circe

Internet back. Home phone back. Coffee good and my hens are laying eggs again. (As evidenced by the fact that for the first time in a whole flipping long time I fried up some eggs and ate them for breakfast.)

I woke up at a few minutes before three and instead of doing anything productive, just lay in bed checking the work the students I'm GAing have done, watching some ridiculous show called Tales From the Darkside on Syfy (please, please, please SciFi, return to your original spelling; it hurts me so to see you call yourself "SyFy), and hoping-hoping-hoping I'd fall back to sleep. (Eh.) Now I need to think of something important-ish to write real' fast so I can blog before I return to my assorted school stuff.

Eh, I can't concentrate on blogging. I'm GAing 40 students and each time I check an email there's something to look into. The last couple days it's been good things. I mean, the students are getting their acts together for the most part (finally!), and I think the grade point averages will be really good this week. Earlier though, all I was getting was shocked affront, confusion, tons of dogs apparently eating tons of assignments, I'm-sick-I-didn't-know-I-don't-have-a-book-what's the assignment?-I-think-I'm-in-this-class-I've never-taken-an-online-class-before-and-I-don't-know-how-to-use-a-computer-why-can't-I-post-in-chatspeak?-I'm-being-forced-to-take-this-class-I-don't-want-to-take-this-class-I'm-a-Christian-woman-not-a-feminist-I-don't-want-to-read-about-lesbian-b.s.-this-class-is-against-whites-and-whites-are-oppressed-here're-my-late-assignments-what-do-you-mean-the-syllabus-says-no-late-assignments-will-be-accepted?-what's-a-syllabus?-why-did-you-give-me-such-a-bad-grade?-when-did-the-semester-start?

The amazing thing, I mean the thing that continually amazes me, is how freaking patient and kind I've consistently been. I may be rolling my eyes, gnashing my teeth, and muttering some pretty interestingly harsh things, but in all my communication I'm really fricking encouraging, supportive, positive and crap. Who knew?

Who knew indeed, because the classes I'm GAing are fricking EASY! I wish the course had been this fricking easy when I took it almost two years ago! No writing assignments, no essays, just two short-ish multiple choice t/f exams, a really easy wiki assignment, and three short weekly discussion board posts on the readings. Simple! Ridiculously easy! And most of the class can't seem to do it, can't figure it out, can't put a sentence successfully together!

Eh, but some are getting better. Some of the ones I've worked with are getting their act together. (Some still aren't.) And that feels good. It makes me happy to see them improve. Teaching is apparently about caring (who knew?), and I find myself caring very much.

But I'm also tired, and probably doing too much. I need to find a balance. And now I better go. (Ugh. It feels kind of not-good to have food on my stomach in the morning. Hunger makes me feel, idk, sharper. Now I just feel kind of heavy and dull. Meh.)

test

oh blog, why won't you accept my comments? it's me, blog. me, circe. why are you treating me this way? you accept comments from all those spammers --i know because i have to get rid of them every day. what do they have that i don't? and i was just trying to leave a funny comment in response to that one spam comment on my last entry that i actually published, but you keep calling my comments "invalid." invalid, blog? am i too invalid for you? i was going to say, i just wanted to comment: "(Heh. Since the server switch, I've been getting like twenty spam comments per day. They span from ambiguously flattering to obliquely precautionary like the one above. Spam means you never have to be alone.)" that was it, that was all, but you won't let me. why blog? why? why? why? is this your passive aggressive way of saying good-bye, blog?

Crap. No internet at home. First, here's what I was typing this a.m. as it was gradually occurring to me that my internet was gone and not coming back:

Blah. Modem slow. And our home phone has been out for a week. Verizon says that on my street rain "leaks into the wires" and when it rains the phones get static-y. This is beyond static -this is no dial tone, and now my modem is all slow. I may have to go on a killing spree.

 

I just had Rayne restart the modem. As we have many times timed it, it takes fourteen minutes to only flash the dumb little lights it's supposed to and start working. I'm always afraid that one of these times it's just not going to work and I'm going to have to start the whole repair/replacement process all over again.

 

In other suck-y news, no child support this week. No alleged court settlement thing either. My property tax check just went through ($1084, if anyone's really interested), and I'm broke until the 15^th. Let's see if the modem's back . . . Nope. Fucktarded thing.

 

And wtf? My entire street is just supposed to accept Verizon's leaky phone lines? Figure when it's raining we're incommunicada/o? Wtf? You know, I'm changing my name for my town from Small Town, Texas to Third World, Texas.

