primarily because the first hundred pages have not managed to make me care about the characters, but also because I'm getting tired of a particular syntactic tic:

A dark blue Lincoln Navigator drove into the building. Stopped....Gorbovets leaned on the gates. Pulled. The steel sections aligned. Clanged. He slid the bolt shut. Spat. Walked to the car.

That's just a sample from the first page of the book, and while those solitary-verb fragments emphasize the staccato nature of the actions here, the pattern is repeated over and over in the book, all those solitary verbs pelting my eyeballs like sleet pellets in an ice storm. Sorokin's style is edgy and hip, often self-consciously so; like a small child who has just learned to ride a tricycle, the sentences clatter past while yelling "Look at me! Look at me!" After a while, it just gets tiresome.

So I give up. Unless someone can provide a compelling reason for me to keep reading, Ice is going directly into the giveaway pile. But who would want it? Here's an offer: make a case for the book in the comments to this post and I'll mail the novel, free of charge, to whoever is most convincing.

Musical madness

We've entered the part of the semester when the eye-rolling gets intense among certain students in my film classes. It's the men, mostly, who object to the subject matter I'm forcing them to consider, and it's not all the men either but just a certain baseball-capped contingent of them. They know what they like and they know what they don't like, and they don't mind letting me know that they don't like musicals.

Yesterday I subjected my film classes to torture by talking about the history of musicals and making them watch short clips from The Jazz Singer, 42nd Street, Top Hat, and West Side Story, and in a week they'll be writing about Singin' in the Rain. They grimace and groan and want to know why: "Why can't we watch something we like?"

"Because Saw isn't a musical," I want to say, "and because we can't watch Fight Club or Superbad every day of the week." (Well, maybe they can, but I can't.) We could spend the hour identifying and repairing comma splices and run-on sentences, or we could take a nice little quiz on vocabulary terms from the textbook, but instead we're sitting in a dark room watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing and singing and falling in love while the rain pours down around the gazebo. What's not to like?

Yesterday's West Side Story clip portrayed the characters' attempt to use music to bring order to a chaotic situation, but in my classroom, musicals do just the opposite, inspiring an epidemic of squirming and grumbling and shuffling of papers. When music leaves my students cold, I want to snap my fingers and say "Play it cool, boys--real cool."

And I would--if I could just carry a tune.

So what IS a thesis?

"She called me at 1 in the morning to ask me, 'What's a thesis?'"

The speaker is one of my students, and "she" is another. The first major paper is due in five minutes. The students had read a chapter on writing a thesis statement and I had talked about thesis statements in class, demonstrated how to formulate thesis statements for this type of paper, and offered specific suggestions for improving their thesis statements in my comments on their drafts. Also, last Friday I reminded the class that I would be happy to look at revised thesis statements over the weekend if they would e-mail them to me. Two students did--but not the girl who had to call her classmate at 1 a.m. to ask "What's a thesis?"

Sometimes I wonder why I even open my mouth.

Sing a song of daughters

When my daughter walked out in front of the audience last week at the beginning of her vocal recital, she looked as if she owned the stage. When she opened her mouth, she owned the music. By the time the hour was over, she owned the audience.

How did she do it? Where did all that talent and confidence come from? I'd gladly take the credit, but I can't sing a note, nor can I stand on stage in front of a group of staring people without wanting to hide in the closet. She looked radiant, as if she'd found her rightful place in the universe. Once upon a time she was a five-year-old singing her first duet with her dad in church, and then she became a 10-year-old orphan belting out tunes while tumbling all over the stage in "Annie." Now she's this radiant woman singing art songs and arias in languages I don't understand--but music is universal and her performance makes the meaning clear.

I used to be able to track down my daughter wherever she was just by following the sound of her singing; now she's so far away that I never get to hear her except when she comes home for a visit. But last Thursday, she filled my ears with beautiful music that will ring in my memory for years to come.

The wrong way to walk the loop

I didn't set out to walk the six-mile loop this morning, but after I'd passed the point of no return and conquered the ice-covered slope, there was nothing to do but keep going.

I've kept that loop in front of me all winter as I've walked around the countryside and worked out at the rec center. One fine spring day, I told myself, I'll gather together a few congenial friends and we'll walk up the hill and along the ridge and down the other side of the hill and along the creek and back home again. I'll choose a day when the sky is clear and the road is dry, and we'll equip ourselves with water bottles, high-protein snacks, sunscreen, pepper spray, perhaps a notebook and pen for recording brilliant Thoreauvian insights. We'll look at birds and wildflowers and we'll encourage each other through the steep stretches, and at the end of the loop we'll come home to a celebratory lunch of homemade soup and sandwiches.

That's the right way to walk the loop. Today I did it the wrong way. For this I blame the anger.

Last night I went to bed angry and woke up angry (never mind why), and I tried all morning to work through the anger: I washed dishes, cleaned the kitchen, did laundry, emptied the catbox, filled the birdfeeders, listened to Car Talk, read some Henry James. Still angry. There was no one to complain to except the cat and I couldn't go out anywhere without coming to terms with the car that hates me, so I went for a walk.

I took a water bottle and some kleenexes but no snacks, which was a mistake since all I'd had for breakfast was a little toast and juice. No sunscreen, no pepper spray, no notebook and pen (which was fine since it's difficult to have insights when you're angry), no congenial companions, and no celebratory lunch at the end of the road. The temperature was in the 40s but up on the ridge the wind was sharp, and the road was icy in the shady spots and muddy in the sun.

At first I intended to keep walking until the anger dissipated and then turn around, but somewhere along the way I lost track of time and place. I was halfway up the dangling deer-spine hill when I realized that I'd been walking without seeing anything, all my attention focused on the internal chaos. I forced myself to look around, but it took a great deal of effort.

I made it to the top of the ridge still angry, walked past the impressive views still angry, avoided the annoying dogs still angry. I plodded through the mud and ice not caring where I ended up, and as I walked down the hill on the other side, I was surprised to find that I'd passed the half-way mark on the six-mile loop. Might as well just keep walking--still angry.

Then I came around a curve and saw in front of me a stretch of road that squeezed between a rocky bluff and a steep wooded slope falling down to the creek. For about a quarter mile the road sloped up, first gently and then steeply, and the entire surface was covered with ice.

One thing I know: walking uphill on ice right next to a cliff is not easy, and anger doesn't help. There was no way around and I wasn't going back, so I swallowed my anger and picked my way along the narrow snow-covered shoulder, certain that if I fell and broke my neck, no one would even know where to look for me.

But I didn't fall. I made it home in one piece, hungry and thirsty and sweaty and tired but no longer angry. I'm a little annoyed with myself for walking the loop without any hoopla, but I suppose the hoopla can wait for the next time. Next time I'll walk the loop the right way. Next time I'll leave the anger at home.

The ghost of closets past

At the Goodwill store I am haunted by the ghost of closets past: between a slinky psychedelic mini-dress and a dress-for-success suit with shoulder pads the size of dinner plates hangs a drab, boxy drop-waist jumper everyone was wearing in the 80s. I owned that dress! I wore that dress!

I loathe that dress.

The Goodwill store makes no distinctions among sizes, styles, or even decades. Clothes are sorted in the most rudimentary fashion: a long row labeled "Tops" over here, and beyond it another labeled "Bottoms." Pastel silk blouses with bows as the neckline rub shoulders with tattered T-shirts advertising the wearer's devotion to the Grateful Dead. (Good color for me, but can I wear it in the classroom?)

I'm at the Goodwill store because my wardrobe budget can't keep up with my weight loss. In the past year I have lost the equivalent of a person--a small person, but a person all the same--and I have nothing to wear. My colleagues are not inclined to sympathize with this problem. "Not a bad problem to have!" is the way they put it, but I get up every morning and look in my closet and wonder what I can wear today that looks professional enough to carry me through a meeting with college Trustees: pants so baggy in the back I look like I have diaper-butt, or purple corduroys a little too casual for the classroom, or a skirt that fits topped by a blouse that doesn't? That's too much stress first thing in the morning.

A few weeks ago I tried to address the problem by buying a chunk of wool and making a skirt, just to see whether my sewing skills might still be useful. They might. Then again, it was a straight skirt with no frills, a pattern so easy a trained monkey could have made it, and it took only about three hours of focused work. But I can't do that every weekend, especially with papers to grade, so I've been trying to patch together a professional wardrobe wherever I can find one, which is how I ended up at the Goodwill store.

I head toward "Bottoms" to look for a skirt. No problem finding skirts: here's a plaid wool mini-skirt wider than it is long, and right next to it a swirly confection in floral chiffon, then a pencil skirt with kick-pleats, size 6 petite (dream on!). I find home-made skirts with uneven hems next to skirts with designer labels, spotless skirts next to torn and ragged skirts, long wool wrap skirts next to the merest of minis, but everything in my size looks faded and matronly.

In fact, the only thing I find in the whole store that might fit me is that hideous boxy drop-waist jumper. I wore that dress when I flew to Florida with my two-year-old daughter, who was wearing a matching dress I had made from the leftover fabric. I'm sure we looked just darling, but that was 20 years ago and I'm not going back there.

