Begun Before Midnight, Finished After

In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen,
Snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter,
Long ago.

Our God, heaven cannot hold him,
Nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When he comes to reign;
In the bleak midwinter
A stable place sufficed
The Lord God incarnate,
Jesus Christ.

-From Christina Rossetti's "In the Bleak Midwinter"


It has been "snow on snow, snow on snow" here in Syracuse until tonight. Tonight the weather has warmed to the mid-40s or so, and the wind has blown so hard that our power went out for about an hour earlier tonight.

I don't have much to say, to be honest. My days here have been relatively quick ones--reading, eating (too much eating), a little ice skating (that was Sunday), Christmas shopping.

Teaching saved my semester. Studying good subjects in my classes also helped, but the work was so relentless that it's really the experience of teaching that brings me out ahead. Which is a bit odd, because teaching itself was stressful and much more work than fun. But I've already discussed on this blog how teaching feels, and most of what I said there is still true.

Oh, and unrelatedly, I found my digital camera under my bed.


*

This being my first year with a sitemeter, I don't really know who my new blog-readers are (some random person from France has popped over a couple of times recently...I don't really know what to make of that, except that I hope he or she reads English, let alone likes the blog). Just in case I do have new ones: every Christmas Eve I wish a merry Christmas (or other applicable holiday) to all the new friends I've made in the past year. If you don't see yourself this year, check the past years.

I know, I know. Most of them don't read it, so for everyone who does, it's a long list of names that you mostly (or wholly) don't know. But it's a good way for me to remember, here in the bleak midwinter, how much my life has been enriched with each past year. It's sometimes hard to believe that only a year ago, this person or that who's played such a big part in my most recent semester hadn't yet even appeared in my life, or at least wasn't a friend yet.

So in addition to all of you, whom I dearly love, merry Christmas to Megan and Sujin; to Charles, Dave, Jihye, Jillian, Katie N., Kevin L., Sam, and Scott (and, come to think of it, to Dr. Kinney); to Andrew, Barb, Christine, Eliud, and Rachel G.; to Doug, Matthias, Joyce (C.), Chris V., John and Pat, Rebecca (and Anna), Kay, and a whole passel of others from church who were wonderful to me this summer especially; to Cathy H.; to Manfred. Merry Christmas and happy Chanukah to my darling students, my firsts ever.

A merry Christmas to Samweli and to the soldiers who're everywhere but home.

Here's to the past year and the one that's coming. Peace and joy to us all.

Little Notes, Often in Fragmented Sentences

Am back in Syracuse--have been since Saturday. Came back then instead of Sunday because that was the free day between snowstorms. (My brother's still in Rochester 'til tomorrow--my dad set out to get him today and turned back because the snow was so bad on the Thruway.) Saw Jo on Saturday, too--she's set this year's Christmas-present bar high, not through fanciness, but through general funky sweetness.

I've been beginning (in a very just-beginning way) to look at college English departments that may be open to hiring the likes of me...it looks like I may have to spend the end of this break trying to get some application stuff together, since the only application deadline I've seen listed is for earlyish February.

It's a really bad idea to put as many M&M's within my reach as circumstances lately have.

Sweet, Sweet Freedom

I finished and sent off the paper around 3 PM. I hadn't looked out the window in, jeesh, I don't know how many hours; apparently this morning, around the time I got up, a great big-ol' snowstorm started. So when I finished, I heard what sounded like a snowplow outside my window and looked out on a slate-gray sky, a bunch of snow on the ground, and more falling.

So my semester's over with. A passel of my students ended up making out like bandits, thanks to my being way too lenient with the oral-pres and participation grades--markedly better than they deserved--but whatever, it's Christmas.

And the break I've been waiting and waiting for is here, here, here.

Bring on the wedding! Bring on an apartmentful of lodgers! Bring on seeing cousins and trying to randomly catch up with APO people while my brother's curling in Massachusetts! Bring on Christmas shopping (I haven't had time for it yet) and trying to clean this pit of a room! Bring on my finding my digital camera (no lie, and it's got all my DC pics on it...pray?)! Bring it all ruddy on!

I seriously danced in front of my computer this afternoon after sending off the paper. They Might Be Giants, The La's, whatever.

I don't know what to do first: cook, clean, or sleep. I would go out and get a few necessaryish groceries, but Broome County's warning against travel before tomorrow ("Closed Early Do To Storm," read the photography studio I passed). So probably what I'll do is the same stuff I've been doing--eating, reading, blog-following--but just more legitimately this time, heh.

Huh. Well, then.

I was just about to ask what I think I've probably asked before--why the people who play their music at hundreds of decibels (or at least that's what it feels like) never blast oldies, or even country, instead of the ubiquitous rap and reggaeton and the like.

But the people upstairs who've been cranking out the rap, etc., have just, to my surprise, begun to blast a country song after all. Granted, it's Toby Keith's "I Love This Bar," which is the most predictable country song a group of party boys can blast, but I have to admit, even that makes a nice change.

Questionable Holiday Decisions

1. Buying a whole half-gallon of eggnog a couple of weeks ago. No, it doesn't hit sell-by until Christmas Eve. But let's think about this one for a second: a drink wherein half a cup's worth, four ounces, provides a quarter of one's RDA of saturated fat and almost the same percentage of cholesterol. And who is drinking this eggnog? I am. Not my apartmentmates, I am.

This wouldn't bother me so much if the rest of my diet hadn't been consisting, for at least a week now, largely of fat, sugar, salt, cholesterol, and...

2. ...Wegmans cinnamon-swirl sandwich bread, which I was stupid enough to buy this afternoon based on pleasant memories of it from my childhood. I think I've eaten eight pieces of it already--though, in my defense, the slices are considerably smaller than regular Wegmans bread slices. Plus, I feel like two of them shouldn't count because I attempted to be more nutritionally-balanced by spreading peanut butter on them at dinner (I actually mean that when I say it, since part of my lunch consisted of four such slices eaten plain), which killed the cinnamon-sugar taste entirely.

3. Making it all the way to Tuesday night without having either a) started grading the second-round WRIT 111 portfolios (though I have, of necessity, graded my own students') or b) worked on my ESL-P final revision (the written part, that is; I did do the field research I mentioned in the previous entry). Granted, the former isn't due until Thursday and the latter until Friday, so I'm not as far behind as usual, but I really need to do something other than sleeping, napping (I've been soaking up sleep like a sponge), eating while staring at my computer (most notably at the witty blog Ask Sister Mary Martha...things may be going from unexpected to flat-out odd, given that I've now made the leap from Catholic-mommy blogs to a Catholic-nun blog, despite still not having the slightest intention of leaving Protestantism), and undertaking my usual practice of doing housework to save myself from schoolwork (mopped the floors yesterday...they really needed it, but that is probably no excuse).

In short: I can't be trusted to properly manage my time during the semester, when I have classes, and then I can't be trusted to manage my time when I don't have classes. And I have zero food willpower these days for some reason. So I'm pretty much rating an epic fail on all responsbility everywhere.

At least I'm eschewing the Mad Trivia Party for tonight. I'm not even going to look to see whether they're asking really good questions, which means that they probably will.

So okay. One final concession to substitute-work by putting in some laundry. One final peek at ASMM, and saving time later for catching Oregon's airing of Says You!. But I am going to work, too, dang it.

::dance dance dance::

The semester is almost over (I do still have 64 portfolios to grade, some field research to do for my Four C's paper, and the revision of my latest Four C's draft to do, and all in the next seven days). This is gonna be a crazy weekend and no mistake.

