Wedding album

I finished (I think) the wedding mix I'm making for my friend. Here's the playlist and cover art.
The Taco Bell Canon (artist unknown, CD lost)
Spam Song - Monty Python
Heart of Glass - The Bad Plus
Willimantic USA - (artist unknown, recorded before 1950 I think)
Connecticut's for Fucking - Jesus H Christ and the Four Hornsmen of the Apocalypse
My Generation rx - rx
Big Balls - Hayseed Dixie
Seasons in the Sun/Hustle - The Squirrels
Flower Girl - Joe Henry
Herbs, Good Hygiene and Socks - Lovage
Love You Madly - Cake
Gopher Mambo - Yma Sumac
A Hard Day's Night - Peggy Lee
You Oughta Know - Richard Cheese
Always on my Mind - Lewinski
St. Paul's Mix - me (sort of - I mixed it. The artists are Eddie Izzard, clips from Airplane, the Simpsons, the Marx Brothers, Pat Boone, and an anonymous MIDI composer who made a version of Mama Told Me (not to come)).











Now, I just need to hope I still have a date for the wedding Saturday. A____'s family stuff is looking grim.

Dump day

As you can perhaps surmise from the title of this post, today was not a good day. The list is just sort of depressing crap, some trivial and some not trivial. While I'm a fan of venting, putting it all down here isn't going to help right now. I know because I just started to and realized it was only winding me up more. So here's the abridged version.

- A____'s parents can't afford their house and are moving under less than exhaustively planned circumstances next week. Everyone's sick, so A____'s doing a very large amount of the work. Just what he wanted, another move. He's so damned busy and stressed over this (understandably) that he probably can't go to the wedding this weekend with me, which makes for the not super pleasant prospect of going alone. I tried calling some pals, but no one is up for it, or more to the point, everyone's out of town, chronically unreliable, or sick.

- Along the everyone's sick theme, my cat Max is sick. The only thing that was odd in his bloodwork from last week was an elevated calcium level. The vet told me today that this can be a sign of a particular kind of cancer that attacks or affects the intestine, which his symptoms are consistent with. We were really hoping it was thyroid, not because that would be great but because it would be less bad.

-In about two weeks, I will be unemployed and nothing (zero) has come of all the applying I've been doing. Last night, between the cat and the prospect of joblessness, I couldn't get to sleep. This hasn't helped my mood. Not one bit.

So it's officially Dump Day here in Connecticant.
I'm hoping tomorrow is better.

8 dirty words

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advise

So the job search continues. Yes, I am currently employed but this job ends in mid July, which means unless I want to go on unemployment I need to get my ass in gear and get me some job prospects. Bad market for someone looking to change career paths, right? Yeah, well that's me. A master of timing. There are two recent postings which look decent. One is an academic advising position and the other is an office coordinator position. Pros and cons? Of course, for both. My pros and cons even have pros and cons. I am Libra, hear me deliberate!

Advising is what I'm doing now and I like it, a lot. This is what I've always done. Whether or not it was warranted or desired, I give advice quite freely. On the up side, I've learned to avoid speculation when giving advice. Short of gagging myself in the presence of someone discussing a problem or challenge, this seems to be the best strategy to accommodate my need to let loose with a stream of "helpful" suggestions while (hopefully) avoiding the pitfall of spewing a load of crap. Speculating is what I call it when someone doesn't have any hard empirical evidence or explicit knowledge of a thing but continues speaking as if he or she does. To me, this is a cardinal sin, and really damned annoying. The speaker who finds him or herself in such a context should at least have the good grace to say "Well I don't know for sure but based on A (b, and c), I think X", where A (b, and c) are spelling out at least minimally. This allows the listener to know how to rank the particular advice being given. I've given this much thought. How much? Most of my late twenties in fact. I went through this big communication crisis in my late twenties, which I chalk up rather superstitiously to being part of my Saturn return, and which made me a very difficult person to talk to during the time. But I'm clear of it now and I do believe I've learned some useful lessons so in the final accounting, including how to temper my need to advise with some acknowledgment of the limits of my experience, so this is a good thing I suppose.