I leave the store empty-handed. I'd rather muddle through with what I have than haunt campus dressed as the ghost of closets past.

Calming the savage blast

Today I'm taking a hiatus from the hectic life, opting out of the ordinary, fleeing the controversies that leave me flabbergasted, including:

1. The current controversy over whether every course that "uses" literature ought to be labeled a literature course for the purposes of General Education. My question: what does the course use literature for? Fuel? Insulation? Target practice?

2. Students who want to quibble over whether their borrowing from SparkNotes constitutes plagiarism if they just borrowed ideas but switched the words around. My question: why are you relying on SparkNotes for a paper that is not supposed to use sources outside the primary text?

3. Bill collectors who call at all hours to demand money from a person whose name is similar but not identical to my husband's, a man who apparently owes a lot of money to some very persistent people. My question: how about letting me have your full name and phone number so I can pass it on to the State Attorney General's office? I promise to get your name exactly right!

As absorbing as all these issues are, I'm waving bye-bye this afternoon and zipping down the interstate to Kentucky to see my daughter and hear her sing. They say music calms the savage beast, so it ought to calm the savage blast of demanding calls and messages from all the other voices in my life.

Small and sleek meets big and bulky

A brief window of decent weather inspired me to walk farther than usual this morning, which allowed me to witness an unusual encounter. I walked past the place where my road shifts from tar-and-chip to gravel and then on past the place where the two-lane gravel road narrows down to one lane to twist its way up a steep hill, and that's where I saw a sleek little FedEx delivery van come face-to-face with a big ugly township dumptruck lumbering up the hill with a full load of gravel. There's no room to pass, so one of the vehicles had to back up. In a showdown between the sleek and the substantial, who wins?

The dump truck backed down the hill and around the curve until it found a place to pull off, and the FedEx van went zipping on its merry way. In this case, small and sleek triumphed over big and bulky.

I thought of that encounter later in the day as I stood with a handful of lug-nuts next to my husband's small sleek Honda. I've tried for years to convince that car that I'm the boss, the driver, the powerful member of our partnership, but in a face-to-face contest between my will and the will of the car, the car wins every time. I say "Drive!" and the Honda says "I don't think so." First it was the starter, then the alternator, then the transmission, and today a nearly-new tire blew, leaving me pretty well stranded.

I may as well just back off and admit that I'm the powerless one here. All right, car, you win! I give up! You go on and do what you want to do and I'll just stand off to the side and yield the right of way!

If a dumptruck can do it, why can't I?

Yes, we're all getting older

Funny thing at last night's candidate dinner: as soon as my colleague arrives at the restaurant, she hands me the departmental credit card and I stick it in my purse. The restaurant is noisy and crowded and I'm on the opposite side of the table from that colleague, so when she gets up and dashes out of the restaurant to go look for something she's misplaced, I'm pretty much in the dark. She comes back a bit agitated because she hasn't been able to locate the missing item, and when I ask for enlightenment, I hear her say, "I can't find my car."

"You can't find your car?" I ask. "How could you lose your car?"

She looks at me as if I am a raving lunatic. "Car-DUH," she says. "I can't find the department credit card."

"That because you gave it to me as soon as you came in the door," I remind her.

Yes, we're all getting older...some of us more rapidly than others.

This is the week that was

At one point during yesterday's chaos I heard myself asserting that things couldn't possibly get any worse. Those words came back to haunt me at 2 a.m. as I lay in bed trying to block out the sound of my husband in the next room tossing his cookies--loudly. He had violated the First Law of Healthy Travel: Never fill your gas tank and your stomach at the same establishment.

After a week of complications caused by less-than-rational individuals (student with guns and 1000 rounds of ammo on campus, other students expressing desire to cause severe bodily pain to said gun-toting student), weather (flooding, trees falling, wind whipping the door open while I tried to fill the wood-burner, daughter waiting out tornadoes in the basement of her dorm in Kentucky), quirky job searches (first candidate cancelled, second candidate got stranded at O'Hare, second candidate finally arrived 12 hours late and had to have all appointments rescheduled), classes (graded 28 essays in just 24 hours so they'll be out of the way when the next 48 papers come in today, and let me just say that at this point I don't ever need to see a work of literature described as "relatable" or, even worse, "really relatable"), and sheer bad luck (choosing the shower stall with no hot water after a hard workout on a very cold day, knocking all the pens on the floor not once but twice while reporting the shower malfunction at the main desk of the rec center, dropping all my dirty sweaty workout clothes on the floor while picking up the pens)--after all that, I was really looking forward to the husband's return from his travels and a good long restful sleep.

Ha! And again I say, Ha! I was still awake at 3 a.m., and the alarm rang at 6:30 as usual. Today's forecast calls for no guns, no floods, no candidates, and no vomiting--which will make those 48 student drafts so much more bearable. All I have to do is stay awake and go through the motions and before you know it I'll be able to close the book on this bizarre week--and not a moment too soon!

Diligent but unlucky?

For the past year or two I've been periodically hearing an odd sort of excuse from students who have done poorly on papers: "Oops, I sent you the wrong version of my paper!" While I can sympathize with a student who revises a draft and then sends the earlier unrevised version, I hear this excuse most often from students suspected of plagiarism or whose papers clearly do not fulfill the requirements of the assignment. What they're really saying is, "I wrote two versions of my paper, one plagiarized and one original, but oops, I sent you the wrong one!" Or "You know, I wrote a whole different version of this paper that actually did follow the guidelines for the assignment, but silly me, I sent you the one that didn't!"

Are students these days really writing multiple versions of all their papers? What diligent students! I've revised hundreds of drafts, but once the final version is done, the draft goes into the trash. And suppose a student wrote a paper full of plagiarized passages and then revised it to "fix" the plagiarism; wouldn't he want to delete the plagiarized version just to destroy the incriminating evidence? But no: these students carefully store the plagiarized versions and then send them to me purely by accident. What unfortunate students! To think that a minor and completely understandable error in clicking on a file name should result in a Very Bad Grade!

Such diligent but unlucky students deserve my compassion, don't they? I ought to give them the benefit of the doubt. "All right," I'll say, "since you've worked so hard to write two different versions of your paper and since the 'right' version is sitting right there in your document file, go ahead and send it to me. You've got sixty seconds...starting now."

Timing is everything

"Rain, flood warnings, guns on campus...great time to be bringing in job candidates!"

So said my colleague first thing this morning, and he's right. The gun incident is all over the papers, the sky is gray and dripping, flooding is in the forecast...and our first candidate arrives tonight!

Dodging a bullet...or many of them

My colleagues and students have been up in arms about an incident on campus, but I'm opting out of the campus hysteria. It's true that campus police discovered a cache of guns (some semi-automatic, some loaded) stashed in plain sight in a student's car on campus, but it's also true that the student was quickly removed from campus and will not be returning. There was some miscommunication at first, some tendency to treat the incident as just a minor infraction, but that mistake was quickly repaired. In the meantime, the hysteria level has gone off the charts, with some students eagerly expressing a desire to see this student drawn and quartered along with several administrators whose responses to the incident were perceived as too slow. It's a little frightening when the first response to fear of violence is to threaten more violence.

Yesterday morning several colleagues came in and asked me what I intended to do about the situation, and I was befuddled. I'm an English professor: what can I do? Tell my students not to bring guns on campus? They've already heard that message. Later I learned the student's name (it's a small campus...everyone knew the kid's name by the end of the day) and recalled my rather unpleasant encounters with him a few years ago, not to mention his more recent run-ins with several of my colleagues. If he intended a massacre, I'm sure my department would have been high on his hit list.

This brings the threat closer to home, but I don't intend to lose any sleep over it. It is the responsibility of campus police to keep us safe, and in this case they did just that without any assistance from me. I may be too trusting, but I'm happy to let them do their job while I focus on mine. So instead of getting hysterical, I'll be thankful that in this case, at least, we've dodged a bullet...or many of them.

Making an entrance

"I brought the offending alarm clock with me," said my student as he dashed into class, plunked the clock down on the desk in front of me, and stood there panting (from running across campus) and dripping (without an umbrella).

We'd started class 25 minutes earlier, but his alarm clock still claimed he had another hour free. "I knew no one would believe me if I said my alarm clock was wrong," he explained, "so I said, 'You're coming with me!'"

It's a small class and fairly informal so his entry wasn't terribly disruptive. At least he came to class, I told myself. In the same situation, I think I would have skipped class entirely, unwilling to draw attention to myself by walking in half an hour late.

My student, on the other hand, saw the situation as an opportunity for theater. When an otherwise reliable student takes center stage in his own entertaining spectacle--well, the only proper response is applause.

Why I need a cat-nap

My husband has been out of town less than 24 hours and I'm already plotting to "lose" his cat. Okay, she's not exactly his cat; she's our cat, and we carefully divide the cat-care duties: the husband feeds, pets, brushes, plays with, and thoroughly spoils the cat. I clean the catbox.

She's not a terribly demanding cat most of the time, but when the guy who fills her food dish leaves she gets a little alarmed. This morning she began expressing this alarm at about 4:00 and she didn't stop until I got up and fed her.

