Back-to-School Scheming

Most people look at the beginning of a calendar year as a time to review where they’ve been in the last twelve months and what they want to do in the next twelve. This makes sense, of course. The first day of the first month of a new year seems so ripe for new beginnings.

For me, though, the new year always begins at the end of August. When a new school year begins, so do I. I have been living according to the August-to-August year for as long as I can remember. I started Kindergarten in August, 1983, and since then I have been governed by the school year. Thirteen years of primary education (counting Kindergarten), four years of college, seven years of graduate school, and three years of college teaching — this is year four. That’s a lot of years, now that I list it out like that. Twenty-seven years. Damn.

Well, to steer back in the direction of my point: I don’t begin the year anew in January, but now. Now is the time for me to think about goals, hopes, plans, plots, and schemes.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about trying to accomplish this school year:

Stay Organized: Between my campus office, my home office, my teaching, and my research, things can get crazy. I always find myself wishing I had brought home a book or folder that I left at school, or frantically looking for my flash drive. I am attempting to solve this problem by syncing my work-related files with dropbox (AMAZING, simply amazing tool), keeping up with my schedule on iCal and my tasks with teuxdeux.com. My home office will be used mostly for research and writing; my campus office will be prep, teaching, and grading central.

Plan Ahead, Grade Ahead: Hopefully staying organized will help here. My goal is really to avoid last-minute class prep and weekends full of grading hundreds of essays. Do a little at a time until it’s done. SO much easier said, though.

Pack Lunch: My office mate and I are going in together on a mini fridge to use in the office, which will make this easy and convenient. Any lunch I pack, no matter how hasty, will be cheaper and better balanced nutritionally than anything I can find on campus. Period.

Maintain Weight: I am really happy with where I am right now weight-wise. My fitness goals are always growing and changing (with my marathon focus right now and maybe more triathlons in the spring), but I don’t need or want to lose any more pounds. My newest Sports & Wine post over at the Bodies site explains my plans for the food aspect of weight maintenance, should you want to read about it in any more detail.

Bike Commute: I am committing to get to campus by bike instead of by car on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Those are my non-teaching days, where I might go in to grade or prep and thus I’ll be dressed in more casual, bike-friendly clothes. I may also try biking in on Tuesdays and Thursdays if I am wearing trousers, but my road bike with horizontal top bar isn’t ideally suited to biking in skirts (which I wear frequently). I have biked to campus once last week and twice so far this week, and it has made a trip in to the office on my “off” day much more enjoyable!

Dress Nicely: I still run into the problem of looking a little too young for my job, so I’m trying to cultivate a more professional appearance on teaching days so I can feel more confident and authoritative. I think it’s also going to help me to project more professionalism around the halls in general. Plus, clothes shopping is so much more fun now that I can wear standard sizes and therefore can shop in any store (uh, any not-too-expensive store, anyway — I still do have that enviable teacher’s salary). I’m currently finding inspiration from a few academic fashion blogs. See here, here, and here.

Job Market: The academic job market runs concurrent with the school year, meaning that postings for tenure-track assistant-professorships will start appearing soon. I don’t want to talk about this too much because it is an AWFUL topic, but here are my thoughts: I am not going to waste a ton of time and energy throwing myself at any halfway appropriate job just because one “should” go for the tenure-track openings. If something truly great appears on the job list, I will attack it with purpose. Expect not many updates on this one, ’cause, like I said, AWFUL topic.

Open Windows: I am going to try to be open minded about relationships and new people. Not just romantic relationships, but new friendships and social opportunities, too. Even though the guy and I split up, I still believe everything I said in this post. Just because that relationship didn’t work out doesn’t mean I have to be like Clooney in Up in the Air, and shit, you know?

What about you guys? Though your lives may not be Ruled by School like mine is, do you have any goals or plans cookin’ right now?

Miscellany

I am sitting in my classroom right now proctoring the final exam for my summer course. The end is in sight! This might seem like an inappropriate time and place to be composing a blog post, but I’m afraid it might be the only chance I get to write anything before I take off for the weekend.

After this exam I’ve got to finish all my end-of-term grading and reporting, deal with a few (?) recalcitrant late assignments, and run approximately forty-seven various errands. But now! Now I just sit, and watch, and wait.

And blog, apparently.

So this weekend I am heading off to Mississippi to visit Clarabella. We are going to be running a 5K and then celebrating afterwards with watermelon-based frozen drinks of some kind. Even if you don’t like to run, wouldn’t you do a 5K for the promise of a watermelon-based frozen cocktail? I bet you would. If you do like to run, well, that is just even better.

I am very much looking forward to the chance to get out of town for a little while and decompress after a summer of teaching intensive courses. When you unceremoniously stuff a semester’s worth of literature (almost four thousand years of texts!) into five weeks, everyone starts going a little bit insane — not just me. I don’t know how the students manage to keep up with it either. We are all ready for a break.

