What Now?

NaNoWriMo update

So, perhaps you've been wondering how I'm doing with my NaNoWriMo novel.

Eh, not so hot, actually, I'm sorry to say.

I'm a big believer in writing fast, I really am, but maybe not quite this fast. I knew when I started this that 50,000 words in November would be pretty much beyond the pale, and I'd set my sights lower, at 30,000 words, but even that is not going to happen, I think, since I'm less of a third of the way there with only one week remaining in the month. I'm trying not to get too distressed about that and, in a schadenfreude sort of way, comfort myself with the fact that the colleague who convinced me to sign up for NaNoWriMo then dropped out on the second day of the month. He told me the same thing that I'd told him last summer, which is that it was crazy even to contemplate doing NaNoWriMo when our trimester ends in late November, what with all of the exams and the comment-writing that has to happen. He now wants us to do our own writing program in December, so perhaps that's when I'll reach my goal.

So here's what's been good about NaNoWriMo: I've already written more in three weeks than I did on my mystery all last summer! And I've realized that I'm definitely not a planning sort of writer; I was never an outliner when writing academic stuff, so I guess it's not so weird that I'm not an outliner at fiction either. And I've found it kind of freeing just to write without much plan; in grasping for material off the cuff, I've come up with a couple of things that I think will work well as motifs throughout the novel, things I don't think I'd have come up with if I'd sat down to plan everything out. And I've had some fun along the way -- not consistently, but often enough that it's been okay.

Here's what's been not so hot: I'm one of those folks who sometimes retreats under pressure, and I've found the NaNoWriMo emphasis on wordcounts to be counterproductive sometimes. I'm sure it works well for some folks, but as I fall further and further "behind" the NaNoWriMo daily goals, I'm increasingly inclined to hide in bed with my head under the pillow rather than write, since I can't possibly catch up now. So today I had to go back to my fail-safe system of lowering my productivity standards drastically; I decided that all I had to do is write 500 words a day, and that this would count as successful. The approach that Chris Bray (founder of NaNoWriMo) argues for is lowering one's standards for the quality of the work, and I'm all for that -- I'm a big believer in Anne Lamott's "shitty first draft"! -- but I can't follow his advice for what to do when the wordcount is coming up short: kill someone off! throw in a tornado! have aliens attack! That might give me more words, but since I'm pretty sure I don't want to write a novel in which aliens attack during a tornado, it seems like that would be a lot of work for words I know I don't want. So I'm lowering my standards for wordcount instead.

Here's the bigger problem, and it may be an insurmountable one: I'm just not sure I've got the chops to be a fiction writer. I can think of characters, but I seem unable to make them DO anything. This has always been my problem. When D. and I tell each other bedtime stories (one of our rituals that I love), I can create characters and name them and give them occupations and all the rest, but then I'm tapped out. Now, this works out just fine for bedtime stories, the point of which is to be only mildly interesting at best so that one's audience falls asleep quickly, but it's not such a great sign for a novelist.

Maybe this plot failure is simply failure of nerve, failure to step out boldly and, damnit, make something happen! Or maybe it means I'm just not creative in that particular way. Hard to say at this point.

HipWriterMama did an online interview today with young adult author Robin LaFevers (who has a great website in which she blogs about her writing process), and the interview included these comforting words:

HWM: What advice would you give to all those NaNoWriMo writers out there?

R. L. LaFevers: Don’t stress. It’s only a game to get you really focused, nothing more that that. Simply by doing NaNo you’ve proved that you are committed to this idea of writing, that you are compelled to put words to paper. Enjoy it. By the same token, if doing NaNo doesn’t work for you, or your work from it is unusable, don’t despair. That might just mean that slamming through a quick and dirty first draft isn’t YOUR process. Lots of writers shudder at that approach, so it just means you’re one of them and not one of those who thrives on that. But don’t walk away! Continue to experiment with all sorts of different approaches and processes. You never know when you’ll find one that sticks.

Also? Nothing is wasted. Not even stuff that appears to be pure dreck. It’s important to know what doesn’t work so we can get that much closer to what does.