But after the 19th comes (or at least should come)...sweet, sweet freedom. Besides the sleeping in, cooking, and folk dancing, early January will bring Joe and Andrea's Wedding, For the Win!, which will pretty much be, for those of us in CNY, a weeklong prep and carryout all-together-now extravaganza. Just thinking about it pretty much makes my day.

So, um, time for bed.

Why I Shouldn't Be Writing This

Because I have to outline and write another five pages of analysis for Dr. Tricomi's class by Thursday. The first five pages took me about twelve hours (just for writing...that's not counting the reading/outlining stages) spread out over three days, which is ridiculous.

I still also have to grade sixteen research papers by Friday--in blatant, if guilty, defiance of the department's instructing me to get them back by tomorrow, not to mention the probable best interests of my students (who have to revise them by the 12th). That would normally take me on the order of twelve hours.

But you'll notice that I don't have twenty-four spare hours between now and my due dates, given that I have to sleep (though, as I've been proving lately, apparently I don't have to sleep much) and attend/teach classes, so this time I really AM going to learn how to comment on a research paper in only half an hour. Like, I'm going to set my cell phone alarm over and over again, or something like that.

Tonight I am definitely not attempting to defend my new Mad Trivia Party title, more's the great pity.

Oh! But PS like whoa!: M2 is apparently just one of those people who never lets anyone off easily, not someone whom I bored and frustrated immensely. He told his friend my class was really good and she should be in my section next semester.

"So, what'd you do over Thanksgiving break?"

"Oh, nothing much," I'll say. "Graded a huge stack of papers, wrote nigh on ten pages' worth of essays, came up with a research question for a conference, and won The Mad Trivia Party as a first-time caller."

And though I'm not sure all of that will get done in such a short time (though theoretically it has to), that last part, at least--courtesy of tonight's being a night when practically no one was listening, as far as I can tell--will be absolutely true. (I once described the show here, if you don't remember it.)

Here are the factoids I knew for my win:

-Lizzie Borden, according to the rhyme, gave her parents forty and forty-one whacks (respectively).

-There are three teaspoons in a tablespoon.

-There are two pints in a quart.

-The Red Cross's emblem is a red cross on a white background because it's the inverse of Switzerland's flag, and the Red Cross began in Switzerland.

-Obi-Wan Kenobi is the speaker of the quote, "Who's the more foolish, the fool, or the fool who follows him?"

-White chocolate isn't really chocolate because it consists of cocoa butter, not cocoa itself.

-If you find a pickle ornament on a Christmas tree, it's supposed to signal good luck (in the form of an extra present, I was told)

-The Roundheads briefly took over England.

-Retsina wine is made with pine pitch lining the barrels.

I feel like there might have been one more, but maybe not. Anyway, that's really all it took, since, as aforementioned, it was a slow night (I was the only one to call back in during Speed Round, which pretty much clinched it...assuming I didn't already have the lead, which I may have). So I won the "amazing prize" of the night, some hot chocolate mix--which, let me say, is way better than most of their prizes.

So that was cool. I guess I'd better go back to grading papers, huh?

Sure, get yourself into a deeper op-ed grading hole. Take two hours to write this. Go ahead.

Teaching, I've decided after my not-quite-semester of it, is bizarre, and a little like a drug. On the one hand, I get to feel intensely smug about being surrounded by people who are younger than I, rather than older--especially right now, when I'm young enough to be comparable to them in age, when it's not yet kidding myself to think that sometime after the semester ends, two or three will invite me to come have pizza with them on such-and-such a night (after all, I got invited out trick-or-treating, though I had to turn them down), and I'll have the awkward, exciting, flattering task of deciding whether or not to go. I get to work with college freshmen at a resonably-good school--my favorite group of students in the world, all angst and sincerity and bizarre foibles and intense out-of-class drama, with high school romantic relationships that they don't realize are, in nine-point-five cases out of ten, as ultimately doomed to failure as mine was, and a good thing too.

On the other hand, while I've long paid lip-service to this idea, mainly because I didn't have any better ones, I don't look at myself and think, a teacher! That's what I look like. That's what I was born to be all along. But then, I don't look at my friends and see them as born for their jobs. Our jobs all fit us like hand-me-down clothes. We're supposed to be having dinners at 8 Park and Ford Street, we Alfredians; we're supposed to be eating pizza in my basement in Rochester, we homestars. We're all supposed to be in choir, singing. That's what we do. We don't do jobs. We do homework. We watch movies. We climb trees and lie in the grass and take pictures of each other, and despite the occasional little sore-to-the-touch corner where the person we admire and wish would tell us all their secrets doesn't, in all the other corners we are happy, so happy and excited that we hardly know what to do.

As with all drugs, you end up surprisingly isolated. My mind's filled some days with my students, my students, my students, this whole world of intricacy that usually either FERPA or Binghamton's privacy code or simple accepted convention forbids me from describing with authenticity. M2 scowls at me from his seat by the window, I write in e-mails or in blog posts, abbreviating him because none of the other teachers I know use full first names on their blogs or in their Facebook messages. R--, writes Chelsea; B., writes Tom. We want people to know their real names--until someone walks into our classroom. Then we're not sure we want them to know. I complained about M1, M2, and S. to my mom, to my friends, to anyone who would listen. Scott came in to observe my class, watched M1 fire clever questions at me (which are worse, the guys who're too smart to be in my class and know it, like him and S., or the guys who think they're too smart to be in my class but aren't, like C.?). He told me at the end of class, when everyone had left, that he'd wanted to smack M1 for being so difficult. I felt vindicated and then troubled. M1 is also one of my brightest kids, a great guy who has no idea how much harder on himself he makes every project by pursuing a brilliant but difficult topic. A hilarious boy who has no idea that he should feel awkward when he eats a late lunch of potato chips and tea in my class, filling an otherwise-silent room, during five minutes of freewriting, with crunching--who has no idea that I'm smothering a laugh but not really trying to smother my grin, though J2's watching me and will probably follow my lead and silently laugh at him, too.

Frank McCourt says he didn't say "teach" because he felt phony, since he was always still learning--he conducted a course, he ran a class. Not me. I'm instantly possessive. It catches my ear when I say my students; I feel like a different person, for just a split second, when I say it.

Imagine what parenting much teach you about Christianity--about the way God's love works. Imagine having your own kids. Just from "having" these kids I've learned something about unconditional love. The one good thing about teaching English, which is the grayest-area'd and most guilt-trip-inspiring subject in all of teaching, is that through their writing I get to know more than what they say in class. God bless the sixteen-student cap in Writing 111. I know all of them at least a little, enough to more fully understand how parents love their children even when they want to kick their butts. (It's not like I questioned that my parents loved me; it's that I, eager to please and prudy and prissy, never thought I was that big a pain.)

And I've got L. raising her hand at every question, sitting at the table of conscientious girls, sweet and articulate and the kind of student I tried to be and would want my child to be. But I wish, instead, that J3 in the back would raise her hand, because she doesn't talk enough, and I have reason to believe that below that gum-chewing exterior lies a girl who actually is intrigued by, if still not exactly sold on, my class.

And I realize in writing this that my first class, which sits around small round tables instead of in individualized desks, has sorted itself into types, with like personalities more or less grouped together--the conscientious girls (up front), the conscientious boys (one row back, on the other side), the quiet ones (way in back), the too-cool-to-seem-interested ones (also way in back), the happily-normal ones (one pair across from the conscientious girls, the other across from the conscientious boys), and the one guy who misses class a lot and sometimes switches groups, which fits, because he isn't quite any of the above.

