Grape & grain

I’ve never been much of a drinker, but the past few years, I’ve come to appreciate the assistance in winding down that a nice glass of wine or whiskey can provide.  I did eventually get to sleep last night, and I’m planning to hit the hay fairly soon tonight–but I was at NLNRU again this evening reading applications, and then meeting about fellowship offers.  We had birthday cake for our chair but not anything you would call dinner, so when I came home it was snacks and cracking open the one-large-glass serving-size pinot grigio I bought at the drugstore a few weeks ago (yeah, right behind the lady with the giant plastic bottle of no-name vodka)–and now I’m admiring the rosy glow that seems to have settled over everything.

Tomorrow is my light teaching day at SA, just one big double block in the morning, and then the rest of the morning for prepping and recordkeeping and a lovely relaxed lunch punctuated by a yearbook photo for one of the clubs I help advise.  I’m also meeting with Dr. Tea for a discussion of submitting work to magazines, and in the afternoon I’ll read through a slew of promotion documents for a committee I’m serving on at NLNRU.  Finally, a phone conference with said committee and heading down to an NLNRU reading.

In the end it will probably be about as busy as any other day in the week, except that I’ll only be teaching and “on” full blast for about an hour and a half, so I’ll have a splendid autonomy over most of the day.  I can eat or pee whenever I want to!

Winding down

Back from class, and still awake.  My NLNRU class is on Wednesdays this semester.  It’s been on Thursdays for the last couple of semesters, and I thought I wanted a change.  By Thursday, I’m tired.  I get up at 5:45 most mornings–earlier if I have work or writing to do before school–and it’s hard to get into bed early enough for an eight-hour stretch on weeknights.  On Mondays, though, I’m still pretty fresh–I’ve got the weekend behind me, after all.  And if I can flog myself into bed early on Tuesday, I have a chance of finishing out the week reasonably well rested.

So this semester, we scheduled my class for Mondays.

And yet it’s on Wednesdays.  How did this happen?  Well, about three months ago, as students were preregistering for the spring, one course looked to be in danger of not filling.  We particularly wanted to be able to run this class, and one problem seemed to be that it was on Mondays, directly opposite the course I’m teaching.  But my class hadn’t started preregistration yet, since it’s for people in the first year of the program, and they preregister last.  We thought–and I was on board with this–that if we moved my class, the people already in the endangered class could stay in it, and some of my students could register for it as well.

You see where this is going, right?  The course still didn’t fill, and was canceled.  My class filled just fine.  And is on Wednesdays.

I have to admit that Wednesdays are a little better than Thursdays.  I am less fatigued–not as fresh as I’d be on Mondays, sure, but still better after three days of SA teaching than four.

Also, the NLNRU campus is calmer and quieter on Wednesday evenings when we get out of class–much less drinking and partying going on, more students going to and from libraries.

And on Thursday evening, instead of going to class, I’m going to bed early after doing the minimum necessary to prepare for Friday.

So it’s better than it has been, just not as good as I thought it was going to be.  In the fall, however, we are scheduled for Mondays.  Hooray.  And I’m not going to switch it.  I’m fabulous, remember?  And I deserve to have the class on the night I want to teach it.

Meanwhile, the Year of Being Fabulous is going okay.  I finished collecting rejections from 2011, and now I’m gearing up for a fabulous series of submissions.  Stubb has been working out of town more, but now that’s coming to an end (for now) and he should be around again so that I can get more chunks of time for writing and submitting.

One effect of the year’s theme is that I am being more protective of my time and energy.  I am doing better with “not my problem” and “now is time for me to take a break.”  It’s a small shift, but I can feel it, and that’s what counts.

It looks like we’re going to be able to rearrange teaching assignments at SA so that I will move to teaching mostly juniors, which seems like a good plan.  I’ll miss the freshmen, but this will get me out of the freshman year before the Snork Maiden turns up in the high school, and last year’s fantastic freshman class will be next year’s juniors, so I get to teach a bunch of them again.

Now if I could only wind down enough to go to sleep!

The Sunday philosophy club

So, a chance to bring my new attitude to the table.  I was tired and sore last week and I decided to take it easy wherever possible–which means, unfortunately, that I have a bunch of work to do today.  I need to compute quarter grades for my SA students so that they know where they stand going into the final, and I need to go in to SA to do it because all of the little odds and ends are still there–the piece of paper where I scrawled grades for that one quiz and forgot to add them to the gradebook, the essays that came in late or early (happens!) and didn’t get done with the others, etc.  It would be nice to be a more conscientious recordkeeper, but oh well.  I have a system that works fairly well at SA, and I tweak it a bit from time to time, and part of the system, I guess, is that I always need a mopping-up session to make it all come out properly.

