Crash smash smoosh lunch

The message came down from on high: in times of financial austerity, it behooves us to eschew frivolous spending, so no departments were allowed to spend College money on holiday lunches this year.

Fine: so we'll bring our own food. Instead of grading finals and papers, I've spent the past hour and a half sitting in the department reading room and sampling delectable dishes made by my wonderful colleagues. Artichoke dip! Persian rice! Kale and pomegranate salad! Rum cake! The kind of food that encourages relaxation, storytelling, and laughter.

And I'll tell you: I really needed that gleeful break from grading. I thought I was having a fun grading break yesterday, but instead I had one of those days that made me wonder why I ever bothered getting out of bed. 

I managed to mail the last two Christmas packages... but caught my hand in the door on the way out of the post office (ouch!).

I was driving to Jackson to visit a friend and stopped on the way to shop at the only store where I can get this fabulous locally-made yogurt...but dropped a four-pound sack of sugar on my foot (double ouch!).

And I stopped at a rest area to use the facilities but had a moment of inattention while pulling out, looking away briefly to locate my glasses, and the car in front of me at the stop sign, which I thought was turning, wasn't, and so I slammed into him. It was a slow-speed crash; my air bag didn't even deploy, and you can barely see the minor damage on the front of my car. The license-plate holder cracked, but Ohio doesn't even require front license plates any more so who cares? This is damage I don't intend to report to my insurance company.

If the other guy had been driving a junker, we probably would have shaken hands and walked away, but his car was both much nicer and more damaged than mine. So we did the whole dance with calling the state patrol, filling out paperwork, and waiting waiting waiting while this patrol dude who looked like he was barely old enough to ride a tricycle took photos of the nearly invisible damage and filed reports.

And wrote up a ticket. For me. Because the whole thing was entirely my fault. When he asked me what I could have done to avoid the accident, I said, "Well, I guess I could have put on my glasses before I started the car." The thing is, I don't even need my glasses for distance anymore, but if I leave them off for too long I get a headache, and by that time I'd been driving more than an hour.

So I got cited for failure to maintain assured clear distance, and since it's been 14 years since I last got any kind of ticket, I'm not complaining. But I also got cited for distracted driving, which adds $100 to the fine unless I complete a 45-minute online training program about how to avoid distracted driving, which I guess I will be happy to do if it'll save me $100 but I'll bet I already know what it's going to say: keep your eyes on the road and your glasses on your eyes.

The accident left me undamaged but flustered, so that last night when I made pasta salad for today's department lunch, I left out some of the usual ingredients. But nobody cared. We were having too much fun talking and laughing and eating just one more slice of rum cake, which I'm sure will make us even more equipped to grade that flood of final papers and exams. And hey, there's lots of food left--come and get some!

Funny/not funny

Yesterday my granddaughter was reading us riddles out of a joke book when she stumped us with this one: What has four letters, sometimes has nine letters, and never has five letters?

I'll give you a minute to think about that. 

Keep thinking.

It's pretty obvious once you see the answer.

But maybe that's a little deceptive, because the secret is that there is no answer--because it's not a riddle.

Rather, it's a statement of fact: What has four letters, sometimes has nine, and never has five.  The thing that makes it funny is that it's not a joke at all.

I'll tell you what else is not a joke: sitting in a room full of campus decision-makers as an IT guru introduces a new database that attempts to quantify how each department, program, and course contributes to the College's mission. It's bad enough that this meeting was scheduled for 3:00 p.m. on the last Friday of classes, but the moment that made me want to slide under the desk occurred when the IT guru decided to use the English department as an example: "You can see here that the department as a whole brings in a decent amount of revenue, but when you scroll down to these low-enrollment classes, you can see that they're costing the College more than they bring in," and as he says it, he's pointing at the very sad number for a class I'm teaching right now.

Does it matter that students are doing remarkable work in that class? The database doesn't care. When the Powers That Be look at all the factors that determine how much a department contributes to the College's mission, this database will be only one piece of evidence they consider--but it's the most easily quantifiable piece, so it will surely loom large. No one's threatening to stamp out the English department, but it certainly doesn't feel great to be held up publicly as an example of someone whose contributions to the College fall into the negative numbers.

And on my birthday, no less! I had a hard time shaking off the glumness until I went to a colleague's house for a wreath-decorating party, where we ate comfort foods, juggled hot-glue guns, and helped each other tie bows in pretty holiday ribbon while friendly dogs looked on curiously from underfoot. It turns out that I'm not very good at decorating wreaths, but neither am I very bad. Fortunately, no one tried to quantify just how my wreath-decorating skills compare to those of my friends and colleagues, and if they did, I'd tell them that the experience was immeasurably worthwhile despite the mediocrity of my performance. 

Now I'm spending the weekend with the grandkids and assiduously avoiding the massive grading pile while listening to the kids tell silly jokes, and if you ask me how much fun I'm having, I'll say what? (Four letters.)

Hark, the herald chipmunks sing

I don't know what my son was thinking when he popped in the Christmas with the Chipmunks CD while the grandkids were visiting for Thanksgiving a few weeks ago--I mean, those kids know how to work the repeat button! We heard a year's quota of Chipmunks songs all in one day and somehow no one took a crowbar to the CD player.

Today on my way to campus I turned on the local holiday music station and heard Vince Guaraldi playing the Charlie Brown Christmas theme followed by Jose Feliciano singing "Feliz Navidad" followed by Trans-Siberian Orchestra playing "Carol of the Bells"--a trifecta of holiday perfection. Okay, so they followed up with "Frosty the Snowman," but that's why the tuner button exists.

Seven years ago I blogged about my top-10 holiday music selections, a list that remains remarkably accurate even though some of the links no longer work. The local production of Handel's Messiah never fails to fill me with awe, and this year's soloists were especially powerful and even, sometimes, fierce. But I'll also happily listen to any dumb little song my grandkids want to sing, even if it's accompanied by squeaky little chipmunk voices. 

