I'm writing you now ... well, because I always do a "Famous Blue Raincoat" post every year, whether on here or someplace else. This is probably the worst year for me to be staying up to do this post, too, because not only is my schedule such that staying up this late is harder than it has ever been before (yeah, I'm getting old, thanks for asking), but in about four hours here we're going to have movers coming in to get all of the heavy stuff out of my sister and brother-in-law's room to move to their new apartment. Given that their room is right next to mine, I'm guessing that I've doomed myself to less than a full night's sleep here, and of course I don't want to sleep through the change to a new year tomorrow night even if the passage of calendar years has never really been my thing.
I haven't made any actual resolutions for the new year in some time -- I prefer to make resolutions on my birthday -- but I guess I still kind of have wishes for the upcoming year. More than the requisite health and good luck for myself and my friends and family, I'm hoping I can finally achieve some clarity regarding my job/school situation that I wrote about a month ago. I do feel good that I was entrusted with an extra class for this coming term, and I'd like to think that my prospects for finding a full-time teaching job are looking up, but I'm still dealing with nagging questions about whether I may regret not going for an additional degree (or possibly even two). I don't think that my mind and heart are still split so evenly as they were a month ago between work and more schooling, but between the time and money I'm looking at investing here, as well as my own confused wishes, I'm still hesitating to commit one way or the other. Given how the deadlines for some of the schools I've looked at are rapidly approaching, I can't afford to hesitate much longer.
I was hoping that this vacation would give me time to clear my head about that mess, but of course then I had to worry about clearing my head of a hundred pounds of mucus in addition to everything else. I'm only just now getting back to a resemblance of a normal life, and two weeks from today I'll be back in the classroom again. (I'll actually start teaching my online course before that, but I'm still not in the same frame of mind for that class as I am for the ones I teach in the flesh.) As I teach more and more classes here -- if I don't get a full-time position soon then I'd like to at least pick up additional classes at other nearby colleges -- figuring out my schedule becomes more and more complicated. I'm not quite at the point where I'll need to start keeping a daily calendar, but I'm getting closer, and I'm having to deal with more uncomfortable questions about just how I spend my time. Perhaps I won't be able to make these "Famous Blue Raincoat" posts for much longer.
Labels: personal, teaching, work
It is one of those unexplainable phenomena in life that Target stores always seem to carry the notebook paper lined so that it takes the least amount of writing to fill up a page; that is to say, the lines are spaced wide enough, and there's enough white space at the top and bottom of each page, so that filling a page on Target-bought paper takes less time than filling a page on notebook paper bought from another store. (Mead brand takes the least to fill, but when Target stopped carrying it about a year ago they replaced it with another brand that takes nearly as little to fill.) This was something I first started keeping track of back when I first went back to college, as of course I wanted to be able to complete in-class writing assignments as quickly as possible, and I've always passed this little factoid on to my students so they know where to buy the paper that requires the least amount of effort to fill up. (This also results in fewer students tearing sheets out of wire-bound notebooks for their assignments, thus leaving me with fewer of those annoying "jaggies" to deal with.)
Last night I went to Target to purchase more notebook paper, and it was bad enough that I had to wait in a fairly long line while Hockey Night in Canada was starting. As I usually do when I'm waiting in long lines and have a small purchase, I went through the change in my billfold to see if I could pay for the purchase in small coins instead of having to use dollar bills or quarters. (I try to save the latter for when I go to play dance games outside of the house.) However, when I got to the cashier, she triple-counted my coins and still insisted I was five cents short. I didn't have a nickel or five pennies, so I just gave her a quarter, more interested in that point in getting out of there and finishing my shopping than missing more hockey.
Right after that, though, the woman bent down to give me my Target bag with the paper in it ... and the paper wasn't there. She checked her station and I checked my person, and neither of us had it. The nearest we could figure, the person ahead of us in line must have taken my paper by mistake. The cashier called her manager over and explained the situation and asked if I could just go get another pack of paper, and he said okay. I went to get the paper, but on my way back to the front of the store I realized that the woman had never given me my receipt, so I didn't have a way of proving that I bought the paper. The manager was no longer up at the front of the store, and when I got back to the cashier she had stepped out of her station to hug someone even though she had a line at her register. I walked out of the store and nothing more happened after that, but it was uncomfortable for me to walk out without getting one last okay from one of the workers there.
