The bullet or the bribe

From The Onion: “National Essay Writing Contest Now Accepting Video Submissions.” 

I have about four more hours to serve in grading jail, not counting the time it will take to calculate and record final grades (most of which I’ll do during my free periods tomorrow).  This time must be served between now and 8 a.m. tomorrow, and must be fit in around child care, sleep, grooming and commuting.  Despite the Damoclean nature of the situation, I am having to bribe myself to finish: if I grade for an hour, I can watch a 22-minute Sex and the City episode (courtesy of Netflix).  If I grade for an hour and a half, I can watch the episode and have popcorn.

The finish line’s in sight, but I am dragging my tail.

Tales of the unexpected

We did survive the sleepover.  All three kids were asleep sometime before midnight.  They started stirring again around 7 a.m.  Bestfriend doesn’t like pancakes, so I ended up not having to make them, and while I had sort of looked forward to being an awesome sleepover mom who makes pancakes, it was nice not to have to clean up from making pancakes.  They had muffins instead.

And Xavier’s mom, whom I really like, came to pick him up and sat drinking coffee with me while we waited for Bestfriend’s dad.  A knock came at the door and I went to get it–but it wasn’t Bestfriend’s dad.  It was Stubb!  He’d driven all the way home (6.5 hours!) to spend his day off with us.  So what I thought was going to be a lazy, recuperative Sunday turned into a special day. 

He left early Monday, but I think both the Snork Maiden and I are enjoying the residual happiness of having him around.  Today I’m going on a field trip with her class, and later she’s going home with the Bestfriend family to see their new puppy while I meet with my grade-level partners to talk about next year.  I turned in my NCC grades, but am still somewhat behind on my Starfleet grading.  (Which is about the least unexpected thing in this “tales of the unexpected” post, I might add.)

Sleeping with one eye open

Sleepover still under way.  I wonder what time they will all be asleep, and how late they’ll manage to sleep in the morning.  They’re watching National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets, which requires a lot of explanation from Bestfriend, who is the only one who’s seen it before.

Not sure how well I will be able to sleep, even after they’re all down. 

While they slept

In this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, Robert Pinsky reviews Kathryn Harrison’s new book, an account of the murder by a 16-year-old boy of his parents and one of his sisters, and the survival of his other sister, who tells Harrison her story.  There’s much that’s compelling in this review, which considers the act of storytelling as a response to immediate horror (the surviving sister remembers, the night of the murder, telling herself that it was happening in a book: “Now, Jody told herself, she was a character in a book, she was the girl for whom things looked bad — very bad — but turned out all right. In the end, they always did turn out. … How did she escape? Jody asked herself. Did the heroine jump out the window?”) and to its aftermath, how one tells the story of a horror, as Harrison herself did in her memoir The Kiss.  I’m sure her own experience with that book informed her observation that “Those of us who insist on speaking what’s often called unspeakable discover there’s no tone reserved for unnatural disasters, and so we don’t use any. We’re flat-affect; we report just the facts; this alienates our audience.”

Good review; sounds like a striking book.

Nobody’s fool

As I mentioned, I agreed to let the Snork Maiden have two friends sleep over tonight–Bestfriend and Xavier.  The Snork Maiden is going to a birthday party this afternoon; I’ll have three hours to myself while she’s there.  Then I’ll pick her and Bestfriend up, we’ll go get Xavier, and back here again.

So we’re cleaning up and rearranging the living room furniture and shopping for supper food and snacks.  We also have to make a quick stop to register her for fall soccer.  (The Snork Maiden continues to act miffed when the subject of not playing on the travel team comes up, but otherwise I don’t think she really regrets it.  She seems to be looking forward to the fall AYSO season.) 

As for me, I am feeling better now that it’s the weekend.  I’m not going to grade my finals until Monday–I left them all at Starfleet Academy.  I am, however, going to finish the dregs of my NCC grading and turn that in.  Today, I looked into going to the movies while the Snork Maiden is at the birthday party, but it doesn’t look like anything I want to see fits that time frame.  I think I might go to a discount shoe place and look for the new pair of sneakers I’ve been saying I need, then come home, have lunch and watch a DVD.  Maybe also return some books to the library and look for some fun reading as well.

Next week is looking appealing–lots going on, but not at all overwhelming.  I’m meeting with the teachers who also teach sections of the courses I’ll have next year so that we can make some plans while this year is still fresh in our minds.  I’ll be grading, of course.  I’m also going on a museum field trip with the Snork Maiden’s class.  I’ll see all my classes one more time to return their finals and wish them a fabulous summer.  I’ll get a haircut, make a couple of doctor appointments, and start making summer writing plans in earnest.  Yum.

Oh, I almost forgot!  I’m back in the part of campus I wanted to be in next year.  My department chair (I need to figure out a pseudonym for her) was great about it; she’s arguing against her own interests, in a way, since she is actually entitled to a room of her own, but is sharing with me so that I don’t have to be in a totally different building, away from all of the people I’m supposed to be collaborating with.  I’ll probably have to trek over there to teach one or two of my classes anyway, but I’m more than willing to do that.  What I really wanted was to be sure of seeing the cool girls (the other AP Lang teachers) and my grade-level partner every day, and that will happen if we’re on the same hallway, using the same photocopier, bathroom, supply closet, etc.  This seems far more important in high school than it ever did in college.  And yes, I have become desensitized to the one-hole bathroom. Really don’t even notice it anymore. 

By the great horn spoon!

Via Snickollet, a link to the new online newsletter Notes from the Horn Book, brought to you by the people who produce the Horn Book, the classic (84 years old!) guide to books for children.  Awesome.  (Snickollet notes that a friend of hers is on the masthead at the Horn Book.  So’s a friend of mine from grad school–one of their reviewers.)

