This is probably a poor coping mechanism, but...

So my lone remaining new apartmentmate and her boyfriend and his entourage (seriously, there're like five friends on rotation) are driving me crazy this weekend, and are probably going to be making lots of noise again tonight and, as they seem to be doing very skillfully so far, pretending I don't exist. In general, Binghamton feels depressing and awkward, and Joe and Andrea have gone to Alfred...

...so I am, too. As in right now. See you Monday.

My students and I get Labor Day off--whew!

Still tired. Still none too good yet at teaching--of the three lessons I've taught this week, today's probably went worst, though it wasn't horrible or anything. I ought to organize things this weekend, 'cause I have WRIT 111 papers and gear strewn everywhere.

I was supposed to be writing on the stealth blog every day I had class and then anytime I had something else to say, but I haven't since Tuesday.

Plus, while great in theory, one of my shy-guy students showing up to the InterVarsity general-interest meeting and seeing me there was also, in life practice, notably awkward. It's not that I didn't want any of them to come, it's just that I knew I'd have no idea how to handle that moment, and he seemed not to know, either. It'd be easier if there were other instructors there, but there weren't, and I know of no other ones who might affiliate themselves with us. Well, that's life.

I'm gonna have some cereal or something and then go to bed.

Stupor

Two days in, and I'm pretty braindead.

I'm not planning to make the teaching blog available to anyone 'til after the semester, I've decided; no sense putting it all up online and then having nothing to say to people when I actually talk to them in real life. Besides, I already answer to five program administrators, six fellow instructors (no, really, we instructors will be meeting every Wednesday to be "professionalized" together, and I am more or less answerable to them, as they also are to me), and thirty-twoish students; I don't think I need any more people's opinions just yet.

Christina's moving back to campus 'cause she misses everybody there.

If I can get retroactive "after-1900" lit credit for last fall's creative nonfiction class (please say yes, Dr. Heywood), my semester will be all good on the class-taking front because I'll be able to drop Postcolonial Fiction (probably a decent enough class, but I'm only taking it to get the aforementioned credit) and take up ESL Issues in Composition (or whatever the name is of the "independent study" that Dr. Kinney's running that's rapidly if unofficially turning into a full-on seminar class) as an elective instead. If I ultimately want to be in rhet/comp, I might as well take every rhet/comp class I can find/create/finagle.

All right, I'm done.

I may be a rampant grammar freak...

...but I don't know that I'd go as far as this.

In other news, I'm off to go buy six hundred marshmallows (not bags thereof, but enough bags to cover that many individual marshmallows), eighty Hershey bars, three hundred graham crackers, three hundred sandwich bags, fifty sticks of gum (it's required to be minty), and twenty-five packets of fruit snacks. All of this, happily, is on InterVarsity-Binghamton's tab, to be used for the New Student Outreach campaign. I volunteered to get them, both because a) let's face it, despite the depressingness that is most other forms of shopping, getting groceries is usually kind of fun; b) my help for NSO is going to have to occur behind the scenes because I'm a teacher now as well as a student, and I don't think it'd be a good move to risk running into my own students as something potentially-intimidating before classes start (more on that self-made decision another time if you feel like hearing it...and let me underscore that I'm not scaling back my overall attendance or anything like that; I'll be there for the general-interest meeting on Friday).

You'd think, speaking of shopping, that it'd be an easy thing to find a nice-looking and well-fitting pair of brown-colored dress shoes.

Well, That's Not Right

I accidentally poured water over my cereal this morning instead of milk. I had to strain it and give the whole thing another try.

WRIT 111 training is over and I've scoped out the two rooms in which I'm teaching this semester, but I'm still picturing a different "teaching room" in my head, one that, oddly enough, does not quite correspond to any classroom in which I've ever learned--though, logically enough, it bears the most resemblance to the first room in which I ever saw ENG 115 taught. Ah, well.