It has perhaps been one of the biggest blessings of my life that I have never had to work a job in retail; I can only imagine how boring and unthankful those jobs must be, and whenever possible I try to use self-service checkouts and such so that workers don't have to deal with me any more than is absolutely necessary. (I don't want to have to deal with them either, but that's more due to my lack of sociability than anything else.) My experience at Target last night is one of those rare instances where I felt that the employee I was dealing with did not deal with me in a competent manner, and had I not been in such a rush I might have done something more to try to right each of the tiny things that went wrong there. However, after seeing that cashier go and hug someone, I can't help but think that perhaps she had something really heavy to deal with, and was understandably distracted while she was serving me. I'm sure that others might think I should have complained about her to the manager, but after watching her hug that one person on the way out, I couldn't help but think that the small amount of money and time I lost in the transaction, ultimately, really wasn't that important, and that she probably had far heavier problems to deal with than me trying to save a couple of coins and watch a bit more hockey.
Seriously, what is with all the people who make the computer operating systems of our time remaining so freakishly young-looking well into middle age? Steve Jobs seems to be the only one who doesn't seem to mind showing some beard stubble and a little grey in his hair. Dick Clark has nothing on these guys. Anyway, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five!
1. What is an acronym specific to your workplace or profession?
SCF: Students Come First. Okay, it's not exactly canon, but I don't have the time to come up with a stronger acronym right now.
2. What is an acronym you use a lot in your personal life?
WTF. (I also tend to use FTW a lot, but in its pre-"for the win" usage. Yeah hi, it's been over seven years, why are you still reading this?)
3. Internet acronyms are unavoidable, but what’s one you particularly despise, and what’s one you particularly like?
I dislike BTW because spelling "by the way" out really doesn't take that much time. I guess WTF is the only one I actually like, mainly because it enables me to drop an f-bomb without actually having to spell it out.
4. What acronym could you create right now for some regular annoyance in your life?
IHBS: I Hate Being Sick.
5. What would be a memorable or appetizing acronym for your most recent meal?
My last meal was pizza, so there's absolutely no opportunities for making an acronym there. Cheese pizza would be CP, and that acronym is already in use for another big part of my life.
Labels: fridayfive
Given how little most of my online friends have been updating lately, I guess I don't feel quite so bad about not posting these past few days. Of course, they're probably away on family vacations celebrating the holidays, whereas I'm still trying to shake the last of this bug off. I'm finally starting to feel like myself again, and I think I should be resuming normal activities here. I still have about two weeks of vacation, so I should have a good chunk of time here to handle the things I was hoping to handle over break, just not as much time as I would have liked. I really hope I feel well enough to start exercising again soon here, though, because I have put on a bit of weight these past couple of weeks (thanks to the combination of holiday food and going off my diet), and I want to get it off as quickly as possible.
I'm still kind of getting caught up on a lot of things, but I wanted to mention a couple of big changes in my life lately. I'm not sure if I said something about this earlier or not, but I was originally scheduled to teach two sections of composition next semester, which was going to be my first time ever teaching multiple classes in a term. Well, near the end of the semester I got an e-mail from my boss, and he asked if I could take an online section of introductory business writing. (The wait list for the online sections already offered was so big that they needed to create an extra section for the overflow.) I've never taught online before, and generally prefer to teach in the flesh where the students can interact with one another and I can help guide their conversations, and I'm definitely more at home teaching composition than business writing, but I took the assignment anyway because it's going to be a challenge for me, and, well, I like challenges. It also means more money, and it'll mean more stuff to put on my CV.
This does, however, mean that my reading load over vacation suddenly went sky-high since I have to familiarize myself with the text for the business writing class, and it's a pretty darn big one. My book pile was getting high enough to start with, and of course it only got bigger after Christmas. (I asked for clothes and books for Christmas and wound up with more clothes than books, which under the circumstances may actually be a good thing. Oh, and none of you bought me anything off of my Amazon wishlist, so expect more whining when my birthday comes up in March.) In spite of that I still went out tonight and picked up Keith Olbermann's new book, and there are still a lot of books I want to get as soon as I can. I have no idea where I'm going to find the time for all this reading, but maybe I can try to get caught up on it here before the next term starts.