So I'm taking her advice and considering this a useful experiment, one that maybe I'll continue into December with my colleague. And I'll treat it as a game to get me focused, and I'll wait for awhile to decide that I'm actually "committed to this idea of writing." We shall see.

Further thoughts

Thank you for your supportive comments to my last post. After I blogged about it and blew off some initial steam, I went over to the dining hall for dinner and ran into one of the colleagues who teaches in the program that's essentially the "Empowering Young Women and Helping Them to Make Smart Decisions in Their Lives" series of courses. So I told her about my conversation with my colleague, naming no names, and she told me that in the senior year of this course, they do a unit on sexual violence and bring in people from a rape crisis center. So I'm feeling a bit of a relief at this reinforcement of what we at FGS do stand for, despite my misogyny-masquerading-as-sensitivity (MMAS) colleague.

I also told the story to a sympathetic colleague today, and she had an interesting perspective. My conversation with MMAS yesterday began when he wanted to talk about an incident from earlier in the week, when he had completely dropped the ball for the second time in as many weeks on a responsibility for a program that I run. I stopped by his room to say something about it, and he immediately apologized for having blown off what he was supposed to do. But then yesterday he stopped by to say that he'd felt I was yelling at him and that he'd been really angry. I actually knew this already since he'd bitched not-quite-publicly about my "yelling" at him, so I'd been waiting for him to say something. Let me hasten to add that I hadn't yelled at all; he was just clearly really embarrassed at having been called on his irresponsibility.

So, as my sympathetic colleague pointed out -- correctly, I think -- that MMAS had perhaps brought up the whole rape-is-worse-than-death thing as a way to find some common ground with me, and then my response showed him that he'd blown it yet again, and that's perhaps why he just shrugged in a "What can I say?" sort of way instead of responding to the substance of my comments. So her advice, and I think it's good advice, is to let things lie for a week or two; given that we're heading into exams week and then the Thanksgiving break, it's not as though he's going to be doing any more damage in the next couple of weeks. And then, once we're into December and the fall term is over and everyone's emotions have settled down, I can return to the topic again. And my sympathetic colleague thinks that, under those circumstances, he may well voice different opinions if his ego isn't engaged in certain ways. This seems like excellent advice, and I think I'll follow it.

In retrospect, I've been interested in my visceral reaction against MMAS's teaching something that I find so antithetical to FGS's mission and ethos ... and I had a moment of empathy about how some folks at St. Martyr's had visceral reactions against me, viewing my mere presence as antithetical to St. Martyr's mission and ethos. Of course, there were multiple versions of that mission competing at the school, and I was antithetical to only one of them and not the one under which I was hired, whereas FGS has a much more unified vision of itself as a school. But still, it was interesting that one of my early responses to MMAS was to think "If that's what he thinks, he shouldn't be teaching here!" I calmed down, of course, but it was an interesting moment of walking in someone else's shoes, even if I think that other person is unreasonable. Interesting.

And now, thank goodness, it's Friday night, and I'm committed to not worrying about FGS stuff over the weekend ... well, other than grading my student's in-class essays and planning the exams for my courses. But other than that, I'm working on my NaNoWriMo novel and puttering around the house with D. I need such a weekend after this week!

Thanks again, everyone, for the supportive comments yesterday.

Misogyny masquerading as sensitivity

I'm boiling mad right now, the result of a conversation I just had with a male colleague, someone I normally like and find an agreeable fellow teacher. What began as a perfectly respectable conversation about teaching Mary Rowlandson's Indian captivity narrative took a nasty turn:

"It's really interesting to teach this book in a girls' school," he said. "I ask them, 'What's even worse than death?'"

I answered, "Being tortured and then killed?"

Surprised at my apparently missing the point, he answered -- in that quiet sort of voice that people use when mentioning something unpleasant, like cancer -- "Rape."

"Really, you tell your students that rape is worse than death?" I asked.

"Well, yes, because you have to live with it for the rest of your life."

I have heard this line over the years from more than one male acquaintance who thinks he's being sensitive to women's plight, so I asked what is usually a convincing clincher in an argument: "Do you know how many women are raped? Do you really think it would be better if all of them were dead?"