So I’m going to try to go in to campus in a spirit of “awesome me wrapping up this awesome term,” rather than in a nervous, guilty mood.  I’m going to bring a few favorite CD’s, and I’ll have lunch there.  The Snork Maiden is going off for an adventure with a friend, which should give me a few hours to do the wrapping-up in, after which we will come home, have dinner, and I’ll put in an hour on the other administrative stuff that needs to get done before Monday.  Because I am good at that stuff and it shouldn’t take any longer than that.  Then I can watch The Simpsons and ice my soreness.

Then tomorrow at the end of the day, I’ll finalize my exams and copy them.  I have one essay to swap out on the AP exam, but otherwise they are pretty solid to go.

 

The view from Saturday

Good thing I had only one class and some students dropping by to ask exam-related questions today, because I didn’t have much left in me by the time we got to the end of the week.  I’ve left myself grading to do over the weekend–not huge piles, but a number of poorly-managed quizzes and makeup tests and a batch of AP essays from this week.  I will probably need to go into SA one day to sort it all out so that I can give my students their grades going into the final.

And I told the Snork Maiden she could have a couple of friends over to study for exams tomorrow afternoon, which means she and I will tidy up the living room and buy some snacks in the morning.

I’m glad she’s having friends over, but I am also glad that we don’t have a lot planned otherwise.

Between the acts

Classes at SA resumed today.  This post  from last year came to mind a bunch of times today; all that energy!  All those questions!  All that talking!  Squealing and hugging in the hallways!  And good lord, these children just keep growing.  You can really see the difference in some of them.

Now we wrap up the semester and spend a few days reviewing.  Exams begin in a week.  Impatiently waiting to see what the proctoring schedule is like; typically, we don’t proctor our own subject, but pop into the exam rooms a couple of times to answer questions.  I’ve tended to proctor Spanish and geometry exams, for some reason (probably just recycling of the schedule from year to year), but the schedule has been somewhat rejiggered this year, so there may be surprises.  Usually we have at least one day completely off from proctoring.  The Snork Maiden, in seventh grade, will have three exams (eighth graders have four, high schoolers have all five core subject areas–math, English, social studies, science, and foreign language–and some have six or even seven exams, as it’s possible to double up in most of those areas, and quite common in science and language).  So she’ll get next Friday off altogether.  Stubb actually is working out of town for much of the next few weeks, so it will be useful if I don’t have to proctor on Friday.

I am pretty beat, partly because of the intensity of going back, partly because I didn’t sleep well last night (in anticipation of the intensity of going back, I’m sure!).  It was especially nice to be able to sit for lunch today with Dr. Tea,  Elinor, Akela, and a few CWPs (Colleagues Without Pseudonyms, of course).  Things are starting to wake up over at NLNRU–not too bad yet, but by the end of tomorrow, we’ll be in full swing, I make no doubt.

All that (the real post this time)

Back in October, I wrote about needing to put a little more Lenny Dykstra into my attitude about writing and publication.

I’ve always cared deeply about doing good work, and I’ve done a lot of it, but I’ve always taken my failures to heart, and I’ve always questioned my successes, whether I really earned them.  (Even to say “I’ve done good work” without a qualifier takes a bitten lip.)

And the more I think about it, the more I think that on one hand, there are ways this attitude has served me.  I sought to do good work before I sought publication; I listened very carefully to others; I aimed for quiet excellence and only put myself forward diffidently.  I had some great opportunities–but there’s no denying I missed out on others.  For example, in college I wrote and took creative writing classes, but didn’t get involved with any of the several literary magazines I could have.  I was involved with a lot of things in college–I wrote for the newspaper, worked in the theater, was the most politically active I’ve ever been–but it was more than I could do to submit to a literary magazine or show up to offer to work on one.  To do so would have been to openly show desire for the thing I wanted, and that is something I have always found it very hard to do!

Some part of this is gendered, of course.  Nice girls don’t let their desires show, seek recognition, or act as if they are more deserving than other people.  As a woman and a feminist, I am not willing to reject completely (even if I could) such modes of interaction as collaboration, care for others, communality.  I value these traits in both genders and try to foster them in my students.  In teaching girls and boys, in particular, I have a lot of opportunities to experience how different people balance respect and care for others’ needs with respect and care for their own.  As a teacher, I’m often urging students (whether female or male, fifteen or forty) to value their own work highly, speak up about their opinions, be proud of what they’ve done.