Tomorrow I'll be inundated with piles of student papers and projects demanding to be graded, so I think I can be forgiven for taking advantage of some free time this afternoon to pop in some holiday music and write some cards and absorb the joy of the season--before it gets drowned out.

The curse of constant communication

My composition class started with a viewing of the printer-smashing scene from Office Space, always a therapeutic way to start the morning, and I was surprised once again to find that none of my students have seen the film. The topic of today's discussion was technology, how it simultaneously aids and impedes communication and why it sometimes fills us with a mad desire to take up crowbars and smash things. 

Even as we were discussing our love-hate relationship with technology, however, some angry people were sending long email messages demanding immediate response from me and others in a particular group, but fortunately, I was too busy actually doing my job to contribute to the discussion, which moved toward resolution without me. Sometimes the fast pace of electronic communication is part of the problem. Sometimes the best thing to do is step away from the keyboard and take a breath.

I've been away from blogging for a full week, fighting a cold and feeling as if my entire head was under attack from a raging mass of phlegm. Teaching has happened but probably not my best work. With all my students working on end-of-the-semester projects, I've spent more time listening and offering feedback than standing up and trying to be brilliant in class, which is good because my voice has been coming and going on its own schedule without any advance warning. I can still type when I can't talk, so technology has been helping me teach.

But still I find myself seeking solitude and distance from all my devices. This morning's reading in composition dealt partly with the dearth of solitude in daily life, the way the constant availability of communication makes it hard for our brains to get a break. I need to get out for a walk in the woods, away from phones and texts and messages, but I've been too sick and too busy to get too far away from all my electronic devices. Things are happening--important things--and I need to stay involved!

One of these day, though, I'll bypass my phone and reach for a crowbar instead, and then all my electronic devices had better look out. (My luck, I'd drop it on my foot.)

  

If it's not one plague, it's another

A plague on all our houses! At home we're battling the usual fall influx of mice and spiders, while on campus I fight an epidemic of frantic questions, complaints, and requests for extensions, plus piles of drafts featuring festering masses of inanity and pestiferous punctuation.

The comma problems alone! My students prefer to use no commas at all, while in another context I received a long angry screen insinuating that inserting a particular comma will destroy the writer's life. Can we please find some middle ground between apathy and hysteria?

Yesterday I encountered a colleague in the hallway and noticed that we were both carrying boxes of tissues to our classes, which are full of students sniffling, coughing, and struggling to keep their eyes open as they try to complete all their final projects in the last two weeks of classes. Two years ago, we compressed the Covid-inflected fall 2020 semester and took no time off so that we could end before Thanksgiving, which was awful, but I'm not sure that semester-long slog was much worse than the stress that stalks these hallways in the two weeks after Thanksgiving.

And to top it all off, I have a cold. It's not the end of the world and others are suffering much more severe illnesses, but the constant drainage makes sleeping difficult so I'm not at the top of my game, inside or outside the classroom. "Phlegm can't think," I told my students yesterday. "It may resemble brain matter a bit, but phlegm can't compose any coherent thought and neither can I." 

But here we are slogging through the various pests that plague us, armed only with a box of tissues. (I would call out "Exclesior!" but every time I raise my voice I start to cough.)

 

Gobble, gobble, gobble

Coloring books all over the table, Legos all over the floor, and a fine youthful voice belting out "God Bless America" from the bathroom--some things happen only when the grandkids are visiting. Right now the kids are giggling while singing "The Twelve Days of Christmas" along with The Chipmunks while their mom colors and the men wrestle with a plumbing problem in the laundry room. Two plumbing problems in one week--we are doubly blessed! But at least we have some extra hands around to lift the burden.

Yesterday many hands made light work of our Thanksgiving feast. The resident grillmaster smoked the turkey overnight and the rest of us labored over the rest of the meal, which was fabulous despite a few flaws. (A little gravy burnt onto the cooktop never killed anyone.) My daughter's pies were flawless (apple pie with a lovely lattice top and sweet potato tart), and my pumpkin roll was good enough to remind me why I make it only once a year--because if we had it every day, we would all be shaped like pumpkins.

The grandkids enjoyed constructing tiny mutant turkeys, which were nearly cancelled due to supply chain problems. Vanilla wafers were unavailable locally so I substituted Nutter Butters; the three local stores I tried were sold out of candy corn, and I couldn't find any burnt peanuts either (but my husband did--at the farm store). My daughter saved the day by bringing candy corn and we were ready to assemble our candy turkeys.

After all that work, all we had left to do was to gobble, gobble, gobble. And for this we are thankful.

Pie makes everything better

My students were talking about pie yesterday, all the pies they expect to see at Thanksgiving dinner and which kind they like best, when I suddenly realized that I'd missed our annual Friday Pie Day on campus. For years, on the last Friday before Thanksgiving the College served pie during the noon hour to any employee who cared to come and get it. 

How wonderful it was to gather with faculty, staff, and administrators in the middle of the day to chomp down on pumpkin, apple, blueberry, banana cream, or many other types of pie, with or without whipped cream on top--and when the pandemic prevented us from eating pie face-to-face in an enclosed space, we could pick up individually packaged wedges of pie outside a classroom building and eat them in our offices or stand and eat outdoors while socially distancing.

But this year, no Friday Pie Day. I never even heard any mention of it in Faculty Council, but I assume that the ongoing budget crunch put the kibosh on pie, just when we're all in need of a morale boost. What a pity! There are few situations in life that can't be improved by a timely slice of pie.

I won't be baking pies this week because my daughter will do the honors.  I'm afraid the pie-crust gene skipped a generation: my mother made good pie crust and my daughter's pie crusts are fabulous while mine are...not. A few weeks ago I visited a dying friend in Jackson and stopped at the Amish store along the way to buy giant apples so fresh they went snap when I cut into them, from which I made two apple pies. The resident pie-eaters agree that those were the best-tasting apple pies I've ever made, but the crusts were thin, hard, and not at all flaky. 

