Let Me Remind You That IV-B is At Least Sixty Percent Asian and Mainly From LI/NYC

[Laurel]: ...How was Basileia? Carrie said you guys [that is, the InterVarsity-Binghamton members who went] said everyone from Alfred looked like me.
[Matt Tuttle]: haha it's true
[T]: they stood up there [during a conference-wide talent show]
[T]: and said "we're from alfred!"
[T]: and I thought
[T]: oh my gosh. they ARE from alfred!
[L]: ::laughs:: What makes someone obviously Alfredian?
[T]: i don't know
[T]: they were all white
[T]: and blonde
[T]: and looked like they enjoyed reading, cooking, and folk-dancing

Days Gone By

I kind of miss the late-high-school days when I'd iron my shirt every night before I wore it to school in the morning.

Now I'm surprised I bothered. College sure ended that phase of my life.

Another Thing for You to Read! Oh, Good, Right?

Because clearly what I need is another blog, I've started one to chronicle my summer (I'm doing a "summer challenge" again - this time, seven new places, fourteen new books, and twenty-one new recipes). This is really because it's time I started something my parents can read. You, on the other hand, need not read it if you don't want to - I will not be insulted. Should you want to, however, you can get the link via my Facebook page or by messaging me in some other way. Tra-la!

Semester's End Is...

...fielding e-mails from students unhappy about their grades. I've only had three so far, but each of them has e-mailed multiple times, not finding my initial explanations satisfactory. Two out of the three didn't bother to capitalize or punctuate their messages, but didn't appear to find any irony in that.

I'm really hoping that I'm able to put more time into teaching now that I'm not also a student. I have indeed, for anyone who still hasn't heard, been hired on as an adjunct; I've been given three classes. I've applied to another area college, hoping for another section or two, but really I'm almost hoping that I don't get them, or that I get only a single section, because if you get too far over three sections, you get into workload trouble fast. It'd be easier to be part-time church secretary as my second job, since in that there would be neither preparatory nor take-home work involved, whereas more classes will mean more of both of those things.

If I'm able to put more time in, hopefully my teaching will get better (right now it's okay, but not great - when you get right down to it, I am still more a TA than anything, and with the skill level to match) and this career will start to be more rewarding, since that's what everyone insists teaching is, but which it mostly hasn't been for me this year. I mean, it's been a good experience, don't get me wrong, but let's face it, it hasn't been something out of Chicken Soup for the Soul, especially this semester. Besides being disappointed by some of the things I've learned about freshmen, I'm markedly uncomfortable with many of the things I've learned about myself.

And now, having been a big bummer, I will rejoice in the summer stretched out before me by going downstairs, lighting a candle, maybe getting some ice cream, and continuing my first-ever read of my Penguin-sale copy of Treasure Island.

Oh, XKCD and NPR, How I Celebrate Thee. Especially You, NPR. Or Perhaps "Especially Thee." ..."Especially Thou"?

(hat tip: XKCD)




...PS: I'm done with all my Master's work. :)

Imminent Poetry Fail

Or not really, since Joe Weil's kind of a grade pushover. I hear.

Number of pages left to write, supposedly: 16.

Number of hours in which to do so: 22.5.

Why: Because I didn't get started early enough this morning and because I took a nap. I'm starting to get a cold. I'm not proud that my graduate career in ending in such hardcore lameness, but here we are. Sigh.

Speaking of naps, I really haven't just been online tonight or anything, but this is often true:

Draft (Could Be Good, Or...)

In Which I Attempt, Per Joe Weil's Instructions, to Pay More Attention to Rhythm. In Which I Also Use My Own Blog Entry As a Jumping-Off Point. It's Not Plagiarism if You Steal from Yourself, Right?


First Whole Chicken

I’m holding a three-pound fryer in my hands:
this is what comes of a kitchen to myself
and a cold that gives me dreams of making soup.
I’ve never done this. Plucked whole chickens feel
bizarrely trusting, their small weight so deliberate,
their nipped-bud wings tucked in and motionless.
It seems too...friendly to give anyone salmonella.
Despite what you’d expect, I’m still okay
with taking my shears and new santoku knife,
commencing a stretched-out hack job on the skin
and an eighteenth-century sailor’s amputation
of thighs, wings, breasts. My pictured guide’s at hand.
I’ll crack the joints, extract the bones’ collagen
with boiling water, deal with schmaltz and spume.
In this last moment, though, the kitchen’s quiet:
grad student dripping phlegm, with messy hair,
just through with writing papers back-to-back,
meets hen – denuded, knobbly, but intact.

