Have been grading papers all day — only four left, so I was browsing the Interwebs for Shit the Baby or I Might Need, and I found this:
Holy hellballs, people. Knowing what these were for would have kept my virginity intact a good ten, fifteen years more.
I seriously don’t understand how we can go over summary, quotation, and paraphrase for HOURS and students still don’t use quotation marks for words taken from another source “because it’s paraphrase.”
NO IT’S NOT. The SOURCE may have paraphrased, but YOU did NOT.
*tearing out my hair*
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Update: Have fixed typo in title. Now am considering live-blogging Meltdown to Baldness 2010. Ugh.
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Those faint screams are the sounds of me checking my students’ sourcework.
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I must speak a different language when I teach. It’s the only explanation for a couple of these research papers.
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It’s really only three out of twelve papers (and two of those weren’t my students in ENGL 101) that are so awful, but they’re THAT AWFUL. (And this is one benefit of teaching at the pen: my students will never know I liveblogged my hairloss.)
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I think the key here is to not read all the good papers first. Stupid, stupid planning.
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Remember copyediting? That was a nice, stress-free career with regular hours….
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The delusions are getting stronger.
Lately, a few things about being publicly pregnant have been grating on me nerve. Yeah, that’s singular. And, apparently, Irish. And because I worry less than I probably should about other people’s feelings, I’m saying what I think about those things.
1. If you use the words “preggo,” “preggers,” or “womb,” I will glare.
2. If you tell me, “Everyone’s hoping it’s a boy,” I will respond, unoriginally but cuttingly, “We just hope it’s healthy.” Then you will say, “Well, of course,” and feel foolish.
3. If you criticize or question my dietary choices, I will probably cry. I’m pretty sure I can tear up on cue these days. And if you’re lucky, I won’t also vomit on you, which I can also just about do on cue.
4. If you comment on my “baby bump” (another term closely related to No. 1), I will mince no words in pointing out I’m a lot fatter right now than I am pregnant (see also No. 3); it’s just that I can’t suck it in any longer.
5. If you ask if it was on purpose, I understand your curiosity and I will try to be polite through my gritted teeth instead of screaming FOR THE LOVE OF GOD YES, but that’s still a rude question.
6. If you ask me if we “tried anything” to have a child of a certain gender, I may be tempted to answer with graphic detail. G-R-A-P-H-I-C. Maybe even demonstrate. (Seriously. I can’t believe I’ve been asked this.)
7. If you so much as touch my belly, so help me god you’ll lose that hand.
Other items for the shit list:
8. Polka dots — seriously, why? On clothes, decorations, baby gear, etc. Is it the roundness that people associate in some Freudian manner with the pregnant belly? LIKE I WANT TO LOOK ANY ROUNDER.
9. Winnie the Pooh. The strength of my irrational distaste for that animated series is beyond words.
10. Baby-talk. Gag me.
I’ve eaten plenty of my own words lately (cf. “I’m never having kids!”), and I’m sure I’ll have a few more portions to consume before all this is up, but getting this off my chest feels better.
Whenever I talk to my students about college, I say “when you get out of here and go to a four-year college.” Not if. To me, it’s important that they see this associate of arts program as a step towards something bigger and better. There’s at least one ex-Pen student who is a department chair at University of Chicago. Even if he’s an exception, he can be an inspiration.
Yet…last night I was talking to one of my students about what he’ll do when he gets out. He wants to go on for his bachelor’s degree, and he’ll have an HVAC certificate as well, so he’s hoping to work his way through college.
But, he said, I’m competing against people who haven’t been in jail. You’ve got me and a guy without a record, who are you going to hire?
Who, indeed. It’s such a struggle just to avoid getting into a defeatist mentality about life after prison, life as an ex-con. But my students know this, because I tell them all the time: even if life after prison is tough, education is one of (or, as I believe) the only proven ways to reduce recidivism. Line cooking out there, or struggling to start your own business, beats the hell out of coming back here, doesn’t it?
From what I’ve seen and heard, there are some tremendously good guys in my class. I know they could be playing me, so I keep my distance, but these are guys who were doing okay in life until they got sidetracked by drugs and/or drinking, guys who say that they weren’t criminals before they came to prison, but prison made them into the criminals that they now see themselves as. And Internets, I know there has to be a price for crime, but I can’t help but think here in America we’re doing it wrong when we lock them up without treatment. Because when they get out, and they’ve got a record in addition to an untreated disease or addiction, what kind of success can we really expect? I don’t know if that’s something education can fix.