I tried to ignore her at first. She doesn't have claws, but she sort of bats her paws against the bedroom door to make it rattle and meows in a loud and insistent manner, as if to say, "Who's in charge here? Where's my food? Doesn't anyone care about my NEEDS?!!" I do care--I care deeply--but I'd rather care a little later in the day. At first I resisted feeding her, assuming that if I give in and feed her at 4:30 a.m. today, tomorrow she'll want to be fed at 3:30. But I couldn't sleep through the caterwauling and I was getting less relaxed as time went on, so I finally got up and dumped some kibble in her dish.

"Satisfied?" I asked, but to a cat with food in front of her face, I am invisible.

I spent the next two hours trying unsuccessfully to get back to sleep, and when I finally got up, the cat was snoring comfortably on the sofa. Tomorrow I intend to wake her up at 3 and demand my breakfast, and while I'm eating, we'll have a little chat about her neglect of her mouse-catching duties. It's time that cat learned to sing for her supper--as long as she doesn't do it at 4 a.m.

Strictly complimentary

You know you're in for an interesting lunch in the faculty lounge when a colleague (male) starts off like this: "What I'm about to say is not intended as sexual harrassment" (and a quicker-witted listener would interrupt with, "You mean unlike everything else you've ever said?"--except that in this case such a statement would be inaccurate) "but you look great!"

This led inevitably to a discussion about whether and when it is appropriate to compliment colleagues on their looks. When is "Nice tie!" just a comment and when is it a come-on? Does it matter if the giver of the comment is in power over the recipient? On a small campus, we all have opportunities to exercise some sort of power sometimes--by serving on a committee that grants money for faculty travel or makes recommendations about tenure, for instance, or by taking a turn as chair of the department. We're all occasionally in a position to help (or hurt) each other, but is complimenting a colleague's appearance helping or hurting?

We didn't solve the problem over lunch, but if you locked an infinite number of monkeys in the faculty lounge with an infinite number of attractive ties, perhaps eventually they would come up with some coherent guidelines on how to compliment colleagues without incurring a lawsuit. Until those monkeys arrive on campus, though, I'm accepting all compliments--and giving some in return.

A moving story

"Moving water mains posed," said the headline, but my tired brain couldn't make any sense of it. I mean, I understand the need for mobile phones, but mobile water mains? Why would anyone want underground water lines to shimmy and dance and move around? And what were they posing for? Plumbing-porn mags? Or were those mobile water mains simply impersonating something else, perhaps posing as presidential candidates or police officers? In that case, those moving water mains ought to be arrested. Cuff 'em, Dano.

But wait! Maybe the water mains themselves are not doing the posing! Suppose some person or persons unnamed poses--what? A question about whether water mains should be moved? Perhaps someone in a position to pose such a question proposed that it would be advantageous to move certain water mains, but it sounds odd to speak of a proposal's being "posed," unless it's a particularly photogenic proposal, in which case I stand corrected.

Here's my theory: someone posing as a headline writer moved some some words around to fit the available space and produced a headline that posed more questions than it answered.

Waiting for the other shoe to drop

A colleague and I were comparing notes on our classes today and we agreed that things are going well--maybe too well. "I must be overlooking something important," I said, "because it feels somehow wrong to be enjoying the semester this much."

It's true that I'm a little swamped. I'm teaching an overload, so three days a week I feel as if I'm running from one class to another without any time to take a breath, and on the other two days I'm preparing for the busy days. But so far, I'm managing to get most of my work done without taking a pile of it home. Things may change in February when we have job candidates visiting one after another, but so far, the load is not unpleasant.

And more importantly, I'm really enjoying my time in class. I'm teaching material I love, and the students seem to be responding pretty well. Today I gave the first quiz in the film class, so I'll soon know whether the students are keeping up with the reading assignments or slacking off on the assumption that film is "just entertainment" and they don't need to know all those big words like "duration" and "diegesis." I have decided not to let the slackers bother me. If they don't engage with the material, they will fail the course, which is really their problem and not mine.

So either my semester is going really really well or else I'm living in denial, which is not entirely a bad place to be. It's the old conundrum: is there any real difference between believing that you are happy and actually being happy?

I believe I'd rather not answer that.

A student by any other name

A week into the spring semester and things are going well, mostly. I have 80 students in writing-intensive classes, which is crazy, but yesterday I tested myself on their names and I knew more than half of them, which is better than usual. I knew all but four in the American Lit class and all but six in the morning film class; the afternoon film class, though, is killing me. Twenty-one students but only four women, and the men tend toward the strong, silent type. I don't want to suggest that all tall, quiet guys in baseball caps look alike, but if they don't do something memorable within the first two weeks, I'll never learn their names, which all seem to start with J: Josh, Jason, Justin, Jack. Two Matts and two Chrises in the same class and I don't know which is which. Maybe I'll just settle for "you in the baseball cap," but that would apply to two-thirds of my students.

My upper-level creative nonfiction class is easier: only six students, most of whom I've had before. That promises to be a really fun class. Today we're discussing "The Undertaking" by poet/undertaker Thomas Lynch, an essay that consistently knocks my socks off no matter how many times I read it, and we're working on using concrete details to make abstract ideas accessible to readers.

I've tried using concrete details to make my students' names more accessible to my mind, which is why I know about half of my students' names instead of fewer. I've been taking roll by making students answer a question rather than just saying "Here," and it helps. One day in the American Lit Survey, the class had read Mark Twain's "Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," which features three important characters: the unnamed narrator, Simon Wheeler, and Jim Smiley; for roll call, I made each student tell which of those three characters he or she would most like to be and why. It was illuminating, but I'm not sure I dare try the same thing tomorrow with "Daisy Miller." No one would want to be Daisy because she's dead, and, as Thomas Lynch reminds us, the dead don't care.

When I'm dead I'll stop caring about learning my students' names. Now, though, I'm still trying.

Doughnuts in the snow

Yesterday we got home to find four-wheeler tracks in the snow covering our frozen creek. Someone had been doing doughnuts, trusting in the firmness of the intermittent ice just a few feet away from a spot where the water was still freely flowing, and even though I know how dangerous it can be to drive a heavy and expensive piece of machinery on ice that isn't always as thick as it looks, my first thought was: I want to try that!

I didn't, of course. Instead, today I hauled a hefty and expensive pile of technology into the unpredictable classroom environment and did some spins and twirls, not knowing whether the result would be a beautiful pattern or a sudden disaster. Today I kept my head above water, but tomorrow--who knows?

Good has been done here

It doesn't happen often, but every once in a while I'll be in the middle of doing something brilliant in a class and it's working--students are responding, learning is taking place, good work is being done--and a little voice in the back of my mind steps up to the microphone and says, "You're good--you're really good."

I had one of those moments today and I've decided to preserve it for posterity so that in a few weeks, when my students start griping about grades and I finally get to see my fall evaluations with the inevitable comments indicating that the students somehow missed the entire point and purpose of the class, I'll be able to look back and say, "But when I'm good, I'm really, really good."

You is who here?

That's the question I heard myself uttering this morning in class. Under what circumstances would it be unobjectionable to utter the words "You is who here?"

Pass the tiara

Sometimes I have to wonder why I'm doing what I'm doing. Right now, for instance, I know why I'm typing this very slowly and carefully in two-finger fashion--so that I don't smudge my freshly-applied nail polish. What I don't know is why I polished my nails tonight or why I've recently taken to polishing them several times a week after spending the past 18 or more years not polishing them at all. Have I finally reached Princesshood?

That's the reason I polished my nails the first time: so I could be a princess. To a small girl, becoming a princess seems quite simple: all it requires is a twirly dress, a sparkly tiara, and pink nail polish--and a Fairy Godmother wouldn't hurt.

By adolescence, though, all that pinkness gets swept away to make room for more sophisticated colors like the green glittery nail polish I sported during my seventh-grade year, the polish that made my mother put her hand to her forehead, sigh deeply, and ask if anything was bothering me. Then there were the many little bottles of deep burgundy nail polish one after the other, year after year, after I decided that it was easier to stick with a color I liked instead of constantly trying out something new that might very well turn out to be a hideous mistake.

Then suddenly I was an adult and the proud owner of a white sofa that stayed pristine only until the first time I tried to paint my nails in the living room, at which point it became the white sofa with the pink stain. And then there were children. Somewhere in there I stopped wearing jewelry (because my son was a grabber--I gave up earrings after the first time he pulled one right out of my ear and popped it into his mouth). And then I had a house and two children and a job and grad school, and doing my nails just dropped right off my priority list.

Now it's back on again but I can't come up with a good reason why. People ask. During all those busy years, no one ever asked me why my nails looked as if they'd been trimmed by rabid wolverines wielding hedge-clippers, but now they want to know: what's with nail polish? And I don't know what to tell them. Maybe it's a midlife crisis. Maybe I'm due for a whole-body makeover. Or maybe it's finally my time to be a princess.

Where's that Fairy Godmother when I need her?