The other bit of big news is that my sister and brother-in-law finally got their own apartment. They started moving things over today, and I'm guessing it will take them a few more days to get fully moved, but the house is about to get quieter, and given the antagonistic relationship I've had with them lately that's kind of a good thing. The bad part, though, is that they're taking Spyder to their apartment, and while we'll be moving Skooter into the house after that, I don't like that it'll be that much harder to see Spyder now. I'm hoping that the fact that I've already been trusted with an extra class in just my second term at MCCC means that I'll get a tenure-track position there soon, so I can start making enough money to live on my own as well.
Labels: family, personal, teaching, work
I've been sick for close to two weeks now, and it's only been in the past day or two that I've felt well enough to resume what I consider to be normal activities for me. It's almost as if my body was trying to make up for how I didn't have a serious illness for close to two years there, and shut down almost completely when this bug really hit. As it is I'm still not feeling well enough to resume exercise, and I continue to use television as a way to distract myself for how lousy I feel (thankfully there was a MythBusters marathon earlier today), but I'm no longer feeling like I was earlier when I basically had to save up my energy so I could tend to work stuff, then come back here and basically collapse either in front of my computer or, more likely, on top of my bed.
It's amazing just how out of it I continue to feel right now. I've kind of been taking things easy so that I didn't tire myself out with other things, but now I feel kind of disconnected from the world around me. For example, I haven't been following the news that closely for a couple of weeks, and I don't even have my Google Sidebar on my computer now because it was hurting my head trying to keep up with all the information on it. I recognize that this is a natural response to being sick, and that in the long run this is probably a healthy thing for me to be doing, but at the same time we're getting very close to the first primaries for the "big two" parties and I don't feel all that informed as to what's going on here. Just from the cursory glances I've gotten of the news lately, it looks like Ron Paul's come out of nowhere in terms of coverage devoted to his campaign, and once again Dennis Kucinich is getting the short end of the straw. Without being able to delve deeper into the news, though, I don't feel like I can make a good blog post about the campaign, so I'll probably need to take an afternoon here after Christmas just to get caught up on the news.
I also haven't been on instant messenger that much lately, when I'd been doing such a good job of making myself available on it once I downloaded Trillian and got it installed. Normally this wouldn't be such a big issue for me, but a couple of my friends seem to have been going through some tough times recently and it kind of stinks that I haven't been around to help them. I suppose it would help if I were better about talking on the phone, but I haven't had a landline connection in my room since we got our cable modem, and I only really use my cell phone for emergencies and business purposes. I'm kind of an insulated person to start with, but this cold just made things ten times worse for me in that regard, and just like with the news, now I find myself needing to catch up on stuff with my small circle of friends that I missed these past couple of weeks.
There have been some other important developments in my life here, but I'll get to those in another post; right now I must play catch-up with yet other things. Gee, I thought things would slow down once I was on vacation here. Silly me.
Labels: internet, personal, politics
The L, of course, stands for Motherfucking. On that note, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five!
1. If money were no concern and LOOKS the only consideration, what car would you get yourself?
If money were no concern I'd get a hybrid, thanks. If I really had the money to spend, and I couldn't spend it on more worthwhile things, I'd probably get the hybrid painted black with dark purple and dark green accents.
2. If money were no concern and YOUR LIFESTYLE the only consideration, what car would you get yourself?
The hybrid minus the paint job. (I figure the custom paint job would make it a bigger target for thieves.)
3. What is the best thing about your current car? If you do not own a car, what is the best thing about the car you most often ride in?
It's been in a lot of accidents (never the fault of anyone who was driving it) and it barely has a scratch on it. It probably gets three miles to the gallon on a good day, but I can feel fairly safe for myself when I'm driving it. (Now if I could only feel that safe for other drivers.)
4. If cars could be skinned the way cell phones, laptop computers, and iPods can, what would be a really cool skin for your car?
The paint job from before. Let's just say a black base with dark purple mists on the lower half and a strip of dark green ivy on top of that. (Kind of like how the .org used to look before the most recent redesign.)
5. If you were going to decorate a friend’s car with a custom-made skin as a practical joke, whose car would you skin and what would it be?
I don't do practical jokes, thanks.