Normally this elicits a shocked "No, that's not what I meant," followed by back-peddling, and we can then talk about the "dead purity before defilement" line of thinking, but not this time. He didn't actually say "yes," but he shrugged and made a "What can I say?" face.

He was on his way out the door by this point, so my parting comment was, "Please go ask all of the many women of your acquaintance who have no doubt been raped if they all wish they were dead right now. I can guarantee what most of their answers will be."

He made one of those "Well, I guess this is just our opinions" sort of comments as he backed right out of my classroom, leaving me to get madder and madder until I was shaking. Not about his opinion, particularly -- he's welcome to be a misogynist asshole if he likes -- but at the fact that he's apparently teaching his students that women's purity is more important than their life. And damn it, those are MY students too, and nobody should be laying that crap on them!

I'm so furious on behalf of my students that I feel it incumbent upon me to do something, but I don't actually know what to do, and clearly I should get my blood pressure back to normal and my head cleared before I act. Blogging it is the first step toward calming down and thinking rationally and deciding what to do about this. Suggestions are most welcome.

NaNoWriMo, Day 7

NaNoWriMo began last Sunday, on Nov. 1 – what a lovely calendrical turn of events, getting one’s start on a weekend and having the whole day to get well and truly launched!

Except that D and I were painting window trim that morning. And I also had a set of papers to grade. I had had the crazy notion in the week before that I would get everything done in October, somehow clear the decks so that I could concentrate on my novel and little else during the month of November. Yeah, right. It finally sank in the Thursday before NaNoWriMo began that I couldn’t possibly grade five sets of essays in the couple of days before the novel-writing month got started, and that I would have to tackle my writing on top of rather than instead of everything else. I’d known this beforehand, of course, but then had forgotten it in the rush of anticipation right before the starting line.

But, despite the painting and grading, I managed to get a good if not great start to the month by writing 1136 words that day: 2% of the way to 50,000 words! I was particularly impressed with myself since it became clear the moment that I sat down to write that I had done very little planning ahead of time. The night before it had occurred to me that I should name my characters, and I already had a setting chosen, but I hadn’t decided when the story took place and hadn’t thought much about plot at all. So that 1136 words doesn’t include some last-minute planning that had to happen before I could even get started. One needs to write 1667 words a day to maintain a steady pace, but I wasn’t even going to try for that, assuming that I’d do most of my writings on the weekends and especially over Thanksgiving week, which I mostly have off of school. (Yes, I need to be grading final exams and writing up end-of-term comments for all students that same week; I’m steadfastly not thinking about that right now.)

And then my word-count remained unchanged for the next five days as I struggled to get through one of those exhausting weeks that one isn’t entirely sure one will survive. I was getting up at 5:00 or 5:30 every morning to grade, and then the days were taken up with what felt like endless demands; classes themselves went fine, but nothing else seemed to go smoothly the whole darned week. I admitted to myself on Monday that writing was just not going to happen during the school week.

I had thought I might try to get 500 or so words under my belt when I staggered home on Friday, but instead I listened to D’s words of wisdom when she asked, “Why don’t you take a nap?” No writing but much sleep was had, and this was a Good Thing.

Plus, I know this morning was going to be ideal for jumping back into my novel. Say hello to the SATs! Yes, this instrument of torture for adolescents is the single best method of enforced discipline I know of. (I hasten to point out to my non-high-school-teacher readers that proctoring the SATs is not a required part of my job; it’s something I signed up for so that I could get paid while forcing myself to get caught up with my regular job, so I consider it a win-win other than the having to wake up early on a Saturday.)

But this morning, instead of my usual SAT grading marathon, I did an SAT novel-writing marathon. As the students labored away, filling in little circles with their number-two pencils, I labored away, writing 2173 words (plus drafting this blog entry) in the three hours of forced work time. Okay, I know that 2,173 words does not exactly constitute a "marathon," but still, it's not bad. I’m hoping to get in a couple shorter writing sessions today and then a couple more tomorrow as well, plus spending time with D since I had little time for her (or anyone or anything else) this past week.