In honor of this link, these are a few of the books I secretly, or not-so-secretly, wish the Snork Maiden would someday love as much as I do–books that she could possibly discover this summer, even.  She has already fallen for Harry Potter, of course, and more recently, Harriet the Spy.  I can’t tell you how happy it made me to see her attaching a pen, a flashlight, and other tools to a belt in imitation of Harriet.

• From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
• Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth
• The Chronicles of Narnia
• Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
• The Westing Game
• The Long Secret
• Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change
• A Wrinkle in Time
• The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles
• The Borrowers
• Emil and the Detectives
• The Great Cheese Conspiracy
• Henry Reed, Inc.
• Misty of Chincoteague
• The Saturdays

I’m at Starfleet Academy today, proctoring exams.  Not that I don’t have plenty of grading to do, but I might bring a nice book instead.

Fury

I am in a wildly bad mood right now.  Funny, because on the face of it, this wasn’t a particularly terrible day.  It’s true that an annoying thing happened at Starfleet Academy: the people who decide who goes in which room next year have decided that instead of this plan, they want to exile me to another part of campus, which will solve some problems for them, apparently, but cause other ones for me. 

However, this is by no means a done deal, and I talked to my chair and then wrote an email about it, and I’ll probably get some kind of concession even if I don’t get exactly what I want.  So I don’t think that’s the exact source of my bad mood.  No, I think it’s probably 40% the result of giving my exam today and fielding the waves of anxiety from my students, 15% the room issue, 15% the continuing messiness of my house, 15% the lack of cooperation from a tired and fractious Snork Maiden, and 15% not getting any significant kind of a break for who knows how long. 

We went out to dinner with Stubb’s parents tonight, and as his parents and his brother and sister-in-law compared notes on the movies they’ve seen recently, I felt myself filling with rage because I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie in a theater.  I’m not even such a big movie fan–I just suddenly felt ridiculously sorry for myself because I’m not having any ordinary old adult fun like going to the movies or just doing something with a friend.  FLS took the Snork Maiden and me out recently for my birthday, which was so great of her and I really appreciated it, but the Snork Maiden was uncharacteristically antsy, interrupted us every other sentence, and was unresponsive to FLS’s gracious attempts to turn the conversation toward more Snork Maiden-centered subjects.  (I would say that the SM is getting bored with being with just me, except that her social life has been reasonably lively lately–playdates, birthday parties, etc.)  And I wasn’t all that charming either because I kept nagging the SM to sit properly, stop interrupting, put your shoes back on, blah blah. 

I know that my big break is coming soon, but I don’t think it’s soon enough.  If I’m to get through this weekend, and the sleepover that the Snork Maiden is having with two pals on Saturday, I think I have to leave her with my sister for a few hours on Saturday morning or my head might explode.  And I have to go somewhere that really counts as fun, damnit.  I don’t think movies start early enough. 

*Added later: I listened to Loveline while I washed the dishes and made 24 tiny apple tarts (phyllo shells with apple filling–apples, brown sugar, cinnamon, butter–for the Snork Maiden’s class’s Johnny Appleseed celebration tomorrow), and I’m feeling better.  Sometimes I need to kvetch before I can get my perspective back and remember what a great life I actually have.  However, this does not mean that I don’t need fun.  Fun helps me appreciate my life.  I am still trying to think of what I can do on Saturday morning to have some.

Our mutual friend

Pym Fan said it would be OK if I posted her excellent reponse to the books of consolation meme here.  Thank you, Pymfriend!  Other thoughtful responses can be found at Ferule and Fescue; New Kid on the Hallway, part one and part two; and Hypatia’s Library.

Pym Fan writes:

I’m not sure what a meme is, but seeking consolation in books I certainly understand. Here’s my list:

1. Almost anything by Barbara Pym, but CRAMPTON HODNET is probably my favorite.  To me Pym’s novels always feel homey and comfortable, even though most of them take place in the slightly exotic world of 1950s England, a world with rationing and curates and monkey-puzzle trees.
2. THE LORD OF THE RINGS.  I read this novel obsessively for a while when I was a kid.  I remember reaching the end the first time and being so unwilling to leave that world and those characters that I started back again at the beginning of the first book.  I think I read my whole boxed set of paperbacks three or four times that way, reaching the end and starting back at the beginning.  Chalk this one up to escapism, I guess, but I think it was also the first novel that made me understand what it meant for a fictional world to be fully realized.
3. HARRIET THE SPY, by Louise Fitzhugh.  This novel was a huge comfort to me as a kid.  I recently reread it and enjoyed it all over again.  This time I was especially impressed with the book’s intelligence and empathy.  I don’t know much about Fitzhugh, but she was clearly a smart cookie.
4. The novels of Jane Austen, especially EMMA and PRIDE AND PREJUDICE.  The stories are great fun, of course.  And some days there’s just nothing more reassuring than a gracefully constructed sentence.
5. PERFUME, by Patrick Suskind.  I’ve been thinking about this one lately and meaning to reread it.  It may not seem like a book to go to for consolation, but I include it here because the feeling that lingers with me from that novel is deep satisfaction at the loving treatment even a monster can receive at the hands of a good author.

Oh, dear, I’ve left out all the horse novels I read as a kid (though they were a great comfort), and I haven’t included any poetry (Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, Berryman’s DREAM SONGS), and I’m afraid I’d be hopeless at choosing a book to give to someone in need of consolation — people’s reactions to books just seem too individual.  But what fun to think about all this and to read other people’s lists.  Thanks for the meme, MS!