Burning it up...

It turned out that Cathy didn't need me today, miraculously enough, so I've been up here in the office, slogging through the syllabus for 102 and trying to get my head together in terms of the assignment schedule, thinking ahead to essay assignments, what I'll need in terms of handouts, blah blah blah. It feels like being in a swarm of gnats at the moment: there isn't anything huge in and of itself that I need to cope with, but there are a zillion little bits that are floating around, and it's very hard to keep track of them all.

Of course, this is situation normal: I can't think of a time when I haven't felt like this except over summer or winter breaks. It will be very interesting to see how I adjust when I am not periodically, chronically plagued by mental gnats of the professorial variety. My hunch is I'll have a tendency to forget just about everything that isn't tattooed on my forehead; I'll be so happy to let go completely that it will be an adjustment to hold on to at least a few things.

I don't really believe it, you know. I really, truly do not believe that I am seriously going to go through with this and retire. I don't have any choice at this point (that wonderful word "irrevocable"), but it is just too weird to contemplate. I have occasional moments when I try to project into that future, imagine what it will be like, but generally, I go about my days as if this will be my life in perpetuity.

I hasten to remind myself that we do not know what the future may hold. I know nothing at all beyond this particular instant, and even my projections five minutes into the future could be completely wrong--and the further away in time something is, the less likely my projections are to be accurate. It's an interesting project to be involved in a continual mental retraining of my inherently negative thought patterns into something more positive. Despite all the wonderful reminders that worry is useless, I have a hard time letting go of it. Right at the moment, I don't actually feel worried, just a bit addled. And I do feel a teeny bit concerned that I have decided to put everything on hold until tomorrow, work-wise: no more work on the syllabus, no more checking through of all the little bits and orts to make sure I have them lined up. I have a feeling I'd be more likely to make mistakes at this point than catch them, so I'm opting to come at this all fresh tomorrow. I am making little notes for myself about everything I can think of to do as I think of it, but I'm betting I'll uncover more things over the next week or so. And I did find out that, if I take the reader pages to our print and copy services on Tuesday, they can have it for me relatively quickly. I'm going to make copies of the first reading just in case, but it's nice to know I can, in fact, get the readers copied quickly enough that it makes sense to use them.

And it was very nice to find that we hadn't made any howling blunders with schedules--or at least none that have yet reared their ugly heads. Lori is scrambling for a room for my class, but since it still might end up in a lab, the cap remains at 22. As of this moment, four students are enrolled, but if we get close to the wire and it doesn't have enough students to make sense, Cathy will "level" sections--take a few students out of each of the other sections at that time and move them into my section. (I wish I could see who the students are and cherry pick, but that's not how it works.) There was an interesting moment this morning when the course still wasn't up on Banner, so no one could be registering in it--which would have created an interesting predicament--and then when it was up, the cap was wrong and my name wasn't attached. All of that has now been fixed, of course, but this is the kind of silliness we're reduced to at this point in the semester.

Oh, and a side note: the Nature in Lit has lost a student, so it's even further from running than it was. I think we all see the handwriting on the wall on that one.

Whatever. It will all sort out one way or another. I'm prepared to be even more of an absent-minded professor than usual throughout the entire term. It will drive me marginally nuts to feel like those pearls from the broken strand are bouncing and clattering all over the place, but c'est la guerre. What are they going to do, fire me?

I have a phone appointment in about 20 minutes--and since I'll probably be calling on my cell, I won't be able to stay in the office (which is beautifully air-conditioned, I am grateful to say). Not sure where I'll go to get good cell service--I may end up sitting outside in my car, with the engine running to the AC can do its thing--but that's no big whoop. Life is Hunk and Dora. And I am, yours most sincerely, signing off...