HAIRSHIRT
Helping You Get the Most Out of Your Misery
|
HAIRSHIRT Helping You Get the Most Out of Your Misery |
|
Tuesday, January 03, 2006Christmas Break: The Aftermath
How is it possible that I could be so completely blindsided by something that was completely not a surprise? It don't make no sense.
And yet, this morning, I found myself completely unprepared to get back into my work routine. It seems that ten days sans teaching is about what it takes to make me utterly forget how I used to do it. Good god. I woke up this morning with exceptional difficulty, the result of spending so many days in a row leisurely sleeping in until seven thirty or eight. I had to drink an entire pot of coffee just to get my ass out the door. It was pathetic. This may have had something to do with the exhausting drive back from Ohio, made more difficult by uniformly shitty weather all the way across the accursed state of Pennsylvania. Weather so shitty, I might add, that we were actually forced to go to a Wal-Mart to buy new wiper blades half-way through the trip so that I could see the road on which I was supposed to be driving. And of course I graded precisely none of the papers I'd brought home to work on on the 23rd. I guess I didn't really expect myself to get to it, but I'd held out some vague hope that I wouldn't drag them all the way to Seattle only to let them sit in the corner, ignored. As it turns out, they never even made it on the plane. I left them sitting at my parents' house in Ohio after a three-second struggle with my conscience that went something like this: "Oh, man. I'm gonna be really far behind if I don't take those with me and grade them. I really owe it to the kids to come back with something to show them...Y'know, fuck the kids. It's my break. I don't wanna think about that shit." Mind you, the actual struggle didn't take nearly as long as it took you to read that. So I went to bed last night having done absolutely none of the work I should have. I sat down at my computer this morning and quickly tossed off a couple of lesson plans, which were actually not that bad for having been done in about a minute and a half each. This is why I didn't assign my students any homework over the break. I had no illusions that they would've given any more of a rat's ass about working on my piddling little two-times-a-week class than I gave over grading said work. I'm glad the day is over and I'm glad that I've got another long weekend in a couple weeks. Thanks, MLK! So I get to spend the afternoon/evening putting away all the stuff we dragged back from the West Coast and Mid-West. We've both got really wonderful, thoughtful parents who made sure to get us really great stuff. And now we have to figure out how we're going to squeeze it into our tiny New York apartment. We're also once again dealing with the manic attentions of our cat, Sven, who demonstrates his tremendous relief upon our return by velcroing himself to our bodies. It's very nice to have an affectionate pet, but goddamn. There's only so much rubbing up you can take at three o'clock in the morning. It's nice to be back, but it would've been a lot nicer to have another few weeks off.
Comments:
Glad to see you made it back safe my friend. Of course, I would've chosen sliding off the road into a fiery crash rather than go to a Wal-Mart. But hey, that's me.
i apologize for the rain in PA on behalf of the state in which i reside so much against my own will. i'm glad you made it out alive.
Post a Comment
|
|
|||
| . | |||||