On another subject, I have been loving having my little basil plant in the front window so much that I decided it needed a few friends. Last weekend I went down to this amazing nursery in town and picked out a few succulents to join it in the window. I have had succulents before and have managed not to kill them, so I hope these guys will stick around for a while.

I got a jade plant (my favorite),

an elephant bush (hilarious name),

and an aloe plant (very useful for a klutz like me who is always accidentally burning herself in the kitchen).

Also to be spotted occasionally in my windowsill:

A surly feline, who occasionally has been putting some effort into pretending to be nice. We’ll see if it’s just an act, or what.

Well, I hope you each have a lovely weekend in store. May I suggest a watermelon-based frozen cocktail? If that’s not available, something else, perhaps? As long as it is decadent and relaxing.

Not-So-Extreme Home Makeover

Although I’m still all wrapped up in my summer teaching, it’s about time for a reckoning with regards to the fall semester. That shit is fast approaching! I want to be able to make the most of my time next semester, when I’ll only be teaching two days a week and will have the other three work-week days to do prep, research, grading, and other business. Which I can do from home. That’s right; I’ll be able to work from home three days a week!

This was a bit of an unexpected boon — I’ve been wanting this schedule forever but never thought I would get it. I usually teach three days a week and I had thought I was going to do five days a week this fall. Due to some scheduling and registration mishaps, I got the coveted Tuesday-Thursday schedule of my dreams at the very last minute!

My office at home, where I hope for much of the awesome productivity, writing, and such to occur? Well, it has been sorely neglected for the last couple of years. I almost never work in here at all, and only really come into the room to feed the cat (her food is in here, where the dog is not usually allowed to go because they usually harass each other), to fetch a book, or to dump mail, exercise equipment, and other unwanted detritus.

The room was a disaster. I don’t know how many pieces of old mail and paperwork are in here, but even just the amount on the desk took ages to go through, sort, shred, file, and so on. There are still two small boxes of mail I need to handle.

The area by my bookshelves was a random dumping ground for nonsense, as you can see here.

I definitely had my work cut out for me. I headed out to Walmart, where I usually do not shop, for cheap file boxes and a paper shredder. It’s much closer and a bit cheaper than Target, but readers, I ask you, is that worth the pain of being in Walmart? First, I had to listen to an angry dad yelling at and berating his maybe three-year-old crying son over why he wouldn’t buy him something. It went a little something like, “YOU GIVE ME ONE GOOD REASON — ONE GOOD REASON! — WHY I SHOULD BUY YOU THAT. CAN YOU? CAN YOU GIVE ME ONE GOOD REASON? I DON’T THINK YOU CAN. EXPLAIN IT TO ME. ONE GOOD REASON.” In response to which the boy just whimpered. Nice job, Angry Dad. Nice. I’m sure that’s an effective communication technique for barely-verbal toddlers.

Then, after paying, I had to wait in a second line of about six shopping carts at the exit. Why? Well, a very officious, bitchy woman was working the exit door, checking everyone’s receipt before they could leave the store. That’s right; in the fifteen yards between the cash registers and the doors, surely we had all managed to steal some of their valuable merchandise. Is this shit even LEGAL, I wonder?

Well, I have gone off topic here, but that all needed to be said, if only for my own sanity.

So, after all that I came home and started tackling the office. I managed to clear off the desk and finally hang a white board and some cork boards (those are actually cork trivets from the kitchen section at IKEA only a couple of dollars per three-pack).

Don’t worry, after I took the picture and saw how crooked the white board was, I re-hung it. I tend to just eyeball those things instead of using a level, which sometimes works and sometimes does not.

I also neatened up the shelf area:

Also, after the picture, I realized I still had some things cluttering the top of the shelves, so I took care of those, too. The white shoe boxes on the short shelf are full of MORE MAIL to sort. Good lord, I hate mail. (And before everyone suggests it, yes, I do have everything possible handled online instead of through paper billing. That makes a dent, but not a big enough dent, you know?) But now I have a paper shredder and a better filing system, so that should help matters.

I’d still like to make a few improvements: I’d like a regular desk instead of the door-balanced-on-two-cabinets thing I currently have going on. The cabinets are about 3 inches too tall for this to work perfectly, but with the addition of a new, taller desk chair from my friend MZ, it’s a bit more comfortable. Then, I’d like my bookcases to match and be of better quality, which is something I don’t see spending money on in the near future, so I will live with what I have. Finally, the couch (whose corner you can see above) needs to go. It has been a bit shredded by the cat and I am constantly having to manage the cat-fur(niture) situation and it’s a giant nuisance.

Otherwise, I am quite happy with the newly organized office! I have put my laptop here as its regular home, and will only carry it out to the couch/coffee table for, say, watching movies on Netflix Instant Play. I like the idea of keeping the computer in the office and having the living room be mostly computer-free.

What this means is that I’ve been hanging out in the office a lot more already, and the dog has been following me in here, and the cat has been allowing the dog into “her” space, for the most part, and everyone seems to be happy.