I'm sure I'll end up starting another blog just to record my teaching experiences, but you'll have to get the link from me by other means than here. I would just post all my observations here, but after her many years of patience with stories I spent my adolescence working on in privacy, followed by college assignments whose results I typically didn't share, I should probably put something up that my mom's allowed to read. And I want to get too regular and in-depth over there to just copy-paste from there to here, though I'll probably post "greatest hits" here as well.

Oh, and my gratitude to all who were generous, at least in their hearts, with their Riverside Shakespeares. I do have the library's copy, odd-looking though it is, so if it's inconvenient to people to get theirs to me (not, heh, that I'd object to Tuttle bringing me his copy after his first trip home), don't feel guilty or anything.

::intense facepalm::

Biggest regret of my English-major life: I must have sold back my Riverside Shakespeare after Mayberry's class, though I don't know why I would have done such a thing (actually, I might: I think that at the time I thought the Shakespeare collection that Erik had given me had more plays in it than it actually did, and couldn't see taking up the space in my room for two of the same type of thing, since however famous was the Riverside, it hadn't been bought for me as a gift). And now, of course, I need it as a textbook for Dr. Tricomi's class this fall.

The BU library still has at least one, and maybe two, copies that they actually lend out. Maybe I could pull a Tom--I used to consider it overly-cheap and vaguely unfair when he did this, but time has taught me never to criticize too harshly the things that Tom does, since usually I end up later doing them myself--and check one of them out when I come to campus today for the beginning of TA orientation.

Gracious.

I would never name my child Erato.

I can't remember the last time I wrote something that was good instead of merely correct. Certainly not since I've entered graduate school.

Melissa, one of the new apartmentmates, has moved in. She's pretty nice. And it's a relief, actually, not to be the only one around every night when I turn the lights out.

Mean-Spirited Eye Movement

Well, I've had my first bad dream about teaching (and one about living in a college's basement corridor apparently named after the infernal regions, with the rooms apparently named after demons, but that's another story, I suppose), and it didn't even take place at the school, but at church: Micah told me I was teaching the adults' Sunday school as a practice for WRIT 111, and it was pretty much late Saturday night or early Sunday morning when he told me. I didn't even know what we were supposed to be studying that day, let alone how to wrangle it together into a one-hour lesson. I never found out, either: I woke up first.

That's about where I am right now. ...Not in a basement room named after a demon, I fervently hope, but in an ignorant position as far as teaching goes. Until orientation on Thursday, I won't even know how my semester's supposed to look. When I wake up on the 25th, I'll have thirty-six students, across two sections, to address (as of the registration stuff Dr. Kinney recently forwarded to us, both of my classes are full to capacity now)--maybe with Jillian there, maybe not--and though I'm sure that day will be little worse than syllabus reading and introductions, the fact remains that I'm the one who has to be talking, at least to begin with. I mean, I knew all this before. It's just that I'd never playacted it before, as I've now begun briefly and unconsciously to do.

I'm trying to figure out what sort of activity would have prepared me for such a thing, outside of having TAed something already. Well, I did have to teach for an hour this past semester in PM&R, my lesson on Jenny Lind, and I had to do that solo--bless Dr. JSA for that (and swallow my pride in saying so, since, bad person that I am at heart, I am almost determined not to like her or her obsession with professionalization). It was okay, though it wasn't fun. But class discussion carried much of that one, and I had eager classmates who, since no one had yet had to present alone, were also trying to help me. We'll see how eager my freshmen are, but at least the class is less discussion-based than a lit one would be.

I am hoping not to get too nervous about this. For one thing, it's weak faith. I'm loved and helped with everything else--why not this?

For another, it'll profit me nothing. I still have thirty-six students to teach, however prepared or not I feel.

Anyway, I've got to get ready for church. Which, thank heavens, I'm not teaching this morning.

Head Bowed

http://www.npr.org/blogs/mycancer/

This blog's been on my side-column link for, oh, over a year now; I've been reading it since something like October '06. I'll probably keep it up there for a while yet.

