What Now?

Gone into that good night

This afternoon, D and I had to put our sweet, elderly kitty-girl to sleep. We'd been expecting this moment for two months now (when I wrote a post about her twilight days). We had worried a lot about how we'd know when it was time, when her quality of life had diminished past the point with which we were comfortable, and you all had reassured us that she'd let us know when it was time. All week, we'd had an eye out for her, and I'd been increasingly convinced that she wasn't going to make the move with us to the new house, but she was still purring and snuggling and seemed happy; and then, this afternoon, it became clear that she wasn't happy any more and that the time had come. We had a lovely vet at the animal hospital, and we were both with her when she died.

A sad day for both of us, and especially for D; she and the kitty-girl had already had an 8-year relationship before I ever showed up on the scene with my two cats. The five of us made a very successful blended family. And for the last three years, when it was just the three of us left, we got all the sweeter on each other. The house just isn't the same now.

They don't call me "Doctor" for nothing!

Poor D. sprained her ankle this evening, and we wound up spending our Saturday night at the ER, having it X-rayed to make sure that she hadn't broken anything. And the news is good on that front -- nothing broken, an air-cast for her ankle, regular icing and keeping it elevated, and she should be good to go in a week or so.

But enough about her. The important thing is that I am going to be okay.

As we were sitting there in the examining room, the nice young doctor was manipulating D's various joints to make sure that everything was in working order, and as he worked his way down to her foot and was wiggling her toes to make sure they weren't broken, I suddenly started feeling very peculiar, in an oh-dear-I-may-faint sort of way. I started fanning myself vigorously with a magazine and put my head down between my knees, and suddenly everyone was gathered around me because I apparently was looking quite gray. As they wheeled D. out to the X-ray room, the doctor was helping me to lie down on the bed and putting a wet cloth on my forehead and another behind my neck. A nurse came to check my blood pressure and then came back with some ginger-ale and graham crackers for me.

By the time D. got wheeled back, I was sitting up at a slight angle in the bed and taking more interest in the world around me. And everyone who came back to check on D. at various intervals would stop by my bed and make sure that I was doing fine as well. We started joking that we might have to get another friend to come pick both of us up, but that we'd need to make sure the friend didn't see either of us being examined or she might pass out, and on and on with a domino effect through everyone we know in Adventure City, until the ER room was piled high with the bodies of D's and WN's friends.

After double-checking that I was really going to be okay to drive home, the nurse brought D. a glass of water and a Vicadin (mmm, opiates!), and D. started joking with the nurse that I got ginger-ale whereas she -- the actual ER patient -- only got water. So then later the nurse brought us two of her specialty "cocktails" of cranberry juice and ginger-ale, whereupon we decided that this was the classiest nightspot in Adventure City.

I feel quite confident that I did not miss my true calling, and that the only type of doctor I'm fit to be is a literary one. I can do some writing triage if you need it, but otherwise I'm apparently not to be counted on in an emergency.

Status: Resolved (or mostly)

Well, this has been a week for the record books, but I managed to limp my way through it and even to stay sane by virtue of the repreated refrain, "I can do only one thing at a time, and right now that thing is X." It's now Saturday, and not one but FOUR various situations have managed to resolve themselves in the last few days. Herewith, the week's updates:

Remember the plagiarism? It turned out to be a situation of one student's copying from another, which is one of the dumbest situations imaginable since of course the offending student knew that I'd be reading both papers. The copied-from student had sent her paper to a couple of friends to get their feedback; one of these friends was the copier, who I think was panicking about her own paper (all of this was about 11:30 the night before it was due) and thought she'd just copy the thesis and structure from the other girl's paper; but she's such a bad writer and thinker that apparently the only way she knew to copy the structure was to copy the first 2-3 sentences of each paragraph, which of course is how I caught the plagiarism. Anyway, I've now gotten an up-close-and-personal look at academic dishonesty procedures at FGS, and I'm exhausted but very impressed. This was the student's second offense, and so expulsion was a strong possibility, but the administration and the Disciplinary Committee decided that the better route was to suspend her for the rest of the year, make her take a writing course this summer, make her start seeing a counselor weekly (to deal with working under pressure and wise decision-making), and require weekly sessions in the writing lab all next year. I think this is a great outcome, combining punishment with opportunities to learn from her mistakes. The Dean of Students told me that she'd been telling this student that she needed to learn NOW how to avoid academic dishonesty, because when she got to college everything would be different; a single case of plagiarism and she'd be kicked out of college. I refrained from disabusing the Dean of her confidence in how seriously colleges take dishonesty. And there will be letters of apology from the student, to me, to the dean (to whom she lied repeatedly), and to the student from whom she copied, who went through quite the hellish week herself.