Labels: fridayfive
As I'm still recovering from this bug, and I'm exhausted from finishing up the semester at work today, I'm going to cut-and-paste an e-mail from Jeremy Botter to fill time here until I feel well enough to start making semi-intelligent posts myself again. Speaking of buying stuff, though, you've got less than a week to buy me things off of my Amazon.com wishlist before Christmas. Please? Sigh, here's Jeremy ...
Some of you might know that I'm in a band called The Favorites. We've been together for a long, long time, and we're getting ready to release our first full-length album. We recently went into the studio with producer John Glover (he's produced Jaci Velasquez and a bunch of other people you've probably heard of) and finished the album, and I've gotta tell you -- I'm really, really proud of it. It's the best recording I've ever been a part of. It's got 12 songs on it, all of which are super-catchy and happy and generally filled with joy. I guarantee that this album will have you singing along on the first listen.
The album is called Bright Nights, Bright Lights, and it will be out in March. If you pre-order the album, however, you'll get a copy as soon as we get it back from the factory -- which means you could have it two months early! Pre-ordering the album will also help us out quite a bit -- getting an album made is expensive, and you'll be helping us offset the costs we've incurred while doing it. Plus, you'll get a really awesome album out of the deal!
The album is only $12 if you pre-order, and we'll also send you a special gift along with the CD to thank you for ordering it early. We're going to release the first single from the album on New Years (at midnight!) at our MySpace page at: http://www.myspace.com/thefavoritesmusic
If you'd like to get your hands on some awesome music (and help us out in the process), you can send your checks or money orders to:
The Favorites
23405 W Fernhurst Dr #1809
Katy, TX 77494
Please put my name on the Memo line, and also send me an email
(botter@gmail.com) with the following information:
Your Name
Address
Phone Number
Email Address
Thank you guys & gals so much for supporting me throughout the years, and I hope you enjoy the music!
Labels: plugs
I'm up at work right now; I don't teach Mondays, but I wanted to give my students more time than just the regular class time to turn in their final portfolios. I seem to be regaining my strength at just the right time, because the final portfolio review is always a drainer. It's not always a happy time for me either, because even though I get immense joy from being able to see just how much my students' writing skills have improved since the start of the semester, it also marks the end of my association with them. As much as I feel that I'll always get more enjoyment out of teaching first-year comp than any other English course, I can't deny that it would kind of be nice if I could teach at least one higher-level course so that I have a longer amount of time to associate with students. (I've already had one student this semester ask if she could continue on with me in later English courses.)
Anyway, I seem to have recovered a great deal over the past couple of days, but for the most part I had to write off last week as a total loss. I had to cancel class on Tuesday because there was just no way I could get out of bed, and even though I forced myself to get up here on Thursday to teach, I could barely talk and wound up using the class computer and projector to "say" things to my students. I don't know how other people react to the bugs that I get, and I can't really use my family as examples; my father hardly ever comes down with anything, and everyone else in the house already coughs and hacks a lot from smoking. It seems to me, though, that when I do come down with something, and then later in recovery, my sinuses just go completely haywire. The wastebasket in my bedroom is unbelievably heavy right now, and all I have in there are popsicle wrappers and tissues; it must be what's inside those tissues that is weighing the wastebasket down so heavily. It takes a long time for my sinuses to return to normal, too, and at the rate I'm going right now, I don't see myself returning to normal until the end of the week, if even then.
In the meantime, I've been trying to do what I can to make things easier for myself. I really don't like being laid up in bed for long periods of time, but it really can't be helped when I get as sick as I do. I think I've watched more television over the past week than I have the whole rest of the year, and believe me, I wasn't that impressed with most of what I saw. I tried reading, but there's just something about watching television that distracts me from my illness much more than books or anything like that. This is one of the main reasons I'm hoping I can accelerate my recovery here, because my obligations for the semester are done Wednesday afternoon (that's when I turn in final grades), and I was really hoping to use this upcoming vacation to do a boatload of reading and writing. (Let's not forget that I also can't do my dancey games when I'm like this, and it's impossible for me to stay on-diet when I'm this sick.) I've lost too much time to this bug as it is, and I really don't want to lose any more.