And I've been wondering what happened between M1 and M2 in my second class. They seemed like a fairly dynamic duo early in the semester, the latter sitting right behind the former, the two of them playing off each other a bit. But then S., who used to sit in the middle of the front row, drifted to my right until he was right next to M1, and gradually M2 moved a row back, and I noticed belatedly that when I let everyone work in pairs, M1 and S. were always together now, and M2 had struck up what felt to me like a consolation friendship with the pretty, friendly Z.

But for all I learn a little from their writing, I have few ways to know what they don't tell me. I bet J1 could tell me whether M1 and M2 were ever really friends to begin with. He'd probably think my observations were crazy.

I have thirty-two students, and I wish this were Alfred and I were still at 8 Park, so that I could make bread and put it out on the table, and they could slice it while it was warm and fill themselves with it, and I could watch them hang out and, while I couldn't erase the teacher-student gap any more than Morehouse managed to erase it with us, I could at least erase some of Binghamton's bigness and impersonality. I could at least give them something they didn't expect.

I am a part of all that I have met. If my math is correct, and if these things had been assigned randomly (which, of course, they're not), each of my students would've had just over a 3% chance of landing me as their instructor, and I'd have had about the same chance of landing any one of them. The reality probably isn't too far from the estimate, so all of this is pretty unlikely, isn't it?

But okay. The op-eds. I'll be up late and then up early; there're nine of them left, and they'll each take half an hour at least. I don't know what I was doing with this, putting on a reflective voice and meandering through thoughts half inspired by and flavored with Frank McCourt's Teacher Man, and then hardly editing them because I'm tired and have stuff to grade. But it feels good to've done.

And I don't know what on earth I've gotten myself into with all of this, whether it'll turn out well or ill or somewhere in between. But it feels important, all in all, to be doing it.

Monday-Morning Amusement...Sort Of

Wal-Mart uses a different color scheme for its gallons of milk than does Wegmans. I've been around Wegmans for enough years that I can recite theirs: light blue (skim), green (1%), purple (2%), red (whole). This is the same scheme employed by Byrne Dairy, who supplied the milk cartons for my school lunches; and probably by Sealtest as well, not that I can verify that (since I haven't seen them around lately); and basically, I feel, by any such company worth its butter.

But Wal-Mart, because I guess they don't already contribute to enough of this world's misery, had the bright idea of making their 2% milk caps light blue. Thus it was that I, not paying attention this morning, grabbed one of my apartmentmates' milk cartons from the refrigerator and poured its contents over my cereal, instead of the skim milk I had bought. So then, because apparently I'm one of those overachieving people who can't just leave an explanatory and apologetic note, I strained my cereal (again) and put the milk back in the carton, despite the fact that Melissa's(? Megan's?) milk probably now has a few tiny cereal-flake pieces in it.

Then again, you could also blame me for all of this, for thinking skim milk a good idea in the first place.

Seven Years

I checked Ananda's blog and found that it started in early December of 2001; it'll hit its seven-year mark in a little less than a month.

Seven years ago I was in eleventh grade? Is that all? For all that that year was so life-changing, and though my friends, its stars, were exquisite and irreplaceable, there's a big divide in my memory now: my life after I first arrived at Alfred, and then everything else that came before.

As though I took my first steps as I swayed, arms outstretched for balance, along the top of fence by the Steinheim as John and I walked back to Tefft after Death by Chocolate, my mind reeling with amazement and risk and fascination and freedom.

Seven years from now I'll be thirty, but I can't imagine feeling a world away from who I am right now. Freshman year comes at just about the perfect time--you're old enough to comprehend a lot of what's going on, but young enough to still have raw emotion course all through you, transport you, make everything seem doubly and significantly real.

I am confident that my brother...

...will have a better future than this. :-p

Culinary Geekness Entry, The Latest

I've acquired some delicious chicken recipes over the past two-or-so years. Moroccan chicken and lentils. Coconut chicken curry. African (chicken-and-)peanut sauce. Chicken stock. Lemon-velvet chicken soup. And except for the latter, all of them make lots of leftovers, which gladdens my grad-student heart.

Mmmm.

I'm going to try to make chicken-and-dumpling stew soon. As in, whenever my chicken finishes thawing and I can cook it. Maybe that'll be Saturday.

Um, I'm gonna go with, uh-oh.

-Teaching: we instructors appear to have made, if it were possible, an even worse hash of the op-ed unit than we did of the This I Believe unit, and for the same reason: we have no way of knowing what goals the department actually set for the project or what they think constitutes a successful essay. So I still have thirty-two op-ed drafts to grade and no real idea of how to grade them. I'm meeting with Jillian and Dr. Kinney about it, probably on Friday. And then trying to respond in depth to thirty-two op-eds in about one-and-a-half days (hint: not possible), since my second-section students have been clamoring for them since two days after they handed them in, which was in lateish October.

-Learning: so Scott's a good guy, and I don't actually blame him for this as much as it sounds like I do. But remember those two or three arguments I had with him about whether our paper actually had a thesis, since I thought it didn't and he insisted it did? (No, you don't, because I didn't really mention them. Well, we had them.) Remember how he ultimately won those arguments? We got the paper back. I should have won.

-Health: my apartmentmate has mononucleosis. Not like we're sharing waterbottles or anything, but here's hoping she at absolutely no point coughs while I'm within range.

On the other hand, my ESL-P paper draft, which I handed in this morning, was probably okay. And, pretty excitingly, I have managed to keep my room clean (or, well, at least my floor and surfaces...not so much the drawers) since, like, this past Thursday or Friday. On Sunday I even vacuumed it. It looks really good.

So, you know. Never a dull moment here in Binghamton.

Back from Errands

Too Many

By mistake once,
I bought too many staples
Staples that would last five years,
Ten, maybe even twenty
And I wondered
What will my life be like
Next time I buy staples?

-Aubrey Atwater


I just bought a 544-count package of hole reinforcements. I feel the same way.

Before I write anything about Alfred, assuming I'm going to write anything about Alfred, I had better post DC pictures, hadn't I?

::snort::

I have six books in my room right now that could be construed as some kind of grammar manual (even if there're other things in it as well). All of these books belong to me.

Go ahead and call me a hopeless nerd. I definitely have it coming.

On the ESL-P Rough Draft That Was Going to Be a Disaster Tomorrow

Sometimes beautiful things just fall into your lap. Like this e-mail from Dr. Kinney:

Hi Folks,

Unfortunately, I’m going to need to postpone tomorrow’s independent study. Of course, you can feel free to meet without me if you choose. Are you all free to meet next Wed. (11/12)?



Natasha hasn't started writing, either, and she and I make up half the class, so I assume we'll just not meet. Or that, if we do, there'll be no pressure for us to have anything more than an outline.

And I'm sure that, come next week, things are going to feel a little insane again: now, on top of drafting those five-to-ten pages (what a range! I'm pretty sure I'm only going to get to five), I also have to be grading my students' op-eds (though I can start doing that tomorrow night, right after our teacher-team meeting tells me how on earth to go about grading them) and planning, with Scott, our TLE ("Team-Led Event," the thing where we teach two classes on The Duchess of Malfi), which will be on the 18th and 20th. Plus there'll be that take-home essay for that class, due the 20th, and when am I going to do that?

But right now (as a schoolgirl I was so much better about delaying gratification...sigh), I could hardly be happier. Yes, I'll probably do at least a little more research tonight. But first, I am going to cook something. Or clean something. Or get some other thing done I have been meaning to do for weeks. And I shall allow Kristin to geek out at me about the election all night (this is what happens when a public-policy major and the first Tuesday after the first Monday meet: "I want an electoral map, some cheap bar food, a drink, and a TV! The first polls close in only two hours and I will be ready!") Except that when I say "all night," really I just mean, "until I decide that it's time I sank into deep, glorious, rather-unexpected sleep."