Remember the annoying colleague? Well, my demand last weekend for clearer communication seems to have had some effect, at least temporarily. We wound up having a 2 1/2-hour meeting on Monday after school that was incredibly productive and made me feel much better about this project we're working on; of course, the fact that my colleague didn't mention the need for such a meeting until that afternoon is exactly the sort of thing that has been driving me crazy, but I decided not to push the issue because it was more important for my stress levels that the work get done than that it get done in an orderly fashion (mostly because that ship has long sailed!). And I have done a fabulous job of not feeling guilty in the intervening week; it is entirely true that my colleague has done more than half the work, but that is entirely her fault because she has refused to communicate about what needs to be done (and she's done this project many times, whereas this was supposed to be a learning year for me) and she has made demands on me at the very last minute, only some of which I have been able to comply with because I had made other plans in the absence of information from her. I am doing a last few things for the project this weekend, and she'll have a couple of things to do on Monday, and then the project is done for another year. We may well end up doing this project together again next year, but things will be different, believe me!

Remember the tooth crisis? I had an appointment on Thursday afternoon for the dentist to take impressions for the crown. I was under the impression that this was all that was happening at the appointment, but it turned out once I was in the chair that this was also the appointment in which the dentist, as he put it, "tried to be a hero" to see if he could clear out all the decay from my cavity and to determine whether a root canal was going to be necessary. Two and a half hours later, I staggered out to my car with my face half-frozen from Novacaine, a dull ache in my gums, and a temporary crown on my tooth -- not at all what I would have chosen to do with this week if I'd realized! The good news is that it actually wasn't so bad; boy, that Novacaine sure does the trick, doesn't it? I did make him give me an extra shot of it, but whether that had additional numbing value or only a placebo effect, I don't know. I only reacted emotionally once, when the assistant was taking an x-ray to see if they'd gotten all the decay out; she stuck an enormous and sharp-edged piece of film down my throat, gouging the soft tissue in the bottom of my mouth and triggering my gag reflex, and I started crying and couldn't stop for several minutes, which distressed the dentist and assistant no end. They kept patting me and calling me "honey" and were quite sweet, and of course I was embarrassed. But we all weathered the situation, and the x-ray eventually got taken, and all of the news seems to be good. The decay came very close to the nerve, and it's still a possibility that bacteria got into the nerve and that a big, raging infection is starting up at this very moment; so I have a prescription for an antibiotic and for Vicadin in case I develop pain, at which point a root canal is the only way to go. But so far, so good; it's been almost 48 hours, and I've had no pain since Friday morning, so I'm cautiously optimistic. And I'm ending up with only a partial crown, although it looks like that will cost me just as much as a full crown, so I'm not entirely sure why this is the good news that my dentist hailed it as; I guess less metal in my mouth is a good idea on general principle.

Finally, remember the house? As of 25 hours ago, it's ours! Closing went off without a hitch. It was an incredibly lesbian-friendly closing, I must say; our realtor's sister is a partnered lesbian, and the other realtor is herself a partnered lesbian, and the other seller's attorney has a large LGBT client base, so as we were signing the deed, D. asked a question to make sure that it was as legally clear as possible that we were co-owning the house; and in that conversation, it became clear that there was actually another way to write the deed that would make this even clearer, so we all waited while a new version of the deed was drawn up -- a very happy solution. And while our attorney was drawing up said deed, the rest of us had a conversation about deeds and wills and domestic partnerships and marriage, and the end result of that conversation is that we're going to make an appointment with the other attorney to have her do our wills, powers of attorney, etc., which we never updated after we moved to Adventure City.