But back to the jobs and deliberating about which one I should pin my hopes and wishes to, at least until the next round of searching comes along. The one job is advising. It's full time and if it is not flexible time then I'm screwed. Moreover, it is at an institution with a religious affiliation. Not great. However, it's my sense that religiously affiliated institutions may have more respect for needs like caring for family (i.e. my brother) and an institutional understanding that, well, shit happens in life. I am hopeful that I'll be less likely to encounter that wretched secular Calvinism which marks so many professional cultures in the U.S. if I work for a catholic institution, but my distrust of organized religion is so strong that even typing that last phrase gives me a small internal shudder.

The other job is office coordinating. This one is a part time, 35 hour a week position. Pros? Less committed time for work, less responsibility (hopefully). Cons? Less money, less responsibility (yes, it's a pro and a con), and more of that low man on the totem pole shit. There's a tendency in academic culture to treat administrative support staff like crap, which can manifest as explicitly shitty behavior or as seemingly benevolent but ultimately condescending attitude, and god knows I don't deal gracefully with either.

The list of pro and con goes on, but I don't feel the need to put all two of my blog readers through the full, winding process - especially since with this job market it could end up I don't even get an interview for either position. I'll be sending resumes for both today, so wish me luck.

weddings

Well only one I'm going to, so properly that should read "wedding", however it is wedding season and thus the plural. Maybe it should be a mass noun, like oatmeal or brick. I'm going to a wedding at the end of the month. Unlike many joyous unions I hear of, this is one I approve of. The participants, that is the blessed couple, are both fully self-aware adults for starters. Moreover, the bride (B___) and hubby (R____) to be have wonderful senses of humor which I'm sure will influence the ceremony. E.g., they have titled the wedding "The Motorcycle Marriage of the Martians" and sent B-movie themed invites. Excellent. They also requested no presents unless they are d.i.y. and out of sentiment, like a pair of knit socks - no seriously, this was in their invite. They're very cool people. So I made a special Letters to the Corinthians mix for them since B____ and I have a running joke about this being a necessary part of ANY wedding ceremony. As in "so how was the wedding?" "Oh you know, Letter from Paul, dyeable shoes, chicken polka, oh yeah and Pachelbel's Canon."

While the Letter from Paul mix (called "Love is Patient" and featuring Pat Boone, Eddie Izzard, Airplane quotes, and the Marx Brothers) is hand made, I have a prefab but still totally excellent version of Pachelbel called "the Taco Bell Canon". I have it somewhere. Somewhere in the boxes. I hope to unearth in it time to burn to the cd for B___ and R_____. Time's a ticking though, and speaking of, it's bed time for pfg, so I leave you with this google gem I found while leaning how to spell "pachelbel".

jobs

If you've used online job sites like Career Builder or Monster lately, this isn't news to you. For me, it's news. It seems no matter what I'm searching for, apparently the US military offers me employment opportunities which are an excellent match. E.g., are you looking for work as an entry level professional hummel duster in Duluth, Minnesota? Well apparently the United States Navy Reserve is the place for you. Cat washer in Sweetwater, Texas? You'll want to try the Army. And just wait 'til you see what you get after 6 months of active duty...

hicks

Below is an excerpt from a news story from Vernon, CT. I don't live in Vernon CT, but I've lived near it on and off since living in CT.

Vernon is a combination of the backwoodsy ruralities - the hallmark of the Northeastern section of CT - and a few miles of traffic filled, stripmall lined roads. They have a Price Chopper. There are some diners in Vernon. I feel this makes it distinct from other more truly rural places like Coventry or Ashford. The town of Vernon boasts one lane roads over covered bridges, a paucity of street lights, no sidewalks, and other elements which the residents of this foul state apparently consider quaint. Adding to the quaintness factor are the locals in Vernon, who do what they can to preserve that good old country feel. What makes a CT local? In part, it seems to be many generations of careful breeding, often among just a couple of families who can be traced back to some of the earliest settlers of the area. This results in as little brains as teeth among the lot of them and news items like this one from the Hartford Courant.