Slick brick

The view from my office this morning is amazing: big fluffy snowflakes falling from the sky to coat every surface with a layer of white. It's a good thing I like the view because I'll be stuck here a while. I left the house before the snow started and therefore did not think to take the car that remains maneuverable in snow. Instead, I drove my van, and I was fortunate enough to arrive in town and get it parked just as the brick streets were getting covered with snow--but if I hadn't managed to parallel park in that spot, I would have had to just walk away and leave the car in the middle of the road because it doesn't really go anywhere on slick, snowy brick. Or actually, it goes somewhere, but not where it ought to go, and sometimes it wants to go everywhere at once, which is not the textbook way to negotiate a busy street. So I'm staying put.

In search of lost time

One good thing about teaching a J-term class: all that hard work and high-energy teaching produced a sense of momentum that carried me through the first day of classes without the usual feeling of having been jerked out of a warm, cosy bed and plunked down all unprepared in front of a group of demanding and irrational students. No first-day-of class nightmares either, although I did have a really vivid dream about trying to potty-train a nine-month-old child while stuck in an airport terminal.

I taught my first class this morning in a room so cold I wanted to start a bonfire and my second class in a room so ugly that if I'd allowed my red blouse too close to that orange wall, the students' eyeballs would have exploded. I figured out the technology, distributed syllabi, answered questions, made students write, and went back to my office to read J-term portfolios, which, so far, are pretty good. In a day or two I'll put J-term behind me for good and get on to the business of teaching my current classes, which means I'll be too busy to notice that I seem to have misplaced winter break. By the time I figure out where it went, it'll be spring.

Timber!

Last week when Paul Bunyan and friends chopped down the big old oak tree threatening the garage, they found that it was hollow--but not empty.

There was no doubt that the tree needed to come down: a few limbs were still producing leaves, but most of it looked pretty dead and if it were to fall the wrong way, it would neatly bisect the new garage and guest room. The problem was finding the time and the tools to get it done: ropes, chains, tractor, and a chain saw sturdy enough to cut through a trunk nearly four feet across.

And helpers, of course. Even Paul Bunyan needs a hand sometime, so in the absence of Babe the Blue Ox, the resident woodsman arranged to have some helpers come out on his day off--and if you're ever in need of someone crazy enough to climb a nearly-dead tree in subfreezing temperatures, let me recommend an English major. The one we called works at the climbing wall in the rec center and was pretty excited about getting up into that tree to attach the chains so the tractor could pull the tree away from the garage when it fell.

I wasn't here to watch the process, but the woodsmen caught it all on videotape. The resident woodsman mans the tractor, ready to pull as soon as the tree starts tilting; the notches have been cut and there's nothing left but to knock out the last remaining bit of wood with a wedge and axe. Helper 1 runs the camera while Helper 2 swings the axe: swing, clunk, nothing; swing, clunk, CRACK--and suddenly everything is moving. Helper 2 scampers up the bank clumsily ("Why didn't I drop the axe?" he wonders later), but he needn't worry: the tree is falling the other way, right down toward the meadow, knocking a limb or two off another tree along the way but otherwise causing no real damage. When you watch the tape in slow-motion, you see one huge limb come tumbling down out of the sky long after the rest of the tree has landed with a FWUMP.

Afterward, we looked inside. The tree was hollow from the ground to about 10 feet up, and the stump still standing could easily shelter a full-grown bear, but that's not what we found inside. To judge from the many rusted bits of metal we found inside the hollow, sometime in the distant past that tree must have absorbed a section of fence. No wonder it was dying! You can't feed an oak tree wire and chain and expect it to keep standing for centuries.

Clearing the decks (not!)

I like to start a new semester with a clean desk, a clean house, and a clear inbox, but spring semester starts Monday and so far I'm batting .300.

After a veritable festival of deleting and responding, I have nearly emptied my inbox for the first time since December. My house, on the other hand, looks as if it has been hosting the annual Dust, Dirt, & Clutter Congress, and my desk looks as if a row of filing cabinets exploded on it. There's a big pile of stuff from last semester that needs to be filed and forgotten, a pile of books I borrowed from a colleague to use for my J-term class, a pile of assessment data that has somehow failed to assemble itself into a spreadsheet, a pile of information about our two job searches and the visiting author coming in March, a pile of unread submissions for the literary magazine, a pile of spring semester syllabi, and a pile of miscellaneous stuff that requires some sort of action or response but I'm too exhausted to figure out what--and on Monday there will be another pile: the final portfolios from my J-term humor writing students. Yes: I get to start the new semester with 250 pages of student writing on my desk! At least it's good student writing. If I had to start the semester with 250 pages of freshman writing on my desk, I believe I'd run away.

I can't get into the office this weekend because the whole building is closed for floor-waxing (and won't my colleagues who went on the cruise be surprised when they get back and realize that they can't get in their offices!), so the desk piles will still be waiting for me on Monday, along with all the new things that will start piling up on it right away. Today I'll clean house. I'd rather clear the decks and start the new semester with all the detritus of the previous semester neatly whisked away, but if that's not possible, the least I can do is dust.

What happens in J-term stays in J-term

Some of my colleagues are teaching courses while cruising the Caribbean, so I'm sure they'll have some great stories to tell when they return--as well as some great stories not to tell. Not every story needs to make the trip back home.

I've enjoyed some similar freedom in my J-term class without ever leaving the cold north:

• I have taught an entire class from a seated position--in a very comfy chair.
• I have worn striped purple socks so fuzzy they make you want to pet them--in the classroom.
• I have led a class discussion of testicular humor.
• I have read and given positive feedback to a student writing about men's bathroom habits.
• I have ordered pizza for the entire class on the last day--with the department credit card.

See what happens when you let an English professor outside the box? I hope nobody tells the Powers That Be about my intransigence; if the right people were to find out, they might get very, very angry and cancel next year's J-term.

But wait--they've already done that!

FAC 101: Humoring Colleagues

So I'm at this big faculty hoop-de-doo hobnobbing with colleagues I haven't seen since Finals Week when I keep encountering the same annoying conversation. It happens whenever a faculty member asks me what I've been doing over break and I mention that I'm teaching a J-term class, and then my colleague wants to know what kind of class I'm teaching, and when I say "Humor Writing," that's when the expression occurs: the cynical eye-roll accompanied by the little knowing nod, the sort of expression I would expect to encounter if I admitted to teaching Piece O' Cake 101 or Introduction to Loafing.

"It's a demanding course," I insists.

"But are you learning any good jokes?"

"It's not about jokes," I insist with a sigh. "It's about writing."

"Right, but how hard can it be? Anyone can be funny."

This is where I start to lose patience. "Good humor writing is good writing," I say, but then the eye-rolling starts again.

This conversation was annoying the first time, but by the third time, I realized I was fighting a losing battle. I may as well admit it: I'm teaching a course that few of my colleagues consider serious academic work. Those colleagues who consider me a lightweight teaching a laughable course would, no doubt, hold me in higher regard if I claimed to have spent the entire break watching daytime television while organizing my recipe files. "I made it as far as the Eggplant section before I got distracted by Oprah's search for the best pizza in Chicago," I'll say, "but at least I've got a meaningful project to tackle over Spring Break."

High-flying embroidery

I am delighted to report that my son the pilot-in-training has taken to the skies after solving his flight-related embroidery needs--and it didn't require a stitch of work on my part.

He's been looking forward to getting into the cockpit for quite some time, but first he had to overcome a variety of obstacles:

Ground school: check.
Sectional exam: check.
Logbook: check.
Radio headset: check.
Appropriate embroidery: check.

The embroidery is part of the pilot training dress code at his college: students don't take to the air if they're not dressed appropriately. Now if the college asked the students' mothers what kind of attire might be appropriate for their darling boys to wear in the air, we might have suggested an asbestos suit equipped with a personal jet pack and auto-inflating air bags, but no one asked us. Instead, he's required to wear dress pants with a white dress shirt and tie or a white polo shirt embroidered with the college's official logo, and since today's young men find ties a tad intimidating, it's no surprise that they tend to go for the polo shirt.

Except the polo shirt with official logo costs $40 at the college bookstore, and he needs several, particularly if he's planning to do any sweating in the cockpit--and let's not even think about why he might be sweating in the cockpit. I'm trying very hard not to think about the fact that the young man in the cockpit is the same one I taught to drive just a few short years ago, and I do recall some times when sweating occurred in the car--so I guess it's just as well that I'm not the one teaching him to fly!

So: unwilling to either wear a tie or pay $40 for a polo shirt, my frugal son betook himself to a local business establishment that specializes in embroidering appropriate logos on white polo shirts for aspiring pilots, allowing the young man to leap the last obstacle and take to the air. Now he's flying, which makes him pretty happy and makes me happy too--as long as he eventually learns how to land.

The She-Devil speaks

Milestone alert! Today for the first time a student called me a "She-Devil" in the middle of class. What did I do to deserve such a sobriquet? I'm making my students play surgeon with their own writing, and it hurts.

First, each student had to listen as a classmate read a chunk of his or her essay out loud, exactly as written. There's nothing like hearing one's own words read out loud to develop a sudden humiliating awareness of awkward repetitions, inelegant syntax, and inaptly omitted words.