Actually, I imagine Dr. Kinney's giving us the extra week on the drafts because she's going to be up half the night helping to run the campus's election party and doesn't feel like coming in for a flexible ten o'clock Wednesday meeting when she could be getting a few more hours of sleep.

So whadaya know: election years have an advantage after all!

And they all lived happily ever after. Or at least until next Tuesday night. The end.

I've been struggling with this one since I realized (about five years ago) how dang many click-to-donate sites exist.

Though I'm still being mostly sarcastic.

Anyway, thanks a lot, Nathan Bixler, for posting all of those "free water/rice/flour/some other staple ingredient for the hungry" links. 'Cause I really didn't have enough guilt in my life. How does one, in good conscience, decide to stop playing a game that gives free food to the hungry? "Oh, sorry, guys. I could go on and give you another ten bowls of rice, but you know how it goes. That Facebook profile isn't gonna check itself."

One for the English Scholars (And, Really, Whomever)

(Potential Subtitle: What Good is an Autumn "Fallback" if You Wake Up Two Hours Early?)

Okay, so here's what I want to know, because I have somewhere I want to go with this later:

1) How do you understand the definition of the phrase textual interpretation? (If this question helps you answer, how should one go about interpreting a text?)

2) On what grounds do you say so?

This is much more accurate than the "::laughs::" I use.

(Courtesy, of course, of Toothpaste for Dinner)

So after last night's outburst, I went to bed at one-something, slept until almost eleven (I haven't done that in a while), and have done almost nothing of academic value since.

I really will be able to go to Alfred on Friday, I promise, 'cause there'll be a slight lull in this work by then. But I have this feeling like Tuesday night is going to be super-wretched.

Still, I got some good sleep last night, so I feel considerably more sane this afternoon than I was for a lot of yesterday. Has anyone ever managed to forgive someone with whom they were annoyed via dreaming about talking it out? I more or less did that last night. Not with the drunken freshman boys, with someone else. It was kind of cool, in a dorky way.

Also, doesn't Daylight Savings end tonight?

In Which the Emetophobe Listens to a Freshman Vomit

I shouldn't be so journalistic, but I just don't feel like being narrative, so:

I've been in a sleep-deprived bad mood and attempted to go to bed at 10 tonight. By 11:15ish, I was still awake and now hungry. So I went downstairs and fairly soon decided to make myself a grilled cheese.

Just as I was beginning, Sujin came in, two Halloween-costumed guys in tow. One, a tall Korean guy Y., led his friend C. (we directed him) to our downstairs bathroom--C. was obviously smashed half out of his mind.

"I don't know them," Sujin confessed. "They were just outside, and I wanted to help--I didn't want him throwing up on the street."

I nodded. She was right, and despite how the rest of this entry is going to sound, I was glad she'd done it.

I assume they were both freshmen. I know Y. was. He told me his year, and after asking, I found out that he's in one of Jillian's WRIT 111 sections. He kept apologizing to Sujin and me for the whole thing.

The thing is, I do not drink. I have never drunk. And, frankly, this is a huge part of why: my first experiences with people drinking were with relatives hung over, people having to get out of cars (after birthday parties, after weddings) the next day to be sick. You don't have to see it, which I didn't, to be ten years old and horrified that it's happening.

And drunk people, to what degree I've experienced them, are so frighteningly altered, in a way that something like caffeine just can't seem to touch. Major caffeine overdose is bad, but too much stimulation is very different from its opposite, which seems to present you with someone who isn't more than himself, but less.

So I didn't go to parties in college. I made friends just fine without them, and the fifty percent of my friends who did drink knew better than to invite me. I have exactly and only one regret: I've had no idea how to gauge danger levels within drunkenness. Almost all of it looks frightening to me, honestly.

But I figured, you know, I'd play it cool. I kept making grilled cheese. I got a glass and filled it with water and gave it into Y's charge, to be put into C. as soon as he could keep anything down. I told Y. to help himself to the Raisinets we've been keeping around as Halloween candy. We waited for C.

Who did stumble out. And plunked down onto our living room couch, trying and failing to string a coherent sentence together. And within twenty seconds was back in the bathroom, pulling up our toilet lid.

The emetophobe in me, horrified, could only ask Sujin to shut the door as I clapped my hands over my ears. It didn't help much.

I called Katy (since she's a nursing student) to ask what to do in case he was alcohol-poisoned. Sounding rather more concerned at my level of concern than at the actual situation, she informed me that as long as he was actively getting sick instead of passing out and ceasing to breathe, he was probably okay. This was good news for Y., who knew that I was starting to take Harpur's Ferry really seriously as an abstract concept and was busy pleading with me not to make a fuss.

Eventually C. came back out--Y. pretty much ordered him to. "You can't do this anymore. I feel too bad for them. C'mon, you have to stop." Do sober friends usually have to talk to drunks like that? ...So C. held it together enough to drink half the glass of water. He sat dazed on one of our chairs, staring at me, sounding like he was going to cry. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry." He refused toast (Katy had added that I should try to get some bread into him as well as water), but did manage, with Y.'s help, to get out the door. (It was going to be hard enough for him to walk, but he'd also dressed up for Halloween as Sarah Palin, so he was in heels.) They were going to get a cab back to campus so Y. (still bewildered by his friend's trouble--"he was fine; I don't know what happened") could drop him off.

And then Y. was going to go downtown to the bars to meet the friends that both he and C. were supposed to meet.

Almost unfathomable to me, that he still intended to do that.

He (Y.) has Sujin's number, so he can call us back if he needs anything or to tell us that things are okay now. Sujin, too, left to go meet friends downtown, though apparently she's not drinking; her friend ended up sick as well.

I didn't have the fortitude to go check the state of the bathroom, so I pretty much got Melissa's boyfriend (they must've been upstairs the whole time, but they missed all the action) to do it; he said it was fine.

I ate the grilled cheese, despite not wanting it anymore.


It could have been one of my own students. And as much as I hope they'd be willing to come into my apartment in such a case (it'd almost be better to know the guys in question, even if I'd also be more frightened), I am horrified by the idea that, sooner or later, this is going to be one of them. Blisteringly plastered, crouched helplessly over someone else's toilet, someone just trying to get them functional so they can go about their business, because dang if it isn't only eleven-thirty, with four hours of partying time left once the overdoer's properly dealt with. Let the RA watch him. Or not, since that'd get him written up; let him watch himself.

As long as his friends are watching him, he should be okay. Get him some water. Make sure he's breathing.

All this for a party, two years early. Don't tell me forbidding it only drives it underground. I grant that right now I'd love to bludgeon the bar owners downtown who look the other way at fake IDs to line their pockets with freshman money, or whatever happens. But I can't imagine that simple independence from home, simple desire to fit in wouldn't bring about these same results in our freshman class.

I know my reaction needs to be one of love. And it's not the two boys I'm angry with (well, maybe a little angry at each, but not primarily so--I'm much more concerned and, you know, appalled). I am angry at the whole stupid system that makes drunkenness okay, where we look the other way because supposedly these people being a minority makes it passable that it happens to anyone at all. I'm frustrated with the lack of love around them that drives people to feel like they won't have friends otherwise. Angry at whatever makes them think that this whole thing could possibly be cool.

I'm going to bed. I have lots of work to do tomorrow.