VERNON - — Armed with tin snips and fortified by an evening of drinking, a Vernon man led an assault on an electronic speed sign mounted to a utility pole near his South Street home early Sunday.

After noticing the sign missing, police launched a search and soon found its charred remains in a fire pit behind the home of Ben Gardiner.

Gardiner, 22, of 291 South St., admitted, police said, to taking out his anger on the sign after it flashed his speed as he arrived home about 1 a.m. Sunday.
...
Gardiner and friends took the sign to Gardiner's backyard and took turns running toward it to measure their speed. This apparently caused much delight, police said.

The fun lasted until a woman in the group suggested that the sign might have a tracking device or camera on it that could lead police to them. That caused the group to "to freak out," witnesses said. They decided to burn the sign in the fire pit.

work

Yesterday at work my boss announced "Tomorrow afternoon we are having ice cream with mental health..."
I asked "Is ice cream with mental health like ice cream with sprinkles?"

When I got home, I told A____ about ice cream with mental health tomorrow. "Is that like sprinkles?" he said, beating me to the punchline.

Work is going well. The early mornings are dealable, not great but mostly ok. I can tell I need to find a more local job or a later start date before the year swings around into dark, snow, and ice. But it's a good thing to know, a learning experience in a relatively low risk environment.

Here are some other things I've learned.
- I still have a visceral dislike of men. I knew this and experienced it very strongly in my early 20s but being a student masked it for a number of reasons which I invite you to ponder if you're inclined.
- Despite having some physical shortcomings, I am a good worker. E.g., I believe if something needs doing and those present and aware can do it, they should. I believe there is no point rushing through a job if the only goal is to finish fast (and leave earlier) and if rushing is likely to make far more work for you or someone else later on. My beliefs guide my actions.
- I can't take phone calls after 9:00 PM if I want to get to bed on time.
-I can't hit snooze more than once in the morning or I'll be late.
- I need more work clothes.
- I am good at counseling and training and should probably be looking for human resources jobs.
- I still have a hard time working through irritation or impatience (usually at blithering incompetency, likely coupled with an attitude which strikes me as indicating a lack of even minimal age appropriate social and identity awareness) without it showing. I'm planning on using the rest of this temp job to work on that. I'm sure I'll have plenty of opportunities.

Glut

I'm a radio listener. Regular old radio, not satellite HD pay per whatever radio. Want commercial free? Listen to public radio. Even if NPR and their various elitist programs sets your teeth on edge, if you live in or near civilization, a little walk through the lower end of the band will find some public radio stations which play interesting and varied community based shows.

Unfortunately, today I was on my way to work during Democracy Now and I wanted to hear music. The other public radio stations were playing polka-jazz-bluegrass fest or something, so I wandered up the dial until I found some music I could stand. And sing along to. Yes, I am a car singer. As "I Will Survive" ended, the station segued into an ad blitz leading with an Applebee's ad. I was busy merging and got stuck listening to it rather than scanning on to avoid it. I tuned out most of it but I caught this punchline... "Applebees. So much food, so little time."

Holy shit.

I understand that a long work day can create meal planning and executing issues but that is not the gist of this closer. I doubt that too many of us truly find ourselves thinking "That was yummy but I sure could use more time so I could stuff even more food into my face.", and if we do, this is a sign of either an unhealthy relationship with food or a life completely out of balance. Given the upbeat, snappy FUN tone of the ad and the delivery of the line, it's clear the advertisers assume the message of glorified gluttony will resonate and that it will resonate not just with some of us but with many of us.

I spent the rest of the way to work with thoughts of gluttony percolating in the back of my head, thinking of the many forms gluttony can take. SUVs in particular spring to mind.

Here's a short list -
Carpet plush lawns and domestic landscaping involving non-native plants, especially those maintained during droughts.
Super sized anything.
Professional pedicures.
Throwing away all the spare stuff and furniture you don't want to or can't move with you rather than finding someone or somewhere to give it away for re-use (every time someone moves out, take a peek at the dumpster if you live in a complex).