So, although it's been a completely exhausting week, it actually works out nicely that those other school- and health-related issues got resolved, because D. and I are now diving headfirst into home renovation and repair. All we had time and energy for last night was taking down all of the picture hangers and hooks from the walls and spackling the holes, but I'm getting ready to head over there for the afternoon to do a little sanding and then wash the walls so that we can prime them tomorrow. I've already had the remembered realization that things like painting take much longer in real life than they do on home improvement shows, so I've scaled back my expectations for what we can get done in the next two weeks, especially since we also have to pack. But if we can have at least the bedroom, the living room, and the kitchen painted and ready to go, I think we'll be fine; plus I want to get the basement walls painted to brighten the place up and so that we can put shelves up and start storing stuff down there. And everything else can get taken care of at a more leisurely pace over the summer. And that summer, of course, is really not so far away; I'm a free woman one month from today ... and what a busy month it will be. But I'm going to stick with my mantra: "I can do only one thing at a time, and right now that thing is X."

the questions of the ages

Or at least the questions of the ages for those of us about to leap into a painting extravaganza. Closing is Friday, and painting in the new house commences this weekend! So, the questions:

1) Should painted trim be white or cream?

2) Should walls always be primed before beautiful new color is put on? D.'s and my experience of painting is in a house with walls in terrible shape, with layers of wallpaper and hideous old paint and various things that had to be pried off the walls, so we're used to having to do a good bit of patching and repair work before painting; priming was inevitable. But in the new house, the walls are in fine shape (only a couple of small patches needed) and were all painted a neutral pale color several years ago. Should we prime before painting?

3) Other feelings on wall preparation? I can't remember cleaning the walls last time around, but that may be because we were doing so very much repair that cleaning went as part of the whole package and I just don't remember it. But I know some people clean walls before painting. Any suggestions?

I believe pictures will be necessary over the next few weeks!

So disappointing

I just discovered my first plagiarism cases at FGS. Two students had the remarkably bad fortune to copy from the same source for their essay, so as I started reading the second one, I thought, "Wait a minute, this is familiar." Moreover, they chose a badly written essay to copy from. The second student did a better job of revising the stolen paper and of adding the research to it so that it fit the assignment requirements, but there are almost identical sentences throughout the essays. I can't find the original online, so I probably would have just given them bad grades for their weak papers if they hadn't copied from the same one.

So disappointing.

I've just sent them each an email, requesting (firmly) a meeting with them on Monday to discuss the sources for their paper. This should give their consciences plenty of stewing time before the meetings. I've also just emailed their advisors to alert them to the situation.

The good news in this bad situation is that the school will take it very seriously. There will be Disciplinary Committee meetings of the sort I participated in back in February, and there will be Serious Consequences indeed. In addition to grade penalties and probation and detention and phone calls to parents and all the rest of it, students convicted of academic dishonesty have to write a letter of apology (one that passes muster with the dean of students) to the teacher in whose class they cheated. Although there is nothing at all satisfying about this whole sad situation, I think it will be helpful to me, if not to the students, to finally get a formal apology from a cheating student, something I haven't experienced heretofore.

Sigh.

Pissed ... but not so very much

Today, for the first time since I arrived at FGS, I had a lunch date with a friend for the sole purpose of venting about how mad I am about a co-worker with whom I share a particular responsibility and who is making me CRAZY and expanding my workload significantly this month. And the venting helped, but I was still pissed, and then I had to stay after school for two hours to do the work that is made all the worse by this co-worker's simultaneous irresponsibility and sense of martyrdom.