But an imperfect pie is immeasurably better than no pie at all, which is what we received on Friday Pie Day. I know we have many more important problems to worry about on campus, but I won't believe the College has recovered from its budget crisis until I see a room full of campus employees happily eating pie.  

Everything underfoot everywhere

From where I sit in my cozy living room, the view ain't pretty.  I see a chunk of rolled-up carpet piled on a stack of uncut baseboards next to a pair of fat mallets, an empty bucket, and a vacuum cleaner, very full. Across the way in the dining room I see the table shoved against the far wall and miscellaneous items piled on every chair, the detritus of a cleared-out closet. That quilt doesn't belong on the dining table but it will sit there until I carry it away on one of my many trips to our bedroom. Under the table lurk an old dusty briefcase, some torn jeans that need mending, a bag full of things to take to the Goodwill, an exercise ball, and a couple of suitcases. And looming tall beside the table is a big white shelving unit holding cleaning products, paper towels, boxes of lightbulbs, a basket of cleaning rags, and all the kinds of household items I prefer to keep hidden away in the laundry room.

We're at the stage in our home improvement project where the professionals have done their work and now we just need to put everything back together. This morning I was delighted to sink my feet into plush new carpet in our bedroom; later I'll make multiple trips across that carpet to put all kinds of stuff back where it belongs.

New carpet in the master bedroom and guest bedroom and our big walk-in closet, new waterproof vinyl tile flooring in our bathroom and laundry room, new baseboards in the bathroom and laundry room (which never had baseboards before). Everything looks and feels fabulous and all the big furniture is back where it belongs, so we're down to the niggling details.

Like nails. The flooring dudes ran out of nails halfway through installing the baseboards in the laundry room, so their supervisor will come out Monday to install the rest. We can't move the washer and dryer back in place and hook them up until those baseboards are in place, so it's a good thing we did a pile of laundry Thursday. The laundry room is a small and oddly-shaped space where things fit together like a 3-D jugsaw puzzle, so we can't get the big white shelving unit back in there until the washer and dryer get moved, which means it'll be hanging out in our dining room for the next couple of days.

The workers did a good job cleaning their mess but we'll be sweeping up carpet fluff for weeks. Everywhere I look I see a long day's work, but I'm more pleased by what I don't see: No more nasty stained carpet in the bathroom. No more ugly linoleum in the laundry room. No more carpet stains of unknown origin staring me in the face every time I go to the guest room. 

The chaos is calling me: I need to get to work. But just for a moment I need to close my eyes and block out the mess and recall that wonderful moment when I stepped out of bed this morning and felt the new carpet underfoot. Feel the softness, caress the plush, relish the sense of accomplishment, and then open my eyes and get back to work.  

Mess.

 

More mess.

New bathroom floor!

New bedroom carpet!

 
 

Finally, a solvable problem

Last night after a long, late, and probably futile meeting, I stopped in the parking lot to help a colleague jump-start his car. The night was dark and cold and we were constantly pelted with sharp ice pellets, but I did not regret helping for one single moment--because for the first time all day, I was able to offer a simple solution to another person's problem.

Too many of the problems that come my way these days stymie all attempts to assist. Sometimes it's because the person asking for help really doesn't want a solution, but more often it's because the problems are too tangled and I lack the right kind of sword to cut through the Gordian knot. I am happy to help a student narrow search terms to find resources for a project, but if what he really needs is a time machine so he can go back and reverse a whole semester's worth of bad decisions--well, good luck with that.

And faculty governance is the worst. Some person or group brings us an issue and we promise to look into it, but the more we look, the more complicated it gets and the less likely that we'll find a solution that pleases anyone. Maybe we'll pass the concern up the ladder, or maybe we'll draft a stern memo or write a motion to bring before the faculty, or maybe we'll form a hearings board to listen to a formal grievance, but all too often the actions available to us accomplish little more than a pat on the back and a gentle "there, there." 

A dead car battery, on the other hand, is a solvable problem. I have jumper cables and my colleague knows how to use them, so within minutes his car turned over with a very satisfying VROOM. I was wet and cold and eager to get home, but I had to take a moment to savor the feeling of finally calling a problem solved.

Chilling, literally

Today on campus I'm torn between saving the College money by keeping my space heater turned off and, on the other hand, turning the space heater on so my fingers can stop shivering enough to hold a pen. What both hands really need right now is to wrap themselves around a big mug of hot coffee.

The weather has turned and 'tis the season to agonize over how uncomfortable I am willing to become before turning on the space heater in my office. Space heaters are, of course, outlawed, but we all have them because sometimes the Bob Cratchit fingerless gloves aren't enough. I can't turn on my space heater, however, without going through a complicated calculus balancing my need to be warm against. my need to avoid feeling guilty. 

If I'm wearing two sweaters plus a scarf and huddling under a blanket but I'm still too cold to think clearly, then I ought to be able to turn on my space heater, but I worry that that little bit of extra electricity will cause the College to tip from budget crisis mode to full-blown Budget-Pocalypse. I don't want to be responsible for The End of the World as we Know It.

A whole new level of guilt arises if I turn on my space heater without first checking whether my colleague across the hall has turned on his, which may blow the circuits for this whole side of the building, and since no one in the building is authorized to reset the circuit breakers, we all have to wait, powerless, until an authorized employee comes over from the Physical Plant to reset the circuit. I don't even want to think about how much all this is costing.

On the other hand, I don't want to think about how cold my hands are every stinking minute of the day, and I don't want to have to keep my arms hovering a few inches above my desk because the desk top feels like a block of ice, and I don't want my feet to get so cold that it takes the whole drive home with the heat on full blast to take the chill off.