Then each student had to choose a paragraph of a classmate's essay, underline all the verbs, and suggest an alternative for each...and when they'd finished that, they passed the essay to another classmate, who had to suggest yet another alternative for each verb. It gets more difficult with each repetition, but we ended up with some wonderful suggestions.

Finally, each student had to select a 200-word passage from his or her own writing and re-write it using half as many word. "You are a She-Devil!" hissed one student. I can't wait to hear what she says when I make her re-write it again using no more than 50 words.

Why? Because I delight in encouraging students to pay very careful attention to their own writing, and if it hurts a little--what do you expect from a She-Devil?

Random bulletin points of (non)randomness

• First of all, I resist the very idea of "random bullet-points." Bullet points by their nature imply a certain orderly arrangement of ideas, the sort of progression from point A to point B that is the antithesis of randomness.
• Likewise "random notes." If you really want random notes, set a bunch of squirrels loose on a piano keyboard.
• Even more annoying is the way my students use "random" to describe any piece of writing organized in an unfamiliar manner. I have heard students refer to the writing of Henry Adams as "random," which is sort of like calling Britney Spears "predictable" or "a model parent."
  
• "The author did not just pull words out of a hat and toss them on the page any which way," I tell my non-random students. "The words are arranged that way for a reason. If that reason is not apparent to you on first glance, maybe you ought to look again."
• Still, there's something appealing about the opportunity to just plop ideas down as they pop into my head, like this: 17! Mustard! Chattanooga!
• But even those ideas are not really random, are they? I asked my mind for some random ideas and it sent me some, of which I chose these three, discarding others for various reasons.
  
• Moreover, my mind could send me only those ideas with which it was already equipped and which were accessible on short notice.
  
• I suspect that deep down, at a level inaccessible to my waking self, my mind is a seething mass of randomness, but if I could dip a bucket down into that chaotic well, I might come up with nothing more interesting than "17! Mustard! Chattanooga!"
• And who really wants to read that?
• So I believe I'll opt out of the whole "Random Bullet-Points" genre and revert to my usual plodding style...except now I've forgotten what I was going to say.
  

Dust, rust, dirt, and noise

My campus right now is a great place to be if you're a fan of dust, rust, dirt, and noise. In my building, brilliant blue tape lends a festive touch to doors, the better to keep the dust off the freshly-waxed floors of classrooms vacant until spring semester starts. Dust from plaster and pulverized stone hangs in the air and creeps into computers, coffeepots, and photocopiers, interfering with my ability to do my job.

While the dust appears where it doesn't belong, huge holes in the walls open up to make way for elevator installation. It's not a particularly quiet job, but it's no noisier than, say, having someone beating on my door with a baseball bat all day every day. I wouldn't trade jobs with the elevator installers, who had to do some excavating downstairs to make room for the elevator shaft but found that, in the absence of an elevator, there really wasn't any good way to haul all that dirt up the stairs and out of the building except by carrying it out in buckets.

Compared to that, carrying my laptop computer across campus every day is a piece of cake. I'm teaching my J-term class in another building, where, theoretically, we won't be bothered by dust and noise, except that the custodians are cleaning all the floors in the building with equipment that sounds like they're running a car wash in the hallway--and besides, the building is just across from the construction site for the new library, where huge steel girders are being brought together all day long with no more noise than you'd hear if they were dropping college vans off the roof of the rec center.

I worry about how orange those beams look: are we supposed to build with rusty beams? But fortunately, I'm not responsible for supervising the purveyors of dust, rust, dirt, and noise. Let someone else make the tough decisions, and I'll do my part simply by sitting back and griping.

Wrong-way weather

This week we're enjoying spring-like weather, which is a nice change from the wicked winter weather we had a week ago, but let's face it: 70 degrees in January is just wrong.

Dr. Mojo and the Assessment Enforcers

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a college professor in possession of a large chunk of free time must be in want of assessment.

I haven't written my assessment report for the fall semester. The data sit on my desk like a pile of radioactive waste, daily emitting rays of doom; the numbers demand to be aggregated into an Excel spreadsheet and analyzed to within an inch of their lives, but I'm having motivation problems.

If I just ignore the pile, what's the worst that could happen? I suppose I could receive a visit from the Assessment Committee, AKA Dr. Mojo and the Assessment Enforcers, who might expose me to various cruel and unusual methods of torture: they could beat me silly with their pocket protectors, for instance, or assault me repeatedly with committee-constructed institutional prose. I picture Dr. Mojo standing in the corner, arms folded, steely eyes glaring, as the Assessment Enforcers circle round my chair spitting out phrases like "measurable outcomes," "general education cognate areas," and "quality assessment activities." I might be able to resist all that, but if they start browbeating me about the need "to infuse the principles and benefits of continuous improvement into the culture of the college," I'll wilt like a sprig of watercress at a hot spring.

The right way to avoid this scenario is to write the report, but my desperate mind keeps casting about for another way of escape. What I need is for a friendly dog to wander into my office and eat all those tasty data. They're not very nourishing, but dogs will eat anything--which is probably the only characteristic they share with Assessment Committees.

Where's Paul Bunyan when you need him?

If Paul Bunyan lived at my house, he'd make short work of the big dead tree beside the garage, transforming it into stacked firewood before breakfast, and then he would pluck the remains of the old footbridge cables off the big tree where they've been embedded for years and twirl them around and around in the air until they made a mini-tornado, which would touch down and pick up all the leftover building materials and old tires behind the sheds.

Then we'd set him to work on the shed-moving problem. We've been contemplating the shed-moving problem for quite some time, and it looks like it's going to take Bunyanesque effort to empty out the old garden shed, move it down a steep hill with lots of trees in the way, and set it up next to the garden. Paul Bunyan would just hitch up Babe and the thing would be moved in two shakes of a Blue Ox's tail, but in the absence of Bunyan and Babe, that shed is not going anywhere.

Of course, if Paul Bunyan lived at my house, we'd have to knock down some walls to make a room big enough to fit him and raise the roof so his he could stand up straight--and where would we put Babe? An ox that big would exhaust the resources of our meadow before next Tuesday. I would have to stay home all day and cook flapjacks, stack after stack of 'em, just to keep the big man moving, and before you know it I'd be out of a job, and then who would pay the mortgage? If Paul Bunyan lived at my house, he would eat us out of house and home--a high price to pay for a little shed-moving!

Do you think I should call The Incredible Hulk?

The party's over

My full house is emptying out again: the Texas kid left Saturday and the Kentucky kid leaves tomorrow, and yesterday the Kentucky kid's sweetheart left--but not before fixing my computer and the dehumidifier and fiddling with the dishwasher. It's good to have a handyman in the house, even temporarily.

Today the Kentucky kid is busy taking down the Christmas tree and all the decorations; by the time she leaves tomorrow, all signs of the holidays will have disappeared. The house will feel emptier than ever, with just me and the old guy staring at the bare walls. The festive food is all gone, so we're ready to start digging the mystery meats and leftover bits of casserole out of the freezer. The party's over. Time to get back to real life.

Dr. Dull and the Looniversity

The job applicants we interviewed last week can be roughly divided into two groups: those we'd gladly listen to all day long and those who made our eyes glaze over at "Hello." Over the course of 24 interviews, my colleague J developed some pretty effective techniques for dealing with both kinds.

Suppose the candidate was a Froot Loop who'd just beamed in from Planet Flake: interesting, but clearly not firmly enough connected to reality to work at a small college at the edge of Appalachia. While the rest of us were trying to figure out graceful ways to end the interview, J would lean forward with interest and egg the candidate on with question after question, inviting him to share grand plans for transforming our down-to-earth campus into an outpost of Loon University.

This produced an entertaining spectacle, which is more than I can say for J's method of dealing with the candidate who not only was not interesting himself but somehow managed to suck all the interestingness from the room--and possibly from the entire Chicago metropolitan area. While the rest of us struggled to steer Dr. Dull toward more scintillating topics, J would lean back in his chair and lose himself in the white noise of the interview room, nodding rhythmically and occasionally making some vague agreeable sound, like "Um-hm" or "Right!" I would look at him, my eyes pleading for rescue from this fount of dullness, but J would just nod and grin and say "Mm-hm."

When we finally managed to dislodge Dr. Dull from the table, J offered a single comment: "He just about drove me to DefCon 4."

DefCon 1: "So, do you have any questions for us?"
DefCon 2: "It's been great talking to you! Have a great trip back!"
DefCon 3: Stand up and extend the arm for a farewell handshake.
DefCon 4: Excuse yourself to visit the rest room or catch a train.

I don't know what comes after DefCon 4, but if we're ever in that situation, I'm sure J will know what to do.

January teaching tips

How to teach a three-hour morning class on a cold, snowy day in January when everyone in the room would rather be at home in front of a roaring fire:

1. Pace yourself. A three-hour class is not the Boston Marathon; it's just two 75-minute classes back-to-back with a break in the middle. Teaching a 75-minute class is a piece of cake, so two in a row should be double the cake.

2. Speaking of cake, I recommend cupcakes. J-term courses tend to attract nontraditional students, who often have children, who may have recently celebrated a birthday, which may have generated cupcakes in the low three figures. If a student offers to clear the house of cupcakes by bringing the leftovers to class, the only correct answer is "Yum."