In most of my life, I’m actually pretty satisfied with my ability to assert my needs and opinions–to speak up.  The thing I’m not satisfied with is hard to articulate, but it’s to do with operating out of a place of anxiety–of being concerned about falling short, about not being good enough, and particularly about being exposed as inadequate.  It’s rooted, I think, in something other than lack of self-esteem.  I have a lot of self-esteem–I know I’m smart, highly capable, funny, attractive.  It’s more about functioning too much in a mode of humility and not enough in a mode of pride.

I was definitely taught to be privately proud and publicly humble.  And a lot of the time, this is a great way to be!  The thing is that a lot of my dissatisfactions with my life and work can be traced to operating too much out of humility, anxiety, underconfidence.  I think this is the thing that I’m getting stuck on.

Mind you, I know my life is wonderful.  If I couldn’t change a single thing, I’d still be thrilled to be who I am, doing what I do.  I still want, though, to be the best version of myself I can be–the one who enjoys life the most and  puts as much good work into the world as possible.

I also want my work, my writing, to make a place for itself in the world, and I’d do for it what I might not be able to do just for myself, so that it can be here when I’m gone.

And finally, I think I’m ready to test whether my worldview–the disaster mentality, the sense of impending panic, the difficulty being in the moment without anticipating the next problem or concern, the Sunday-night feeling of impending doom–might possibly not be the way I have to live.

So!  My resolution is to act like I know I’m fabulous, damnit.

• I deserve time to write and the conditions I need to get my work done.  Among other things, I deserve to spend two weeks at a writers’ colony.
• I deserve to have my work published.  In fact, magazines and presses should be falling over themselves to get my work.
• I’m an effective teacher.  I contribute a lot to both my institutions.  I deserve everything I earn and then some.  I can operate from a position of confidence and competence.
• I deserve to do things that I know matter, like seeing people I care about, without feeling guilty about taking time away from the jobs that I am, after all, performing with great competence.
• I deserve to spend time having fun.
• I deserve to spend money and time on things that make life easier, like a cleaning service (which we’ve had for about six months and I wish we’d gotten years ago) or make me feel good (like massages–I need one right now–or going out for a run).
• I can care for the people I love, and I don’t have to take on other people’s problems.
• I can choose to eat pretty much exactly what I want to–food I want, that nourishes and pleases me.

I’m feeling a powerful urge to put in a little disclaimer here, to defuse all this self-centeredness and self-aggrandizement, just in case you think I’m really that asshole, so I think I’ll just stop.  For now, I am that asshole/Lenny Dykstra/my bête noire (whose confidence, by the way, is one of the things I both envy and dislike about him).

I rock!  See you soon.

Oops

I accidentally published a draft of my next post.  The title is “All that.”  If it shows up in your reader, please disregard for now.

A short history of nearly everything

2011 was a pretty solid year.  I’d do it again.  Looking back, it feels like most of the molecules were flowing in the right direction, you know?  I did a lot of pretty good teaching.  I completed a draft of my second book.  I managed the SA/NLNRU balance better the second year.  I did the best I could to support the Snork Maiden as she changed schools to SA for middle school, and while I think I made some mistakes in that process, she did make the transition and she learned and grew from it.  In the second half of the year, I made some positive changes to my eating habits, kept to them 90% of the time, and gradually shed ten pounds over six months.  Some good things happened to make me happy–my mother moved across the country to live near my sister and me, we had a spring break trip to New York–and relatively few bad things happened to make me sad.

The big thing I would change about the past year, if I could, is more and better work for Stubb.  He kept busy, he got some paychecks (including a good royalty payout), he did work he cared about, but there was a lot of frustration for him this year.  He didn’t work out of town, although he did have a couple of long-commute gigs.  His staying close to home was helpful to the Snork Maiden and me, especially as she dealt with her first year at SA, but I know he missed going away.

Writing that paragraph made me stop and ask myself, hey, what about you?  Didn’t you have a lot of frustration with publishing this year?  Ten magazine rejections, no bites on the second book yet?  Wouldn’t you go back and change that if you could?

Hm.  I guess not.  What I think as I look back is:

• I FINISHED THE BOOK!

and

• I started the process of getting it published.  Ten months and ten rejections is not much time or many rejections, really.  I am still revising some.
• Even though it took me a long time to get my first book out, it was a little sad and strange to let go of it.  I’d seen friends go through this, so I’d thought about it a lot, but I think it’s different for everyone.  For me, it was partly the sadness of finishing, having it over; partly the strangeness of having something so private and meaningful to me become public, launched into the world (even if into relative obscurity); partly the process of accepting that it was the best I could do at the time, however flawed.  I do love having a book out–it’s much better than having an unpublished manuscript for years!  Still, I guess what I’m saying is that there are some okay aspects to a long path to publication.