So if I say I'm just chillin' on campus, it doesn't mean I'm relaxed. It means the part of me that craves to be warm is waging a fierce internal battle against the tiny internal Puritans who insist that frugality is the highest virtue and suffering builds character. One of these days I'm going to wield my space heater as a weapon to beat all their tiny little Puritan heads to a pulp. Maybe then I can relax.

 

Just showing up, for the win

The other day a colleague told me I need to lower my standards for success, insisting that sometimes just showing up should count as a win. I thought of that this morning when the cashier at a convenience store started complaining about an absent employee: "He's been on the job two days but it's more work than he expected so he called in and admitted that he's just too lazy to do the job." Compared to that dude, I'm definitely winning today.

Just showing up feels heroic after I've spent the last couple of months in frequent long stressful meetings related to faculty governance issues, after I struggled for three weeks to get 37 contributors to the comedy volume to respond to the copy-editors' queries, and after I've devoted way too many hours to dealing with the kind of student who thinks "Desk, News" is the correct way to cite the name of an author of an anonymous news article. But today just showing up was even more difficult because last night I helped the new honors director drive students 45 minutes away to see a performance of Julius Caesar at Ohio University and arrived back home around midnight. On a Tuesday. When I teach at 9 a.m. on Wednesday.

I'm not sure what possessed me to agree to this, but it was an experience both enlightening and exhausting. The production was clever, utilizing only six actors, some of whom played multiple roles very convincingly. Above the stark stage was a screen where projected images and video reinforced the play's action, so that the first act's explorations of power and persuasion played below blurred black-and-white images of mass crowd scenes devolving into violence. I had to close my eyes during Mark Antony's funeral oration because the video projected above him was making me dizzy, but the rousing demonstration of the use of political rhetoric to manipulate the masses made me wonder about the midterm election results. (I checked my phone during intermission. Mostly inconclusive.)

And then after the play the twelve of us walked down the main drinking street in Athens to find a cookie shop where we bought a dozen cookies and ate them while standing on the busy sidewalk and singing "Happy Birthday" to one of our students, despite the fact that we were surrounded by OU students who looked way too young to be as drunk as they appeared to be at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday. I wonder how many of them will show up to class today. 

Well I did, and I'm glad for it. My students were alert and ready to work this morning, even the ones who went to the play with us last night. The discussions may not have been scintillating (I mean, how scintillating can you be while demonstrating the finer points of citation format?) but we got the job done. Most importantly, we showed up, and today that counts as winning.

But don't even ask me about tomorrow.

Marvelous Monday

Today I emulated my students by emailing the department chair to request that we hold our department meeting outside. Three good reasons: (1) our building is beastly hot; (2) the weather outside is warm, sunny, and welcoming; and (3) lately I've spent so much time stuck in front of a computer or a classroom in this building that just stepping outside would feel celebratory--and I've got plenty to celebrate.

First, I got to spend a little time today with a sick colleague whose cheer has been sadly missing from the building. Some people encourage me just by stepping into a room, so I'm glad she was able to do so.

Second, my Concepts of Nature class engaged in a really fun discussion today, led by two classmates who presented excellent discussion questions. I'll never get tired of looking closely at Aldo Leopold's "Thinking Like a Mountain" or Joyce Carol Oates's short story "The Buck," and the students seemed to enjoy it too.

Third, I finally submitted the updated version of the Comedy collection to the copyeditor yesterday after spending the last couple of weeks tracking down distracted contributors, responding to questions, negotiating the finer points of comma placement, and seeking out missing references for the sake of contributors who were, for various reasons, unable to assist. The minute I bundled all those essays into a Zip file and pressed send, I felt a massive burden being lifted from my shoulders. That kind of effort deserves a small celebration, even if the ticker-tape parade has to wait for a later date. 

So I hope my department chair agrees to let us go outside. It would do us all a world of good, and if the cursed leaf-blowers show up to disturb our piece, we can throw things at 'em until they go away. Winning!

Hampered by spinbots

I read this article in Inside Higher Ed about "spinbots," tech tools that allow students to evade plagiarism detectors. The principle is simple: paste text, click "spin," receive "paraphrased" version of text that substitutes synonyms for many words. Suddenly a light bulb clicked on and I understood a phenomenon I've been seeing in student papers recently: passages that look like they're copied from online summaries except they contain a slew of words that don't quite make sense, and I can't locate a source. 

How do we fight this? The Inside Higher Ed article suggests all the usual methods: change texts and assignments frequently; make assignments very specific to the course; teach students (more!) about plagiarism and proper citation. I'm already doing these things, and yet certain students keep finding ways to take unacceptable shortcuts that produce papers that aren't quite coherent. 

I decided to try out one of these online spinbots to see how it works. Since I've just finished grading a whole bunch of mostly great papers on Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, I found an online summary and copied the following text:

Cold Mountain opens with its protagonist, Inman, lying in a Virginia hospital recovering from war wounds. He is shattered by the violence he has witnessed while fighting in the Confederate army and wants to go home to reunite with Ada, the woman he loves. Inman talks to a blind man and realizes that losing something you already have is worse than not getting what you want. One day in town, Inman writes to inform Ada that he is returning home. That night, he leaves the hospital through a window and sets out on his journey back to North Carolina. 

And here is the "paraphrase" Spinbot provided:

Cold Mountain opens with its hero, Inman, lying in a Virginia emergency clinic recuperating from war wounds. He is broken by the viciousness he has seen while battling in the Confederate armed force and needs to return home to rejoin with Ada, the lady he cherishes. Inman converses with a visually impaired man and understands that horrible something you as of now have is more terrible than not getting what you need. One day around, Inman writes to illuminate Ada that he is getting back. That evening, he forgets about the clinic through a window and hampers on his excursion to North Carolina.

In some ways it's no worse than the kind of patch-writing I saw before the advent of spinbots, but in other ways it's just nuts. I mean, the last two sentences are nonsensical. "Hampers on his excursion"? Reading such text is no picnic, but I wonder what happens if I paste this result into the box and spin again?