Very sick, as a matter of fact. I don't think I've had an infection this bad in several years, and it's left me bed-bound for the most part. Back then my computer was actually up against my bed, so I could keep bouncing around online as much as I wanted then, but now it's kind of an effort to stay sitting here for any period of time. I just hope I get over this bug in time to enjoy the start of winter vacation.
Still, it is a Friday, so let's do the Olbermann thing here. Today marks the anniversary of the end of that most bitter of American conflicts, the one that pitted brother against brother, and sister against sister, like none other before. Yes, on this day in 1836 the Toledo War ended. If you can believe it, Ohio and Michigan once raised militias and were prepared to wage all-out war just for the rights to have our little piece of the Great Black Swamp considered an official part of their state. Facing pressure from Congress, Michigan eventually gave up its claim on the land in exchange for most of what is now Michigan's Upper Penninsula. It sounds like a bad deal, but Michigan got the best out of it considering all the iron and copper deposits that were eventually found in the U.P., not to mention all the lumber they were able to sell, whereas Toledo ... well, we've got glass, or something that rhymes with glass, anyway. On that note, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five!
1. What’s your favorite song about growing up?
Good, just what I need: questions about music that require very short answers. This one's easy: Tom Waits' "I Don't Wanna Grow Up."
2. What’s your favorite song about cars or driving?
I'm not sure if this counts, but once before I die I swear I'm going to rent a convertible, put the top down, and drive around all day long blasting Tori Amos' "Cornflake Girl" at top volume. That song just strikes me as the perfect "convertible song" for some reason.
3. What’s your favorite song whose title is a person’s name?
I'm assuming fictional people are allowed in response to this, so Björk's "Isobel" gets the nod.
4. What’s your favorite get-up-and-dance song?
Given all the dancey games I play I'm tempted to answer with a song from one of those, but instead I'll go with Tori Amos' "Raspberry Swirl." It's the only song I can dance to without the aid of arrows.
5. What’s your favorite novelty song?
Given how addicted I was to Dr. Demento's radio show back in the early 90s, I could come up with a million answers to this. (My father's song that Dr. Demento played on the air back in 1994 would not be one of them, thank you very much.) 2nu's "Ponderous" comes to mind the most readily, so I'll go with that.
Labels: fridayfive
If you've been paying attention to the news over the weekend then you've probably heard about the ice storms that have affected the northeast over the past few days. Apart from a few car crashes, Toledo doesn't seem to have been hit that hard. We've still got a fair deal of ice everywhere; it's kind of eerie to look out of my window right now and see the lights from the highway being reflected off of the bare tree limbs and wilting evergreens. However, whenever the possibility of an ice storm arises, I can't help but think of how in recent years some ice storms in places near here -- Montreal and western New York, to name just a couple -- downed power lines for several days, causing many more deaths than have resulted from this weekend's storm. Remembering those stories, and imagining what it must be like to be without heat or food for days on end in the freezing cold of December, kind of makes me feel bad for telling myself how much of a pain it will be to have to scrape the ice off of my car tomorrow before I go up to teach. Compared to what people in Quebec and New York went through, I've got it relatively easy here.
That being said, I'm not going to deny that there is a part of me that hopes that work shuts down before I have to go up tomorrow. (We'd originally had more ice in the forecast for this evening and into tomorrow, but now the forecasts are saying we won't have any precipitation at all until late in the evening tomorrow.) It isn't that I don't want to teach -- I love my work -- but at the same time I'm not going to deny that I still shelter a bit of my childhood mind inside of me, and that the thought of a "snow day" kind of makes me cheer a little to myself, thinking of staying home in elementary school and watching game shows like Press Your Luck and The Price is Right. (Were I to have a snow day now, of course, I'd more than likely sleep in and do some extra reading.) Given how close we are to the end of the semester, taking a snow day tomorrow would be difficult for my class -- I'm handing back the penultimate drafts of their final papers tomorrow, and they'll only have a week after that to revise them and turn them in with their final portfolios -- but I'm not going to deny that a snow day would be totally unwelcome for me.