Considering that my students handed in their op-ed drafts on October 20th...

...they're going to be pretty displeased with me when they don't get them back until sometime between November 14th-17th.

The problems with being a graduate instructor in a big school are these:

1. I can't devote as much time to them as they deserve.

2. I'm feeling increasingly less guilty about that, despite this being directly against what I want for myself as a teacher. I think things like, why do they have to ask so many questions?, and, the final revisions aren't due until December 12th, so it's not like they're going to actually do any revision until about the 9th anyway. Which in some cases is most likely true, but not in all of them; not everyone's as incurable a procrastinator as I seem to be.

'Cause I'm doing my usual ridiculous thing (my dad admits to having done this same thing all through his PhD work), this if I'm doing fifteen other work-type things, it's okay that I'm not doing the work that's actually coming due! So tonight I should have been researching for ESL-P or doing preliminary op-ed grades, or at least correcting my students' extra-credit assignments. But instead I started reading The Knight of the Burning Pestle for class (I have to have it all read by Tuesday), I got some exercise, I cleaned various apartment surfaces, and I made cornbread. (And I stared at the internet, as I do whenever I don't get enough sleep, both before and after watching Jeopardy!). And now it's nearing midnight, despite that I was hoping (read: lying to myself) that I would be in bed by, like, nine-thirty.

I lie to myself a lot when it comes to bedtime.

Oh, and about my pipe dream of applying to adjunct at Alfred State: um, let's hope this state-employee, until-further-notice hiring freeze is over soon, and that it doesn't apply to community colleges (technically owned by the SUNY system), or upon my graduation in May '09, I will be all manner of hopelessly unemployed. Unless AU wants to take adjunctive pity on a starving alum. I guess I should give them some money soon or something, huh?

MIT Student Pranks

There's one. Some of the others are here.

Countdown

I'm going to Alfred for the square dance on November 7th. But apparently, thinking back to the DC trip, there's this rule that I have to spend a week or two in scholastic misery anytime I want to leave Binghamton in favor of joy and wonder. This time around, here are the things I have to do between now and then:

-By the 30th: finish my half of the Duchess of Malfi draft (it's a pair-written paper). I've been trying for two or three weeks to get Scott to explain the thesis to me in a way I can understand. I know that theoretically I should have come up with half this thesis myself, but arguing with Scott is not something I've done well until recently, and he had this big idea. So for the rough draft we'd divided things up so that I was giving background with my half and he was drawing whatever brilliant conclusion he was drawing with his. Predictably enough, when the draft came back, Dr. Tricomi had picked faults in Scott's half and more or less rejected my half outright because it didn't follow the thesis. So Scott has to be more articulate, and I have to start from scratch, and we've been trying to revise it, but we only have until Thursday. Every time I try to work on it, I end up having to talk to Scott, and ninety minutes later, I think for the nth time that this time I really do understand the argument we're making and what my half of the paper's going to entail. I keep being wrong, but let's hope I'm right ruddy soon, because my six-to-seven pages are due this Thursday. I'm running out of time to stare at Scott blankly or argue with him crabbily.

-By the 31st: have 111's extra-credit assignments graded and actually have my lesson plan wrangled together (heh, good luck to me on that one).

-By November 3rd, in theory (read: fat chance): have my students' op-ed drafts graded.

-By November 5th: have my ESL Pedagogy paper drafted (5-10 pages) from scratch, despite not getting to even start the research until about November 1st.

-On the 31st and the 6th: observe ESL writing classes with Natasha.

-On the 3rd, 5th, and 7th: teach for a (very small) audience again--Scott this time, 'cause it's for his ENG 589 class. He and I are probably going to be pretty sick of each other by the end of the semester, all things considered (see below).

In between all this: do my schoolwork, what else of it there is; teach my students; start planning the two classes that Scott and I have to also teach about Duchess of Malfi; actually, like, vote or something.

It's going to be an (over)eventful time, in which maybe God will do amazing-feeling things and I'll follow Him brilliantly and get all my work done successfully and relatively painlessly. May it be. In the meantime, I have stocked up on groceries and am going to bed, so's to get up around 5 tomorrow morning and take another hopeless-feeling crack at that Duchess essay. Pray for me and wish me the best.

::feeling like Sally Field::

I haven't read my second class's midsemester evaluations of the course yet, and they're probably going to be a bit more critical just because some of my students in there are generally more critical, but the ones from my first class, which I just read over lunch, are a huge relief. My class isn't perfect, of course, but most of them like it, or at least feel it's been worth their time, and are generally cool with my teaching so far. I actually had one student (and I think I know who it is, 'cause he drew a picture at the bottom with a figure in it that suggested his last name, which can be read as a noun) say it was one of his favorite classes ever. ("Serious," he added in parentheses.) One student compared me favorably to "other grad TAs" he/she's had (apparently my official status as "instructor" isn't fooling anybody, and I'm considered a TA in the same way I sort of feel like one).

One student called my class "1337" and told me to UrbanDictionary.com it, apparently not thinking I'd know. Haha, I wonder how old they think I am, even after my in-class references to Facebook and Lolcats.

'kay, well, off to go teach them. :)

Since I'm (Inappropriately) Still Awake...

...some short takes:

1. You know those corners where buildings or building-wings meet, where the wind bounces off the walls in such a way that leaves get stirred into an upward spiral? If I stood in such a corner with long, loose hair, would it look kind of amusingly wonderful, or would it not work somehow?

2. Apparently I can apply at about any time, once I get my Master's, to adjunct-teach English at Alfred State. I'm pretty sure it's low on the pay-and-benefits scale, but SUNY enrollment is up in these hard times, and housing in Alfred is supposedly not that expensive. It's tempting. Very tempting.

3. Dear Price Chopper Supermarkets,
Roasted-garlic flavor or no, if that is your "mild" salsa, I am staying away from your medium.

4. My brother is apparently going to try out next year, with two friends, for the Winter Olympics in curling. They're not going to make it, but if they did, I would cancel all my classes and go straight to Vancouver and be as adoring a groupie as he could stand. I suppose that would have to involve my officially learning the rules of curling, though, huh?

5. I've come to a decision that took some deep thought. At this highly polarized time of year, it's a risk to take a stand on this at all, but I would feel responsible if people kept assuming my preferences--or lack thereof--falsely, since I grew up holding one position but converted to the other. That is, I've finally concluded that I do like pumpkin pie better than apple. I hope we can all still be friends.

The good news...and the bad news

Got this e-mail just now. Yay for the assignment! But agh, look at these times!

You are scheduled to teach two sections of WRIT 111, Coming to Voice, in spring 2009. The times of your sections (16 students) each are: [days here] 8:30-9:55 a.m. and [days here] 4:25-5:50 p.m.

Also Not About DC Yet

The third presidential debate was much better than the second. But I never want to hear about Joe the Plumber again.

Season's End (Not About DC Yet)

Weather high today: low 70s (warmer than usual for this time of year, right?).
Tomorrow: high 60s (early-fall usual, what we've been getting for a while now).
Thursday: high 50s.
The next whole week after that: mid-to-low 50s and, one day, high 40s.

And I forgot to bring my fleeces/hoodie out of Syracuse. Heh.

More to Come; For Now, I'm Back

I have triumphantly returned from our nation's capital (not to mention, indirectly, capitol). Photos and anecdotes to come. Sometime. Soon, I think, but we'll see.

Almost There

My computer's fritzed again. The maintenance people still never see it fritzing.

I finally made the apple crisp tonight that I've been meaning to make for, oh, weeks. It's delicious.