Cold Mountain opens with its legend, Inman, lying in a Virginia crisis center recovering from war wounds. He is broken by the violence he has seen while doing combating in the Confederate furnished power and needs to get back to rejoin with Ada, the woman he treasures. Inman speaks with an outwardly hindered man and comprehends that horrendous something you at this point have is more horrible than not getting what you want. One day around, Inman writes to enlighten Ada that he is getting back. That night, he disregards the facility through a window and hampers on his trip to North Carolina.

Writing is an iterative process, so let's iterate again:

Cold Mountain opens with its legend, Inman, lying in a Virginia emergency focus recuperating from war wounds. He is broken by the savagery he has seen while doing battling in the Confederate outfitted power and needs to return to rejoin with Ada, the lady he cherishes. Inman talks with an apparently obstructed man and grasps that shocking something you right now have is more awful than not getting what you need. One day around, Inman writes to edify Ada that he is getting back. That evening, he dismisses the office through a window and hampers on his excursion to North Carolina.

Worse and worse, but not far removed from some of the prose I've been seeing in student papers. Insert some line breaks and some of it could almost pass as poetry:

an apparently obstructed man
grasps that shocking something
you right now have
is more awful than
not getting
what you need.

It's not going to win any prizes or earn any high grades but these lines hover on the edge of almost saying something sort of worth saying. Or, as Spinbot puts it, it won't win any differentiations or gain any high grades yet these lines float on the edge of almost offering something sort of worth saying.

If Spinbot does nothing else, it once again reminds us of the vast gulf separating the right word from the nearly-right one.

Angst, insomnia, and grad-school flashbacks

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

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

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

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

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

But first, I've got some work to do. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supply chain problems and a change of plans

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

 

 

 

A very full Fall Break

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

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

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

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

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

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

Encounters with brilliance--and its opposite

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

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

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

Three cheers for an un-cretin future!

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

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

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

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

Friday poetry challenge: bananas for pawpaws

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

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

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

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

I need a cure for Three-Hour Meeting Madness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surprised by students

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Jennette McCurdy on mothers and middle school

Jennette McCurdy was a child star on a Nickelodeon show I've never watched, but nevertheless I found her memoir, I'm Glad My Mom Died, insightful and terrifying and funny all at the same time for its compelling portrayal of her controlling stage mom, her battle with eating disorders, and her life as a child star. She puts the cost of stardom into perspective here:

It doesn't help that I'm famous for a thing I started when I was a kid. I think of what it would be like if everyone was famous for a thing they did when they were thirteen: their middle school band, their seventh-grade science project, their eighth-grade play. The middle school years are the years to stumble, fall, and tuck under the rug as you're done with them because you've already outgrown them by the time you're fifteen.

But not for me. I'm cemented in people's minds as the person I was when I was a kid.

As I said: horrifying. I quit playing the flute following the fiasco of my seventh-grade marching band season and I shudder to imagine being stuck in that wretched scratchy wool uniform forever, desperately struggling to march intricate formations while playing the right notes on my flute but knowing that I could accomplish only one of those two goals at any given moment. Don't even get me started about the fire ants on the practice field. I've successfully swept those memories under the rug and I would not care to carry them around with me everywhere.

So I have some sympathy for the child star "cemented in people's minds" as a 13-year-old, and her book is a brisk and often comical variation on the tear-off-the-bandaid memoir, full of grotesque details but never maudlin. I've never seen her act, but I believe her when she says she's rather write than act; her long-thwarted passion throbs through the book and made me want to keep reading long after she'd finally left behind her eighth-grade self.

I guess I'll never be a ditch-digger

As I struggled to remain standing in wet, slippery mud while trying to dislodge a stubborn wad  of heavy wet clay off the end of a shovel, I thought, Well there's another career path closed to me in case the whole teaching thing doesn't work out.

Two days later my entire upper body is still aching from the short time I spent with a group of volunteers digging shallow trenches to improve drainage on a newish trail near the Luke Chute pollinator habitat. Volunteers were urged to bring their own tools, so my husband brought along a shovel and mattock while I brought along my husband, who could dig a trench through the Hoover dam without breaking a sweat. 

He swung that mattock to dislodge rocks and break up clumps of roots while I struggled to lift the heavy shovelfuls of clay soil and struggled even more to stay standing in the slippery mud on the edge of the trench. I'd never make it as a ditch-digger, but at least I was there, trying to make an impact on a place that matters to me. 

I hadn't ventured up that particular trail before and wouldn't have found the way without a guide, but now I'm looking forward to walking up there in the spring when the trilliums starts blooming. There's a spot upstream where wild ginger grows, a treat I've not yet seen in the wild, and the whole trail holds the promise of unexplored territory.

In fact we encountered a set of hikers walking the trail from the opposite direction as we made our way up the steep hill to the part of the path that needed trenching. That spot was muddy on Saturday but is reportedly nearly impassable in the spring. The two trenches we dug should make a difference, and even though my ditch-digging skills are subpar, I can still give myself a pat on the back for being part of the process--and for bringing my husband, the hardest-working tool in the box.  

How do you count what can't be squeezed into a spreadsheet?

The problem with clarifying our value proposition, as the current euphemism puts it, is that a lot depends on whose values are included in the proposition.

Let me try that again.

Suppose you are a bean-counter at a campus suffering from budget problems, and one way to fix the problem is to cut some faculty lines, transform others into part-time contingent positions (because "any adjunct can teach that class for a lot less money"), and discontinue some programs entirely. How do you decide which programs to chop and which to enhance? (In this context, "enhance" might mean simply "allow to continue functioning as usual," but that's a quibble for another day.)