That as a political group who believes in individual responsibility, right-wingers blame the government for an awful lot of stuff (not that they’re necessarily wrong; it’s just hypocritical), and I am cynically amused. For example: This week, Someone messed up something important at a government institution. As I understand it, it was very much Someone’s fault — no one/nothing else’s. Yet because it was a gov’t institution, my very right-wing friend blames the government. And somehow dragged the census into it. (Um, okay?) So I guess this righ-winger wants both personal responsibility and a convenient punching bag.
…Ugh. That’s it. I am starting my own country and it will be totally anarchist and I will be the only person there, so I will have total freedom. Total freedom and total control. I’ll have it both ways, too.
Today I was unlocking my bike from the rack outside the Patisserie and overheard two people chatting about the musical scene in Walla Walla. Or what they thought was the scene in WW. One — whom we’ll call PA for ‘pretentious arsehole’ — asked the other if Other was doing any music these days. He replied in the negative, and PA said, “Yeah, people around here just don’t appreciate good music.”
I turned and looked in a very Miss-Manners-ish way, not quite believing my ears. Have you heard our symphony? Have you been to the chamber music series? Hell, even the senior recitals around here are pretty good. And jazz at Merchants and Backstage has been good, and I’ve even heard a good fiddler in downtown playing for tips. Hence my look.
He continued: “And I think it’s a disservice to music to play what people want to hear instead of what is good.” Other said something I couldn’t understand; PA said, “All anyone wants around here is butt rock.”
This time when I turned and glared, I made sure he saw me. He had the grace to look uncomfortable and lower his voice. Arse.
I would bet good money that both these guys are Seattle-area transplants, not native or recent Walla Wallans. Sure, we leave potholes in our streets and have a century-old sewer and water system that no one wants to pay to upgrade, but dammit if we don’t like all kinds of music in Walla Walla. And gentlemen, it doesn’t take balls to come into a community and [wrongly] criticize it; it takes ignorance. Fuckers.
Since my husband abandoned me on a weekend that held not just Valentine’s Day but also a three-day holiday, I went on a dreaming spree. And boy, is he paying for it: he has to listen and marshal counterarguments to my willfulness. Which pretty much defines our marriage, come to think of it, only this onslaught of mine is a little more intense than usual. Because,
Internets, I have a hankering to discover the world. Sooner rather than later, preferably. So my plan is as follows:
1. Sell our house, preferably for about $10k more than we paid for it (ha, ha?) in order to break even, what with fences, hardwood floor redoing, landscaping, and other miscellany we’ve done to it, plus closing costs. I don’t know if this is even possible, but judging by what other houses are going for on our street and in our part of town, it seems plausible.
2. Loan Lucy to my parents. We’d miss her terribly, but she might not be the best traveling companion.
3. Give Trollop back to the devil, from whence she came, and Orwell to my parents or any other nice home where he’d be welcome to hide under a bed all day. Every day. For all his life.
4. Sell or store our junk, including our car and pickup.
5. Renew our passports and get vaccinations.
6. Once steps 1 through 5 were secured, we’d quit our jobs. This would be painful, as we both have jobs we enjoy, and income is always a bonus, but it’s the last thing tying us down, and a necessary step.
Aside from our mortgage, which we would no longer have, we don’t have any long-term debt obligations. We could leave our 401ks dormant, withdraw from savings and put the cash from our house sale in the highest-interest-yielding account possible. Then we’d kiss our mothers goodbye and go see the world.
But.
Just “seeing the world” isn’t a good enough reason for me. It’s fine for others, but I’m not content being a tourist-consumer — I hate that feeling. (That also explains why we never get gifts for people when we travel. Just see the claptrap of a tourist shop makes me shiver.) I envision being more of a tourist-worker, even if it’s not for pay, because I want to not just see new places, but see who lives there and how they work. Specifically, I would love to do agri- or eco-tourism. And when I’m done, I can come home, live in a tiny house on a river with a big garden and composting toilet, and officially apply for hippie status. I may even grow out my leg hair which, come to think of it, could be Matt’s biggest reservation with the plan. (Easily solvable problem: I’ll let him grow out his beard.)
But in my current state, I am not a bona fide hippie or environmentalist. I fell off the biology bandwagon in college (curse you, chemistry, my nemesis!) and have regretted not working with hands and plants and animals ever since. (People are just so fucking complex, you see.) Fortunately, there are organizations willing to take and train people like me, which is good since I’d like my husband to go along with this perfectly logical, well-thought-out scheme. Organizations include:
And I’m sure there are others.