I guess part of what may be going on here is that whenever there were snow days when I went to UT, they always came at inopportune times, either when I didn't have class or, in one memorable instance, I had an oral exam scheduled for Japanese class and the school shut down five minutes before I was scheduled to take it. I think I actually had more classes canceled on me because of 09.11 than because of the weather the whole time I was at UT. (Of course, the semester after I graduated, the whole city shut down for two days because of a blizzard.) I understand that the bar is kind of set higher for closing colleges due to the weather than for closing other schools, but at the same time when I read stories online about all the traffic accidents that have happened since the ice storm, it makes me wonder if maybe we need to set the bar at least a little lower. As important as a lot of businesses are, and as important as I consider my teaching to be, when you hear about all the serious injuries and fatalities that have happened in the wake of this storm, you really have to rethink the whole risk/reward factor involved in trying to drive on roads that are so icy.
I wish I could say that the news of the mall shooting in Omaha this past week shocked me, but I'm kind of surprised that it took this long for something like this to happen. Granted, I don't go to that many malls (over the past five years the mall I visited the most was the one in Westland, Michigan, back when they had a good arcade in there), but whenever I go to malls I always look at all the different inventory loss control systems set up in the front of each individual store, and I can't help but think to myself that it would be a lot easier if the stores could come to some sort of standard, and then to just have the inventory loss/metal detectors set up at all the entrances and exits to the malls. I don't know that much about how those devices work, so maybe it would be difficult to get them all standardized, but when you see so many of them as you walk through a mall, it's hard not to think that there's probably a fair deal of waste there. More to the point, given the kind of traffic that malls get, it just makes zero sense that there's no kind of metal detector at each entrance just to catch the most obvious stuff.
I will say that as much as I saw something like this happening, though, I wasn't expecting that the violence would be gun-related; I expected that there would be some sort of bomb attack, perhaps even a suicide bomber. There wasn't much strategic value to al-Qaeda in hitting the World Trade Centre, but there was a lot of symbolic value to them because, for them (and others), it represented the evils and excesses of American capitalism. American malls are nearly as much of a symbol of our capitalist economy, and particularly in the days leading up to Christmas they get a tremendous amount of traffic. I don't recall if there was an increase in mall security after the 09.11 attacks, but every time I've been to a mall since then I can't recall seeing more than the odd rent-a-cop walking around. My heart goes out to those who lost loved ones in the Omaha shooting, but at the same time I can't help but hope that this episode will lead to the country re-examining how lax mall security is, and that maybe at least some steps will be taken to lower the future possibility of someone armed with a gun or a bomb being able to waltz into a mall unhampered and kill lots of people.
On top of this, earlier today a gunman opened fire at a megachurch in Colorado Springs, killing someone before an armed guard shot and killed him. On the one hand I'm glad that the gunman was stopped before he could kill anyone else, but at the same time I can't help but wonder what it says about our society that churches now have their own armed security forces. I'm not questioning the logic of it (particularly given that those megachurches can have more people in them than all but the biggest of malls), but it's still one of those things that makes you despair a little more for our society as a whole.
Labels: politics
It's Tom Waits' 58th birthday today. Happy birthday, Tom, and on that note, let's go lickety-splitly to the friday5.org Friday Five.
1. What playground game do you remember most fondly?
None of them, really. The playground where I went to public school, and more specifically the kids in that playground, are the reason why I have a chip out of one of my front teeth (and a good part of the reason why I started going to private school).
2. What playground game did you just hate?
Pretty much anything that involved climbing. In addition to bring highly unathletic, I also had a fear of heights when I was younger. (I'm still a bit nervous around heights, but I've gotten better at controlling the fear.)
3. Which playground apparatus did you most enjoy?
Swings, although I never got good at being able to swing that high when I was younger. I finally figured out the physics of swinging when I was older, but by that point when I tried to swing high I just gave myself a really bad case of motion sickness.
4. Which playground apparatus did you generally avoid or not care much for?
At my public school there used to be this big metal sheet tilted at an angle, much higher on one end than the other, with an iron pipe above it. The kids there always scaled the bar from one end to the other, but as they did so their bodies were flat against the metal sheet, and particularly close to the summer months that thing reached about a million degrees. Shortly after I started going to private school, the apparatus was taken down.
5. What playground game might be really fun if grownups played it with adult rules?
Cops and robbers. What?