You've got to develop some metrics, concrete numbers to show which programs are contributing to the success of the institution and which ones aren't. The problem with this system, though, is that numbers can measure only those qualities that are measurable by numbers, which seems so self-evident that it's hardly worth mentioning but at the same time needs to be reiterated: numbers can measure only those qualities that are measurable by numbers. Which raises the question: what about the ones that aren't? How do you measure the immeasurable, untangle the intangible, eff the ineffable?

First let's think about the metrics that might be used to evaluate the effectiveness of a program, starting with FTEs, AKA "butts in seats." How many students does a program attract? How many of them graduate, and how quickly? How effective is the education they receive in those classes? This can be hard to measure--course evaluations are notoriously unreliable, but that doesn't mean their numbers won't be consulted. Assessment data will help. What about post-graduate outcomes--how many students go to grad school or find a job in their field within six months or a year? And of course you have to consider costs: How much does the department cost the institution in salaries, benefits, equipment, and facilities? How much grant money does it bring in? All these numbers are easily obtained and will therefore play a big part in evaluating a department's value to the institution.

So you run all these numbers through the algorithms and you come up with a list of programs or majors that attract a lot of students who demonstrate positive outcomes at a reasonable cost, and you conclude that those departments are contributing quite a lot to the success of the institution and should therefore be enhanced. Kudos to you, Top-Notch Department! According to the metrics, you're doing a great job educating your majors!

But of course Top-Notch Department isn't functioning in a vacuum. Its majors must take courses outside the department--writing and speech and general education courses, maybe even a second major or minor or certificate. How much do these other departments contribute to Top-Notch Department's students' success? That's a little harder to quantify. How much does a good Business Writing class contribute to a Finance major's ability to communicate clearly? How much more employable is a Petroleum Engineering major who can speak a foreign language proficiently? How can you equitably distribute the credit to all the departments that might contribute more or less to a student's success? And what about outside-of-class activities? How much does participation in student government or baseball or a fraternity or Model U.N. contribute to student success? 

Maybe that task is too difficult. It's a lot easier to ignore extracurriculars and courses outside the major; in fact, maybe it would be a lot easier--and cheaper!--if more of those general education and service courses were taught by part-time and contingent faculty members, which would improve the value proposition of the institution as a whole.

But, again, a lot depends on what you value.

Do you see general education courses as check-marks on a transcript or as opportunities for students to have enriching and sometimes life-changing encounters with a wide range of ideas? Is there room in your algorithm to measure the degree of enrichment experienced in those classes? Where does "that course changed my life!" fit into your metrics?

Do you see faculty members as interchangeable cogs in a machine or as experts and leaders who contribute to the quality of the institution even when they're not in the classroom? Is there room in your algorithm to value the time faculty members spend advising students, leading campus committees, or organizing cultural events that serve the entire community?

How, in other words, can your numbers quantify the things that make a Liberal Arts education a Liberal Arts education? How are you going to quantify the value of students' self-understanding and breadth of knowledge and in-depth study with faculty members who enjoy the academic freedom protected by tenure?

Maybe that's too much to expect. In fact, this whole program evaluation process has a fairly tight deadline, so you'd better just gather the numbers that are easily gathered and crunch the numbers that are easily crunched and ignore those qualities that resist quantification, even if those are the qualities most closely associated with the institution's mission, history, and identity. After all, you devalue the intangible or immeasurable or ineffable characteristics long enough, eventually they are bound to disappear. And since the costs of ignoring unquantifiable qualities are themselves difficult to quantify, you don't even have to worry about what may be lost along the way. Problem solved!

Meanwhile, those of us who value the intangible qualities that can't be squeezed into a spreadsheet find ourselves, at best, sidelined, dismissed as obstructionists or devotees of an outmoded ideal--or, at worst, deleted entirely from the system, just as our values are deleted from the institution's value proposition.

So go ahead, bean-counters, count what can be counted--but be watchful lest you count out the very qualities that make the institution matter most.

Mount Chicago: comedy, memory, anomaly

When people ask me what Adam Levin's new novel, Mount Chicago, is about, I'm tempted to respond, "It's about 600 pages long."

The length is an important detail I neglected to notice when I ordered the book. I'd read a review that made me think this novel could be a good reading assignment for my Concepts of Comedy class, but a 600-page novel in that class would wipe out half of the syllabus. I might assign a 600-page novel in an upper-level class full of English majors, but certainly not in a lower-level class full of General Education students. Unless I want to spend a month talking to myself about a novel no one else in the room has read, I'm not going to assign Mount Chicago in my Comedy class.

Which is not to say that it has nothing to say about comedy. In fact, the novel tackles a couple of my favorite questions: How do cultures memorialize tragic events, and what role can comedy play? The sections that deal with these topics are insightful and often quite funny, but they're funny in a way unlikely to resonate with my students. I mean, when the malaprop-prone Mayor says he wants a memorial more popular than Auschwitz but "less depressing," the laughter is not unmixed with pain.

But, on the other hand, there are plenty of poop jokes, plus a personable parrot named Gogol, a duck named Momo whose attempt to free his people--er, ducks--from their oppressors is thwarted by an untimely erection and who therefore becomes a comedian, and a comedian named Shlomo--er, Solomon Gladman--doomed by hemorrhoids to a miserable life that may or may not be redeemed by comedy.

It's complicated, in other words. The style evokes Vonnegut, Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace, with massive digressions that tumble forward and backward and circle in upon themselves before reaching punchlines that are frequently worth the effort.

The longest digressions concern Apter Schutz, who seems at first like a minor character but, like the parrot named Gogol, steps up, demonstrating a powerful ability to make money through honest but not always honorable means and eventually becoming advisor to the malaprop-spouting Mayor of Chicago, who struggles to create the appropriate response to a disaster that swallows up a huge chunk of the city. 