Short-Term TV Addiction

Well, I got Mi Jeong's TV to work after all (It turns out, as far as I can tell, that her name should have a space in it...I guess she's never left me a note where she's signed her name before, and the mail that came to the apartment was split half and half), so until and unless she comes back for it, I'm off being a good American citizen, watching the Olympics and as much of the Obama/McCain/Rick Warren thing as I can stand.

Oven-roasted corn on the cob (just plunk the ears in there, crank it to 450, bake for 30 minutes, don't worry about the toasty-husk smell): yes.

Question Answered

My faculty mentor for WRIT 111 will be Jillian, who runs the Writing Center. This is a good thing overall: I like her easy manner with students, I like her, and we were in Dr. Kinney's class together, so I know she's on board with the whole rhet/comp deal. I guess the one fault I'd pick is that she grades student work way more easily than I do (in fact, more easily than pretty much the whole rest of our class last semester did), but given the portfolio system we're using (and the fact that I'm not as inclined to be hard on ignorant freshmen from all over liberal arts as I am on ignorant junior-year English majors), that gap in opinion will probably shrink anyway.

But I just counted a little over an hour ago and discovered that I will be teaching--or whatever--in a mere ten days.

Thoughts Upon the Occasion of Finally Finishing the Move Back to the Old Apartment

I have a ruddy lot of cooking-related stuff.

So, yeah, I've returned and am now trying to get up the motivation to finish lugging things back from my car and unpack them (speaking of Alfred nostalgia, where is a team of OGs or athletes or IV-A movers when you need one? In Alfred, I suppose. Sigh). Yeah, right. This will probably end with me stretching across my half-bare bed (some of the bedding's in the wash) and reading more of Letters of C.S. Lewis, which I have shamelessly stolen from Good Shepherd's rather neglected library.

I'll be more responsible later. Maybe.

Shameless Nostalgia, Courtesy of Dr. Grove's Website

Because, clearly, if a month goes by without my posting something about my favorite place on earth, it's a month in which I'm doing something wrong.

Alfred. Who could ask for anything more?

Though non-Alfredians should take note: the correct spellings are "Canacadea" and "Pollywogg." And I have to say, um, this may have been a questionable choice for Alfred's poster cow.

Thoughts Upon the Occasion of Half-Moving Back to the Old Apartment

I have a ruddy lot of books. And they're none too easy to drag around, either; I don't happen to have any cardboard boxes at the moment that aren't meant for other, differently-shaped things (my monitor, my little yellow vacuum cleaner).

I got some of the moving done today; the rest I'll do tomorrow. I'm working solo. And I'm lazy about it.

The schedule thing worked okay on Monday and Tuesday, but not in the way it should've. Simply writing down what I have to do every day should be enough if I'm not going to follow the timeframes to the letter (which so far I haven't...I haven't even followed the schedule to the letter, but I've done most things I should in any case), but I know from past experience that I tend to ignore such lists. On the other hand, it appears that if I schedule out every hour of my day, I break it in terms of what happens when and even whether less-important things happen at all, but I'm more productive on the whole. Odd.

I didn't bother making one for today; I knew I'd only end up ruining it with a long nap, whenever it fell. And fall it did.

After all my raptures over the opening ceremonies, I haven't watched much of the Olympics.

Finished, 8/13, for the Summer Challenge...

...though, by the way, someone should probably have corrected me on my last such entry's title, since July is not the eighth month. I'll fix it in a minute.

Anyway, Beka Cooper: Terrier, Tamora Pierce (Emily's pick): I more or less guessed the villain before the final capture thereof (though admittedly I made more than one guess), and I don't know that the book is something I'd want a junior-higher reading. Nevertheless, speaking as a graduate student, it was a very good story, almost enough to make me welcome the hours of sleep deprivation I bought by tearing through it so quickly. I got just about all the slang and concepts even without the glossary and appendices, but if you read the book and don't feel like working with context clues, it's all in the back.

