Brain Tasers and Other Awesome Ideas

This week was chock full of incidents that have made me seethe with anger and defensiveness and resentment and then, ultimately, just kind of sink back into a weird sort of ambivalence about other people, because ultimately, there's not a damn thing I can do about the way they are going to act. 

Also, anger and defensiveness and resentment is exhausting. Also, I do not have time for that shit. 

The small-child's worth of grading has been (finally) organized and I'm slowly but surely turning it into the size of, oh, a smaller child. It's still pretty damn big. But at least I'm making progress, and there's the chance that by the end of the weekend I *might* have a small-child's worth of graded assignments to hand back. 

That would be awesome, wouldn't it? Just let me dream, haters.

Today I'm going to soccer games, the dentist, and a wedding. WHAT IS MY LIFE.

Tomorrow I'm participating in a Making Strides walk at the college.

On Monday the sabbatical application is due. It's nowhere near complete. 

By Tuesday I have to have all the papers graded. Like, for every class. Because midterms and students needing to know grades because they care more about grades than learning and blah blah blah blah . . .

Also by Tuesday I have to finish an ars poetica I began as part of the paper M.S. and I are presenting at the SECAC conference in Columbus, Ohio, because FOR SOME INANE REASON I DECIDED THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA. It's also nowhere near complete. I have to make copies while I still have access to a copier.

You know what would be a good business venture? If someone invented a kind of brain taser that shocks you every time you have a stupid, asinine idea. I would totally buy that.

Also also on Tuesday my mother arrives, and because she is good enough to fly up here and watch our children for the rest of the week, I have to have my house (and the room she's staying in) far more clean and well organized than it is currently.

On Wednesday, A. and I fly to Columbus. M.S. and I have to edit our paper to a solid 18 minutes (which means, I guess, we have to practice it, but when will we have time for that?) and polish and finish the accompanying PowerPoint AND fully create the 50 or so "Teaching Creativity" manifestos/broadsides we're distributing as part of our presentation. All of THAT has to be completed by Friday morning, which is show time.

Friday afternoon, following the presentation, I expect to be operating on half a cylinder and sputtering to an inglorious, smoky, burned out stop. But I'll have a day and a half of the conference still to go, so there's that. 

I'm kind of using this blog post as a way to focus on all the shit I have to do over the next 48 hours & beyond -- as if you can't tell. I'm sorry -- hopefully my next post will be about how awesome SECAC is and how I managed to knock all of these projects listed above right outta the effing ballpark.

I do not play, watch, or care about baseball. Why would I use that old, worn-out metaphor?

If I had a brain taser I wouldn't have written it. 

See? There's definitely a market.