Archive for the 'Television' Category

Please Don’t Make Me?

I find myself in possession of approximately 110 student essays, each awaiting my painstaking care and attention.  What a lovely situation to be in on this Monday afternoon!

While I would very much like to go bury my head under a duvet and dream happily of a life in which I do not have to read freshman composition essays, it seems that instead I must actually begin grading.  Oh, woe!  Wail!  Rend!  Weep!  Gnash!

The only consolation I have is that there will be three glorious hours of Heroes to watch tonight, and I will be able to enjoy every minute of it, guilt free, if only I do my due diligence with the grading.  I’m ready to get started on that any minute now.

Back to the Routine

After the first day of Real Teaching (i.e. not just taking roll and going over the course objectives), I am unsurprisingly exhausted.  At the end of a day like today, I feel like my insides have been emptied out with a giant ice-cream scoop, and all I have left is the damp and slightly rumpled shell of my formerly perky self.

My schedule this semester is particularly annoying– have I mentioned I am teaching three days a week instead of my typical two?  How galling, to have to show up to work three days a week.  Can you imagine the indignity?  More than that, though, it’s the hour-by-hour schedule that is so taxing.  Rather than teaching both writing classes and then both literature classes, or vice versa, I have a scrambled-up schedule that has me shifting gears every hour.  I know! Life is hard!

All sarcasm aside, though, it is truly fucking exhausting, this standing in front of a classroom and lecturing and trying to facilitate discussion and guiding and moderating and encouraging.  Especially the first week, when you haven’t gotten to know any of your 120 students yet and so far they all seem like relatively blank, staring faces, many of them dead behind the eyes.

It’s a good thing I have the evening to relax, which I’ll be doing tonight with friends and the newest episode of Project Runway.  I’ll likely post some thoughts on that later on the media blog — where, currently, you can see my favorite items from the latest Mad Men episode, if you’re into 1960s fashion and household goods.  (And frankly, why shouldn’t you be?)

And now, I think I will sit here and stare at this wall blankly, dead behind the eyes, for a few more minutes before I make my way home.

Miscellany

My plagiarizing student seems, as many others have seemed before, to be unaware of the fact that faculty also have access to the internet.  In fact, most of us are better at using it than they are.  S/he also seems to be sadly delusional. That’s all I’ll say on that subject (for now).

Despite dealing with that ugly situation, I have managed to turn in grades for my class, and am happy as ever to be well shut of it.  Now, on to research and writing.

The real news today, though, is that I have a lot of poorly expressed opinions about dance to give, and I’m seeking opinons about what my newest TV addiction should be.  Go and opine, why dontcha!

Less Bitching, More Twitching!

Good evening to you, dudes and ladies of the internet!  It has been a long, stupid, sweaty day here in New Wye, but it is finishing on a good note.  Let me just tell you how it started, though, just for fun, before I get to the pleasant parts:

First off, may I mention that my alarm clock is exhibiting some seriously psychotic tendencies of late?  Sometimes, when I am up at night reading in bed, I notice it switch from displaying the time to displaying the FM frequency, even though the radio is off.  Then it starts whirring and whizzing through all the frequencies, all flickering and flashing.  This happens for about 2-3 minutes, then it goes back to normal.  Then it does it again.  Weird, right?

Last week, it started fucking with me in the mornings — instead of the snooze alarm going off every 10 minutes, it started going off every ONE minute.  Basically, you have time to hit the button, lay your head back on the pillow, get comfy, and then it starts beeping all over again.  I am so out of it in the mornings, though, that I have been just letting that happen for, like, half an hour.  That’s THIRTY snoozes, in this crazy scheme!

This morning, some extra excitement was thrown in, however, by the fact that the power to my building was cut off.  (This occasionally happens in the morning, why I do not know, but I will tell you that it is one of the many reasons why our local power company is on my shit list.)  The alarm still sounded due to its battery backup, but the number display remained dark — I suppose that’s to save power.  It was impossible to see what time it was, though, as the lighted numbers are, you know, kind of necessary for the telling of the time and all.  Anyway, let me again say how out of it I am in the mornings: just completely oblivious and really more in the realm of dream than that of reality.  As such, I am easily confused.  So, despite the alarm’s going off every one minute, I still didn’t manage to get up on time.

Worse than that, the alarm clock COULD NOT BE TURNED OFF.  I hit the “off” button, not just the snooze, and it wouldn’t stop snooze-beeping EVERY ONE MINUTE!  I unplugged the damned thing, and searched all over for the battery compartment, and it STILL KEPT BEEPING EVERY MINUTE.  God, it was awful.  I wound up wrapping it in a towel and burying it in my laundry basket just so the neighbors whose place abuts my bedroom wouldn’t decide to murder me.

My friend K. was there to witness the whole spectacle, as she had come by to give me a ride to school (my car was still in the shop).  And dog, what a spectacle it was!  I was running around trying to get ready, and I had no time to shower, meaning I probably looked like hell and smelled even worse, thanks to last night’s beers and cigarettes at Pub Trivia.  Thank goodness I have a huge supply of default clothes that can be worn like a uniform on mornings that I can’t come up with anything better (trouser-jeans, black tee shirt, black cardigan, black ballet flats, in case you are wondering).

The morning was off to a disastrous start, and I spent the hour of office prep time before class knocking back advils, laying my head on the desk, and occasionally looking up words from the DFW story I had assigned.  (Dude’s got a wicked arcane vocabulary, you feel me?)  Luckily, I was free to leave campus immediately after class, if by “free to leave” I mean “only able to leave because I had decided to shirk my grading duties for yet another day.”

I walked over to the garage where my car was being repaired and picked it up, and once again, the saintly mechanic there had found the problem, which was just another fuse that needed replacing, and had fixed it for free.  I swear, that man is my future husband (despite the fact that he is so country that I literally cannot understand him — this will mean we won’t have to bother with any meaningful conversations when we are wed, and we can thus just ignore each other, me doing my things and him fixing my car and stuff).

The day continued to get better when I got home, where I lounged around in the delicious air conditioning, which was much needed after my walk to the garage, and then took a nap on the couch with the dog.  Favorite afternoon activity ever.  And do you know what else?  Tonight was another fab episode of So You Think You Can Dance, and my favorite dancer, Twitch, got to do a hip-hop number that was completely fantastic.  Excellente, I say!

May I Direct You Elsewhere, and Good Day to You!

I’ve got no time for a real post today, as I have got to go home and get some things done, and then prepare to host the guest round at Pub Trivia tonight. My round is on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, only the most awesome show of all time. Would you like to read my further thoughts on that great topic? Please to go here then.

And! Have you any thoughts or opinions on the greatest reality show of all time, So You Think You Can Dance? If so, please to click hereabouts.

And good day to you, sir. I SAID GOOD DAY.