P.S.: As of 2006, at least, apparently Tamora Pierce lives in Syracuse. Or New York City, depending on which of the two included bio-sketches is most recent. But if Syracuse, I wonder where.

::laughing for real, not just digitally::

It took me a bit to get it, but here's one guy's clever answer to those weird questions they have you answer for your Blogger profile:

Q. What reason do you have to believe the earth is flat?
A. Have you ever listened to the earth sing?

Plagued

I have been battling flies for a couple of weeks now, but today is easily the worst day: I'm pretty sure I've swatted at least twelve over the past fourish hours, and I think it's more. I took out the garbage even though nothing in it appeared to be decomposing; I've flinchingly checked predictable places for bunches of maggots or their cocoons. Nothing. Yet every time I kill one fly, I find another--or another three--fifteen minutes later or so. No lie, I've taken to stunning them with all-purpose cleaner spray and then whacking them with the BU science library's (heavy and hardcover--no book jacket--and it's already seen better days, so I don't feel so bad) copy of The Dancing Wu Li Masters (I don't know where my flyswatter is...I should probably buy another one). The spray makes cleanup easier. Seriously, are the horrid things breeding in the vents or something?

PETA is going to come for me any day now, I figure. Or else Binghamton's librarians will.

I'm going to go pick up my (public-)library book. And then I am cleaning this dang apartment, even though it's not really dirty.

The schedule thing is more or less happening. Just not necessarily in order.

...but not worrying doesn't mean I'm not still into questionable attempts at self-improvement.

The previous entry sounded much more lame and shallow as a final draft than it did in earlier drafts. My writers' vanity begs me to assure you of this, and asks you to believe me.

Anyway, in an effort to not do quite so much nothing this week as I did last week (no, seriously, I understand that rest is important, but it's rapidly descending into open sloth), I'm going to experiment with schedule-keeping. As in, scheduling every hour of my day (generously, with time cushions and free hours). We'll see whether it works. I have to say, I'm not real optimistic.

But I'm hoping to schedule plenty of amusement, such as Olympic-watching and potential team trivia (Ife's trying to get a team together, or so he claims), and there is a lot I should be doing this week that will be more efficiently done if I'm not wasting hours of time on the internet. Including time spent writing boring, self-absorbed blog entries, though there will probably be a couple of those as well.

Things I'm Not Going to Worry About, #1

Whether I look too young to teach freshman comp. Unless my students' thinking so means that they take their work less seriously, but barring that, I'm not going to worry.

I just spent a long time writing this all out for myself, trying to articulate why I was concerned and what the answer might be. Thanks to many things from the past several days, with Tuttle's most recent blog entry being the clincher, I've decided not to worry about it. I'm 23, and somehow I'm teaching a room full of 17-to-19-year-olds. That might be odd to them, and it will probably be odder still to my fellow grad students, considering I'm the youngest instructor and the only MA candidate, since it's usually a PhD-only job (I remember, in retrospect, the sort of startled and jealous, even if low-grade, resentment I felt at Kathryn Knowles's being allowed as a sixth-grader to skip into my already-advanced seventh-grade math class...remind me to write sometime about my middle-school hypocrisies). And surely my now being a teaching grad student in a world of undergrad friends makes other things complicated (hello, WRIT 111 students potentially coming to InterVarsity's general-interest meeting).

But at bottom, does it really matter that last year I kept having to tell people (mostly office staff and people at church, not fellow students) that I was a grad student and not an undergrad freshman? My guess is that it doesn't, and that maybe some of this worry is me trying to be concerned because I'm told by other professors that I should be concerned.

And maybe a small percentage is wanting to buy skirts. Or maybe not. I'm not sure, and am a little reluctant to think too hard about it in case it is.

So I'm not going to worry anymore about what I look like as an instructor, both age-wise and appearance-wise. No doubt I'll look a little better than I think I will, but a little worse than I want to.