Here

Tonight in InterVarsity we had "testimony night," where selected speakers came up and talked about what God's been doing in their lives this semester, and after that there was prayer for everyone there as we all get ready to go out to summer-and-next-fall things. It was really good. There's been some great stuff going on in IV-B this year--our fellowship has grown and diversified; we've had eleven! people come to know Christ; and lots of really cool things have happened (for example, since the fall we graduating kids have been secretly collecting money to put towards a Basileia scholarship or scholarships--Basileia is this statewide InterVarsity conference held every May, and I'll tell you, the one time I went, it ended up being really important to my life--and the amount we ended up with by this week turned out to match the amount somebody needed if she was going to go).

I haven't gotten to be as much a part of it all as I would have liked: grad school has gotten in my way a lot more this year than last year, and even when it hasn't, sometimes my attitude has been off. Sometimes I just don't want the burden of having to introduce myself to visitors, or humble myself enough to take instruction from undergraduates, or be part of long stretches of singing sometimes-awkwardly-worded praise songs to a God that, sometimes, I still doubt. But you know what? Every time I come back after several weeks away, as I did tonight, I'm reminded of how good it really is.

I'm also reminded, tonight, of how I sometimes tend to derate IV-B just for being big and made up of city kids, assume that it can't be as good as IV-Alfred, can't love as genuinely those of us who don't live on campus and hang around the fellowship all the time. That's wrong, though. I've had plenty of opportunities to see just how wrong.

For, as I often forget, I owe IV-B a lot. There've been so many times in grad school, particularly my first semester but even after that, when, confused by some theory or some worldview or just by the fact that Christianity is literally ridiculed by a lot of people in my program, it's been IV-B's love for me and for each other and for the campus that's steadied my shakiness, given me more experiential evidence (there are other kinds, naturally) that there must be something to this. Their love has been so real.

So let me take this opportunity to say that I am so happy to be staying in Binghamton, as it looks like I most likely will be. I am so happy to be with this church, this fellowship. I am so happy to have students. Natasha and I will be housemates if I stay, but before that, I'll have a whole summer to cook and read, to geocache and hang out with Joe and Andrea, to see my friends. It's about as beautiful a prospect as I could ask for, and in a few short days--I should hand in the last of everything by Wednesday night--my Master's career will be over, my nearly-twenty consecutive years of studenthood will be over, and my new life will begin.

::pant::

Jeezh, writing this last paper is like trying to walk through knee-deep peanut butter. Sometimes I wonder whether I'm writing a boring paper, but then I decide, no, it's not that it's boring, it's just that I feel like I bear the accumulated mental fatigue of at least the whole last year into this paper-writing process.

Which may just be a guilt-deflecting way of saying that I've had a big case of graduate senioritis. All I know is, my rate's a little less than my usual page-an-hour, I did get some sleep but not a whole lot, and I've still got three pages to write over the course of the next four hours. Ruddy.

But then, thank heavens, this will be over, and theoretically, please God, I will never have to do such a thing again. Comp scholarship is different somehow...the theory and texts don't seem so divorced, since ultimate the goal seems always to be to work with an eye toward how to teach.

I really have only been writing this for four or five minutes. Okay, going now.

In Which I Become, Momentarily, a Total Poser

...since I'm not a southerner. But y'all ('cept R2R, which did) really need to update your blogs. How can I peer voyeuristically into your lives if you refuse to post anything for weeks or months on end?

So I was rejected from the Binghamton writing associateship, which would have paid me like a real-world part-time job (as opposed to an adjunct part-time job) but given me only an adjunct's workload. Would've been perfect, but the budget money just wasn't there. However, my best job prospect is still Binghamton. I can't talk about it unless it becomes official, only because I was asked not to tell the world, and it's not even going to be that surprising a piece of news if I can. But I may manage to get a composition job and move in with Natasha and her housemates and stay here after all. Which is exactly what I want, so hurray, hurray, hurray.

I learned today, after being confused by a line in Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker, about which I'm currently attempting to outline and eventually write a ten-page paper (due Tuesday), that the word "prodigal" does not mean "disobedient runaway who'll hopefully have a change of heart and come back," which is roughly what I'd concluded it meant from the story of the prodigal son. The word actually means "lavish," usually in the sense of "wastefully or recklessly extravagant." The son was prodigal because he spent his whole inheritance so fast, not because he left home. Thank you, Dictionary.com.