I was also wondering what in my own life counts as gluttony. I am a participant in this culture. It is unreasonable to expect that I don't also have habits which reflect this aspect. Is my air conditioned car gluttony? Does my plethora of office supplies count as gluttonous? (something I discovered in the move is that I have a shit load of office supplies).

And on that note, I am signing off. Thunder outside and there have been a lot of lightning strikes with these daily heat wave induced storms here in CT.

R.I.C.E.

Stands for
Rest
Ice
Compression and
Elevation

Why this snappy acronym today you ask? Because we finished moving. We ended our move on the hottest day(s) of the year, although this is not a record high for PFG moves since my move in 2005 was also on the hottest day of that year as well - both with temperatures around 92°F and fairly dripping with humidity. Last weekend we moved the bulk of the stuff. I say "we" but I mean my fella and two extremely excellent people. That was the end of the help. We were expecting more but this move was whatever the opposite of serendipitous is. Thus we struck out early yesterday intending to push through and get all the stray bits out of the old place and then clean. It's a big place to clean.

I learned some new things about my body and what it now affords me. E.g., I discovered that dusting 3 very large rooms with a long and flexible duster followed by sweeping and mopping said rooms is quite bad for the wrist (literally "unwieldy"), hence my cleaning came to an abrupt end late yesterday afternoon and it was R.I.C.E. for me last evening. A____ went back over while I RICEd, before the monsoon started. He managed to finish an embarrassingly large amount of cleaning by himself. I iced and elevated and then put an ace bandage on my wrist. It felt so much better that I started doing stuff around the new apartment - mostly unpacking kitchen stuff, discarding the "R" part of the equation. After some time, I thought "wow, my hand feels way better. I bet I can take this bandage off now..." and I gave a test wiggle of a finger. Numb. I quickly removed the bandage.

So when you are doing R.I.C.E., remember ice only for 15 to 20 minute intervals and don't try bandaging your own right hand because odds are you won't be able to wrap it properly and it will either be too loose or too tight. Too tight and you're numb (which happens to rhyme with "dumb"), resulting in either
Dumb
Ice
Compression and
Elevation
...or if you're a real winner like me and you go and use your too tightly wrapped hand as a lever to heave up heavy kitchen items for over an hour, D.I.C.K.

I am sincerely hoping that the next move we make, we can afford to pay people to help. It's done and I'm happy for that, but this was not a great move. Not the worst (which was 2002 - I caught lyme disease right at the start of it, had to deal with Tom's evil family who were pointedly not helping, had to help a friend re-claim a cat she had given away in the middle of the move, and then at the end went up Amherst way to look at apartments with my sister who was starting college out there that Fall - all of which was just plausibly tiring and ache inducing enough to have masked the start of the lyme symptoms), but definitely not something I want to repeat.

May

What happened to my May? What the hell?

School ended, work started, we found a new apartment (have to move from the lovely place we're in now because the landlord is becoming a slum lord), and life life life.

Work's good. It's necessitated a change in schedule though - I've gone from being an evening person in all ways to needing to be at work (over 15 mostly country miles from my place) at 8:30 AM. Ugh! But I'm proud to say I managed to do it, mostly. I overslept a bit today but made it in on time with some rushing about. I had been expecting this to be just a short term summer job but I guess they like me because my boss mentioned that she was looking into hiring me "during the semester". I need to follow up on that. At the time, I was on my way off to do something (work related) and so all I had time for was a quick "Oh that'd be great....especially since I am in need of employment".

I like and am good at what I do, which is also a relief.