Labels: fridayfive
Our first snowfall of the year wasn't too far off-schedule; we normally get our first accumulation sometime in the last third of November, and this year it came this past Saturday. As is my tradition, I play Björk's Gling-Gló during the first snowfall, partly because I remember buying it on my winter break that year I went to Antioch from a locally-owned music shop, and partly because those of us who grew up watching A Charlie Brown Christmas will, for better or for worse, always associate soft jazz music with the season. The next day we warmed way up above freezing and it all melted away. Temperatures dropped again soon after, though, and last night we had an inch fall on us that will probably be on the ground here for some time to come.
Given how long of a drive I have to and from work, having the roads get snowed on becomes an even bigger hassle for me; I'm used to doubling my estimated driving times to get to and from someplace when it's been snowing, but not when that place is over a half-hour away. Yesterday I asked my students about how well Michigan keeps their roads clean (about as well as they keep the roads repaired, which is to say not at all), and they helped me find an alternate route to take to campus that should be plowed more frequently than my normal route. What particularly concerns me is that I heard that last year, when down here in Ohio the whole county I'm in shut down for two straight days because of a huge snow emergency, MCCC still had classes going on because the snow wasn't so bad up there. Obviously there's no way I'm going to break the law to go up to campus, no matter how much I like my job, but the problem I run into is that I don't get paid for the days I don't teach. I suppose this is another reason for me to work on getting a tenured position as quickly as I can, so I can get salaried and be able to take the odd day off over the winter if I don't feel like fighting the roads. (There were at least two accidents on the highway in our backyard this afternoon alone, and the roads didn't look to be that bad.)
All of this leads up to another interesting dilemma, because I'm scheduled to go to Cleveland for a DDR tournament this Saturday, and sure enough there's the dreaded "wintry mix" in the forecast that day. The last time I went to Cleveland for a tournament back in February the roads were hazardous from snow and ice, and I wound up arriving about ten minutes too late to register for the tournament. (Not that I had any shot of winning, but it's the thought that counts.) I don't like that I'm having to hold off on making a decision about whether or not to go until the last minute (particularly given all of the baking I'll be doing for the tournament over the next couple of days), but I suppose that it's really out of my hands. Even though I've lived up here all of my life, I still can't get used to how, in these coldest months, the weather can mess up my schedule so much.
Labels: driving, stompity, weather
(Happy 42nd wedding anniversary to my parents today.)
When my most recent order came in from Amazon, included in all the special offers that Amazon packs into everything was a deal on business cards. I've needed new business cards here for a while (I don't get any from MCCC because I'm only an adjunct there), but I'd been kind of hesitant to go out and get new card stock from OfficeMax to use with my printer for some reason. In order to get the special deal on these new cards I had to use the company's templates, but I was able to tweak the fonts around to something that looked nice. (I also splurged for a gloss finish since I liked the finish on the card Ariel sent me when I ordered an autographed copy of her book.) The cards weren't due to arrive until around Christmas, but they actually showed up in the mail today, and I've kind of been playing around with one of the cards, oohing and ahhing over how pretty and shiny it is because, well, I'm easily amused.
One advantage I always had when I printed my own business cards was that I could print a few at a time, so if for some reason my contact information changed I wouldn't have to trash that many cards. In order to compensate for this, my new business cards have only my cell phone number, .org e-mail, and the address for the .org printed on them. (I gather it's kind of been a trend in business recently not to include snail-mail addresses on business cards, though MCCC still includes their address on their cards.) Now, my e-mail and Website addresses won't be changing any time soon, but ever since the cards arrived, I can't help but think about all the problems I've had with my cell phone. I've got Virgin Mobile (they're cheap and I don't use my phone that much anyway), but for some reason I don't get very good reception here at the house, even though I'm in a pretty busy part of town what with a major highway interchange a half-mile from here. If for some reason my non-teaching work starts to pick up, then a more reliable phone may become a necessity, and I'm not sure if you can take your cell phone number with you to another company if you're on a prepaid plan like I am.
Now, there's every chance that I'll keep this phone number for far longer than it will take me to get through my new batch of business cards, but episodes like this just remind me of how stupidly pessimistic I can be at times. Granted, I run into Murphy's Law all the time -- I think I've discovered at least one new genus of it -- but you'd think I could spend the time I've been spending worrying about my new business cards becoming out of date, you know, actually getting my work out there and finding uses for those cards. Maybe not over these next couple of weeks -- MCCC's semester ends two weeks from tonight, and I'll have less than twenty-four hours after that to submit my final grades -- but once I'm on vacation from teaching I really need to redouble my efforts to land other work.
