It's New Year's Eve, and the closest thing to human contact I'm going to have (apart from with blood relatives) is playing Magic online with other people. Yes, I am pathetic, thanks for asking.
You all know I'm not much on resolutions. Nevertheless, I have a promise I made to myself nearly five years ago that's going to have to get resolved in the next couple of months or so, and that's pretty much going to consume this coming year for me, or at least the first part of it. I hope this works out well, because I'm not even going to say a word about the alternative.
Okay, so I have another semester's worth of fees coming up to pay here, and I figured that as long as I saved the same amount of money I had to pay last semester, I should be safe, right?
Well, I just registered for classes, and it turns out that now all of a sudden students who register for spring semester are being forced to buy insurance for the summer semester even if they don't plan on attending over the summer.
Mind you, I have the money for this, but that money was what was going to pay for gas, food, and lodging for my trip to North Carolina next week to meet up with Lara and Jboy and all the other cool DDR/ITG players down there.
Yeah, I am not exactly what anyone would call a happy camper right now.
Whatever happened to the concept of going out and buying a simple pair of sweatpants?
I remember that when I was a teenager, I could go down to the K-mart just a mile down the road from my house and pick up either a sweatshirt or a pair of sweatpants, in any of the eight standard crayon colours, for five bucks each. I've never cared for sweatshirts, but sweatpants have always been my bottoms of choice because they're functional and comfortable, and if you're wearing black (like I always do) they're virtually indistinguishable from trousers unless you look really closely at them.
These days I just can't seem to find sweatpants anywhere. The closest thing I can find are these so-called "yoga pants" that not only do a much poorer job of keeping your legs warm in these cold winter months, but also cost upwards of $25.
Did the government or the fashion police make sweatpants illegal when I wasn't looking?
Went to Media Play today, where in spite of the deep discounts and Christmas rush, they still had plenty of copies of Karaoke Revolution Party in stock. Huh. Go figure. Anyway, I picked it up, and I'll have more to say about it later, but one of the things I find humourous is that they're offering all the songs from the original KR on XBox Live for download at $5 for five songs, like all the other songpacks. I guess some people just can't be bothered to change discs to play songs, although I suppose when you're playing in an actual party setting, not having to change discs could be advantageous. (Oh, and I now have a second microphone for duets. That'll be nice, assuming I ever find someone to play with.)
Oh, and my crappy cable company did give me one nice present here: We finally got MSNBC, so now I can go back to watching Keith Olbermann every night instead of scouring the Web for clips of his show.
Dentist appointment Thursday. *puke*
Days like this make me realize why I generally only try to talk to my family during dinnertime: They can't smoke if they have food in their mouths. Not that I'd be so lucky this morning.
I really don't want to get into specifics about what just happened downstairs, except to say that right now I'm thinking and feeling a lot of things that I should probably be ashamed about, but I'm not. I thought things couldn't get any shittier than they already were, but silly me, they did.
So yeah, happy whatever you celebrate. As for me, I'm going back to bed, and hopefully I'll wake up soon and find that the past few hours were just a horrible nightmare.
Sorry I haven't posted much lately. As I figured, this holiday season has been even worse on me than previous ones. I don't have any problem tuning out all the commercial bullshit and stuff, but when I go out it's just impossible to avoid seeing just how many people have the things in life that I wish I could have at least once in my life. I'm probably going to get all kinds of neat video games and DVDs and stuff tomorrow, but they're not going to help me to actually feel better and treat the root problems of my unhappiness.
At least I got an early Christmas present from the Bengals, who assured me that I don't have to care about football any longer this year. They're a lock to lose at Kansas City next week for sure, and then I'm sure whoever they wind up playing in the first round of the playoffs will blow them out of the water. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
I'm just finishing up my students' final portfolios and I caught one instance of gross plaigarism. This student didn't just lift a section from somewhere and insert it into the paper, but copied the whole thing, and the worst part was it took me all of about ten seconds to Google the paper.
I try not to take my teaching failures too personally, but plaigarism is something I take very seriously. How can anyone think that s/he can just copy-and-paste something from the Internet and expect to receive the same rewards as the students who actually worked on their papers? Seriously, by the point you get to college shouldn't you just instinctually know that doing stuff like that is just wrong? Sigh.