I have some things to say about what I’m learning about myself as  novelist, how my process is going, etc., but I’ve just realized that I’m using valuable writing time in blogging rather than novel-writing. Oops! Must get back to it, and must treat blogging as only a quick break from other writing.

Bullets of "back to the blog"

• The next time I have the bright idea to teach an overload while also running a self-study committee (for the school's reaccreditation process), I'll run it past you all first, and you can dissuade me.
• Fortunately, the self-study work is over next week, and the overload is over in mid-December. Then regular life will resume, and I bet that it will seem much more relaxing (at least for awhile) than regular life normally does.
• Plus, the money from said overload has gone to replacing six of our windows. You know, with the kind of windows that don't let cold gales run through them. So that will be a welcome improvement this winter.
• But that means that D and I have been doing things like painting window trim in the same week that I've graded papers from every single one of my students. Again, I'll check with you all first before making such arrangements in the future.
• My mom is getting D and me glass doors for our fireplace for Christmas, yet another sign that winter is right around the corner. What we'd love to do in the next few years is to get a wooden stove insert for the fireplace, but who knows when we'll have the money to do that, and the glass doors and their surround will spruce the place up in the meantime, as well as providing the necessary smoke barrier required for our tiny fireplace. Last year we wound up tacking up a strip of aluminum foil at the top of the fireplace opening, which was effective but not beautiful. The doors will be a distinct improvement.
• There are several blog posts I want to write now that I'm not grading and painting all the damn time, and I shall get to those soon, but now I must go have dinner with my sadly neglected honey and then go to bed early, since I have SATs tomorrow. Proctoring SATs is actually a great thing to do; the hourly rate of pay is not so much, but it's the principle of getting paid for a period of enforced discipline that I love. Tomorrow I'm doing extended-time testing for the SAT subject tests, which means that I'll have a few hours in which I absolutely have to sit in a quiet room while kids are busily working, which is a great chance to catch up on all of the non-papers grading I've been ignoring for the past week. Last time I did SAT proctoring, I got all of the essays for my freshman finals graded in only a couple of hours, something it would have taken me much longer to do normally. Plus, apparently I'll seize any opportunity to read aloud, even if it's as un-beautiful prose as SAT directions.

The next noveling adventure

So, you know how I was trying to write a murder mystery this summer? And how the work was interesting but painfully slow because it felt as though I were writing in a foreign language? And how I then abandoned the project, at least for now, because the trial made murder not so much fun (if you see what I mean) and because school was starting anyway? And besides, I was less and less confident that I could really do it anyway.

Well, I'm going to try the whole writing-a-novel game again, but this time, I'm taking an entirely different approach. NaNoWriMo, here I come! Yes, I'm going to attempt to write a 50,000-word novel in the month of November, buoyed by all the other folks around the internet who are attempting the same thing. It's crazy, no doubt about it, but somehow the sheer craziness is part of the appeal.

I'm going to write a young adult novel, a historical novel set in a location pretty near here that my mom and I actually visited when she was up here a couple of weeks ago, which is when I started cooking up this idea. I have only the vaguest ideas about characters and plot, but I'm trying not to worry about that fact but rather to embrace it as part of the adventure. The theory behind writing so much so quickly is that one wears out one's inner critic so that the words come flowing out -- lots of junk, sure, but probably something salvageable as well. I rely on this same theory all the time when doing brainstorming exercises with my students, so why not try it myself, instead of the painfully slow writing I was doing this summer? Especially since I've always been a writer who figures out what I want to say only after I've said it.

A colleague had suggested this summer that we do NaNoWriMo together this year. I, of course, pointed out to him all the reasons that this was a foolish idea, not least of which is that we're on the trimester system, so our fall term ends in late November. Who ever heard of grading exams and writing comments while also trying to write a novel? Absolute nonsense!

And yeah, it probably is nonsense, but we've decided to dive in anyway. Recognizing that this is actually a busy month for us, we're promising ourselves that we don't have to do the entire 50,000 words and will call it a success if we get even half that much written. So it's not actually so unreasonable a goal, really.