The down side - there's always a down side. The temporary negative right now is that we're moving, like NOW. My fella's been awesome, as usual, and so he's taken care of much of the move stuff. His diligence, as wonderful as it is, happens to be taxing my "gimp-guilt" as I call it, which relates to potentially more enduring down side of my post-graduate school, employed life my new smaller life on account of having less than stellar health. I swear to god my warranty ran out at 31. Since then I've had more health shit than you can shake a stethoscope at, none of it fully resolvable (by which I mean "curable"), and some of it only marginally treatable. I hate giving the full list of ailments but the highlights includee the endometriosis/adenomyosis and the shitty immune system which is better at attacking me than it is at doing its job on viruses, bacteria, or even (as I've recently learned) fungi. Now that I've put this miserable body to work for normal work hours and something approaching a full work week (so far it's been more like a 30 hour than 40 hour work week), I am confronting the question which was hinted at by my soon to be former advisor when she asked so casually "are you healthy enough to have even a regular job?" I found this question to be rather insulting for a number of reasons but I knew even then that while the context was fucked up, the content is in many ways legitimate. And the answer is...it's hard to know. Perhaps this is just denial, but for now I'm going to say the jury's still out. What I tell myself is that I need to give it more time to know for certain whether the massive fatigue I feel throughout the day even after plenty of sleep and no strenuous activity is just a by product of changing my schedule or if this is a permanent and fixed aspect of my life post 31. If it turns out to be the latter, then yeah, I'm kind of fucked.

For now, there won't be lots of posts here because I'm either at work, asleep, moving, unpacking, or sick and exhausted. The moving and unpacking should be done by mid June and hopefully, the daily sick and exhausted will let up as I adjust. If not, well, there could be lots more posts later while I chronicle the apparently wretched process of filing for disability.

graddeled

It's like addled, but with grades. Or grads. Or grads grading. Fortunately, there are people out there who make things like this for times like these.

but if you try sometimes you get what you need

I was on campus today for a student meeting. It was set up at the last minute, one of my least favorite kinds of meetings, and I nearly canceled it because A____'s car crapped out last night but he needed to get to New Haven today for a meeting which might determine whether he's funded over the summer. The grads who live near me were kind enough to respond to my request for a ride into campus, but all of them were leaving much earlier than I needed to be in. Again, I thought of rescheduling my meeting, but if I did that I'd be leaving my student hanging. He's a non-trad, commuter student and I felt bad about that.

So I bit the bullet and car pooled in, getting onto campus 3 hours before my meeting with nothing in particular to do that necessitated being on campus 3 hours before my meeting. Man am I glad I was there though! I was checking email and grading (mostly the former). I got an email from the student I was meeting asking to bump the meeting to an hour later since he got tied up off campus. Grrrrr...fine. Whatever. I'm stuck here until my ride is ready to take me home this evening. The next email I read was a job announcement forwarded by someone in my department. "What the hell, I need a job and apparently I have close to 4 hours to kill now" I thought and went down to talk to the woman who forwarded the announcement. She filled me in on the details. It's a gig advising incoming undergrads. A temp position, so it's only 7 weeks but it starts right at the end of the semester, it pays decent, and so far all my job leads have left me hanging (post interview, but still no word yet). Also, none of the job prospects were all that thrilling, offering either too few hours with no room to pick up time or too many hours with no room for flexibility. After about 10 minutes and one phone call, I had an interview. About 30 minutes later, I got the job offer. YEEeeeeehhaaaa!

The supervisor seemed very cool. I get holidays off, it's a 40 hour a week commitment but both the interviewer and the contact in my department told me it ends up being more like 30 although you need to be available for the full 40. The supervisor told me that if I desperately need a day off or to leave early or come in late, I can. I didn't ask, she volunteered this info.

I know I'll still have a job search on my hands but now it'll be in late June since this one ends mid-July. This is kind of nice, since aside from the temporary relief it provides, the job search was getting hard with grading, grading, student meetings, grading, big student project presentation, grading, last minute assignment fuckery, and more grading. Also, being offered a job that fast and having such a nice interview makes me feel a little less like a loser, which I was kind of starting to feel like after sending applications and resumes into the void.

All in all, I'm pretty damned happy with how today turned out. The sun is out after two days of nearly non-stop rain. I caught an early ride home with my office mate so now I'm home with coffee (and food) and cigarettes and ready for more grading. And I kind of feel like fate finally said "hey, let's cut her a little break..."