Voluntouring would be the catalyst for moving from point to point; we could take side routes on the way, work cash jobs here and there if we could find them, and take a few days to see around the areas we’d be working. But voluntouring would make the trip all the more meaningful. We might not have fabulous trinkets when we get back, but I bet we’d have great stories and ideas.
What if…
There’s always the insurance question. Sure, we’d no longer be paying auto, home, or other normal insurance policies, but what if something happened in the course of our travels? Emergency appendectomy, lost tooth, etc.? There are companies who cover that type of occurance. I’m sure it’s slightly more expensive, but one quote I got from World Nomads was six months of insurance for $260 per person. It doesn’t cover everything, of course, but it can provide emergency help — which is all you really anticipate.
Traveling
Traveling is sure to be the most expensive part of the deal, especially since it can cost a thousand bucks from one continent to the next, per person. But here, too, there are options. Courier.org allows you to fly as a passenger on courier planes (oops, wrote “pigeons” there for a second…my head got really happy with that visual) for slightly cheaper than you might a commercial plane, and I hear there’s no fee for checking baggage (not that we’d need to; I suspect this would be a backpack-type trip). You can also book multi-destination tickets for cheaper than buying them one hop at a time. For example, flying from Portland to Honolulu to New Zealand, and to Sydney on a multi-destination ticket costs $1,000; flying straight to Sydney costs the same amount. Schedule your flights roughly two to three weeks apart, and you’re gold. If you want to leave early, you can just go on standby on the next available flight.
It won’t be cheap, but I estimate that we can do the bulk of our traveling for just a few thousand dollars each. Food and lodging when we’re not with a host will also be expensive, but hostels are cheap and relatively plentiful for our intended destinations, so I think we’ll be able to afford it. A few good books (and used bookstores wherever we go), and we’ll be able to wile away the hours in airports waiting standby.
Voíla!
Places to go
Because he is a nice person, and he may have felt terrible for having such a great time without me over a three-day, Valentine’s weekend, Matt has been accommodating my current, ultra-planning mood. He even went so far as to list his preferred worldwide destinations, with the caveat that we end up in Europe and take as long as we like (and as long as we still have money) to see every square foot of Germany. He even volunteered to learn German.
The language barrier is a huge issue, though. Unfortunately, neither of us speaks more than a little Spanish, so we thought it would be best if we confined our tourist-worker destinations to places where we would speak the same language as our host family or group. Thus, I researched countries that speak or primarily speak English, cross-referenced them with countries the U.S. State Department doesn’t recommend U.S. citizens traveling to (nothing would put a damper on this trip like being, say, kidnapped) as well as the countries where visa restrictions are problematic, had Matt rank his favorites, and came up with a map that shows just the places we may tour as workers:
It goes something like this: a couple places in the Caribbean, Suriname, Guyana, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Israel, Madagascar, the Seychelles, Israel, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Gibraltar, then Europe.
I realize that some of this is heavily anglo-centric (New Zealand, Australia, Ireland), but again — this is the map of where we might travel and work. It does not include the places we would stop at on our way. Personally, I want to see more of China, Japan, Argentina, and Brazil, not to mention Malta, Turkey, and India, which I hope we’d be able to do along the way, or on trips that aren’t too far out of the way.
We can’t see all of it, but I bet we could see a pretty huge chunk.
In the end, if we do this, I can’t imagine we’ll be worse off for having seen so much of the world. We’ll have learned skills, customs, and lifestyles different from our own; we’ll have met people and made friends along the way. Sure, we’ll be a lot poorer at the end — but so what? So we work a few more years. And anyway, life isn’t guaranteed to go on that long, is it, so why not do it now, while we can?
I’ve been thinking that Dutch Bros. should sell a Monday-morning, week-starter beverage that loosely involves about five shots of coffee and a pound of sugar (pure cane, of course; none of that corn syrup rubbish). I think today that, and only that, beverage could get me started on the mound — nay, butte — of grading I need to do. Which is to serve as the segue into how this quarter is going, which I will neatly summarize for you:
Hell.
Teaching three writing classes is not doable, or at least not for me. The only way I have a single nostril above water right now is because my research writing class is in the research phase; even that is slated to end this week as the annotated bibliographies come in. Of course part of the stress is teaching two new classes, where I have to devise new lesson plans (oddly, it’s the daily grammar lessons that are sapping my will to live…hmm, tangent:
I learned this teaching ESL learners: if you don’t teach grammar, students complain that they don’t learn grammar. If you do teach grammar, students either don’t apply what you’ve learned (because writing is more complicated that sample sentences on an overhead projector), or they don’t care, or they believe they are the exceptions who may abuse grammar because they think they know better. Which they don’t. In my experience, the only way to learn grammar is to use grammar, and revise until you learn how to use it correctly. I don’t know how to teach this effectively.).