 

I don't mean to be all grumpy. I woke up grumpy. The delicate balance that was our human/dog/cat interaction and connectivity has all gone to hell since that puppy arrived. Not that it's necessarily the puppy's fault; she may just have been the tipping point. [Grrr. Rayne's unplugging and re-plugging the modem AGAIN because it just.wasn't.coming.back. Kill me.) Jealousy and incessant barking have become some of our mid-level dogs' current hobby and I'm not nearly as tolerant as Sierra when it comes to canine bullshit. [The modem's never going to come back, is it? Fucking stupid wiring. Fucking Verizon.] And Orangetoa, the big excessively fluffy orange cat is having some kind of nervous breakdown. A breakdown that relentlessly involves peeing on whatever towel I put down on the floor as an after-showing-stepping-upon-textile. It makes me INSANE.

 

The modem's not coming back. What am I going to do? I've got all this class stuff to do, besides grades for my GA classes. How can I do this without a modem? This is so fucked up. I've got to get the kids to school. What kind of place can't get phone or internet when it rains? I need to get out of here. Trin wants me to start looking for a house locally. Not this town locally, but local-ish-ly. Because the trailer's not going to last much longer. And I'm in no position to move out of Texas. And Trin hasn't had friends over in years and years (at this point, I don't think I'd let anyone come over).

***

Okay.

I'm at Panera's and I'm having a quiet, fairly well-contained panic attack. No internet? Srsly? Because I have my own classes, and the classes I'm TAing and "no internet" is a fricking death sentence. How long can I stay at Panera? Forever? Or until I od on caffeine? Verizon tried to tell me a number of service calls before that I must have "rewired my phone lines" as they attach outside to my trailer and as such they are not responsible. I was all, in my head, WTF? Rewired WHAT? Like . . . because that's what I DO? Sneak out by the dark of the moon and FUCK WITH MY PHONE WIRES?

Crap crap crap. My home phone and internet are CONSTANTLY going out. And while I don't need my home phone, I DO NEED MY INTERNET. (See all the caps? That's the panic attack typing.)

I better go. I've got an f-load of my own stuff to do, plus the students I am GAing are driving me INSANE. They're calling at all kinds of weird hours, and by that I mean "not during my official virtual office hours." I'm going to change my cell's outgoing vm message to "Have you read the SYLLABUS?"

I better go. Pray for my internet. Give me info on those wireless cards. Tell me if you think I can get my own health insurance for less that the two hundred I'll be paying per month if I get it through my GA job. Send me over another frozen mocha. Tell my flipping students to READ THE SYLLABUS.

I very matter-of-factly told Fran that I am not giving him that money, he starting going on about, "I gave you everything! And you owe it to me to help me!" Blah blah. And I'm trying to grade some of my better students and I don't have time for Fran's bullshit and as I repeat that I'm not giving him any money, he says that if that's the way I'm going to be, we'll just "let the chips fall as they will" and I won't get any more child support.

Oh. Okay.

You know, I may have to revise Fran's non-place on my list.

I need a fricking beer.

Fucking fucktarded crackhead, threatening me. If my tooth didn't hurt and I wasn't all tired and it wasn't fricking SNOWING outside, I'd laugh.

See my blogroll? Read Ebon Bear's entry "The United States Died Today." Is he right? Because I don't know. I've been too busy to follow politics as closely as I used to, and besides, I've been kind of all, Et tu, Barack? lately.

Anyway. Is Ebon Bear right? Right-ish? Wrong? Wrong-ish? Should I be really planning on relo'ing to Canada and stuff?

And that reminds me, my former exalted English professor sends me links to academic stuff, academic stuff showing academic jobs and stuff, and it looks as though strange places I can't reliably locate on a globe are hiring more than, say, Eugene, OR. And I met with the professor I'm GAing for and besides it being a very pleasant and productive meeting (despite my extreme apprehension), as she walked me to my little Socialist Mobile car, she was all telling me that the academic hiring scene is grim. Like, three hundred applicants per position and with this kind of imbalance, the hiring university's are going with the applicants from the way prestigious universities. She said that she put out . . . I can't remember the exact number but it was big . . . applications-or-whatever and got only three offers. She said something else, something that had me mentally rolling my eyes, she said that the salaries aren't very good, that she was "barely hanging on by a thread," and I thought, Yeah. Right. Because her idea of a thread and mine are no doubt light years apart. She said that she wonders now why she got her doctorate, why she racked up such high student loans, if they whole thing was smart, worth it. I listened to her and I kept repeating, "Wow," because I didn't know what else to say. Wow. Wow, indeed. And I guess I definitely need to consider everything she shared with me, and it corresponds to what my former English professor has said. I need to look at what I'm doing, examine where this can realistically take me. And, sigh, I don't want to. Because I like this whole academic thing. I like being a student, I like being a graduate assistant. I like the whole thing, even though it's hard, stressful, challenging. And I've been living on coffee and vitamins and adrenalin this last week and I know I can't keep that up forever. But see, I got it done, and my work didn't suck, and this felt good even as I finally collapsed yesterday evening, had to drag myself away from my keyboard where I was trying to both monitor my own students and organize my coursework, drag myself away and spend an hour with the kids before going to bed, trying -and failing- to sleep. Anyway. I'd hate for this whole thing to be a bad idea. Is the professor I'm GAing for telling me it was for her? I can't understand that, because she seems amazingly cool, she seems like she's got everything together. And she's all published everywhere and stuff, and she's branching off into an amazing video project and she seems, idk, to have succeeded. I don't know. I'm not sure what to think.

