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!

For example, I recently read of a person who died that she was now “sleeping in Jesus.” I get it, but I don’t like it. Looking at that literally, it’s (a.) creepy and (b.) impossible, as if one regressed Benjamin Button-style to reimplant as an embryo on someone’s uterus. The phrase I think was meant was that she was “sleeping in Jesus’ arms,” which to me is a lot more peaceful and sensible (in a metaphorical way, anyway), the way many would like to imagine falling asleep and awakening.

Yet the prepositional disturbance that is “in Jesus” is prevalent in much religious rhetoric: meant to calm and assuage, it instead sounds eery and mindless. Take, for example, the following phrases:

Victory in Jesus: Would you ever say “Victory in Napoleon” or “Victory in George W. Bush”? Probably not, and not just because the latter was a dismal failure. “Victory over death through faith in Jesus” would perhaps be more accurate, so why not say it? Does the shortcut help anyone not already persuaded to understand?

Joy in Jesus: this is just incomplete. Joy in Jesus’…what? Life? Death? Sacrifice? Pick your object. Or better yet, rephrase your sentence: “Jesus gives me joy.”

New life in Jesus: Again, creepy, suggestive of pregnancy. Rephrase.

Of course, the problem with clarifying your rhetoric so that it makes sense grammatically and to a constituency less familiar with traditional religious verbiage is that you may end up making yourself less clear to the constituency that is educated “in Jesus.”

Well, to plagiarize that one singer, no one said it would be easy.

Yea = “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…”

Yeah = “yes,” but casual/slang

Yah = NOT A WORD, unless you want to sound like you’re saying “Ja” in German, and you continue with “das ist gud,” and then you chug a beer and eat a sausage at the same time

Yar = “yes” in Piratespeak

Yup, yep = “yes” in Redneck

Yuppers = “Yeah, I am an idiot”

Go ye therefore and not be stupid.