On the plus side, I found a twenty-dollar bill on the sidewalk outside Books-A-Million when I went there earlier tonight. Yay or something.
Cincinnati Bengals playoff ticket information
I know that the Bengals will lose to whoever their first opponent turns out to be just because of their lack of playoff experience, but still. The long drought is finally over.
My work as a student is done for the semester. My work as an instructor is still heavy here, though, with several student portfolios still to be read and graded. I have to have my grades turned in by Wednesday afternoon, but that shouldn't be a problem.
Now, for the utterly sucky news: Media Play is going out of business. Just as I passed my millionth Replay point, too. I went there to do a bit of holiday shoppping just now, and the signs were plastered all over the place letting everyone know that they'd be closing soon. Apparently only the Media Play chain is being discontinued, as the cashier who rang me up told me that I could still use my Replay account at Sam Goody and Suncoast stores, but I don't know of any Suncoast stores near here, and the only Sam Goody I know of is down in Bowling Green, and it's basically got half the selection of music, video games, and DVDs, and absolutely no books whatsoever.
I bought up all I could at the Media Play in south Toledo today (or at least everything I'd had my eye on), and I'll probably hit the other store tomorrow. Granted, I still have Best Buy for most of my CD and DVD needs, but this is seriously a big blow to me. I still remember the first time I went to Media Play back in my senior year of high school, because I got to skip my afternoon classes to go see David Lanz perform there. Sigh. This sucks.
Status update: One paper left to touch up and turn in tomorrow, then it's off to the coffeeshop with me for some nice hot tea while looking over my students' writing portfolios.
I've already gone through four portfolios so far, and it is immensely gratifying to me to see the improvements in writing my students have made over the semester. Knowing that I've helped to open their minds to new ways of looking at, and functioning in, the world around them gives me a sense of satisfaction that has been sorely lacking in my life these past few months.
Still, this isn't to say that things went perfectly for me this semester. One of the things I asked my students to include in their portfolios was a brief "journal entry" about their experiences over the semester and how they felt about the course. I've certainly known of some mistakes I made throughout the term (pushing them into critical thinking too early and without the proper tools, not effectively introducing other new ideas to them later in the term), but as I read over these parts of the portfolios I'm also finding other areas I could improve on.
It's no secret to any of my long-time readers that I often struggle with criticism, but I'm having no problem with how my students are telling me certain parts of the course didn't work for them. If anything else, I'm just glad that I was able to foster an atmosphere of honesty where my students could be openly critical of me and know that I wouldn't knock their grades down for criticizing me. More than anything, though, I'm learning what mistakes to avoid when dealing with my students next semester. I'll probably wind up making all new mistakes with them, but if things turn out as well at the end of next semester as they did this semester, everything will be okay. This is a learning experience for me as much as it is for them, and as I've said long before I even became a teacher, the worst teachers are the ones who stop being learners.
Okay, back to that last paper ...
I don't think I've ever actually cried in relief to be done with a course before. Good grief. One more paper for one class, a sit-down final for another (the first of my graduate career), then I get to grade my students' portfolios. Thankfully the worst is out of the way now, at least.
I kept meaning to say something this week, either on here or in my class, about how I felt like the Browns game was going to be a trap game for the Bengals, and that's very nearly what it turned out to be. I suppose that if the Bengals were going to have an off game, it was better to have it now than in the playoffs, and at least we won it. Now just one more victory (or one more Steelers loss) will win the division, and the race for second in the AFC is still very much on.
Okay, back to work on papers here ...
So yeah, the Neo-Nazis returned to Toledo for another rally today. It sounds like things went off without a surplus of violence this time, but I certainly curtailed my plans for today in light of the fact that I didn't want to run into any skinhead pricks. Since when has fucking Toledo been the hotbed of this sort of stuff, anyway?
In other news, both Eugene McCarthy and Richard Pryor died today. I can't decide which one I'm sadder about. Seriously.
In still other news, the end of this semester has bene pure hell. I'm not even sure I'm going to North Carolina after I get done grading my students' papers now, which really sucks because that leaves me with no place to go over winter break, and given how the holidays affect me, I desperately need some kind of company to keep me from going insane.
(These images are about 250k each and probably aren't for dial-up users.)