Good start. I just have to keep the room neat and functional throughout the semester, and I should have a great set-up for working at home three days a week. Now, let’s hope I can resist the lure of blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and online shopping while I’m here!

The Fret List

First of all, thank you all sincerely for the words of encouragement on the post below. It means a lot.

This week all of my big training stuff is behind me — it’s time to taper off and rest up, so I won’t be doing any long runs or rides or anything high intensity. Which means I’ll be restless and bored out of my mind, apparently.

This morning I woke up and instead of going for a run or hitting a class at the gym, I lay on my couch for two and a half hours just thinking. As a professional intellectual, I very much support thinking as an activity. I am a fan of it. The kind of thinking in which I was involved this morning, however, was not exactly intellectual thinking. It was more like my to-do list playing on an endless loop, occasionally interspersed with wildly imaginative worst-case scenarios focused on the race, my summer job, my summer finances, my hair, my long-term job prospects, my health, my pedicure, my personal relationships, my counterfeit handbag smuggling ring, and the hot and scandalous love quadrangle in which I am involved.

FINE, some of those things are lies.

(OR ARE THEY?)

But this is what happens when I don’t have anything to do. No work this week, minimal workouts, and plenty of time to fret. Luckily I got myself out of the house to meet my friend Golightly for coffee and productivity. We actually both got a lot of work done this afternoon — actual job-related scholarly work, the kind we don’t really have to be doing on a holiday except that we are achievers like that (and academia brooks no vacations). Tomorrow I plan to get myself out of the house yet again for a short easy bike ride and maybe a trip in to the office. Not exactly big plans, but hopefully a bit of a distraction.

I am really loathe to complain about Summer Job Numero Uno, but I do have to mention that if their pay schedule were more traditional a good fifty percent of the things on my current Fret List could be eliminated. But I don’t really want to talk about money. (Apparently I just want to think about it over and over again repeatedly and again and some more after that.)

As for some of the other things on the Fret List. Well. It’s just that it has been a really long damn time since I have found myself in the position of “dating” anyone or “seeing” anyone or “hanging out with” anyone or whatever the kids are calling it these days and I suspect that I am over-thinking every last goddamned detail. But then I wonder, am I really over-thinking and over-analyzing, or am I so socially inept that I am missing some painfully obvious cues? Am I missing the text for the subtext? I can be pretty thickheaded and oblivious, sometimes, to the ways of human interaction, or at least I seem that way a lot of the time. I can’t help it. As Betty Draper would say, it’s just my people are Nordic.

I think writing out all this nonsense (even as vaguely as I have) may have been helpful. But misery, as they say, loves company. Tell me, what’s on your current Fret List?

Coffee Week Continues – with Poorly Organized thoughts and a Limited Attention Span

I am chugging along in a blaze of caffeinated productivity, hopefully to end tomorrow evening. In the meanwhile, my brain is almost completely maxed out. That thing that happens to an athlete when they overtrain? Called overtraining? It’s happening inside my brain right now. Nonetheless, I can’t believe I’ll soon be done with the semester — there were a couple of weeks after Spring Break during which I honestly felt that time was moving backwards.

In other news, the crush guy I so eloquently embarrassed myself in front of with my weirdo eye hickey comment — remember him? Well, I guess he doesn’t think I am a complete freak (or maybe he does and he just likes freaks; either way) because we have been hanging out a bit. Let’s just hope I can for the love of dog play it somewhat cool (very difficult for me) and not bring up the eye hickeys again and/or not accidentally tell him that I like him like him. Lord knows guys get all nervous when they think we like them.

In completely unrelated news (listen, I said my brain is fried and I meant it — smooth transitions have gone the way of my patience and sanity) I finally caught up on The Biggest Loser. This week’s episode was a real tearjerker. It was makeover week, which I love because the contestants get all prettied up and get to see how great they look after all the hard work, but especially because their families and friends get to see them. The reactions are always great. I know some people hate the show because 1) it both sort of sensationalizes and abjectifies fat people and 2) it presents radical weight loss in an unrealistic setting. Both of these are valid complaints. You know what, though? Watching the fat people sweat it out, eat salads, and get skinny, all while Bob and Jillian yell at them? It has always inspired me, especially back when I had gotten overweight and lazy and thought I was doomed to stay that way. Jillian is totally my fitness guru.

Speaking of inspiration, I spent yesterday and today reading my literature students’ final papers, and honestly — what an unexpected place for me to find inspiration. We never really talked about this topic in class, but for some reason a large number of students wound up writing about relationships and community; the need to nourish our lives by connecting with others; the perils of a life lived for oneself alone. I’ve been thinking about that too lately. I don’t know what I want to say about it here right now, but maybe I will put my thoughts together soon for a post at a later date.

Poorly organized thoughts, indeed. Time for me to sign off so I can get ready to finish my week (and my semester). Thank dog.