mimsy and outgrabe

Vampire Kid has been sick for a month, seriously, with some kind of gross disgusting congested ear/nose/throat thing, and on Wednesday she had a reaction to the antibiotic we gave her, ON THE LAST FINAL EXAM PRESENTATION DAY for one of my classes, and my ass had to be saved by M.S., who kindly and with no small amount of trouble took MY students into HER classroom and videotaped their presentations for me while also providing feedback/art crits to her own students while I stayed home and fielded questions from Vampire Kid while grading a sum total of three papers all day. She's pretty much an American hero . . .  M.S., that is, not Vampire Kid. This time of year blows, and I hate writing that, because I actually kinda love the holidays. But it's always complicated, for me, by End of the Semester Madness, and I reach the end of the year exhausted and grumpy and demoralized and that's . . . not great. I mean, sometimes I bounce back quickly and by New Year's I...

Today is a day when I will do all the grading.  I just needed to write that sentence, in the hopes that uttering it out loud and sending it flying into the inter-web-verse will make it good and true and actual, and that by the end of the day I will have all of the things accomplished and checked off my list and I will begin the weekend calm and happy and everything will go perfectly and according to plan. And and and. My day of completing residency applications last week was hijacked by a student who met with me for what SHOULD have been a 10 minute conference about his paper but turned into an hour long conversation about his personal history (relevant to the paper, relevant to the class) and ended with him making a wildly inappropriate comment about my appearance (not relevant to the paper, not relevant to the class) disguised as audacious flattery but really most likely just a desperate attempt to improve his grade. Or maybe an underhanded attempt to put me in my...

It is amazing how good you feel about 24 hours after being sick, simply because you aren't sick anymore. Good health sure is underrated, isn't it? That was the beginning of last week. A. and I came down with some gross 24-hour virus thing but thankfully none of the urchins we live with came down with it too, and now we're better and we can return to the business of, well, you know -- busyness. It was around this time that I was attempting to reinstate some past habits/behaviors simply to help me get through the end of the semester -- scheduling blocks of time for grading and avoiding all other commitments, doing quick and brief journaling in the mornings just to get my head wrapped around what I needed to accomplish for the day -- and then boom, sick, and a lot of my motivation deflated. I'm going to try and get back into it, though, because for as much as I kind of loathe the gimmicks and jargon of the Productivity world (read: market), a lot of their tips an...