3. Don't look out the window. There's nothing out there for you. Everything you need is in the classroom, provided that you don't need a roaring fire, a good book, a cup of cocoa, and a cat. If you do need that, then what are you doing teaching a J-term class?

4. If you were stranded on a desert island and you could choose any 11 people to share the experience, you'd probably select someone who could build a boat, someone who could create nourishing three-course meals from palm fronds, sand, and bat guano, and someone who could tell stories to keep everyone laughing through the intestinal cramps, but you didn't get to choose these 11 students, did you? You have no idea what kinds of skills they bring to the table. Find out. Use them.

5. Sit down and shut up--often. You can't lecture for three hours straight (and no one would listen to you if you could), so make the other 11 people in the room do some of the yapping.

6. Make sure the classroom is comfortable--but not too comfortable. A cozy chair in a warm room will result in droopy eyelids and the occasional accidental snort. Keep it cool and keep 'em moving.

7. Make sure to select a topic that you can teach without too much outside preparation, but make sure you still have more to learn. Choose a topic you know too well and you'll bore yourself silly (and, possibly, the students too); choose a topic you don't know well enough and you'll spend every waking hour preparing for class, which leaves next to no time for the aforementioned fire, book, cocoa, and cat.

8. Do the assignments along with the students. There's no better way to discover the flaws in an assignment than to try to do it yourself in the same time available to the students. For instance, if the homework demands that they write a set of humorous instructions for any task, then you could write a set of instructions for how to survive a three-hour class on a cold, snowy January morning when everyone in the room would rather be home in front of a roaring fire.

Nah. It'll never happen.

Wild party...not

We arrived home last night to find a wild party raging all over the house, with drunken youths swinging from the light fixtures and a live band disturbing the neighbor's livestock. Okay, I lied. We got home to find a very quiet house, with both of the young people sitting on the sofa and reading books. That's the perfect end to an excellent (working) vacation.

And now suddenly it's the final day of 2007, and how will we celebrate? What will make the perfect end for an excellent year? We'll go for a walk, eat some sauerkraut, and play some board games later on. Not all that exciting, is it? I'm reminded that a year ago we celebrated New Year's Eve by watching paint dry (read it here). Even Monopoly has to be more fun than that!

Meeting the OMDB Candidate

No one wants to meet an OMDB candidate, but every pool of candidates includes at least one of them--and sometimes more.

The OMDB candidate inspires Search Committee members to proclaim, "We'll hire Candidate X Over My Dead Body." Sometimes Candidate X becomes Candidate OMDB within nanoseconds of the start of the interview, but the rules of the game clearly state that the interview must continue to the bitter end even after the Search Committee has relegated Candidate X to the OMDB file.

What causes an otherwise hire-worthy candidate to assume OMDB status? Here are some sure giveaways (although circumstances have been changed to protect the guilty):

1. Candidate OMDB expresses a fervent desire to teach her dissertation texts and only her dissertation texts in every class from now until the end of time.

2. Candidate OMDB believes that American literature begins with Washington Irving and, when pressed to consider earlier authors, cannot envision ever teaching a text dating from before 1800.

3. Candidate OMDB oozes smug self-satisfaction while saying, "I don't know if you know anything about American literature, but..."

4. Candidate OMDB expresses a fond desire to teach just about every course in the curriculum, most especially those taught by Search Committee members, and then coyly suggests that his administrative experience would make him a prime choice for department chair.

5. Candidate OMDB name-drops shamelessly: "Maybe it's obvious that I studied with [Big Name Scholar]...."

6. Candidate OMDB transform the interview into a personal monologue, causing Search Committee members to lean back and take mental refuge in their Happy Place, so that when he finally stops chattering long enough for anyone else to get a word in edgewise, no one is alert enough to notice.

We have one more day of interviewing and we are very pleased with the quality of our candidates so far, with a very few exceptions. We've already encountered more than enough OMDB candidates for this search, so I'm hopeful that we've filled our quota and tomorrow's candidates will all be stellar. Then we'll have another kind of problem: why can't we hire all of them? That's when the provost steps in to say "Over My Dead Body."

It's better than walking on hot coals

One day down, two to go--but let's not get too excited. We had only five interviews scheduled today and one had to be rescheduled because the candidate had two flat tires on the way to Chicago, so we're doing nine tomorrow and eight on Saturday, one after another all day long in the big interview room with the horrid carpet.

Where do hotels find all this horrid carpet? Do they all patronize the same Horrid Carpet Warehouse, or do their design teams offer Affirmative Action for the Aesthetically Impaired? One hallway in our hotel features puke green walls and checkerboard carpet with interlocking lines and angles that make my eyes hurt.

And how did all this ugliness ooze into the prettiest part of the prettiest big city in the midwest? I'm not a city person, but I can't walk a block up Michigan Avenue without being awed by the wealth of architectural variety and detail, the Gilded Age buildings oozing with sheer, brazen, unashamed hope. I sense the presence of Carl Sandburg swooping among the towering stone towers or stomping along the crowded sidewalks. Sherwood Anderson looked at the Chicago River and saw mud, but it was the kind of mud that could support the (self)creation of an artist. Harriet Monroe made poetry happen here. In the public library just up the street stands a bronze bust of Gwendolyn Brooks looking like a straight-talking, no-nonsense goddess of poetry. City of big shoulders indeed.

But none of those authors had to live with this horrid hotel carpet. Sherwood Anderson stayed in a cold, bare room in a cheap rooming house while he wrote Winesburg, Ohio; if, instead of bleak, bare, drafty walls and floors, he'd been surrounded by horrid hotel carpet, his muse would have jumped in the river. How many potential works of Great Literature were stillborn because the muse couldn't coexist with obnoxious upholstery?

Good thing I'm not here to create Great Literature. Horrid hotel carpet is appropriate for the big bad interview room because no one expects to be comfortable in there anyway: the MLA interview room is a black hole of angst right now, full of people so desperate for a tenure-track teaching job that they wouldn't notice if the floor were coated with hot coals.

As for those of us who already have jobs, the horrid carpet is the least of our concerns. We want to find someone who knows a little something and knows how to teach it to our students, someone who can teach a 4/4 load plus serve on committees and still do some research and publishing, someone we wouldn't mind running into in the hall every day. If putting up with horrid hotel carpet is the price we have to pay to find that person, then it's a price worth paying.

So I'm willing to put up with the ugly carpet. Just don't ask me to write any poetry about it.

Fit for a king

The bed in our hotel room has nine pillows on it. Nine! It's a king-size bed, but until nine-headed kings become more plentiful, nine seems a bit excessive.

Who sleeps on nine pillows? And if we're not planning to sleep on them, what do we do with them? The closet is already crowded with clothes, a safe, and, of course, extra pillows. (In case we need more!)

Some of the excess pillows can sit on the sofa, which is shoved in a corner of the room so dim that if I tried to read over there, my eyeballs would jump right out of my head and out the window and fall splat to the street 24 stories below. I would gladly trade any six of our pillows for just one 100-watt lightbulb, but that would violate one of the unspoken rules of hotel management: "Keep the Customer in the Dark." The less we see, the less we know and the happier we are--or at least that's the theory.

This works with valet parking as well: a charming young man in a dark overcoat whisked our car out of sight and hid it in the bowels of the parking garage, knowing that the absence of car will translate into an absence of awareness of the parking charges adding up day by day. It would be distracting, for instance, if we had to face the unpleasant fact that none of the motels where we stayed on our honeymoon charged as much for a room as this hotel charges daily for a parking space.

Now here's a thought: let's put that idle space to good use and solve our pillow problem at the same time. I say we take the excess pillows down to the parking garage and ask the valet to stash them in the car. He could even take them for a test-drive! With the excess pillow problem solved, I'll be able to relax and enjoy a snooze fit for a king.

Caution: road hazards ahead

So here we are in Chicago getting ready to interview a zillion job applicants at the MLA convention--and let me just say that the excitement level on the road trip was a bit uneven. That long stretch of I-65 from Indianapolis to Gary is so boring you could drive it in your sleep, while the final 30 miles into Chicago are packed with back-to-back (and bumper-to-bumper) thrills. If there were a way to spread out all that excitement over the entire trip, it would be a more pleasant drive all around.

Now I have one or two little logistical matters to adjust before I'm ready to start the interviewing assembly line, but my brain is stuck in thrill-ride mode. Somehow I need to connect with my inner Indiana. Is there a Hoosier in the house?

Theopyropedologian

Yesterday we celebrated the birthday of the resident woodsman, pyromaniac, bread-baker, gardener, teacher, and theologian (and how we squeezed all those clumsy characters into this little house is a mystery to me), and I reminded him that in two years I'll be married to a 50-year-old man.

"Really?" he said. "Anyone I know?"

Spine-tingling

It's not every day that one sees a spine dangling from a tree; nevertheless, that's the sight I found myself contemplating during my morning walk. It wasn't a complete spine, just about a dozen linked bones hanging from a notch in a branch about ten feet above the ground. The question, of course, is where did it come from and how did it get there? (That's two questions, I realize, but you try to think coherently while contemplating a treed spine.)