Non-negotiable activities for tomorrow:

-Bible study (9 AM)
-Finish my paper draft (by 1:15)
-Finish the readings/response for ESL Pedagogy (by 5 PM)
-Have dinner with Chung Eun and Dawn (yay!) (at 6 PM)
-Pack(!) for DC(!) (after dinner, etc.)

Should also:
-Hit up Weg-a-mans for a couple of things
-Mail a couple of things that should be mailed
-Find a couple of things that I've misplaced
-Go to sleep right now. Okay, I'm off.

Mini-Update

This week has been a long waking bad dream ("nightmare" is a bit too strong a word, but it was definitely still unpleasant) of schoolwork, particularly because the attendant dearth of sleep made the term "waking" still more apt. My students got their drafts back (see previous entry); perhaps the less said about those, the better. It turns out that I didn't teach the unit as well as I should have. At least the grades are only artificial; they get infinite revision opportunities until semester's end, and anyway, even the lowest grades weren't below C-level (<-weak pun).

I still have assignments to do until Tuesday night, but I'm on break until tomorrow night. I think I'm going to make apple crisp somewhere in there (not a la Tom, but a la the Alpha-Bakery Cookbook, since its recipe is much simpler and--heh, don't tell the Twin--possibly superior).

Oh, and my computer's back to only working when it's downstairs, which's why I haven't been online much. This time I really am going to get the maintenance people to come.

Once Yom Kippur break hits (instead of one midsemester break, we get two mini-breaks; this Monday-Wednesday was for Rosh Hashanah, next Wednesday-Friday is for Yom Kippur), I'm going to DC to see Kristin. That'll be nice. (But I'll be home in time to see you on Sunday, Jo.)

Ooh, uh-oh.

If I'm going to be commenting this extensively on my students' papers, I had better start typing instead of handwriting. Otherwise, it's going to take me about 40 hours to get through 32 papers, if tonight's grading was any indication.

Earlier tonight was an "I Love the 80s" party at Good Shepherd's junior-high youth group; I told Micah I'd help. Rather-depressing but true: 80s gear is coming back, just with thinner cloth (I am not a conspiracy theorist or a Marxist, but Target has convinced me that the "layers" trend is merely a way for clothing companies in a bad economy to maximize profits--not only do they save supplies in making things thinner, but one must buy multiple items if one cares at all about personal modesty). I bought some magenta-colored legwarmers on clearance. They really do keep your legs warmer, dumb though they look.

So we had pizza, chocolate-chip cookies, and lemonade, and played "live-action" Pac-Man (Micah's idea, and it was a good one: strategically-placed masking tape along the sanctuary pews formed the "maze," and scattered squares of white and pink paper made the "pellets," both regular and ghost-repelling; one person played Pac-Man and could run, while two people were ghosts and were forced to walk) and some Uno. We judged the best 80s costume (the junior-highers, all of whom were girls, did a really good job prepping, or at least their moms did a really good job finding old clothing of theirs). It was fun...for Micah and me. The girls probably also had some fun even when they weren't a) eating pizza or b) sending about 29185795 text messages, but you might have to ask some of them.

Okay, seriously, I need to be more diligent about going to bed on time. Even when I'm correcting papers.

Around the Catholic Blogosphere

Confession: I love blogs written by smart Catholic women.

Which is not to say that I don't also love Protestants' blogs, or my friends', or whatever, of course. But there is something about the blogging that comes out of Catholic women raising their (often many) kids that tends to be creative, wry, often peaceful, and sometimes outright brilliant.

This love, really, is the fault of my pastors (Anne particularly), who themselves write for blogs and therefore link to ones they find interesting. In Anne's case, said sites tend to be the journals of homeschooling parents (since she herself is beginning to homeschool her children) and smart, Christian, mostly-conservative women (since she identifies with all three of those labels). Often these two categories go hand in hand: smart Catholic women seem to like homeschooling their kids. So sometimes I'll read posts she puts up from other people's blogs, and then I read more from the same site because I'm interested, and then I find that those blogs link to other people's interesting-sounding posts, and before I know it, I've used up the free time that I was going to use for something else.

I say all this as background to the things from Catholic-girl blogs that I feel like posting today; this morning these two (which I'd never before read) were helpful reads:

Here, I'm not sure I agree with every point of her interpretation (I do have some of the qualms that "Bubbles," from her comments, does), but it's certainly something to think about, and they may well both be partly right.

From the same woman. If you don't feel like going back to her November '06 archives to read Parts I and II, note that Part I was a description of having to watch her grandfather's murder (he was shot) years before, and Part II dealt with the aftermath of her parents' death.

And I may have excerpted this one before, but I'm doing so again, from Jennifer F.'s Conversion Diary, even though I feel responsible right now to know more about politics, not less:

I'm starting to feel that for me, in this phase of life, it's just not my calling to be all that passionate or involved in politics, to put much time or effort into trying to better the world through changes in government policy or other large-scale initiatives. Right now, as trite as it may sound to some people, I feel like my calling is to just make my little corner of the world the best that it can be: to work on the immigration issue by continuing to lend a helping hand to some friends of ours who are immigrants from Mexico; to preserve the environment by making sure that our household uses our God-given resources prudently; to reform social security by having lots of future taxpayers; to (as Kimberly Hahn once put it) change the culture, one diaper at a time.

Yet I feel like I'm violating some sort of law when I embrace that mentality, that it's carved in stone somewhere that everyone must have an opinion about every issue all the time. And other people evidently know of this law, or would at least seem to from the looks I get when I say in social settings that I don't have an opinion about certain major issues.


But about that use of free time. I really have to start correcting my students' papers sometime today. They're all due back on Friday.

Is it the first Wednesday after the first Monday in November yet?

For the record, I did watch about the first hour of the presidential debates, maybe even more, but then I got distracted and missed the rest.

As was also the case yesterday, I've accomplished relatively little today. I also have a feeling I'm going to accomplish relatively little over Rosh Hashanah break (I know that correcting my students' papers will get done because it has to, and I did finish The Jew of Malta today, but I was also supposed to start writing my paper draft for Duchess of Malfi over this break, which I can tell already is not going to happen), but I do, on the other hand, get to see Jess tomorrow, besides Joe and Andrea. And I get to eat some chicken barbecue made from a recipe that's apparently over 100 years old.

So, you know. Apparently saving myself some paper-drafting misery next weekend (draft due date: October 7) is lower on the chain right now than my social life and reading CB's Haps and Mishaps.

Priorities...right?

My Brain as a Computer Monitor: Usually in Sleep Mode

Well, my internet's back. Don't ask me how; it spontaneously started working again in my room, even before the maintenance guy came. Or, well, it works via ethernet. I'm not going to bother to try the wireless again, lest the whole problem re-rear its ugly head.

So instead of doing anything productive after class today, I've spent something like three hours catching up on a bunch of the internet stuff I've been missing for twoish weeks.

I should start grading my students' papers tonight, but this begins Rosh Hashanah break (technically it doesn't start 'til Saturday, but what with nine out of the sixteen kids in my second section of WRIT 111 telling me I'd have to mark them absent tomorrow, I went ahead and cancelled both my classes), so really what I'd like to do tonight is goof off. And that most likely is what I'm going to do tonight, save a semi-reponsible trip out to get groceries.

So here're some belated additional TLAPD links, plus some TfD comics:

TLAPD 1

TLAPD 2

Otto or Tom might appreciate this. I mean, they don't read this blog or anything, but you know.

Thank you. This has always been a particular point of English snottery for me.

On the other hand, I've had this one coming.