More later, maybe.

Drowsy, Mostly-Olympic-Related Thoughts

So there's no point in my owning a TV just for two weeks out of every four years, but I have this feeling that I might be spending a lot of time in the apartment complex common building, using their TV. Tonight, entranced by the opening ceremonies (wow, so it's four years since Greece...their opening ceremonies happened the night that 'Nanda and Erik and I checked out the Pittsford Wegmans; we watched some of it at Erik's house thereafter), I watched one of the complex's TVs 'til about ten, when the building closed. I probably should've gone out to Windsor after that to watch the rest of the ceremonies with Joe and Andrea (we hung out today and will do more tomorrow), but the thought of missing half an hour just for transportation (there were important obscure countries to see!) led me to Tully's, a local sports-themed restaurant/bar chain (mostly a restaurant--fond memories of their baked-potato soup led me to try the batch I made last fall). While there, I sat by the video game machines and drank Sprite and watched, on a big flat-screen TV, the processions of the rest of the 2349093295 nations (they go so much faster in Yakko's song on Animaniacs) that this planet apparently boasts.

I failed to get the hostess, who came by once in a while to glance at the TV, to understand why I found these processions interesting. "It seems pretty boring to me, honestly," she said, making me a little uneasy for a while as to whether I looked, there by myself on my semi-secluded stool with my Sprite on the narrow counter and my eyes on the procession of the five participating citizens of Nauru, like the athletic-spectator equivalent of a cat lady. (Not that I put it in those words, but...) Then I got over it.

Because I, for one, was enjoying it. I can't imagine what it must be like for someone like Dr. Myers (for non-Alfredians, he teaches global studies and anthropology at AU). He must have been about five times as fascinated. As it was, I hailed familiar-feeling countries (mostly defined as "ones containing, or which have ever contained, my friends or their immediate families") with warmth, marveled at how Peruvian the Peruvians looked (seriously, I remember Peru, and they don't look at all like, say, the Argentinians), and took an atypical and rather unaccountable interest in hats (France's were classy and kind of cute, but ours were wrong somehow--I can't figure out whether they didn't fit a lot of people properly, or whether flat-out white is just a bad choice for putting on the pate of any non-chef, or both. And some country--Romania? No, not them, I don't think--had this wonderful multicolored braided trim on their hats, looking a lot like the kind of friendship bracelets I always wanted to be really good at making), which I usually don't even like.

Anyway, once China exited the scene, I decided I was done. I know the torch-lighting is supposed to be a big part of the point, but c'mon, I was tired. And I can't even remember the last time I watched four consecutive hours of television...that was enough.

So that's all for tonight. As for normal life: obviously I'm not moving back into the apartment today...and I guess not tomorrow, either, since someone still has to put the upstairs bathroom back in working order, but it's currently the weekend. That's all to the good: like I was really going to get any packing done before Monday unless I was obligated.

::snort::

Sometimes I spend upwards of an hour writing a post, only to realize that the whole topic is kind of pointless or that I don't actually have a solid enough conviction about what I'm writing to put forth the statement I intended. And then I can't post it. So I post stuff like this instead.

Something I Forgot, Plus Other Things

I neglected to mention the titles that amused me from the book sale. I get them, but they're still funny. One of them was called something like Flower Drying with a Microwave, and the other was just something like Snakes, but boasted elsewhere on the cover that it included full-size pull-out posters. That's what I want on my wall: life-size depictions of snakes.

I also just made (well, am in the process of reducing just a little bit more) Reverend Anne's recipe for African peanut(-and-chicken-and-onion-and-tomato) sauce (to be eaten over rice, if you can keep from eating it straight off a spoon). It made a huge amount, which I guess I knew it would when I started out, but was too enthusiastic, because it's delicious, to halve the thing. But hey, it freezes well, so either I throw a Ninth Hour dinner if they want some, or my quick-dinner needs for the next month or so are taken care of.