Now the spine in question was in a tree at the edge of woods frequented by hunters, and since deer season has just ended, it would not surprise me to find that this section of spine originated in a deer. The other options are less appealing: the bones are too big to have come from anything smaller than a deer, and the other large mammals in these woods are (1) people and (2) bears. I haven't heard of any bear sightings recently and if that's a piece of person up there, I don't want to know about it.

One part of the puzzle was solved when I stumbled upon the remains of a deer about 20 feet uphill from the treed spine. The head was entirely missing and the rest of the carcass had been pretty well picked over, so I assume some hunter killed the deer, took the head for a trophy, and left the rest. But how did the spine get up a tree 20 feet away? Deer are not known for their posthumous tree-climbing ability, but I suppose a hunter could have hung the spine in the tree. But why? Just to be cute? What else could hang it up there? A carrion bird of some sort?

I'm afraid it's going to have to remain a mystery because Your Intrepid Explorer is, frankly, less than enthusiastic about investigating the matter any further. I'd rather contemplate the mystery of Christmas cookies--warm and crunchy and utterly spineless.

Nutty syntax

The peppery aroma of ground cardamon fills the kitchen but while the dough rises I'm puzzling over the syntax of a recipe calling for "1 cup roasted chopped almonds." It's clear that I am expected to perform three actions:

1. measure
2. roast
3. chop

But in which order? Measure then roast then chop, or roast then chop then measure, or chop first and then roast and measure at the end? What if the recipe called for one of the following instead:

1 cup almonds, roasted and chopped
1 cup roasted almonds, chopped
1 cup chopped almonds, roasted
1 cup chopped roasted almonds

And does any of this really make any difference?

Computer limbo?

What do computers do when nobody is looking?

The question arose this morning while I was sitting in the library computer lab surrounded by bright, shiny computers all booted up and ready to work, but with no one around to use them--except me. I have a few small matters to attend to on campus this morning but I had to flee my office because the elevator installation project has begun and the whole building is suffused with some sort of chemical odor that made my head throb almost instantly.

So I went to the library, where the computers seemed to jump for joy with eagerness to serve as, and I wondered: do they feel lonely when no one uses them? At the end of the day when the lights are turned off and the students and staff members go home, do the computers celebrate? Do they miss us when we're gone or do they take a few nips from their secret stash of bites and belly up to the bar to gorge on ones and zeroes? Or do they just relax and take a snooze?

Silly questions, I know, but I spend way more time with my computer than I spend with any human being or pet, so I'm tempted to personify my computer, to think of it as a helper and friend rather than a cold-hearted piece of machinery. I wish them well, all the computers of the world, and I hope that during this blessed season even the poor neglected computers will have a chance to let their hair down and celebrate a little--and if they want to have a little after-horus limbo party under the desks in the library, that's fine, as long as they're ready to serve me when I need them.

An imperfect Christmas

I've just posted final grades so now I can start thinking about Christmas--a little late. I have not written a card, mailed a package, baked a cookie, or put up the tree. This is bad. If I do nothing but prepare for Christmas 24/7 until the 25th, I still won't quite get everything done. So I've decided not to try.

Oh, I'll get a few things done: I'll write some notes and send some gifts and put up a tree (especially now that the Texas kid is home to help and the Kentucky kid is coming Wednesday), but I refuse to beat myself up for once again failing to produce the perfect Christmas that exists within my imagination. We'll settle for an imperfect Christmas, and if the young'uns complain, I'll just gather them at my knee and remind them of what happened on the first Christmas after the old guy and I got hitched:

It wasn't really our first Christmas. We got married (25 years ago tomorrow!) a week before Christmas, so we spent our first Christmas on our honeymoon. A year later, we were living in a horrible tiny upstairs apartment under a roof with a slope so steep we had to bend over to get out of bed. We were both in school and therefore had no money except the pittance we brought in from part-time jobs, including my holiday fill-in work as a typesetter at a small-town newspaper.

Now the publisher of this newspaper was an old-fashioned skinflint, and he saw no need to switch over to newfangled computerized typesetting equipment as long as the ancient punch-tape machines were still running. I spent long days sitting in front of those machines, surrounded by their incessant clatter and vibration, typing letters and codes on the stiff and sticky keyboard, which translated my typing into perforations on a long skinny sheet of tickertape: punch the tape with one machine, carefully remove the tape without tearing it, and feed the tape into the other machine, which translated the ticker-tape into long columns of justified text.

The room was big and poorly lit, with a cold concrete floor, and I sat with my back to the door so that every time the door opened, I felt a cold draft on my back. I went home every day stiff, sore, and frustrated, because often the tape broke or the machines messed up, and the only solution was to totally re-type whatever got wrecked. I had been in love with journalism for as long as I could remember, but my idea of a great jouralistic job was more like the one Rosalind Russell filled in His Girl Friday: exciting work that could make a difference in the world (and it wouldn't hurt to have Cary Grant as a boss!). Instead, I worked for a crusty old skinflint and shivered in front of a piece of noisy, cranky equipment and typed (and re-typed) articles about the impending increase in water rates and the village Christmas parade. (My favorite sentence: "The winning float will not be chosen.")

So I was inclined to feel a bit sorry for myself that Christmas--and to make it worse, we had no tree, and even if we'd had the money for a tree, we had exactly two Christmas ornaments, both wedding gifts. So it didn't look or feel much like Christmas.

Until one day my husband brought home a Christmas tree--a sad, scrawny, bare tree, the last one in the lot, which was why it cost him only $10. With only two ornaments, though, it looked pretty meager. Where would we get more?

The next day I came home from work with a grocery bag full of discarded rolls of used yellow ticker-tape, and we spent the evening twisting it into paper snowflakes and angels and stars and garlands. In the end it was the oddest Christmas tree I'd ever seen, festooned with yellow perforated paper that barely covered the bare spots, but it looked festive, so we dimmed the lights and lit the candles and sat in front of the tree sipping eggnog, and nothing could have looked lovelier.

Now we have an artificial tree and so many boxes of ornaments that we won't use half of them, and it will look far more sparkly and colorful than our yellow ticker-tape tree, but even then, our Christmas won't be perfect. It's never perfect--but it'll be festive, and that's enough.

Eggnog, anyone?

Finally (almost) finished

One more paper! That's all I need to read to be entirely done with grading. Unfortunately, the paper isn't here. It should have been here earlier this week, but I granted a rare deadline extension so I don't have it.

I ought to have an immense feeling of accomplishment right now, but until I grade that final paper, my semester feels incomplete. Yesterday I read all my freshman research essays one after another all day long, which felt like soaking in a vast tepid sea of mediocrity and then emerging, pink and wrinkled and slightly waterlogged, onto solid ground. The capstone papers were much more pleasant, and the postcolonial exams were either wonderful or awful, with lots of A's and F's and not much in between. The exams made it pretty easy to discern who had done the reading and who had not.

Now that (most of) the grading is done and (most of) the grades are posted, what I really want to do is go out Christmas shopping and then go home and bake--but no, I've got to wait for that final final paper to come in. Not that I'm bitter. And even if I were, whose fault is it that the paper isn't here? After all, I'm the one who granted the extension. So I'll just sit here kicking myself until the final final final paper comes in--finally.

Recommended reading

"The impulse to keep a diary is to actual diaries as the impulse to go on a diet is to actual slimness," writes Louis Menand in the Dec. 10 New Yorker. "Most of us do wish that we were slim diarists," he adds, and then he goes on to explore why we aren't. Menand's article meanders through various theories of diary-keeping and the work of various diarists both famous and infamous. Altogether a delightful article.

The Best American Short Stories 2007 (edited by Stephen King) is more uneven but equally rewarding. Many of the stories deal with families struggling to deal with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune: child murder, parental discord, schoolyard angst. My favorite among these is Joseph Epstein's "My Brother Eli," which explores the aura of the artist and its effect on those closest to him. The story is told from the perspective of a working stiff trying to understand his famous brother, a successful novelist too sensitive and special to feel at home in his working-class Chicago neighborhood. The narrator's no-nonsense observations reveal the ties that bind as well as the boundaries that divide the two brothers:

Eli was wearing a tux with an especially wide sateen collar, a shirt with lots of big ruffles and a red cummerbund and an enormous red bow tie, of the kind which, if, when you shook his hand, it flashed 'Kiss Me,' you wouldn't be in the least surprised. He looked like a Jewish trombone player in the old Xavier Cougat orchestra. His wispy, now completely white hair was combed over and patted down to cover his baldness. He got the family talent, wherever in the hell it came from originally, but I got our old man's thick hair, which maybe was the better deal.

The narrator's clear eye, compassion, and absence of rancor result in a story that reveals a believable world.

Another type of world is revealed in Roy Kesey's "Wait," in which a group of people gathered in an airport terminal in an unnamed country wait out an oppressive fog--a mundane situation to be sure, but Kesey's surreal take sparkles:

The fog scurls. Toilets clog and garbage cans overflow. Darkness drops, the generators growl and fail, and the airline personnel regret that no additional blankets are available. The subgroups gather into themselves. The girl from Ghana dreams the roar of a thousand fontomfrom drums while across the lounge the accountant fights through a nightmare involving misconstrued negative amortization schedules.