And in 2012?  I do have a big resolution, and it does have to do with the book, or rather the book comes under its rubric.  I have to get up and move around now, though, so the resolution revelation will have to wait for the next post.

Rocky mountain high

Happy new year!  I’ve been reading all my favorite bloggers’ reflections on 2011 and hopes and plans for 2012.  I have some of both, but I can’t sit in front of the computer for very long because just as I was getting up from kneeling over the suitcase I was packing for our Denver trip, I got a sudden flare-up of back/buttock pain that I think might be from my sacroiliac joint.  It’s better now, though still a bother; I’ll see how the next couple of days go, and if it’s not definitely improving now that we’re home, I’ll go to the doctor this week.

The Denver trip was fun anyway–I am so glad we made another winter break getaway, and I’m increasingly convinced that this needs to be an annual tradition.  Summers, as I observed a few months ago, are pretty cluttered around here.  The last two weeks of December, though, are quiet and slow and seem to be a good time to escape.  Last year, the effects of the complete change of the New Mexico trip–doing and seeing new things, reconnecting with people we don’t see enough, eating different food–lasted well into the new semester.  It still brings me pleasure to wear the bracelet and gloves I got on that trip and to think about the day and the place I bought them.

On this trip, we poked around Denver, made a day trip to Boulder and another to Winter Park, visited with a high-school friend of mine and his family, and spent a lot of time just hanging out with my aunt and cousin–watched a movie (Noises Off), played Pictionary and Scrabble, cooked (my aunt and the Snork Maiden made mini lemon souffles).  I think if I were fine-tuning the experience, I’d add in a day or two for the three of us to go off and have an adventure on our own, too, but for this trip I don’t think I would have wanted to give up any of the days we had.

I also had time to think about the year behind and the year ahead.  More on those during my next session of sitting!

The documents in the case

In the alternate universe where the MLA convention features an amateur stand-up night:

Letters of recommendation.  What’re those about?  (Pause for anticipatory laughter.)  Oh, I see.  It’s not enough I had to teach you and read all your papers–which, by the way…(Opens mouth to begin rant, decides it’s not worth it, shuts mouth, shakes head)…now I also have to write a paper about you?  (Pause.) Oh, all right.  When do you need it?  (Pause.)  Ha ha, very funny.  When’s the real due date?  (Pause.)  Oh for the love of…Okay.  Okay.  (Laughter.)

Seriously, folks, amirite?  So!  You’ve moved on to the stage where you’re writing letters for your students.  Surely, at least, that means that you no longer have to subject yourself to the embarrassment of asking people to write letters for you.   (Pause for anticipatory laughter.)  You’re a professor now!  You don’t need any stinkin’ letters!  You write the letters now!  You hold other people’s lives in your hands!  (Evil-genius laugh.)

Oh…wait a minute.  You want to apply for a fellowship to go to a library and read the correspondence of a nineteenth-century writer.  Sorry, you need a letter for that.  (Scattering of guffaws.)  It’s okay, at least you get to go somewhere…glamorous?  (Pause.) Oh, really, the University of Kansas?  Well, I hear Lawrence is very pretty this time of year.

Ah, a writers’ colony!  Sounds great.  You’ll finally finish that novel, and they tiptoe up to your door every day at noon and leave your lunch outside the door.  (Pause.)  All you need to do is fill out this application…and this statement of purpose…and this project description…upload a work sample…and just one more thing…(Pause) Three letters of recommendation.

(Laughter, applause, blackout.)

Yeah, seriously.  Anyway, the good news is that after getting dinged from one colony for next summer, I’ve gotten in one new application (which means two unfortunate folk who now have to send in recs for me) and started another.  I also submitted a big packet of work for a prize and have the new book manuscript out at several presses.  Now I have to pick up my magazine submissions again.  I struck out in 2011, but I approached ten different magazines and got some positive feedback.  I am determined 2012 will be the year the book gets taken, though, so I need to keep sending so that I can place whatever it is I’m going to place.

And something else:  all my grad school recs, college recs, job recs, internship recs are done for this round.  Ha!

Merry Christmas if you celebrate…and a nice peaceful couple of days if you are, like me, enjoying the quiet while other people celebrate around you.