In the meantime, I'm clearing the decks a little bit to prepare myself: straightening up the study so that it's a more pleasant place to work, doing as much class prep ahead of time as I can, and most importantly taking a hiatus -- perhaps permanent? -- from some online academic writing coaching I've been doing, which was something I needed to get out of simply because I was burning out on it. This feels like the equivalent of cleaning out closets, getting rid of the junk and creating space in my life for things that add rather than detract from my happiness.

So I'm equal parts excited and nervous, which isn't a bad way to start a new adventure!

Parents' Weekend

Even though it's Sunday, it's really only Saturday for me since this was Parents' Weekend, i.e., the time of the 13-hour Friday and of going to work on Saturday. I know I said a couple of weeks ago that I'd turned the corner on the academic year and that everything was going to be hunky-dory, and that was totally true, but I also knew that the past two weeks were going to be seriously intense. But, having gotten through Parents' Weekend, I really and truly have now passed the fall milestone.

Thank goodness for a colleague of mine, who many years ago got the administration to make the Monday following Parents' Weekend a holiday; she couldn't argue for it on the grounds that the faculty were wiped out, which would have fallen on deaf ears in that particular administration, so she resorted to the plea of "Won't someone think of the children? They're so tired from Parents' Weekend!" I'm sure it is tiring for the kids to have their parents in tow, and certainly they are stressed by having their parents get their midterm academic reports, but it is the faculty who are all zombies at this point. I crawled home yesterday afternoon and collapsed in a hard nap on the couch, and I'm anticipating that my zombie brain won't go away until maybe tomorrow.

Fortunately, FGS does not do what many schools do, which is to have each faculty member have a 10-minute meeting with the parents of each student. Can you even imagine?! I have 60 students! No, we're much more sensible and efficient here. Each faculty member and administrator has 5-8 advisees; the advisors get a midterm report from each of the teachers for those 5-8 kids, and then we have 30-45-minute conversations with the parents of those 5-8 kids, talking about their academic progress and anything else pertinent. It works well to step back and look at the overall patterns in all of the student's classes, which doesn't happen in the traditional 10-minutes-a-student method, and we can also talk about how happy or not the student seems, how sports and music lessons and all the rest are fitting in, etc. The conversations are stimulating and fairly satisfying, but I'm tired afterward, especially since I also taught five classes yesterday to rooms packed with parents as well as students; we're in cheerleading performer mode for most of the day and then in caring counselor mode during the advisee conversations, and it wears a body out.

These are privileged kids, no doubt about it, and I sometimes feel guilty that I have such a cushy job, being paid well to teach well-prepared, respectful kids in a beautiful setting. (In fact, the only way that I've made my peace with it is to think of it as cosmic recompense for the five years of suffering at St. Martyr's. And if I may indulge in a moment of snarkiness, I'd like to point out that Parents' Weekend at St. Martyr's used to be the time of greatest alcohol problems and vandalism on campus, since so many parents brought in alcohol for their kids. Nor did they ever usually to visit their children's classes, even though this was always the invitation. So despite what I'm about to say, I wouldn't trade FGS for my old life for the world!)

But it's also true that even privileged kids have their problems, and this week's meetings gave me new background for the kid whose parents have had such a nasty divorce that they couldn't stop bickering and back-biting even in front of me, and the kid who has anorexia and pretty profound learning issues. I also got hints of a possible bullying situation that needs serious attention; fortunately, I'll be part of a team in addressing this. And most of the kids, regardless of other issues, have parents who are so driven by particular ideas about success that I have a new appreciation for the pressure-cooker that is home.

I spend my time with students alternating between pushing them to think even though it is really hard work and encouraging them to stop and take a breath and realize that life is going to be okay regardless of this grade or that leadership position; I try to shake them up and calm them down simultaneously. And  I'm well suited for this particular combination of mentoring roles; it's one of the important things I do in my job, I think. And Parents' Weekend highlights for me the necessity of that second type of work, of trying to carve out space for students to think about how they might define achievement and success apart from their parents' expectations.

All very interesting. And damn, I'm tired!

One of those good days

Today was one of those days in which I really, really like my job. To wit:

In my first class this morning, a group of juniors who are reading The Tempest, we worked our way through a powerpoint I made a couple of years ago about depictions of Caliban (as only partially human, as an uncivilized savage, as a colonized subject). I don't often do powerpoints in class, but I'm very proud of this one, and it sparked great conversation this morning ... and the students really rose to the challenge and pulled textual evidence to support their arguments. It was a really stimulating discussion -- very fun.