The wait goes on and the characters develop novel ways to pass the time, each activity more unexpected than the last--but like all waits, this too must pass, as much as the reader would like it to continue indefinitely.

And who is that reader? In the introduction to the volume, Stephen King proclaims the short story alive but not entirely well, suffering from marginalization to the bottom shelves of bookstore magazine racks dominated by photos of celebrities and sports stars. The result of this marginalization, he says, is that the audience for short stories consists of "other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines...not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there. And this kind of reading isn't real reading, the kind where you just can't wait to find out what happens next...It's more like copping-a-feel reading. There's something ucky about it."

In the Contributors' Notes, Richard Russo offers another reason for reading:

You'd think that the life of the mind, especially the liberal arts, would make us better, if not happier, people, but too often it doesn't. The study of literature had had what I believed to be a salutary effect on my own character, making me less self-conscious and vain, more empathic and imaginative, maybe even kinder. Perhaps it's an oversimplification, but as I've gotten older I've come to wonder if maybe this is what reading all those great books is really for--to engender and promote charity. Sure, literature entertains and instructs, but to what end, if not compassion? How is it, then, that so many smart people use the study of literature to erect sturdy barriers between themselves and their lives, to become strangers to their truest desires, their best selves?

An excellent question well worth consideration by those of us devoted to the life of the mind. For those stuck behind those "sturdy barriers," this collection is an antidote, for it is suffused with that sense of compassion and charity that Russo considers the purpose of reading.

Rogue recording on the loose!

I'm pleased to report that I am no longer on hold--but that doesn't mean I won't be again soon. Early this morning I spent about 20 minutes listening to the same cheesy melody over and over again, but the music was less frustrating than the ridiculous conversation that had preceded it, which sounded like an echo chamber:

"Why would we have called you at 1:30 a.m.?"

"That's what I want to know. Why would you?"

"Can you identify the person who called?"

"It was a recorded female voice, and it wasn't interested in answering my questions."

"No one from this office could have called you at that hour. This office isn't even open at 1:30 a.m."

"And yet the recording claimed to be speaking for your company. Why would your office try to contact me to provide a new Personal Identification Number at a time when hard-working people are sound asleep?"

"You must have requested a new PIN."

"At 1:30 a.m.? In my dreams?"

"Is anyone else associated with your account?"

"Only my husband, who was snoring right next to me at the time. We have no need for a new PIN, particularly at that hour of the morning."

"Then why would we call you at 1:30 a.m.?"

"That's what I want to know!"

After going around in circles like that for quite some time, being put on hold was a nice break, but after 20 minutes of having my eardrums assaulted by the same tinny, chipper tune over and over and over again, I had to hang up. I gave my morning exam and came back prepared to jump back into the on-hold queue, but now the line keeps being busy. Maybe I'm not the only one who wants to complain about receiving a phone call from a recorded voice at 1:30 a.m. Civilization has come to a pretty pass when rogue recordings can maliciously rouse law-abiding citizens from a sound sleep to offer unwanted information about their Personal Identification Numbers. Is this the end of the world as we know it?

Utterly workless

When a local farmer asked me what I'll be doing during Christmas break, I said, "I'll be teaching a January class three hours a day for three weeks, so I'll be working pretty hard."

"Three hours a day?" she said. "That's not work!"

And then I did some hasty back-pedaling: "Yes, but it's a writing-intensive class so I'll have to read drafts every day and prepare for the next class--"

But she just laughed and shook her head. Reading drafts! Teaching three hours a day! That's not work!

Well, okay, it's not plowing fields or chopping wood or changing diapers, but it sure feels like work. Three hours of teaching is not as painful as three hours of weed-pulling, but it's strenuous and challenging and exhausting to the mind if not to the muscles. It's just a different kind of work. Isn't it?

To a farmer, nothing I do looks very much like work: I sit, I read, I write, I stand in front of classes and say brilliant things, I go to meetings, I fill out forms. Mostly I think a lot. Thinking can look an awful lot like loafing, especially to people who work with their hands. There's not much point in trying to explain to a woman with calloused fingers that the time I spend staring out the window is just as valuable as the time she spends canning beets. How can my staring possibly feed a family? Work should look like work, and thinking doesn't.

So next time someone asks me what I'm doing over break, I'll have a better answer. "Nothing at all," I'll say. "I'll just spend three hours a day having fun with students--and being paid very nicely for the pleasure."

Keeping my head above water

My computer crashed. The phone lines were full of static. Rain kept falling and falling. The creek rose. The snow melted. More rain fell. More snow melted. The creek rose some more.

All this may or may not explain why I've been pretty much out of touch for the past few days.

When we left for church yesterday morning, the fields were still covered with snow. When we got home, the snow was gone and the creek had widened from bank to bank, but it was only about six inches deep under our bridge. Around midafternoon I glanced the window and saw water. "That's odd," I thought; "The creek is not normally visible from this window." So I walked down to take a look and found that the creek had risen to within a few feet of the bridge. That's at least a seven-foot rise in water level in about three hours--and it was still raining.

Fortunately, the river was low enough to allow the creek to drain quickly, and by this morning the water level had fallen by a foot or two. No damage so far, although I did see a few large chunks of tree rushing downstream. After the water recedes, I'm sure we'll find some major limbs trapped against the bridge piers--but at least the bridge itself isn't under water. More rain is in the forecast for another few days, so who knows what could happen?

And all the professors are above average

I had my final meeting with my least favorite class today and apparently they weren't any more thrilled to be there than I was because by the time class started, only two students had bothered to show up. Two more wandered in over the next 15 minutes, but by then I had already covered everything I needed to cover and I was doing individual conferences to deal with specific problems on research papers, which are due next week. Two students in that class never bothered to pick up their drafts with my comments--drafts that have been available for pick-up since last Friday. I don't know how those students will do on the final paper, but I'm not holding my breath for a positive outcome. I'm much more sanguine about the students I met with today. I've never had a class fall to pieces so badly as this one, so I really don't want to see the evaluations. Let's just put it all behind us and move on.

This afternoon, on the other hand, I'll meet for the last time with my wonderful capstone class, which will be much more pleasant. In the meantime, I'm reading and commenting on a few drafts from my postcolonial students, many of whom have really made tremendous progress this semester. While I'm inclined toward melancholy because of the awfulness of my awful class, I have to remind myself that I've had one outstanding class and one really good class this semester, which is batting better than .500. Sometimes that's the best we can hope for.

An essential equation

I have discovered the equation for departmental bliss:

(S + C) * W = B

S = snow outside, big fluffy white flakes falling gently to the ground to beautify everything they touch.

C = chili inside, a big crock pot bubbling in the department office all morning long, guarded by the departmental secretary, who made the chili and transported it to the office

W = wonderful colleagues who gladly brought in cheese, bread, chips, pop, bowls, and everything else needed for a casual chili lunch

And B, of course, is Bliss, the departmental kind.

Cratchit comes to college

These are the times that try men's soles (and women's too), and not just their soles but their ankles and toes, which rest most of the day on a cold floor in a drafty office. How to stay warm when the indoor temperature hovers in the low 60s? I keep in my office a big fuzzy poncho to toss over whatever I happen to be wearing (whether it matches or not), so that this morning you could have seen me wearing a brown and orange poncho over a purple sweater ensemble.

But the real key to comfort starts with the feet. If my feet are cold, I feel the chill clear up to my earlobes, which explains why I've developed an almost religious devotion to warm socks. The only thing that would ever tempt me to keep sheep in flocks: an endless supply of wool socks. I have 'em in black and brown and green and red, but the black ones have reached the end of their useful life, so today I took time off in the middle of the day to go and buy more, and since none of the local stores carry wool socks, I had to drive over the river and through the woods to get them, which stretched my lunch break into midafternoon. (If the Powers That Be want to object to my going sock-shopping during regular office hours, then maybe the Powers That Be should spend some time in my 61-degree office and then explain how I'm supposed to grade papers when all of my energy is devoted to staying warm.)

Now that my feet are toasty warm, I notice that my hands are a bit chilly. I can't type with gloves on and mittens are out of the question--but how about some of those Bob Cratchit gloves with the fingers cut out? Or here's a thought: what about the whole Cratchit outfit, with top hat and scarf and wool waistcoat and fingerless gloves? It might not look terribly professional, but if all of us who work in this building were to dress up for one day in the whole Cratchit outfit, we might inspire the resident Scrooge to put a few more coals on the fire and warm this place up!

Overheard in the halls of academe

"I would never wish for a building to explode actually, but some days when I've been grading papers--!!"

Winter in the air

Snow today! Tiny, hard snowflakes were coming down when I left the house this morning, not enough to stick to the ground but enough to make it feel like winter. The temperature in my office this morning is 63.7 degrees, which is too darn cold, and the department office is full of various types of rich, sweet chocolatey goodies, a very good reason to stay away. But I have a meeting at 5 (yuck) so I have to stick around. I may flee for a while and do some Christmas shopping just to get away from chocolate and cold--or, better yet, I'll spend some time at the rec center. It's got to be warmer there than here and it's impossible to eat chocolate while working out.