Peachy at the beach

Ice cream for breakfast! What could be better? Grampa made waffles and the young folk provided the toppings, so we had grain, fruit, and dairy products, and we all know chocolate is a bean, right? An excellent way to start the day.

Except that wasn't quite the start. We walked out to the beach before sunrise, the grandkids' flashing sneakers lighting the way, and we looked at jellyfish and sand dollars--some still alive--while the sun came up. We had to bundle up for temperatures in the 50s with a slight sea breeze, but we expect sunshine and temps in the 60s and some great beach weather for the next couple of days. 

And we'll also have to work on finishing off the ice cream. This morning I had peach ice cream on peach waffles with whipped cream--yum!

The last time we had ice cream for breakfast was 40 years ago on our honeymoon right here on St. Simon's Island, and thereby hangs a tale. A month before our wedding, I had a fitting for my wedding gown and found it a tight squeeze. The grandmotherly Italian seamstress said she could make some adjustments before the wedding, but I would still need to watch my weight. "Don't eat-a no pasta," she commanded, and for a month I barely ate anything, which was difficult considering all the pre-wedding and pre-Christmas festivities. 

My mom reminded me that she'd lost 15 pounds just before her wedding, which she attributed to nerves, but I've seen the photo of her on her wedding day sitting in her bed smoking a cigarette. I didn't want to try the cigarette method of weight loss, so I spent a month depriving myself of everything wonderful and vowing that once this was all over, I'd eat whatever I wanted.

Which is why we had ice cream for breakfast on our honeymoon. Peach, if you must know. It was great.

For the record, I looked pretty great in that wedding gown--but I've never again been that thin, partly because of ice cream for breakfast. 

Now we celebrate these 40 eventful years with silly games, family walks on the beach, and ice cream for breakfast. What could be more fun? Let's not wait 40 more years to do this again.  

When the waves come close, everyone jumps back.

A tiny sand dollar, still alive. We threw if back.

 

Stopping by birds on a snowy morning

Just now I counted nine cardinals on and around our bird-feeders, their scarlet feathers standing out brightly against the blowing snow. The ground beneath the feeders is hopping with juncos while finches, bluejays, woodpeckers, and the occasional starling make brief visits.

I thought about taking pictures but the camera bag is out in my car, and the temperature outdoors is something like 2 degrees Farenheit with a sharp wind blowing snow all over the place. My fingers don't work well under those circumstances, so let's just let memory supply the visuals. 

Last evening we celebrated my husband's birthday with a great meal and a visit to the Guernsey County Courthouse holiday light and music show an hour's drive north of here. It's amazing how many people will stand outdoors in a light drizzle dancing and singing along with Christmas music while the wind whipped cold rain into our faces, but at least it wasn't cold enough to change to snow. We came home cold and damp and ready to sleep and then woke this morning into a world of white.

I know that others not too far away are experiencing much worse weather, so I'm not complaining--especially since I don't need to go anywhere. My son made a lengthy road trip to his sister's house last night to deliver some gifts but turned around and came right back home to avoid getting stuck in a blizzard, but here we just have a few inches of snow and lots of wind. Earlier, my husband went out to batten down the hatches after some deck furniture went airborne. Right now I'm more worried about wind damage than snowy roads, but we'll be fine as long as we don't lose power.

Yesterday I worked on spring semester syllabi. Last night I sang Christmas songs. Tomorrow I'm baking a ham. Today, though, looks like an ideal day for sitting inside a warm house and watching colorful birds flit around the snowy feeders. It's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it. 

 

 

 

Shutting the door on the semester

Today's top task: pack up my office laptop and some books, set my office trash can outside the door, lock the door, and walk away. My goal is to avoid campus until Jan. 3, and I may even emulate a colleague and stop reading campus emails. 

Maybe. 

I don't know. I expect to hear from a few students embroiled in an academic dishonesty incident (word to the wise: if you must submit a classmate's paper, make sure to remove the classmate's name from the top), and we still have some unfinished business re: faculty governance (when I see a smoke-screen, I want to know what's being screened and why). But otherwise it would be really nice to shut the door and walk away both physically and mentally so as to free up some bandwidth for fun times ahead.

Like, for instance, our 40th anniversary, which we observed two days ago but we'll celebrate more fully next week when we take a road trip to St. Simon's Island, Georgia, where we spent the first part of our honeymoon. I don't know what the weather will look like in coastal Georgia next week, but it's got to be better than Ohio--and most of the family will be joining us, grandkids and all. Beaches! Bird sanctuaries! Board games! What's not to love?

And then there's Christmas, of course. The resident pastor now serves three churches, all of which have some sort of special activity this week, although only one, thankfully, has a Christmas Eve service. When Christmas falls on a Sunday the worship service tends to be fairly brief, but he'll still need to drive to all three churches and lead three services before noon on Christmas, and then he'll need to come home and sleep it off. So I think we're doing our celebrating on Saturday. 

Before then, though, I need to bake cookies, buy two more gifts (because Amazon failed to inform me that two major gifts were no longer available), wrap some things, and pack for our trip. Most importantly, though, I need to shed the excess mental baggage I've been carrying around thanks to all our campus controversies, and that starts with shutting the door. 

Gently, of course. I wouldn't even think of slamming the door and stomping off in a huff, tempting as that might be.

Here we are 40 years ago. My favorite wedding photo.

 

In the grips of Grading Brain

This time of year college campuses everywhere experience uncontrolled outbreaks of a virulent malady. I'm not talking about Covid-19 or flu or the million little viruses causing coughs and sniffles all over final-exam classrooms but a more cerebral disorder I call Grading Brain.

When there's nothing left to do but grade final papers and projects, we sit in our offices or at home staring at screens and grading one fool thing after another until our eyeballs want to jump right out of our heads and run away to some island or mountaintop or desert where they can look away from whatever isn't pleasing and seek something more soothing.

My head hurts. My neck hurts. My eyes are really angry, and my brain is twisted into knots from the effort of wading through tortured prose. It's not all tortured, of course; this week I've read quite a few original, clever, witty essays that fill me with hope for the future. But mostly I'm reading the other kind: not bad enough to be amusing or good enough to glow but just dull, mediocre, uninspiring.  

And of course at this point there's no respite from grading. Final grades are due next Tuesday, so procrastination is no longer possible. I move from one paper to the next to the next, inserting comments into margins and punching numbers into rubrics. Every once in a while I get up to take a walk around the building just to reassure myself that there's a real world outside the realm of final papers. Recently I discovered something remarkable: for the first time in what feels like weeks, the sun is shining! Too bad it's too cold to grade papers outside.

The grading process so dominates my brain that I find it difficult to communicate off-rubric. I see someone in the hallway and the only phrases that pop easily into mind are things like "nice thesis" or "abrupt transition" or "where's the apostrophe?" I see semicolons in my dreams--which, I guess, makes up for how few of them I see in my students' papers. 

But the end is in sight. With every number I punch into a rubric, the pile of grading gets a wee bit smaller. At some point I'll look up from a paper and realize that there's nothing left to grade, but by then I'll be so deeply in the grips of Grading Brain that I'll just sit here wordless, with empty eyes and drool rolling down my face, hopelessly transformed into a sniveling lump. 

There is a cure, however: it's called winter break, and it's coming soon to a campus near you. Without it, we would all be gibbering idiots.

 

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.