Then, in my second class, with another group of juniors, we had fun of a different sort, talking about dirty jokes and low humor in Shakespeare. As one student told her next teacher, "Dr. Now's class was all about sex and poop today!" The students were shrieking with embarrassed laughter at one point, and I thought, "Hmm, I'm pandering here. But of course, so was Shakespeare!" Anyway, it was a fun end to the week with the juniors.

Then, at lunch, I learned a lot from a colleague, the head of the science department, about the distillation process that creates hard liquor. It was a hilarious as well as educational discussion. I'm a little chagrined to admit that I'd never realized that a "still" was called thus because of the distillation process, and indeed I hadn't realized that liquors were all "distilled spirits." The school is on a big engineering kick this year -- trying to get girls to consider scientific careers -- and I suggested that we set up a still as a school project.

My last class of the day was a grammar lesson with my freshmen, which I know doesn't sound so exciting but actually was. We're doing really basic grammar stuff because so many of them are shaky on things so simple as identifying nouns and adjectives, and there's no point moving forward if they don't know these basic things. So I had wacky sentences up on the board, and I was doing what is probably dismissively called "drills" but in what I'd like to think was a fun and gentle and encouraging way, and I was ultimately rewarded (at the end of an hour class) with the following comments:

• I think I'm starting to get it!
• This is kind of fun, like a puzzle!
• I like breaking down the sentences and figuring out the parts of the sentences!

Okay, I'm not saying that everyone got everything, but we made real progress, and it was a lively class, and I was totally having fun the entire time. Not what I once thought I'd be doing in my career, but who cares -- it's a blast!

I have oodles of paper drafts to read in the next couple of days, and I'm on duty with students this weekend, and there are college letters of rec to be written, and next weekend is Parents' Weekend, which will be a zoo, and the self-accreditation process is creating a hell of a lot of work ... but darn it, I really like my job so very much!

Looks like I made it!

Well, I had a nonstop 11-hour workday today and came home with oodles of grading that I'm not doing, and yet I still feel that life has gotten better as of today and that the rest of the year will go smoothly.

I can't remember if I've said before what a crazy term I'm having, but boy, I'm having a crazy term! Teaching an overload, running a committee, expanding a student service I'm in charge of, all on top of my regular classes. All good stuff, but exhausting in the aggregate.

And then, on top of everything, my mom visited this past weekend, Thursday afternoon through this morning. The preparation for this visit was, as always, exhausting emotionally as well as physically. There was cleaning to do, and stress about all of the organizing and cleaning and household projects that I should have done but wasn't doing. And D. was out of town all last week and couldn't help, either with the cleaning or the helping me stay calm, so that was an added challenge.

But, in the end, I'm glad to say it was a good visit. We were all on our mostly best behavior most of the time, which was tiring but a good thing. ADM had pointed out to me that things might be better because we were on our home turf, unlike most of our visits; I had thought she was wrong, because there's so much more for my mom to criticize at our house than at hers, but it turns out that ADM was right after all. Perhaps when people are giving up their bed for you and sleeping on an air mattress, it's harder to criticize them! She did say a few times that "WN, you really should do X or Y," but X and Y were always pretty small things; I can't even remember what they were now. And she never said, "Oh, I love your darling house!," which she was seeing for the first time, but that's okay; D and I love our darling house, which is what really matters. She did love our darling cats, and her allergies didn't act up too badly, and we had a couple of fun outings in Adventure City and its environs, so all in all, it was a good visit.

I'm afraid that being on her best behavior was exhausting, however. Before the visit, I had dutifully gone out and bought scotch for her, a 1.75-litre bottle since it was on sale and didn't cost much more than the smaller bottle; when she made herself a scotch and soda that first night, she laughed at the size of the bottle and said, "Wow, if I drank that in five nights, we'd be in trouble!" And yet, only an inch of scotch remains in the bottle now. One night in particular she was really drunk -- slurred speech, not making any sense, weaving when she walked -- and the other nights she ranged from tipsy to kind of drunk. I know she drinks a lot at home -- I try never to talk with her after 7:00 p.m. -- but I think this was excessive even for her, and I wonder if she felt under strain the entire time she was here. It was all pretty sad and not especially pleasant to be around.

