"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?
11.25.2008
11.20.2008
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.
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.
11.17.2008
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.
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.
11.16.2008
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.
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.
11.15.2008
11.13.2008
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.
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.
11.12.2008
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.
-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.
11.10.2008
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?
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?
11.06.2008
::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.
Go ahead and call me a hopeless nerd. I definitely have it coming.
11.04.2008
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.
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.
11.02.2008
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."
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?
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?
11.01.2008
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.
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.