But where was I going with this? (Canada?) Oh. If Ebon Bear is right, my academic future is even more grim in the United States. There's already a serious trend of anti-intellectualism and this doesn't bode well for, well, you know, me.

Eh. Argh. Damn, it figures, right? I finally get my academic/potentially professional life in semi order and then academia goes all out of fashion and stuff. Just like Wal-Mart discontinued my favorite Michaelina Budget Gourmet Shrimp Scampi. Just to bother me, they discontinued it.  And it's totally gone and it was the only cheap frozen diet entree I really liked. Figures, right?

In other news, I'm having coffee after class tomorrow with one of my fellow students. She's got a big bunch of initials after her name, multiple master's, a Ph.D even, and yet she's pursuing another Master's in WS. At first I was all intimidated, but couldn't stay that way because she's so friendly and stuff and when she emailed me yesterday, asking if I'd have time for coffee after our class, I was all, There's always time for coffee.

So. Cool. And the sub job I was scheduled for went and canceled on me and I was amazingly relieved, because  I'm worried that I'm not logging twenty hours per week on my GA gig, and  now I can work on it today as well as my own classes. And I was doing dishes circa four a.m. as I waited on my coffee and it occurred to me that Fran has a whole lot of freaking nerve, trying to coerce me out of that money, and I almost laughed into my dishes because he must think I'm [still] amazingly dumb, amazingly easy to manipulate, exploit. Give him that money? Remember all that money he went through not-too-many years ago, the money from our foreclosed upon former home in Mc**Ki*nney? Like, seventeen thousand? Eighteen? Wtf? And all these years of no child support? Stealing fricking toilet paper and shampoo because we were so effing poor? Fuck him. No cards, calls, gifts for the kids, ever. And what? What the fuck? He's "never asked me for anything before" ? What universe is he living in? And a title loan on his car? Yeah right, and even so, what the fuck is he doing taking out a title loan? (Who does this?) (I don't.) You know, me and the kids, we're really, really fucking poor, and he's a lot of the reason for this, and now he wants me to give him money? And if I don't he's going to stop working? Wtf? Incredible. (Note to self: At some future point remember to laugh about this.) He's always saying on the phone, "When are you going to get rich so I can stop working?" "When are you going to publish your book so we can retire?" And in my head I'm all -you guessed it- WTF? What the fucking fuck? Because he thinks that I'm going to help him? Srsly? And I don't think/feel this way out of, you know, out of meanness, vengeance, animosity, and you know those lists I keep in my head, the I'll Get You Back At Some Point lists? Fran's not on those lists. (Which is pretty fricking incredible, actually.) But help him? Yawn, no. Nah, nope, uh-uh. Not happening.

Anyway I still feel as though I'm operating on some form of speed and as far as I know -unless you count coffee- I'm not. I feel okay. Not bad. And that thousand bucks? I can get my mower fixed. And the kitchen sink facets have literally rotted, I'm serious, they've rotted and how the flip does metal rot? For months the water somehow drips down under the sink and we have to keep emptying pots, but now I can get it fixed. (I bought new facets from my shrimp scampi-less Wal-Mart but we can't detach any of the pipe connections. I swear, they're all corroded in place or something, and I'm afraid to break something.) My mother's handyman person will replace the facet stuff for hopefully-not-too-much money and now I can schedule him to come out. And I want a garden, and to have a garden I need a goat-proof enclosure, a fenced-in garden, and now I can actually look into doing this. So. Fran's title loan? Not my problem.

I better go. I need to get 2/3 of the kids to school, there's some kind of winter weather issue going on outside, and I want to get home, drink some more speed coffee, and dive into my Pedagogy course and then when Sierra wakes up I want to be able to actually sit down, hang out with her and wish her happy birthday, eat a little piece of the delicious chocolate cake she made, in a way I was too rushed and busy to do yesterday. Anyway. Later. 