But I don't want to end on that note, so I'll add that she came to school with me on Friday, her first time seeing FGS, with which she was impressed. And she sat in on a couple of my classes, which was the first time she'd ever seen me teach. I was a little nervous ahead of time, worried that my professional self wouldn't co-exist with my regressed-around-my-mother self. But in fact it went fine, and it felt good to have her see me in a professional context.

Oh, and I haven't mentioned yet that my college roommate, whom I hadn't seen in seven years, also descended on us this weekend! She was passing through Adventure City and spent the night at our house. I'm afraid that her life seems very sad to me in many ways, and it was completely tiring to have her around on Monday morning, talking endlessly about minor details of her life and not asking much about mine. I kept saying things like, "Wow, it looks like you have a great day for your drive!," hoping that she'd get on the road. Fortunately, D. and my mom and I, anticipating this, had plotted the afternoon before and had come up with a fun Adventure City adventure we were going to have in the afternoon, which gave us a reason we had to leave the house at noon. Then and only then did my former roommate hit the road. It was too bad that it wasn't a better visit, especially since we both teach in independent high schools and you'd think we'd have oodles to talk about, but alas, no.

But now all guests have returned to their respective homes, I can rest in the knowledge of a good if strained visit with my mom, and D and I will get to sleep in our own bed again tonight, with just the two of us and the cats at home. (Poor D will be sleeping in her own bed for the first time in nine days.) And for the rest of the term, neither of us is traveling, and no one is visiting us. And my committee work will mostly wrap up in another month, and my overload ends in December, and so both of these tasks are feeling a little more manageable. And I've gotten through the first four weeks of school, and things should mostly move forward smoothly from this point on. Knock on wood and all that, but the school year has definitely turned a corner.

And so I will declare that it looks like I made it!

Sunday miscellany, 'cause that's all I got in me

• This school year is kicking my ass in a major way. On Friday night I crawled into bed at 8:00 p.m. and read for a little bit before crashing before 9:30. Apparently I groaned in my sleep for a couple of hours. I slept for 10 hours and finally felt okay on Saturday. I got a good night's sleep last night ... which didn't stop me from napping for two hours this afternoon.

• I'm telling myself that I'm always exhausted in the first couple of weeks of classes, and the fact that the exhaustion has carried over through the third week this year is easily explainable because I'm teaching an overload and running a committee this fall, so gosh, no wonder I'm tired. And yet this still feels like more-than-usual tiredness, which is a bummer.

• Perhaps apropos of all of this, I'm worried that my thyroid levels might be off. I've been having mild joint pain in my shoulders, knees, and sometimes hands for the last few months, and that is apparently a possible indicator of low thyroid levels. I had a doctor's appt with the thyroid specialist back in August but had to cancel it because of the trial, and of course it took forever to get another appt., but I finally have one next Friday afternoon. I'm hoping that she says, "Ah, such a simple matter; we up your dosage, so, and you're a new woman within a week!" Of course, that's what I always hope for from a visit to the thyroid doctor, and it pretty much never happens, but a girl can dream.

• At least my color-coding of my classes is working really well and is continuing to make me happy, especially for the ongoing opportunities to shop for office supplies.

• The busy-ness and the exhaustion are interfering mightily with what should be ongoing cleaning in preparation for my mother's visit this weekend ... but instead, I'm doing things like napping. Ah well. I'll confess that when I chatted with her today, I talked up my thyroid concerns and made a bigger deal than necessary about how it was so hard for me to carry on with things like cleaning and straightening because I was so tired all the time -- going for sympathy so as to cancel some of the inevitable judgment once she arrives. But from the phone call, it sounded like she was going to be on good behavior and be cheerful during the visit, so if we can keep that going, all will be well.

• But she doesn't arrive until Thursday, and grading needs to happen before tomorrow, so I'd better get back to it.