 

This disaster is, more or less, the driver of the plot, such as it is. First, what to call the disaster? "Sinkhole" is accurate, but "Sinkholes were for Florida. They made you think of swamps and they made you think of armpits. Swampy armpits." The Mayor similarly dismisses "the seismic event" (too earthquaky), but finally Apter offers "the anomaly," which earns him a job as the Mayor's chief advisor, in which position he is placed in charge of developing the park that will serve as a memorial to the anomaly and become a more popular but less depressing Auschwitz, and off we go on a million digressions, some of which are rewarding and others not so much.

 

But I kept reading through almost 600 pages because that's what I do, and in that I resemble no one so much as the hardy Chicagoans described by their Mayor in response to the aforementioned anomaly:

We are, every one of us, all-star NFL linemen in our souls, and yes it is true that I wish, like I'm sure all of you wish, that there had never been any chapter that required our talent for this overcoming of it to be demonstrated, but we have demonstrated that talent, in spades, we have put our big shoulders to the task of tackling this chapter that needs to be tackled, we have tackled it in fact, and we will keep on demonstrating even more of our talent in even further spades, we will keep on tackling it till the game is over or it can't get up, whichever comes first, and if you want to know why, I will tell you why, even though I think you already know why: because this is Chicago and we are Chicagoans, and that's what we do.

So yes: I have tackled all the chapters, and I found something funny in all of them and sometimes something admirable and often something surreal or bizarre, but now I am done tackling chapters and I am closing the book.

Recharging my batteries

This used to be easier, I tell myself as I slog my way up the Big Horrible Hill, but I'm not sure that's true. Walking up that hill has always been challenging, which makes it a great workout. What's changed is pain.

My hips hurt walking up the hill and my knees hurt coming down. On the stretch of road along our creek--a lovely place to walk in any season--the road's steep bank makes my right foot and ankle bend in a way that causes constant pain and makes me limp through the home stretch. Then I sit down for a few minutes and rise to find I've stiffened up everywhere. If the walk is difficult, the aftermath is even worse.

Good thing the walk offers plenty of distractions from the pain. This morning I followed a red-tailed hawk up the hill; it would perch on a tree and shriek, and then as soon as I got a little closer, it would fly to a tree just a little bit further up the hill until it finally got tired of the chase and flew off into the woods. Elsewhere I heard kingfishers and a pileated woodpecker, but not much else was stirring in the cool morning woods.

Wildflowers are also getting more scarce--just a few tall thistles plus jewelweed, ironweed, wingleaf, some scraggly chicory and something that looked like lobelia. I should have taken along my trash-picker-upper for the fresh crop of beer cans alongside the road, but I can't handle that and the camera at the same time, and apparently I can't handle the camera either because I neglected to check whether the battery had any charge left. It did, but not enough.

But the walk recharged my batteries, calming my anxious thoughts and preparing me for the pile of reading and grading approaching just down the road. I can live with a little joint pain if it means a chance to absorb energy from a walk in the woods. 

 

Friday poetry challenge: seasonal haiku

It's not just the calendar pointing toward autumn: on these cool mornings I drive through dense fog along the river, wearing a jacket or sweater that I'm bound to leave behind somewhere when the sun comes out. The pollinator garden has reached Peak Sunflower while the grass around my house seems to have finally slowed down its frantic summer growth. And the cool nights are already inspiring mice to seek a warm indoor space to spend the winter--time to bait the mouse-traps!

At school the changing season means my students suddenly find themselves facing demands in every class, from history exams to chem lab reports to oral presentations. And in my classes they'll all be submitting drafts--all my students--over the next week and a half. "Do you read them all?" asked a student this morning, but of course I do: read and re-read and respond and reach out. So the honeymoon's over for me as well as my students; a week from now I'll be struggling to keep up with the flood of drafts alongside class preps and committee meetings. ("I feel like you go to a lot of meetings," said our new administrative assistant, but we all have a lot of meetings! Maybe I just complain about them more.)

Between the morning fog and the flood of drafts, I keep wishing someone would toss me a lifeline. I wish I could follow the advice in Wendell Berry's poem "Stay Home," except then I'd have to deal with the mouse problem. Let's write some haiku!

Fog blankets the road,
blanks out my thoughts, bringing
the promise of autumn:

Sunflowers hover
above us who hunger for
transient colors;

their heads droop with seeds,
ours under workloads that mag-
nify gravity.

Light in the fog, or
lines on the page: a lifeline!
Let autumn roll on.

Little worries, big worries

I arrived home after a late-afternoon meeting yesterday to find that my husband had left two boxes of Domino's pizza on the dining table accompanied by a flurry of sticky notes, one of which told me not to worry about the kitchen, which, of course, propelled me into the kitchen to see what I wasn't supposed to worry about, where I saw that the cabinets under the sink were standing open and it looked like the cabinet had vomited its contents all across the floor.

Plumbing problem. Nothing a handy husband armed with PVC pipe can't handle. Last night, I just walked away from the mess and told myself not to worry about it, which is about as effective as trying not to think about pink elephants.

Still, I welcome these minor kerfuffles because they give me something to talk about when I can't talk about larger and more consequential problems that don't quite portend The End of the World As We Know It but certainly feel that way. I mean, we are in the middle of a budget crisis that will eventually lead to the brutal amputation of faculty positions and programs. There isn't enough PVC pipe in the world to fix that problem.

I keep going to meetings where I am asked to envision the future of various programs and departments, but it's hard to get motivated to plan for a program that may get axed at any moment. It's like spending a lot of time picking out new cabinets for the kitchen only to come home one day and find that the whole house has been swallowed by a sinkhole.

Too many metaphors? Since I can't talk about details of the current crisis, metaphors are all I've got. Somehow, they're not helping.

So it's comforting to know that my helpful husband is at home fixing the plumbing problem while I focus on trying not to worry about the kitchen. That's a level of not-worrying I can live with.

Mayo-news

Today a student researching a medical topic said he thought a great source would be the Mayonnaise Clinic (what if the door is ajar?), and in another class a student wondered what kind of Yelp review Odysseus would write about, say, the Cyclops' cave or Circe's house. They make me laugh, these students of mine, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not.

