I feel sick today. I've been feeling "off" for a couple days now and having trouble sleeping besides. I have been at my parents' house _way_ too long without any time/freedom to go elsewhere and not be around them.
Monday I hung out at my brother's house, which was quite nice --- I watched him play one of his new PS3 games while I curled up on the couch with my nieces and nephews, and I faffed about with my syllabus. It was really nice, being able to do work and spend some time with the kids and lump around on the couch and make fart jokes when my brother's character blew his war horn on the screen, all at once. At least I thought it was a wonderful day, but at dinner my niece said she felt feverish and sick and nauseated. So now I am worried that I have been made sick. It's hard to tell what's sickness and what's anxiety, though.
Also, I'm a little shocked by how much work I still have left for my classes, considering I have done several days of faffing about on them already. The Fruit Studies class got a new edition of a textbook, and I was smart enough to photocopy just the table of contents for both rather than bring the books, but that means I have a lot of checking to make sure that the stuff is in the order I want it. And I have two of the assignments I want to re-write based on my last semester's experience, but the notes for them are back at Postdoc City.
Yesterday and today I have been working on the comp syllabus and it is still a mess --- it took a long time to go backwards from what the portfolio and end result should be to all the different steps of the process to then slotting in readings I thought would work. And I don't like putting something on a day unless I know what I am going to be doing on that day and how it fits into the overall whole, so that means I am planning out a lot of the day-to-day stuff before getting it into the syllabus. Somebody else wrote about wanting to do it this way, I think it might have been Anastasia. Anyway, there's nothing I hate more than to come into class than thinking "why the hell did I assign this reading? And what connection does it have to what we did yesterday?" And I need to write homework questions and work up my library assignment ideas into a more polished form.
So, in sum, I am feeling too anxious/sick to my stomach to work and still have many many things to do. And I appear to have used up all the internet procrastination. Dangit. I wish my brother hadn't had to go back to work; I could have sat on the couch and watched him hack up orcs or whatever while my niece and nephew tried to put their feet on each other's heads. That sounds relaxing.
4 comments:
Hope you feel better soon.
twas me
Oh, dear. I hope whatever it is fizzles out or passes quickly.
I plan out calendars in great detail, too, With a heavy teaching load, I find it's the only way to (a) leave time for grading once the semester starts and (b) know what the heck I should be doing once I'm sleep-deprived and generally frazzled c. week 8 (and managing to sound half-sensible only because the students are even more so). But it's a pain, and I more than occasionally feel jealous of my own college professors (and a few of my lit. colleagues) who used to hand out calendars with the name of the novel we'd be reading and discussing each week of the semester, with maybe a paper deadline or a midterm date thrown in (though those were sometimes tba). How'd we get stuck doing all this scaffolding and linking of assignments and all that? Oh, yeah; it works better.
I hope you're feeling better. That syllabus mess right now will eventually lead to a great syllabus before the class.
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