In theory I get to move back into the old apartment on the 8th. This will make about the fourth or fifth timeframe they've estimated since the original flood in late April, so I'll believe it when I experience it, but the drywall people really have come in and done their work, so maybe this one's for real.

Fun in Broome County

Last night I went for the first time to the annual Spiedie Fest and Balloon Rally out in Otsiningo Park. I had thought that everyone in New York State knew what spiedies (pronounced more or less intuitively, like "speedees" when plural) were, but it turns out that they're primarily a Binghamton/(Central?)-Southern-Tier thing, not a New-York-in-general thing, and that the biggest reason I've always known what they are is that both of my parents grew up just the next county over from Binghamton. (The smaller reason would be, quite predictably, that Wegmans sells the State Fair spiedie marinade. Sometime, assuming anybody cares, remind me to briefly comment on the trackability across New York State of regional specialties by their presence in increasingly-distant Wegmans locations.)

So okay, a "spiedie" is pretty much just a glorified shish kebab, but without the vegetables (that is, it's just meat) and with a specific type of marinade that's sort of like Italian dressing, except way better. (The Wikipedia article, for those of you interested, is here.) Thanks to Jo's family, I can also boast of having eaten a venison spiedie, which I think probably few Binghamtonians can say, though I should also point out that Lee from church insists that a "true" spiedie is made from alternating cubes of chicken, pork, beef, lamb, and venison...a sort of animal-flesh variety pack, I guess.

I also saw two new things yesterday, by which I simply mean two things I hadn't before seen for myself: a shofar (a type of horn from the Jewish tradition) and a hot-air balloon launching. The first came courtesy of Rabbi Ron, who is Messianic Jewish and used to run Sabbath services in our church until he moved downtown, I guess to better accomodate his parishioners or something. He got it in Jerusalem and is, as it turns out, good at playing it. He had the booth next to my church's (we were taking people's pictures for free and putting them onto bookmarks--not the most fantastic giveaway ever, I suppose, but we don't have a huge publicity budget), so his shofar-playing attracted a surprising amount of business to our end of the tent as well.

As for the second, they really did launch a bunch of balloons, close to 7 PM yesterday, maybe fifty feet away from where I was, into a pretty-much-cloudless blue sky. It was very cool in a way that is very hard to describe. I would have taken pictures, but I didn't have a working camera with me (my cell phone had somehow, don't ask me how, run down all its power, so I couldn't even use that).

I'll probably go back to the Fest tomorrow, but today I went down to the public library's book sale and somehow, heroically, only bought seven books. Then I proceeded to read much of one of them.

In other news, I'm finding more and more things around here of which I want to take pictures and post them, a sort of "here is my life in Broome County." By summer's end, I hope to have done that. And I also hope to redo the banner for this site in such a way that the little taglines below the title will be randomly-selected from a menu of about a dozen. I don't know, 'cause it'd be fun, that's why.

Oh! And I almost forgot to post this, from the fine people at GraphJam:

"Triumphant/Abundant" Return to the Blogosphere

Well, maybe not abundant; depends on your definition. But I did stay up way too late last night, thanks to my not having any responsibilities until 2:30 PM today, eating homemade chicken curry over rice (it is possible, as it turns out, to curdle coconut milk, for I have done it. It still tastes good, though) and catching up on everyone's last ten days of blogging, which ranged from a whole lot of nothin' (example: more people than I expected) to a frighteningly-prolific amount of text (prime, and probably only, example: Matt Tuttle).

So it's August 1st, which means that I am going to be teaching in a mere twenty-four days, which, may I point out, is a mere three-and-a-half weeks. I am not even remotely ready. And as much as I appreciate the sudden redesign of ENG 115 into WRIT 111 (with the advent of the new composition department), with its increased feedback from a faculty "mentor," now I have to worry about who this mentor is going to be, because, let's be blunt, there're about two instructors I've met here under whom I would actually want to work. On the other hand, her being a compositionist in a department full of literature faculty means that Dr. Kinney probably casts as skeptical an eye on many of her colleagues (hello, Dr. Whittier--if they haven't had a confrontation yet, then it's surely only a matter of time, because each of them hates the other's ideology) as I do; I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if she subjected them to training as well.