In my Nature class, students debated whether a certain poem is about eating apples or having sex (or both!), making good arguments on each side. In the Place class, on the other hand, only two people in the room really wanted to talk about poetry while the rest inspired me to say, "You know, I didn't assign these poems to torture to." I doubt that they believed me.

And then there was cake where no cake was supposed to be. How can I explain the bizarre series of events that resulted in the appearance of a birthday cake proclaiming Happy Birthday Bev in a large committee meeting on a day that is three months away from my birthday? Why do I have the remains of that cake in a large box in my office right now? Well, it's complicated. A few weeks ago, we were looking over the schedule for future meetings and I noticed that the final meeting on the schedule was slated for the final day of the fall semester, which is also, coincidentally, my birthday, and I said, jokingly, something like If we have to meet on my birthday, someone had better bring cake! And someone did...just not on my birthday.

So yeah, it's been an up-and-down kind of day, ranging from silliness to sweetness to torture, but I guess the bright side is that the work week is over and all I have to do before I go home is attend our departmental picnic (with cake!) and then go see the theatre department's production of Into the Woods, presented in a woodsy park next to the river in the dark, with mosquitos (but not cake).

Which goes to show, I guess, that academics is sometimes like a box of chocolates but more often like a jar of mayonnaise where no mayonnaise is expected to be.

  

S'mores and stomping, with aplomb

While we were walking the track at the rec center, my retired colleague asked about my Labor Day weekend and I told her about the grandkids' camping trip in our back yard--sleeping in the tent, stomping in the creek, cooking out, making S'mores.

"Next time you have S'mores," she said, "You'd better invite me."

I struggled to picture my perfectly-pulled-together colleague messing around with marshmallows on a stick. "You know you can make them in the microwave," I pointed out.

"Right," she said, "But that's not how I like them."

This was an unexpected aspect of my former colleague's character. She is the ultimate in elegance, always perfectly manicured and with every hair in place. She never even broke a sweat despite walking briskly around the track for an hour only two months after her knee replacement. But she had very specific expectations for the perfect S'mores experience:

"I'll need two marshmallows, not one, and I'll hold them over the coals until they're just about to catch fire--not charred, but nice and crisp on the outside and gooey on the inside. Then I want to set them and the chocolate carefully between graham crackers and smash them together, and when I bite into it, I want the goo to drip down my face."

I agree that this is the ideal recipe for S'mores, but the thought of melted marshmallows and chocolate dripping down my elegant colleague's face was causing a little cognitive dissonance. Somehow she's always managed to sail through distressing circumstances without a hint of muss or fuss, so I wouldn't be surprised if she could handle the whole S'mores-making experience without a hint of melty goo on her chin or a drop of chocolate on a perfectly manicured fingernail. But it would be worth the experiment just to see how she does it.

And then when we're done, I'll see how she feels about creek-stomping. I'm sure she could stomp with perfect aplomb, a lesson in elegance for all of us. 

Friday poetry challenge: relishing the niceness, for now

The other day I asked my first-year composition students what has surprised them the most about being in college, and several said they were surprised by how stinking nice all the professors are. Give it time is what I wanted to say, but I bit my tongue. 

I've been doing that a lot lately. My tongue-biting skills are legendary, developed over long years of being a pastor's wife, but right now I'm privy to way too much information that I'm not allowed to share with the general public, so I find myself keeping silent when every muscle in my mouth is screaming to speak out. The stress of keeping silent makes niceness much more challenging.  

Students, though, deserve the extra effort required for niceness. I try to be as pleasant as possible to all my students, but there are times when harsh truths have to be conveyed, like You're in danger of failing or This looks like plagiarism or even You need to work harder on getting the details right. Often that kind of message doesn't feel particularly nice to the listener, while an Honors student may consider a B+ positively brutal.

This early in the semester, though, I've had little opportunity to be anything but nice. I've written some pointed marginal comments on homework assignments, but at this point I'm overlooking small issues while balancing out positive and negative feedback. There's no particularly nice way to say Add quotation marks, but at least I'm not prefacing my comments with Hey, stupid.

As the semester goes on, everyone's workload ramps up and sleep becomes more fleeting, niceness starts to fray around the edges. If I wait until after midterm grades come out to ask my students whether they still think all their professors are so nice, I suspect that I'll hear some different answers--if I can hear anything over all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Today, though, I'll relish the niceness and hope that it hangs around as long as possible. 

Nice work! Nice font! Nice title too!
Good vivid verb in sentence 2!
Your punctuation's rather strange;
your spelling is downright deranged.
Your paper lacks a thesis, and
its logic stands on sinking sand.
There's no citation--not a one!
The final paragraph's not done.
This thing's a mess! But one thing's nice:
you've spelled my name correctly--twice!

 

Busy bench

Sit on this bench in the middle of campus and everyone I know will pass by: 

The Instructional Technologist who answers a question about Canvas and tells me about her cats.

The Associate Provost for Tackling Annoying Tasks (or whatever his title is), who asks me which of several options for classroom chairs I prefer.

A retired colleague who has unexpectedly come out of retirement to teach a few classes in place of another colleague who suddenly left us for reasons that cannot be discussed in public so I keep my mouth shut even though I really want to know what happened.

Dozens of butterflies, bees, and birds attracted to the nearby pollinator gardens.

Our resident narcissist, who appears as if by magic the minute I tell a colleague that it's impossible to reason with a narcissist.

A former student who assures me that he's graduating next May even though it seems like I just had him in first-year writing five minutes ago.

A groundskeeper responsible for keeping the pollinator garden growing, who zips past too quickly to do more than accept my thanks.

Another student and another, and then a whole stream of students heading for lunch.

But now my lunch break is over and it's time to head back inside and get to work, knowing that my bench will still be there the next time I want to watch the passing parade--and learn a thing or two in the process.