Can anyone tell me what in the heck could be causing this to happen? (The garbage starts showing up as I scroll a page -- the more I scroll over a section, the worse it gets -- but if I put another window on top and switch back to the old window, all the garbage disappears.) I've already double-checked that I had the newest drivers for my graphics card, and nothing else I've done has solved the problems. (Those screenshots are from Print Screen captures, too, so it's not something with my monitor.)
I just got done with the last class of the first Comp I course I taught. Owing to the fact that it was the end of the semester and people were tuckered out, I made it a "party" and everybody brought food and stuff; I brought my famous brownies with me, albeit without the heart parfaits I put on the batch I made for that woman I had a crush on earlier in the year. I even booked the English department's conference room so we had someplace much more comfortable than our stuffy classroom to be in. (That, and our classroom is on a sattelite campus, so it helped that people didn't have to drive or take the bus out there.)
It was a good time, but honestly I'm feeling really sad now. Having the chance to help shape all their minds, and make them into better writers, and more importantly make them all more aware of the world around them, has been one of the few joys I've had these past few months. I'll have another batch of students come next month, but it's still kind of sad to have to leave this first group of pupils. I kind of hope that some of them will keep in touch with me, and let me know how the rest of their studies at UT go.
Now, more than ever, I know that I want to teach for a living. I think I've finally found something I can make a living at that I truly enjoy. The only hump is going to be getting through the rest of my studies here so I can get the degree(s) that will let me go out there into the job market and get a good position that will enable me to support myself. I guess I'd better get back to work on my own end-of-semester assignments here, then.
It was bad enough that I finished up my paper after class started and I was rushing just to get to campus before class was over. I should have known that the battery in my car would choose to die tonight, right when the family had all the other cars out.
Didn't I tell you all, after what I went through at the end of the last semester, to remind me to never put off my work until the last minute here? (What really sucked is that I wound up scrapping my old topic over the weekend, forcing me to start a brand new paper.) All that work, and given the attitude my professor gives off during class, it may be for nothing. I think I'm going to go curl up in a corner right now.
This paper isn't going to be done by the start of class tonight ... T.T
More than two hours after the victory, this quote is still in the AP story circulating the news Websites ...
"The Bengals came into their biggest game in 15 years with the division lead despite beating no opponent that currently has a winning record ..."
Uh hi, Minnesota and Chicago in weeks two and three. Outscored them by a total of 44 points, too. It's not like the other teams in our division have that radically different of a schedule, either.
A Cincy win against the Browns next week -- in Cinci -- combined with the Steelers losing to the Bears that day clinches the division. I've got the Broncos/Chiefs game on now, with a Broncos loss resulting in a larger possibility that the Bengals would get the second seed in the AFC and a first-round bye in the playoffs.
Is this for real?
Happy 40th wedding anniversary to my parents today.
I just got out of another meeting with my counselor, and were it not for all of the end-of-semester work on my plate right now, I'd probably be scheduling more regular sessions with her after all that's happened recently.
My counselor and I continued to discuss issues relating to my social development (or more importantly, my lack thereof). Between all of my social problems growing up that I mentioned last time, as well as what few opportunities I've had since coming to UT (even my time in Spectrum only really half-counts since I was President of the group for about half the time I was part of it, limiting my ability to interact socially with people), she and I came to the conclusion that socially I am maybe ten years old, if even that, and that I'm tending to think about issues like friendship and such as a ten-year-old.
Looking at things this way, it's become easier for me to see why I've been receiving some of the negative reactions I've been getting from people lately. I may have the body (and age) of someone well into adulthood, but I don't have the experiences needed to really approach friendships and such as an adult, and that, combined with other factors (namely my being transsexual), has really put me at a disadvantage in terms of being able to socialize with people.
As my counselor told me, this is not something that I'm going to be able to get over in a day, or even in a year. This is something that's going to take quite a long time for me to correct, and along the way I'm probably going to have even more missteps like the ones I've been having recently. I know that I need to give myself some patience with this -- even if people who don't know about my social problems won't know about the things I'm going through -- but damn, it hurts so much right now that I don't even know if I can make any steps without fear of things becoming even worse than they are now, and I don't think I could stand it if things got worse right now, especially with the holiday season coming up right now and the whole world becoming inundated with the images of friendship and companionship and happiness that I don't have in my life right now.