I also discovered, in other composition news, that I am going to the Four C's next March. The CCCC, or Conference on College Composition and Communication, is kind of the big conference within the rhet/comp world. Basically, rhet/comp people from all over the country get together and talk about how to teach composition better, which includes a lot of readings-aloud of scholarly articles in the making. The article thing happens like this: four or five people, usually is the number, submit a proposal for a "panel," which means that they have an idea about an issue within composition that they want to research and write and talk about. The panel proposal is accepted or rejected as a whole, which means that either everyone's paper idea within that group gets accepted, or else nobody's does. (Correct me if I'm wrong on any of this, Abby.) At the conference, the chosen panelists bring shortened drafts of what they have so far, read them out, and get suggestions. If all goes well, they revise the things and publish them. And, if I could add an editorial comment, because rhet/comp is a newer field than literature, the scholarship tends to be more interesting and readable, since so far there's still plenty of normal, sensible things that people haven't yet talked about in rhet/comp, as opposed to literature, where people who happen to love the literary canon are stuck trying to find the fourteen-thousandth new thing to say about Nathaniel Hawthorne.

So Natasha, Andrei, Jihye, and I submitted a proposal for a panel on teaching composition to L2 (aka ESL, English as a Second Language, but that term's going out of fashion, currently in favor of "L2") students--namely, discussing whether having separate or integrated classes for L2s is a better idea. We have more street cred than we otherwise might because everyone on the panel but me is considered L2--Natasha's here from Russia on a Fulbright scholarship, Andrei's Romanian by birth and now teaches an all-L2 composition class at Ithaca College, and Jihye is Korean but, if I'm not mistaken, married an American. And Natasha and Andrei completely disagree with each other on separated classes (Andrei) vs. integrated ones (Natasha), both based on their own experiences. So they, the stars of the panel, are pretty much going to duke it out, and Jihye and I will give tagalong papers on L2 instruction for graduate students (Jihye) and Writing Center practices for schools with huge L2 populations like Binghamton's (me). And, because CCCC is known for its friendliness to first-timers, and we have an at-least-not-bad series of ideas for a very popular current topic, we got in.

So now I have six months to research and draft an article that I was really hoping to not have to write. I mean, I really want to see the Four C's conference, don't get me wrong, and I am all kinds of grateful and honored to've been on an accepted panel, and it's a good thing for a Master's student to have on a CV--particularly a Master's student who's really averse to publishing something she doesn't believe in and care about, which means she's probably never going to feel right publishing anything. But I truly have no idea what I'm going to say. Not that I needed to know when we submitted, since it's taken for granted that the papers are going to change drastically between proposal and presentation, but all the same, I have to say something, and the problem now is that I don't even work for the Writing Center anymore. I don't exactly have time to moonlight there, either, given all I'll be doing this semester.

On a happier note, I made chicken stock again yesterday. Version 2.0 looks to be even a little better than 1.0, and let me also say, I am getting way better lately at cutting up chicken and its parts. In the first poem I wrote for Dr. Gray's class in Spring '07, I mentioned (since it was about what exactly signified adulthood, in light of something an FYE student had said that fall) that I was a little concerned about all the "grownup" things I didn't know how to do--among them, dealing with meat that didn't come deboned and skinned in little packages. Well, check that one off the list. I still have no experience, true, with any other kind of boned-up meat. But hand me a chicken, a sharp knife, and a cutting board, and suddenly, I have a plan.

Also, turns out you can't get salmonella through a break in the skin. It has to be through ingestion. Isn't that weird?

Okay. Off to the Spiedie Fest. Cheerio!