Snow Day

Ok, winter, we get it. Yes, we live in Minnesota, it is still February, you are very cold and snowy and powerful. You made your point already.
This is a picture from earlier today. Since it was taken, it's snowed several more inches. It is one of the more dramatic storms we've had, both in terms of the snowfall (2.9" in St. Paul in just one hour), cruelty (it was almost 40 yesterday!), and showmanship (apparently we have something called "thunder snow" here, which is almost as fun as freezing rain). You can tell it's bad because the University canceled classes (this NEVER happens, at least not since I moved here seven years ago), because all the streets leading up the bluff in St. Paul are closed because the roads are too slick for cars to get up them, and because our mail carrier was wearing snowshoes. This weather was really annoying during the hour and a half it took me to get home, but now that I'm cozy in my sweats on the couch at home, it's pretty great. What can I say? I love a good storm. Keep your fingers crossed for a University snow day tomorrow!

To balance the superficial tone of the previous post...

This makes me want to write again, a feeling that almost never comes from reading literary theory:

As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but a disciplined attention to the true meaning of "it feels right to me." We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

From Audre Lorde, "Poetry is not a Luxury," Sister Outsider (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1984), p. 37.

Loss and Mourning

Do you ever get the feeling that your belongings are trying to escape? This happens to me all the time. My favorite earrings in the world made a break for it last week, but I caught them before they made it down the drain in the bathroom sink. Then, a few days ago, the very same earrings dislodged themselves between the car and the bedroom, but I realized it soon enough that I managed to find them on the stairs before they got eaten or vacuumed or anything. This morning, they finally succeeded: somewhere between the bathroom and the locker room at the gym, between 6 and 8am, they got away. They could be at home, but I doubt it. More likely is that they are in the intersection of Randolph and Snelling, being ground into the ice and asphalt, or under my seat on the bus where they'll fossilize into the under-seat-grime, or on the sidewalk by the gym where they will be swept away by the grounds people. I recognize that it's incredibly materialistic of me, but I'm sad about it. For one thing, this only happens to my FAVORITE earrings - these are the ones that always made me look nice and went with everything, that I got at the Indian market in Santa Fe in early 2006, which are obviously irreplaceable. For another, I'm already having an unbelievably stressful, difficult month, and this is just reinforces that sinking feeling that I have no control over anything whatsoever/the world is against me/I am a failure/my life is a tragicomedy/narcissism. I mean, how can I believe that I have anything valuable to say about post-structuralist cultural theory when I can't even accessorize? Really, half of getting through a hard time is not letting it show, and how am I supposed to keep my unaccessorized homeless wino look out of the classroom without these earrings? I don't wear makeup, so my colleagues will surely take my naked earlobes as a sign of imminent collapse.

I know, mountains, molehills, etc. Please cut me some slack.

Pause Button

When I was little, I never understood the appeal of controlling time. Why would Superman want to stop the spin of the earth, or make it go backwards? I mean, it would be nice to snitch cookies, but that was something you could do without stopping time. And if there is one thing we all learned from Quantum Leap, it's that changing the past can be a very tricky business; it just didn't seem worth it to me.
Well, now I get it. I would like the world to please take a time out while I get things here under control. I know there are exactly enough hours in a day for everything that really matters - I just need 40 hour days! If you see Superman, could you let him know?

Weekly Update

I'm noticing a trend in my posts this semester. Could it be that I'm too lazy/unfocused by Friday afternoon to do anything else? Possible. Not unlikely. Of course, since my alternatives are a) work on a paper on ethical criticism and chronology, b) grade and plan lessons, and c) tackle reading for Tuesday, it might just be that I literally have nothing better to do than post, which is of course not to say that what keeps me from posting during the rest of the week is necessarily better than this. Anyways, here is this week's rundown.
Bad News: The Bad News really outweighs the good this week, so much so that I'm starting with Bad.
Good News: I haven't given up Good News altogether.
Bad News: I haven't stopped considering it.
Good News: My horrible Friday afternoon seminar was cancelled! Yay!
Bad News: It was cancelled at the last minute, so I'm stuck at school anyways, and it was cancelled due to illness not 20 minutes after I saw the professor in the mail room where he failed for the third time this week to recognize me or return my greeting, AND it has led to the cancellation of a conference meeting scheduled for after the class that kind of needed to happen.
Good News: I think this cancellation means I'm ahead in the reading.
Bad News: I am waaaaay behind in basically everything else in my life, including the reading for my Tuesday class, which was listed in the syllabus like this: [???], but was changed this afternoon to: [two-inch-thick packet of barely legible copies, including but not limited to "History of German Literature" and the text of Conrad Celtes address to the University of Ingolstadt from 1492 (in both Latin and English)].
Good News: It doesn't matter much that I'm so far behind, because with the luck I'm having, a piano will fall out of the sky onto my head before any other deadlines come up.
Bad News: It really has been an awful couple of weeks. The piano wouldn't surprise me at all.
Good News: Even though my already very fragile optimism is barely hanging on, I am still able to express the hope that next week is better: it's supposed to be above freezing!