Technological Victory Shall Somehow Be Mine

The problem is apparently not with my computer. It's apparently with the wiring in my room, and/or maybe our wireless network.

Tonight, with my computer downstairs in the common room, I discovered that even with nothing at all but the tower plugged in, I could still hear my system kicking into forced reboot. So the problem was either the tower, or the only thing left connected to it, my wireless receiver. Curious, though not all that hopeful, I disconnected the receiver and tried another restart.

Slowly, hardly believing it, I noticed that a couple of minutes had passed, but I still hadn't gotten a forced-reboot noise. I plugged in the monitor and saw, lo!, that Windows had come up normally. Normally! For the first time in twelve days! Well, at least within the apartment; it's been starting normally for everyone outside of the apartment.

I shut the computer down, took it upstairs (receiver-less), and tried it there. I got most of the way to a full Windows boot, but now it cut out at the welcome screen and got stuck going through the reboot cycle again. Sometimes, when everything was unplugged except the tower, monitor, and mouse, I could get a full boot, but sometimes not. And attempting to plug in anything else, the keyboard included, ruined my chances.

But when I took it back downstairs, the tower, monitor, keyboard, and mouse were all plugged in, and everything still booted just fine, first try.

It does make some sense. My wireless receiver has for months now been nonresponsive (despite my apartmentmates' usually working--though the room to one side of mine has needed its internet fixed a couple of times, so maybe we're just a problem child within the wireless world); I've been using an ethernet cable instead. The common room is within the wireless network reception area, so if the receiver was causing the reboot, that would explain why disconnecting it was enough for me to get a full boot downstairs--and on campus and at Circuit City, since both of those places have better-established wireless networks. But there's no ethernet jack downstairs, so I can't get any internet down there, so I can't just keep it down there.

That I'm still getting an eventual reboot upstairs is funny, but honestly, the electrical outlets in my room have never (even when things were working) looked any too well connected to the wiring. Not that things ever looked dangerous, but I have always been mildly surprised by their functioning properly.

So I've put in a workorder on the wiring and internet in my room, describing the problem. Hopefully they'll fix whatever on earth is wrong.

My apologies to Windows Service Pack 3, which initially I insulted, for the confusion.

Also, remind me later to put something up about today's WRIT 111 class; it was very funny.

Yo-ho!

Today was a light enough day in WRIT 111 (all they had to do was write cover letters about their writing process, to be handed in atop their "This I Believe" essays, which were due this afternoon) that I actually told my second class that it was International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Whereupon there was a flurry of disbelief and URL entry as J. and S., who both had their laptops open, checked the internet to verify my assertion. When they found out I was right, things degenerated into several minutes of chaos, ending with J. subscribing me (my e-mail's accessible to the class) to the Talk Like a Pirate Day website's newsletter and me consequently demoting him from "hearty" to "bilge rat."

I don't regret any of it.

And here be a pair o' pirate-chicken cartoons for yer own enjoyment:

Zzzzz

Whew. This week is taking it out of me.

Okay, so I took down the last post because it was too whiny. Instead, hear this: my computer is still down and pretty much on its last legs, according to two computer geeks and counting (Joe, too, is impressed that I got six years out of my machine with nothing but a power-supply replacement, probably especially given its pretty-much-daily use), so rather than pay the money to fix something that probably won't get much better (especially if it's the power supply again that's the problem), I may end up just buying my apartmentmate's laptop PC (she just got a Mac; she's selling her PC), assuming she doesn't price it all that high. 'Cause then, if I had a problem, I could take it to BU's ITS, which doesn't service personal desktops, only laptops(?!).

Also, I think I'm going to attempt some sort of bodged zucchini-and-spaghetti dish for dinner, because I have to use up my zucchini but am too lazy to dredge and fry it for a second round of zucchini parmesan, the first round of which was too messy and inconvenient when I tried it on Monday night...or Sunday night...when did I do that? Hm.

"The system is down, yo."

So maybe my computer and Windows Service Pack 3 (or at least one of its subsequent updates) do not get along: late on Wednesday night, some hours after an updating, my computer spontaneously rebooted itself, totally independent of any wish or accidental button-pressing of mine, and ever since then it's refused to load Windows except in Safe Mode. And I can't run the internet in Safe Mode.

Therefore, happy though I am that my data is all still there and is mostly accessible, all my internet-ing has to be done from computer labs until such time as John e-mails back with his best guess about what's wrong, or until BU's techies fix it if that fails.

So if I've been a little absent or terse over e-mail/AIM/whatever lately, then, as the cliche goes, it's not you, it's me.

I shall triumphantly return soon. In the meantime, enjoy your lack of obligation to read my posts about what I had for dinner (oh, the suspense!) .

Try not to think too hard about what a "digestor" does. It's pretty intuitive.

So it's been a nice evening, don't get me wrong, but there was one blight on the walk I took. Fair warning to any visitors over the next few months: the wastewater treatment plant near campus is having serious problems with its digestor, which means that basically everything from Bunn Hill Road to the westernmost section of Pennsylvania Avenue (translation: an area of land encompassing campus, my apartment, and the area I sometimes walk around for exercise) has become an extended version of the small section of Vestal Parkway that last year I nicknamed "Sulfur Strip." They say it will take ten months to fix, though Joe thinks it won't take that long for the air quality, so to speak, to get back to normal.

On a completely different note (or so I hope it is), last night I made some really delicious white-bean-and-ground-turkey chili, the recipe for which was loosely based on this but ended up very different therefrom. Here's my version:

Sweat in the bottom of a Dutch oven:
-one smallish onion, chopped
-two big cloves of garlic, chopped

Then add:
-1 pound ground turkey (you could probably use hamburger, but I feel like that violates the proper spirit of white-bean chili, since hamburger figures into the kidney-bean stuff)

Brown that, then add:
-half a packet of taco seasoning (or the equivalent spices)

Brown a little more, then add:
-two cans of cannellini beans (one of them mashed up and added as thickening)
-one can of pinto beans (this should also have been cannellini, but I was out of them after the two cans)
-one can of corn
-about 3 or so cups of chicken stock (or broth, but if you use broth, use regular spices instead of taco seasoning, or it'll probably be way too salty)
-about 1/2 cup or so of light cream (left over from previous cooking project in August--clearly this is optional and you could just throw in another half-cup of stock, but I needed to use it and, believe me, that decision was rewarded in full)
-cumin, chili powder, and cinnamon to taste

Cook it for a while; cook it down if necessary, as I did because I like it thicker than it was naturally going to be. It makes a lot; I froze four cups' worth and have already eaten the rest over the course of about three meals.

I also made prune bread and applesauce bread later last night, which means that I wasn't nearly as responsible this weekend, time-wise, as I should've been. But it feels like a long time since I've cooked something that took upwards of an hour, though really it's probably only been three weeks. For me, though, even that's a long time.

Okay, that's all for now.

Short, Boring Post

Today will be a good day for things that should get done: I got some much-needed extra sleep; we're getting some rain that at least feels much-needed, though I'm not sure it actually is; I'm hoping to get some much-needed exercise (though not out in said rain...among other possibilities, I wonder if my DDR pad really is kaput or not); and I should probably do some much-needed organizational/practical work as far as WRIT 111 goes. I'm also hoping to make my first white-bean turkey chili, entry perhaps to follow.

But I guess I should start with a rather-needed shower.