Thank you Ms. Silverman

Gah.
I just watched some Sarah Silverman Show episodes before returning to grading and now I have "Poop Song" in my head. Not totally irrelevant to grading these essays, but a song I'd rather not be humming for the next day or so. I think I'll have to get a Bonnie Tyler fix to bump it out. While I don't love Bonnie Tyler, few songs have the perseveration power of Total Eclipse of the Heart. We'll see if it can overcome the apparently quite catchy refrain "We pooped at the mall today!"

Monday, again

Yes, I know it does this every week. It's Monday again. This week holds last minute meetings with students (panicking), a phone call or two to my doctor's office (irritating), and looking at still more job postings. The panicking is the typical state of undergrads engaged in research with a public deadline looming. The irritating is that this rash I've been dealing with for over a month now is still not knocked down. The jobs? Well, it seems I have a shotgun approach to job searching. I apply to a bunch, interview, keep applying, keep interviewing, etc. until I get offers. I'm already starting to freak out a bit about what to do if I get a less desirable offer to start with. This happened to me in Ann Arbor. The first job I was offered (and accepted) was with what seemed like nice people but for peanuts-pay and very part time with no overtime or extra shift options. The day I accepted the offer, I got a call for an interview at a better (money and time wise) job. I wound up kind of dissing the former and taking the latter. But in Ann Arbor, it was a slightly bigger job market. Here in nowhere CT, it's not and I'm not sure I can afford to pull a stunt like that out here.

feminot

Wouldn't it be nice if feminist organizations like N.O.W. started actually DOING things like arranging day care, work and professional training, teen activity centers, and other community works? I was thinking of this the other evening, possibly as a tangent from thinking about a recent murder of a woman I used to be neighbors with (by her husband*, in front of their kids. She was pregnant with his third kid).

In the news, it said the cops had been called for a fight between the husband and wife earlier in the day. I can attest to the constant yelling coming from the man's mouth when A____ and I lived in that apartment building. Another news story reported that a neighbor had said she was planning to leave her husband. She and I weren't close but we were neighborly. We hung out in a neighbor way, you know? Not like the neighbors you never talk to, like the neighbors you say hi to and stop and chat when you have time. The neighbors you stand outside looking at a rainbow with and smoking a cigarette between the small raindrops.

It wasn't a direct line of thought from this woman to the end point of thinking of feminism as hands on community activism and agency. It was more that the issue of access to pro-woman resources are very limited. E.g., that area of CT (where I used to live) has NO women's shelter, no women's community center, and the NOW chapter at the college less than 5 miles up the road busies itself with feel good activities like being pen pals with girls in juvy.

Fuck, you know?

So that arena of thought made me think, what if there were feminist based women's services in this area? Would my former neighbor have utilized them? Would she have sought them out? Possibly, but my experience in a working class, low(er) income population is that the concept of a "women's center" evokes notions of hairy legged ladies holding patchouli drenched menstrual lodges and the like. Ok, possibly not so extreme but you get the idea. But what if there were actual useful services to be had? What if we took a page from the neo-fundie-cons and started actually providing practical resources to the community? Would this woman have gone someplace that offered free day care and laundry facilities? Yeah, probably. Even if it was staffed by hair legged patchouli stinkin' feminists.

Anyhow, those are my thoughts from this week. There's been lots of "fear and loathing" here in CT lately - the shooting last week rocked me a bit. My closer to home life is good though. I'm leaving grad school, the departure is imminent and I am truly, honestly, and openly relieved. Yes, looking for a job freaks me out a bit but I've had some interviews and I am holding my own. It feels good.

* = technically I'm not sure they were married but they had been together for years and had two kids.

dizzy

Sitting here waiting. I'm waiting for my fella's mother, who I invited to come to a job fair with me today. We made plans to meet at 9:30 at my place then head over to the thing (which runs 9 to 1), and she was going to call before she came over.

Then 9:00 came and went. Then 9:30. My fella called her. She was running late. Ok. So I waited. Caught up with a friend on the phone. Thought "wow I can't believe I was up and going at 7:30 on a Saturday!" and felt a smug, happy sense of impending productivity. I steamed my jacket sleeves, which were a little rumpled.