Phew.

Good News: This week is almost over.
Bad News: Let's just get it all out at once: I can now report that my Friday afternoon class, which starts shortly, is pretty much a nightmare. My other seminar is slightly less horrible, which is to say a far cry from good. My directed study has received no attention so far, because I have a combined 200-400 pages of reading a week for the other stuff. Several of my students are sick, but came to class anyways (I appreciate their dedication, just not the germs). I have to teach adjective endings next week. Adjective endings in German make the Israel/Palestine conflict look fun and easy. I had to take my car to the shop to have the multi-function switch repaired, so my brights wouldn't turn themselves on and off, which cost me about the same as a vacation in Cancun. Frankly, I would rather have gone to Cancun, since EVERY SINGLE DAY THIS YEAR the air temp has been at some point below 0, usually when I'm walking to my office, causing my eyes to tear up, which leads to frozen eyelashes. Better, I suppose, than having my contact lenses freeze to my eyeballs, which happens here sometimes - there is a specific warning about that in the orientation handbook. My ipod broke, and even though getting it fixed would probably only cost me the same as a vacation in Cinncinati, I'm trying to figure out how to fix it with tinfoil instead. I have a paper cut from a file folder under one fingernail. And then, foolishly, I read this: http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/01/2009013001c.htm. That good attitude I wanted to have this semester? Hanging by a thread.
Good News: My students are lovely, wonderful people. I love teaching (except for adjective endings). Matt made it to Zanzibar. I figured out how to trick libraries around the world into mailing books directly to my office. There are a lot of other things to list here, but I have to go to my horrible nightmare class. How does that statement reflect my existence? How would a gendered/poststructuralist/Marxist/etc. reading of that statement shape its meaning? Discuss.

Good News, Bad News: First Week Back

Good News: It's Friday! Alleluia!
Bad News: Friday's not over by a long shot.
Good News: I have a whole hour until I teach and I have already planned a lesson.
Bad News: I just finished planning it. This is a marked departure from my goal of planning the whole week's lessons each weekend, something I managed about 3 times in the fall, and which definitely makes me a better teacher.
Good News: I can try again for next week.
Bad News: This strategy does not make me a better student. If I have to choose between creating activities for my students and reading another 40 pages of Freud, I will definitely choose the former.
Good News: I don't have any Freud scheduled for this semester (for the first time since I started here).
Bad News: There is still one class to attend this week. Not only is it a Friday afternoon class, it could very well have something to do with Freud.
Good News: I'm trying to be optimistic about this class, even though it's on Friday afternoons and is taught by a professor last seen in our department in 1993 who is clearly being forced against his will to do it because there isn't anyone else left here. Anyways, even if it does have Freud, it won't have a certain archnemesis of mine. In fact, I have no classes with him this semester - another first!
Bad News: I still have to see him every day, and now I also have to deal with his former students who have moved on to my class and brought their bad attitudes with them.
Good News: Today I get to torture them with perfect tenses and past participles. Hahahahah!
Bad News: It's going to be really cold again this weekend, so cold that even the prospect of complex grammar exercises won't be able to keep me warm.
Good News: I have a lot of work to do, so I won't be outside much anyways (see lesson planning goals above).
Bad News: Most of that work is not finishing up projects I started (or meant to start) over break.
Good News: 1 week (almost) down, only 14 (or so) to go!