PTMI

Despite my procrastinatory* tendencies, which I highlighted in my last post, by Sunday evening I was actually feeling enough ahead of the game (having finished the reading for both of my seminars) to convince friends to go see Michael Clayton with me at the cheap seats. I enjoyed it, although I suppose I'm a bit surprised it's up for Best Picture.

It turns out I should probably have been grading; somehow I didn't really start that until yesterday morning, and it took ten hours straight. Urgh. There are few experiences as overwhelming as grading 50 2-3 page papers that you know you have to have ready to return by early the next morning--especially when you know you average 10 minutes per paper. And have neither read nor prepared for the classes you are to teach the following day.

Let us say that yesterday was a very long day.

However, today was actually shockingly pleasant, despite the severely abridged sleep that preceded it and its arrival under the specter of still being unprepared to teach. Although my carpool buddy and I headed in to school a bit earlier than usual,** I did get to eat breakfast, make coffee, and further stress about class before heading in, and still had 15 minutes at the office before lecture started, in which I was miraculously able to assemble a PowerPoint presentation and make handouts.

I had sort of resigned myself to this week's sections being sub-stellar, but they somewhat-surprisingly went really well. In the first one, as I moved from one small group to the next one over, I heard my students whispering about how cute I was. I'm not sure precisely how I feel about that, but it does seem preferable to them whispering about what a drag class was--which must, after all, happen sometimes.

A friend and I went to St. Martin's Table for lunch. Somehow I'd never been, even though it's vegetarian and right across from my sadly now-closed co-op. I had the vegan mulligatawny and the peanut szechuan tofu sandwich. They were awesome, and we got to sit by this sunny sidewalk-level window.

I don't know whether it was the coffee we picked up thereafter on the way back to school (all the food I'd just eaten and my sleep deprivation seeming a dangerous combination for a three-hour seminar), but class actually went really well. I felt very engaged and was "talkative"; in fact, toward the end, I was afraid I was talking too much, which may be a first for me in a seminar context. Midway through, I actually recited the following limerick, in reference to Henri Bergson and memory:

There was a faith healer from Deal,
Who said, "Although pain isn't real,
"If I sit on a pin
"And it punctures my skin,
"I dislike what I fancy I feel."

That was definitely a seminar first.

And it is definitely time for me to go to bed.

*Real word.
**The air temp was -11 at 8:00 a.m.