Although I've always had a fairly strong non-comfortist streak, for about a couple of years after I first started going to private school, I really worked hard at trying to fit in and gain acceptance with the "cool" crowd in my class. I begged and whined at my parents until they got me the $40 shirts everyone else was wearing to school, I refused to wear anything my parents bought from K-Mart (which was the family's primary outfitter at the time), I got heavily into rap music during its first real mainstream surge, and started growing my hair out. I failed at gaining acceptance, of course, and eventually reverted to my old ways of acting and dressing (although I still wear my hair long), before finally finding communities at Antioch, online, and (on-and-off at) UT that accepted and appreciated me for who I am. I think it was only later, though, years after I stopped trying to gain my peers' acceptance at that private school, that I actually learned the whole thing about not presenting a false image to others and being true to yourself and all of that stuff.
To this day, though, I don't think it's a lesson that has taken root. As a case in point, I've been doing most of my entertainment shopping online ever since Media Play went out of business a couple of years ago; given where I do most of that shopping, I'll take this opportunity to remind you all that if you, too, want to shop at the Internet's top retailer, use this link to Amazon.com when making your purchases and I'll get a little extra store credit to help me buy stuff. Better still, you could buy me something off of my Amazon.com wishlist. (I'm shameless, I know.) Anyway, as much as I love shopping at Amazon, I shop at other retailers when I can find a better deal or when they can get something to me faster than Amazon can. One of those retailers is Barnes and Noble, and I get frequent e-mails from them about special offers and such; I'm not in their membership club yet, but I probably should be given that I'll probably save more money than the membership costs. (I don't like going to their bricks-and-mortar store in Toledo because it's across the street from our huge mall and the traffic out there is horrible, particularly in the heavy shopping season, but I still try to make it out there every month or two.)
This past week, in one of their e-mails, Barnes and Noble was advertising a collection of four Hemingway novels in one tome for just over ten bucks. (When I went to the Barnes and Noble Website, though, it was selling for less than nine.) Strange as it may seem, I've never read Hemingway before, even though I have a general sense that he's one of those authors whom I should have read long ago, if not for the benefit of my own writing then just for the rich images he paints with his words. Eventually I also received a coupon for 15% off of any item, so I applied that discount to The Power of Myth (which was already selling cheaper there on Amazon, and I needed to buy so I could stop borrowing my sister's copy all the time), and between that and the Hemingway collection I got a good order and qualified for free shipping. The order should arrive here, I hope, by the middle of the week.
Here's the thing, though: in addition to shopping at Barnes and Noble, the Hemingway collection comes from Barnes and Noble's own printing press. As much as I know that Barnes and Noble probably has a snooty reputation among the general public, within academic circles they're actually seen as kind of pedestrian. There just seems to be this general comtempt for Barnes and Noble, not just for being the huge nasty national chain choking out all the good local bookstores (although Borders was the reason Toledo's great independent bookstore, Thackeray's, shuttered a few years ago), but also for being a kind of faux source of intelligence. There's this dark cloud hanging over my head from all my years of higher education that seems to be saying to me that if I were really educated that I wouldn't be shopping somewhere as "common" as Barnes and Noble, let alone buying books from their own press.
Just to be clear about this from the start, no one needs to tell me just how silly this kind of thinking is. I'm well aware of it, and I wish I understood why I was letting this kind of thinking cloud my judgment. Hemingway novels are Hemingway novels no matter who prints them, and I'll be getting the same great content I would have gotten if I'd purchased the books separately, from different presses, and at greater expense, from another publisher. If I lose esteem in the eyes of some of my academic colleagues because I shop at Barnes and Noble, then the real problem is with my colleagues, not me. At the same time, though, as nonsensical as it sounds, I kind of hesitated to place my order for the Hemingway collection at first, and looking back now I feel kind of dumb for having done so. Perhaps all those years ago I did stop giving in to peer pressure to maintain a certain kind of image from my classmates, but I can't help but wonder now if perhaps that kind of poor thinking is manifesting itself again in this pressure I feel about shopping at Barnes and Noble. Maybe I didn't learn my lesson back then as well as I thought I had.