And I was so irritated by the time I left school that I drove home thinking, "I want to go out to a bar and have a drink and eat bar food and bitch and moan about my job!" I called D to tell her, and she gamely went out with me to the local pubhouse for a drink and nachos, and I kvetched and grumped and bitched up a storm.

And then I came home, still wound up, and read an email from said coworker that pissed me off even further and gave me more reason to vent. So I wrote an angry blog post about how I'm so incredibly frustrated by working with this person and how the whole thing is just so damned frustrating and about how I am damn well not doing this same task next year, no siree bob, not unless we establish some serious ground rules before we ever start, and even then I'm cracking the whip so that s/he damn well  lives up to those groundrules.

But by the time I finished that blog post, I had about worn out my spleen. Getting all the venting out of my system, in conjunction with the two glasses of wine I've now had, has worn me out (not helped by the fact that I woke up before 5:00 a.m. and decided to get out of bed and go to work so that I could start grading at 6:00 a.m. -- yeesh). So I wrote back an email establishing a clear-ish boundary (that is, as clear as seemed politic under the circumstances), which has het me up a little bit, but honestly I'm now feeling tired enough that my anger has mellowed a bit and I've deleted that other blog post and instead am going to tell you a sweet little story about my FGS students, because the fact of the matter is that this colleague will only be a thorn in my side for about another week and then the responsibility is over for this year, and how amazing is it that today is the first day I've been really, really angry about something in my job, and honestly I have just the best job ever, this one co-worker notwithstanding.

So here's the sweet story about my students, who totally made up for my irritating colleague today: Every summer the FGS students have required reading for various and sundry classes. The English department assigns them one mandated book, depending on their grade, and then they have to choose two other books from a recommended list; plus they have social studies and science books to read as well. The library puts together a little booklet with all the required and recommended books and annotations about each one.

Today is the day the booklets were delivered to my classroom, to be passed out to the students in my English classes.

Turns out that the summer reading list day is one of the highlights of the end of the year. As students filed into the classroom and their eyes lit on the pile of booklets on the front table, their faces lit up with joy and excitement. By mid-day, the word had spread, and my last class ran into the classroom, all on fire to get their own copy of the booklet. And they said, in all sincerity and earnestness, things like, "Oh, I love it when the summer list comes out! This is the best day ever!!" One student of all of them said, "I find summer reading kind of stressful, because I'm always worried I won't get the reading done by the time school starts," but even she later recommended enthusiastically to her classmates a particular book on the list, which she said was her favorite book ever. And the rest of them were simply over the moon.

Have you ever heard of anything so adorably eager and dorky and sweet?

Mind you, many of these excited kids are not top students, are not the A English students, but are just kids who think that there are lots of good books out there and that the teachers in the English department might have some great recommendations for which of those books would be fun to read.

On Wednesday night I was chatting with a neighbor who asked how the job was going, and I said to her, "You know, I finally have the academic career I've always wanted. It just took leaving academia in order to achieve it." I made the remark kind of off the cuff, but afterward I decided that it was actually true. And my adorable students today, so eager to think about all the fun books they were going to read over summer break, reinforce those rosy feelings.

Plus, the reading list also came out today for the faculty/staff summer reading! So I have to choose which book I want the school to buy for me  so I can talk about it in fall with my colleagues who chose to read the same group. Fun!

(But boy, that coworker of mine is really chapping my hide. Grrr.)

Added the next morning: Well, apparently my accentuating the positive didn't do much for my subconscious. In my dreams last night I spent what felt like a really long time doing work for this particular project and getting more and more upset about it. I forced myself awake about 3:00 a.m., calmed myself down, fell back asleep, and proceeded to have a very complicated dream in which someone had abandoned a baby boy and I suddenly had him thrust upon me and had to care for him with no notice and without adequate resources. Gee, I wonder what that was about? Not a restful night, and I woke up pissed at my colleague. Sigh. Oh well, it's all over the week after next.