Anyway. This is week five, I think, so we’re nearly halfway through. That does not, however, in any way help me get started on what needs to be done this week. It’s a strangely paralytic feeling, knowing how much needs to be done and not being able to actually summon the strength to do it, then stressing about the mounting stress, then imagining my dad saying, “Quit fiddling around and get started,” which only further stymies my will to live.
And the water, I can feel it seeping into that last remaining nostril.
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Edit: five hours later, I have more or less gotten my shit together, have quit feeling quite so sorry for myself, and am … er, don’t remember how this sentence was going to end, as I’m not fixated on whether “gotten” is a word. Okay, it is. Life can go on.
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Edit No. 2: six hours later, I am finished; better yet, the last few papers were great!
I do not know if memory is serving or disserving me, but I recall some time ago when my sister offered me a teapot that had been our grandmother’s. I was excited to have something of hers, as she died when I was six and I barely remember her. What I do remember is the scent of my grandma’s perfume and the six-packs of bottled Diet Pepsi we would keep in our basement for her, which she used to wash down her pain meds as she died of cancer. I guess the theory — aided and abetted by my grandfather, M.D. — was that the caffeine helped the medicine kick in faster. Indeed, Excedrin and other headache meds often have caffeine as an ingredient, so my backcountry doctor-grandfather may have been right.
Anyway, I gladly accepted the gift. My grandparents enjoyed collecting the finer things in life: gems and crystals, pottery, jewelry (which of course they never wore, being staunch E.G. White-thumping Adventists), and I assumed that this teapot was a treasure they had picked up on one of their many travels, perhaps in China or, given the design of the pot, England. So today, as I beheld the pile of grading ahead of me, I decided the only way through this involved tea.
I lifted down the pot and took awhile to examine it. It is ceramic and cream-colored, with a wicker-like texture (the kind you may have seen in wedding cakes frosted back in the 1980s). On its front are a few pink, nondescript flowers clearly envisioned by a ceramic artist who spent most of his time indoors. I would hazard that the flowers are something of a cross between roses and camelias, with perhaps the stamen of hibiscus thrown in for artiness.
I am very careful whenever I handle this teapot, as it has an elegant spout that pours well (something that can not be said for every other teapot I’ve owned) and I don’t want to chip any part of the squat little thing. Yet today, as I rinsed it carefully in the sink, when I turned it over I noticed the following inscription on the bottom:
So much for a family heirloom. Now instead of the spirit of my dearly departed grandmother inspiring me to finish grading, all I can think about is how overpriced and ugly nearly every Teleflora arrangment is that I’ve seen. And given the date on the stamp — 1985 — this was probably sent as a gift to my grandmother just after she’d been diagnosed with incurable breast cancer. Thanks a lot, fate.
This latest spam comment got caught in my filter, and I’ve let it languish there for a few days because it makes me smile. In fact, it almost made me wish I were good enough at something to have fans:
Substantially, the post is really the sweetest on this notable topic. I agree with your conclusions and will thirstily look forward to your forthcoming updates. Just saying thanks will not just be sufficient, for the fantasti c* clarity in your writing. I will right away grab your rss feed to stay abreast of any updates. Pleasant work and much success in your business efforts!
*[ironic sic]
p.s. it was in response to the snuggie haiku poetry. shiny!
I’m sure this has been done and done well by others, but I’m bored and procrastinating on two stacks of grading. Thus: reality television shows I would actually watch:
Am celebrating final week in graduate school by alternating head from side to side in pointless attempt to level off sinus pressure. World’s Swiftest Cold set in yesterday evening; by midnight couldn’t sleep for aches, sniffles, pressure, etc. so took World’s Largest Dose of NyQuil and was out like a lightbulb an hour later. Mouth is all cottony now, though, and brain equally fuzzy. Hmm.
In other news, tomorrow is MY LAST TUESDAY IN PULLCOW and Thursday is MY LAST THURSDAY IN PULLCOW and holy tomatoes, people: THREE MORE DAYS AND I’M DONE WITH GRADUATE SCHOOL. Sure, I have to write a paper and grade a set of papers and enter grades after that, but no more commuting.
A rough estimate of the miles I’ve put on the poor Prius is 23,000 in the last two years, just commuting; a rough estimate of the gas money on said commute is around $2,000. Still, I made just enough money to pay the mortgage and my travel expenses every month. So while I wasn’t saving, I wasn’t taking us into debt, either.
And now…now I’ve got to find a job.