Because I need to handle this right.

Real quick, because it's 3:44 a.m. and I have to actually get up in a few minutes: First -crap! Too effing stressed/busy. Subbing, GAing, my huge courseload. Something has got to change, adjust. I need to achieve a better balance, because I'm not eating, not sleeping, just working, studying, driving. But anyway, that's not the thing. Here's the thing real' fast - I subbed today, it was Sierra's birthday, and I was behind on both my GA duties and my assignments. I was on my computer, working, working, stressing but getting stuff done even as I felt consumed by guilt for not hanging with Sierra on her birthday. Fran kept calling. All day, he'd been calling and calling and I hadn't been answering because, wtf? I'm busy! Anyway. I finally answered, and long-drama-short, he got a legal settlement on some auto thing where in one of his frequent car crashes he was actually hit, and it was a thousand dollars or so, and the attorney general took it for back child support. (This is news to me, as it hasn't shown up yet on my AG Child Support Interactive thingie.) Anyway, he wants me to give the money back to him. Let it count as back child support (and as you can imagine, he owes TONS), and the give it back to him. He says he has a title loan on his car (wtf? he'd previously told me the car was still in his father's name, certainly his mother still insures it for him), and if he doesn't pay back the loan they'll take the car, he won't be able to work, and I'll stop getting the child support I've been suddenly getting since fall. He said, get this, "I've never asked you to do anything for me before and now I need you to help me with this." He tried to all guilt/pressure me into telling him I'd do it, and I said I'd get back to him, that I was desperately in need of money as well, that I had to pay my property taxes, blah blah, and I'd call him tomorrow with my answer.

Now. I'm not going to give him that money back. No way. No how. But there's a reasonably good chance that he really will, out of spite if nothing else, stop working his official, child-support-withheld job just so my child support will cease. What I'm saying, is that by taking this thousand bucks, I may be losing six hundred per month. But still. I can't give him this money. Because seriously, what the fuck? Should I send some official form of communication to the MA DOR that is handling my child support case now? Tell them that he is trying to coerce me into giving him this money? Saying that if I don't he will stop working? I mean, I'd like some kind of evidence on record, for when he really does stop working.

But what do I say to him? An official reply. And no, nothing stupid and aggressive, nothing mean. Just something very definite. Very firm. Very, you know, professional. Something that a woman who is working towards her doctorate would reply. You know.

Ugh. 4:02. Rise and not-shine.  

Here I am, going to an on-campus class, all scared and worrying that I smell like goats and stuff:

. . . go to sleep. The race towards academic and professional prestige will still be there circa four  a.m.

(Note 2 self 2: If I survive and succeed through this week I am so, so drinking wine and eating chocolate this weekend.)

(Tangent: My hens are laying eggs again! Yay organic forms of protein!)

(Tangent 2: Puppy wicked cute and working on developing an actual bark.)

(Note 2 self 3: Serious about that going to sleep thing! Refer to first note!)

And it begins.

Last evening so scared, nervous, self-doubting . . . I'm somehow convinced that the professor I'm GAing for doesn't or won't like me. One of my students emailed me last night because a link from the course didn't work and I drove myself crazy trying to find an alternate source for the link before finally contacting the professor who simply realized that the link just, you know, didn't work anymore. But I was so scared, having a student contact me, trying to find the right tone of communication -- friendly, warm, but not too friendly. I mean, not overly so. (Because I'm scared that if I'm too friendly, my students will be mean to me . . .)

Blah blah, panic attack last night. And I was all, "I can't do it, I can't do it . . ." And Sierra's all, "Of course you can do it. You'll be fine, you'll be great. Your* a genius." And me all, "I'm not a genius, I'm not a genius, I'm not a genius . . ." Sierra: "Even Frankie knows you're a genius. Right, Frankie?" And Rayne looking up from his computer, "What? Yes. You're a genius, Mama."

But so scared, so scared. But I just posted my intro to my classes, and I played it simple and basic and I hope that's okay. The professor suggested the GAs post a pic but I don't think that's a good idea. I think students form associations, biases, even, based upon pictures, and I don't want that. I have a kind of ethnically ambiguous name and I think ambiguity is what I want to do with here.

I've got to go, I've got to go . . . My own two classes start today, too, and I have to do the damned Orthodontist Odyssey From Hades today which means I'm going to be away from my poor computer on a day that I really wish I weren't . . .

Eh. Gotta go.

*[Update: See? TYPO! Grammar typo! See? Already I'm messing up! Argh. Grr! Too much coffee! Must shower! Shower off the stench of typo and bitter, bitter coffee!]

(I'm wearing pink!) (And, well, holding the cute puppy.)