A great summer-to-be after all

Tuesday night, instead of doing the grading I should have been doing (and that I still haven't done and that will now take up my entire weekend. D'oh!), I redid our budget for the summer in light of our hefty tax refunds, some writing that both D and I are doing that's actually getting paid (amazing!), our lower mortgage payments thanks to D's careful comparison shopping and negotiations, and the almost $1000 I'm getting from FGS this summer to do some administrative planning and work that (a) will not take me too much effort, and (b) I would perhaps have done anyway, even without getting $$ for it.

And the end result of all of this financial figuring is that we've decided that neither of us needs to get an additional summer job after all, and we can spend the summer living frugally and writing and puttering in our new house! Yay!!

The best part of this is that I now don't need to study any math at all, which is cause for rejoicing. I had gotten invited to the teacher training for the SAT-prep company, although I was still going to have to re-take the SATs and get a certain score. And, in view of my deep reluctance to re-learn geometry and functions, I was looking into other tutoring possibilities instead. But now I don't have to do any of that, and I feel incredibly relieved. And I also anticipate that I will be much happier about school's starting again in the fall if I've had a real summer, unlike last summer when I started off the year tired from the Dreadful Summer School experience.

And, I'm glad to say, I'm also feeling really excited about spending the summer writing, writing, writing. I'll be signing up for three months of the Academic Writing Club, of which I'm a huge fan for its supportive accountability (it provides a new opportunity for a gold star [or rather a green checkmark] every single day -- who can resist?) and am setting some ambitious goals for myself but am also planning on spending no more than two hours working each day, with plenty of time left over for settling into the new house.

I'm so excited! Now, if only I didn't have four weeks of classes and then a week of exams remaining before those summer plans can begin. Heck, if only I'd done some grading this week and thus didn't have 55 papers to grade this weekend and could spend the weekend daydreaming about the summer instead of slogging away. Entirely my own fault, sadly. But who cares about that; the summer beckons, albeit from a distance!

Do I know nothing?

D. and I were just joking about Cujo, and I was then surprised to see how the word was spelled; I always thought it was "Kujo." In fact, I was so convinced of this that I googled the word in order to prove D. wrong, at which point I discovered that "Cujo" -- spelled just as D. had insisted -- is the title of a Stephen King novel. I asked D. if she knew this fact, whereupon she looked at me as though I were a half-wit and said, "Yeah, that's where the word comes from."

I had no idea.

I thought that people had been referring to wolves as "Kujo" for one or more centuries.

Moreover, the fact that I thought that "Kujo" referred to wolves seems to be yet another mistake, since apparently the Cujo of the novel is not a wolf at all but a rabid St. Bernard.

No idea at all.

Goodness, I'm learning a lot this week!

All these years I've been wrong

I've just discovered that the phrase "high muckity muck" that I've been using for, oh, forever, is more properly "high-muck-a-muck."

Well, "muckety muck" (notice the different spelling) is a not-infrequent variation, as is "mucky muck," and the "high" is sometimes included and sometimes not. So it's not exactly that I'm wrong (except as perhaps to spelling), but more that I had no idea of the standard use or derivation of the word.

Interesting.

End of an era (and I'm a decade late to the wake)

Did you all know that there's no longer any such thing as the after school special, and indeed there hasn't been for well over ten years?

I was trying to explain didactic literature to my students and used the after school special as -- I thought -- the perfect example. They looked at me blankly and had no idea at all what I was talking about.

So then I got to explain both didactic literature and the after school special, with a little digression along the way about growing up with only four television stations and no Internet; my students are getting lessons in cultural history of the 1980s as well as in literature. (These are the same students who learned the significance of "Electric Boogaloo" in December.)

Now that I think about it, it makes sense that this particular TV phenomenon wouldn't exist in the same way anymore, in the age of talk shows and the internet and cable television. I just can't believe that I hadn't realized until now that this genre of my youth was no longer.

Apparently I'm getting old, and I've become one of those middle-aged teachers who talks about how things used to be. Yeesh.

(A bunch of the old ABC specials were released as a boxed set a couple of years ago, and the individual DVDs are also available on Netflix. A little campy nostalgia may be in order soon!)