The Deadheads Win This Round

So the BU bookstore's main competition is a place called Mando Books, which's right nearby and appears to be run by deadheads--whether or not it actually is, Grateful Dead bears, tie-dye, and incense are prominent aspects of the store's decor. A little odd, but okay. They're often cheaper than the bookstore and it's nice to be supporting something smaller-scale than a Barnes and Noble subsidiary. So that's where I bought my books on the first day of class.

However, I neglected to notice something that I know they mentioned but which I didn't quite absorb: the return receipt was marked September 3rd.

The add/drop deadline is today, September 5th.

So, having finally gotten to drop Postcolonial Fiction for real yesterday--it took a few days for my independent-study paperwork to come up on BU Brain, so I didn't drop it until then because I didn't want to be short on credits--I was all set to get a book refund for that class. I'd thought about doing it earlier in the week, but kept forgetting--but now it was Friday, all was squared away, and I figured I'd better do it now because sellback must end whenever add/drop did.

Except that when I found said receipt, my doom became apparent: Wednesday was, without exceptions made, the last refund day.

So now, in part because I didn't drop until yesterday, and I guess in part because it never occurred to me that the refund date might be different there than at the actual BU bookstore, I am stuck with a little over $100-worth of books relating to postcolonial fiction, which I'm pretty sure is a completely useless subject unless you're an English major in a postcolonial-fiction class. I could sell them back for used-book prices, and I guess I might walk back into Mando and at least see whether the price for the theoretical textbook is halfway decent (the rest, being paperback novels, are unfortunately probably going to serve me better as Swaptree fodder than buyback candidates), but I feel like somehow this should not be my fault, even though for several reasons it is (including that my paperwork probably had come through by Wednesday and therefore I should have checked for it), and that I should be able to get my dang hundred dollars back. Or at least the $32.whatever for my theoretical text.

I also feel, after the whole Riverside Shakespeare deal, like I really suck this semester, and possibly in general, at this whole textbook-getting thing.

Link of the Whenever

A Latin-to-Spanish helpful-phrase dictionary.

I don't know why I think this is funny, but I do.

Upon Having Watched Both Presidential Candidates' Acceptance Speeches

(Okay, so Sen. McCain's was still in progress as I typed some of this. But after watching Sen. Obama's run forty-plus minutes last week, I just didn't have the fortitude to watch CNN.com's streaming video for that long a second time. I was listening as I wrote, though.)

I wish, annoying as the process would have been, that I had more of a history of watching these things; I'd have more of an opinion of how much I believe is genuine and how much is mere convention.

And I wish, frustratedly, that I had statistics to back up my gut reactions to certain sections of each speech. I should probably hang out on that fact-checker site more.

And I can't help thinking, in a very petty way, oh no, Senator McCain's running at least a thirty-three percent frequency of sticking a random "R" into the first syllable of "Washington."

Oh, joy, another election year. Of all the things I miss most about high school, I'm pretty sure optimism tops the list, but even my tenth-grade self could never get up a lot of excitement about seeing all my friends and relatives filled with scorn for each other. But that's life in America. I suppose it beats bowing to whatever military faction happens to be strongest and best-armed, which I think is how politics still works in some other countries. So maybe I should, I don't know, register to vote in someplace other than Rochester. And crack a political book eventually. And hope that whomever we end up with, I don't have to spend another eight years listening to everyone whine and moan about a) the awful state of the country, or b) the other side's lack of true patriotism, or c) any other dang ruddy political thing.

Bubble tea!

Agh! It's so frustrating to have a teaching blog but not have any time to post on it.

Today was a big reminder that I am not at home in the world of graduate literature studies: several of my lit colleagues with no composition background are turning up their noses at our WRIT 111 This I Believe project on the grounds that--well, that basically it's forcing our students into trite, tie-the-world-up-with-a-bow boxes when they write statements of belief (I disagree; I think a good writer can make something significant out of something deceptively simple), and that we should be teaching them something "literary" and more advanced, like (no kidding) Plato. Or at least Malcolm X. "There's no content," they say. "Oh, that's right, Kinney outlawed content in this class."

No, she made it into a composition course, wherein we're focusing primarily on how good writing achieves what it wants to--and I think these essays are a good way to talk about that. But they, not accepting that, want to make it into a course where we talk about Grandiose and Authority-Questioning Ideas and, oh yeah, mention once in a while how you might do that in terms of actual practical advice. In other words, they want a lit course paying lip service to composition. Um, I worked in our Writing Center last semester: let me tell you, your personal definition of intellectual stimulation often comes at a heavy practical price for your freshmen. Some of you might want to take some class time to go over thesis statements as you're going over the validity of your writer's ethos. A lot of English majors here cannot write well, so let's not blow our chance at teaching them, please.

The thing is, I should have more charity for them (the other graduates, I mean): I'm the only one in my professionalization mini-group that's actually taken ENG 589, the pre-teaching course that'll soon be required for all TAs and 111 instructors. I came into that course skeptical about a lot of composition things, too, but had a semester to read material about it and see the composition side of the argument...and it actually made a lot of sense. My colleagues, however, aren't new like me, and this is the beginning of standardized 111. So they have to abandon courses they've carefully designed and taught in favor of a common syllabus whose guiding principles they're being asked to take on faith. I can see why they're suspicious, but I wish they'd be more open-minded. Or at least not slam Dr. Kinney with the vitriol that a couple of them display. I know it's primarily because I really like her that I'm annoyed, but one reason I really like her is because she did a great job in class of making a case for composition without quashing our objections and without automatically buying into some of the major prejudices of our department (particularly regarding what literature is). So she deserves better, but the others have no way to see it because she's only their boss, not their professor.

It's hard to love people properly when they make me mad (and to talk about them in loving ways, as you can see). I pretty much want to take them down via brilliant monologue (debate if necessary, but monologue would suit me better) and prove that I am right and they are being elitist jerks and should bow to my superior wisdom, but instead I have to, you know, learn to love them and show them the respect I would want. And realize that I'm probably not actually smarter than they are, given that I've been teaching for all of a week and a half. Sigh.

Anyway, the title comes because my friends here have been really great over the past couple of days--Jon and Tuttle in particular decided that I was really stressed and deserved some niceness, and in Jon's case that came by way of his spontaneously bringing me bubble tea and hanging out. I guess the title should've been "Bubble tea! Voicemail!", 'cause Tuttle's contribution was a very nice message left on my phone. Thanks, guys. Sorry I've been a little out of whack outside of class. On the bright side (besides it getting better some), I totally believe in the wonderful power of brotherly love, courtesy of people like you. Probably, like you guys watched me, I should do what's right by the other graduates by watching for what they need.

...Even though part of me is still saying, see? Hard life experience, more or less brought to an upbeat close, right here. You may not like it, but sometimes it's real.

Here we are / here we are...

I spent Saturday night and part of Sunday in Alfred, which was wonderful--I know of no place so consistently joy-inspiring, even though I always ache to live there again--then went to Syracuse for the rest of the weekend to see some of my family (Jo included, but Sean excluded because he was already back at school), which was nice. Monday involved a Labor Day cookout, which brought things full circle--the same group of us had gotten together for a Memorial Day cookout (except for my cousin Drew, who hadn't been there then but was there this weekend), so now we've celebrated both the beginning and end of summer with copious amounts of delicious food. Plus, back then I started in Syracuse and made my way to Alfred, whereas this time I started in Alfred and went to Syracuse. Oh! This time around, Tom was in Lyons, so I stopped to see him on my way home. Heh, he didn't even ask about Alfred 'cause he was so eager to talk about teaching.

So the schedule-making thing from last month lasted all of about two days, heh, but I really am going to start getting more sleep. I need it. In fact, I'm headed to bed right now.

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.