mimsy and outgrabe

I went to sleep at two in the morning on Sunday night after grading until I was cross-eyed and when I got ready for bed I checked my email and I had a message from a student who said I have emailed you twice in the last month and have not received a response- please get back to me about my questions and so I stayed up another half hour because I felt the need to write her back and prove with a screen shot that yes, I'd forgotten to send her a reply to an email she sent that past Tuesday but I'd only received one email from her since early April, and I DID reply to the one from April, and I could tell that when I woke up two hours later with the alarm and the beginning of a migraine and the non-sleeping Vampire Toddler it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good very bad day. At breakfast Little Miss Talkalot decided she was too tired to eat breakfast and then The Boy decided that he was too tired to eat breakfast and then Vampire Toddler decided she wanted to eat Pir...

I feel as though I have run out of steam, although this really isn't a convenient point to have run out of steam, considering I have a full week of final grading ahead of me. Thankfully, though, there are no more classes to teach. I will have to meet with my students in my comp and developmental writing classes for a final time on Wednesday, but my literature classes on Tuesday/Thursday are simply dropping final assignments off in my mailbox and office this week, up until a 3 p.m. deadline on Thursday. And that feels kind of strange, because I enjoyed those classes a lot and it would be nice to see them again and wish them luck in the next semester -- but none of us really want the commitment of meeting as a group again when we have so many other things to do. This has been such a strange semester. Last night I evaluated developmental writing portfolios and I'll begin those again in a short moment. This morning I felt the need to weigh down the blogosphere with more end-o...

Last night I took the train into the city to attend the Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize Winners reading at McNally Books in Soho. It was quite the adventure for a preggo mother of two.  First, it was a night off from the prepare dinner/eat dinner/bedtime three-ring circus, and second, I was able to rediscover the joy of maneuvering my larger girth through tight city interiors, such as the basement of McNally's Books, where I knocked copies of the Cheryl Strayed Wild memoir right onto the ground in a very boorish manner.  I should come equipped with one of those beeping sensors, like the ones that commercial trucks have when they back up, only it should sound its alarm whenever I begin moving, period -- backwards, sideways, frontwards, whatever. Watch out, world! Preggo's on the move! I need some kind of warning system not only because I have a rounder, wider body overall, but because my sense of balance and spatial intelligence has been compromised over the past few wee...