By about quarter after ten, small waves of vertigo from what I guess is a sinus/ear thing were starting to creep up on me. My fella offered to call her again. I counter offered. He said it would probably be better if he did. She got tied up with this and that but she's leaving in just a few minutes, and will call when she's on her way.

I can feel my productivity evaporating. I want to be patient, I really do, but I'm starting to get annoyed.
Grrrrr.
Parents.

Ah....

Sometimes in life, you just have to sit and wait for it to come around. I love the "back around" moments.
Yahoo/Google deal is anti-competitive: Microsoft
Seattle (Reuters)
Microsoft Corp said on Wednesday that any definitive agreement between Yahoo Inc and Google Inc would make the market for Web search less competitive.

Granted, it's not as deeply or personally satisfying as finding out this Fall about the marital strife and upcoming divorce of one of the professor's who had been using my IMMENSELY slow progress through my PhD program* as a lesson for junior grad students. It isn't as warm and fuzzy as how I expect I'll feel when I hear that my (former) department head's smoldering type two diabetes contributed to the first of many toe amputations two months after he's had his first heart attack (yeah, keep eating them skittles!). But Microsoft making a plea to "anti-competitive" does have a touch of satisfying irony, doesn't it?

* = I'd just finished 5 years, had 3 publications, and was collecting data for my dissertation proposal when I discovered he'd been using me as a cautionary tale of a (mal)lingering grad student

motivation

I have a student who moved to the US only a few years ago, who started learning English by checking out free English language materials from the public library, and who then took English courses at the community college. I'm grading her first individual writing assignment and I gotta say, this student's writing is seriously kicking the ass of my "But I took AP English!" squealing, native English speaking, born and raised in the USA students.

Mother of god, I wish I could teach adult students who feel they have a personal stake in their education only. I might be tempted to actually stay in education if I knew I could do that.

boys part 2

I mentioned I have boys. The infestation is still ongoing. I've had many opportunities to hear and even interact with them because I've been home a lot this week fighting off a steroid enhanced throat/sinus thing. Which by the way, feels fucking awful. What does it feel like? Like a viral infection, on steroids. Get it?

Anyhow, I'm home lots and feeling shitty lots and the kids are here, not lots but loudly when they are. Last night featured kids in the hall, then kids down in the basement. I have to wonder, what possible appeal can it hold for them? Is it a throwback to when they were still living at mom and dad's house, 3 months ago, and they had to hide out in the basement to smoke their weed? I was going to say "to smoke a joint" but I'm doubtful these kids smoke out of anything other than overpriced glass bowls or vaporizers.

I found out this week that my landlord helpfully told the boys that "the people downstairs called the police on them". He told them this, he claims, to try to stress upon them the gravity of the situation (the situation being my landlord's inability to consistently and place screen tenants).

Here's who called the cops on whom. I called on people in the parking lot last weekend. The lady across the hall called specifically on the boys several weeks ago, and either the guys down the hall or the lady in front called on the boys as well two weekends ago now I think (I wasn't here for that one). But it turns out the boys assumed "the people" who called the cops were me and my fella. Why? My best guess is because my fella and I have spoken to them in person when they are being loud. Alone that's not really great reasoning, certainly wouldn't be sufficient for me unless I was 8. I think the rest of it goes something like "and the boys are not very smart thus they assume things like the 50 something year old disabled woman who had the misfortune to move in below them last month would not have called the cops on them for any one of their post 1 AM beer fueled fun-fests. Why would she? Afterall, she never came up, knocked on their door, and asked them to keep it down in the middle of a party".


Tonight's been quiet so far. Aside from some very occasional thumping and bumping, and the sounds of someone running down the stairs, a slam of the door which sounded like it was going to take the side of the house off, and then more running all the way across the porch and onto the pavement around the house and past the window just next to my desk, it's been peaceful.

And hey, my temperature is finally down a bit. I'm going to go celebrate by reading on the couch.