Perhaps, Perhaps

Perhaps I am going to get into writing again. Perhaps it's because I met Danzy Senna yesterday and she is a lovely person with a great talent and with two small kids! Granted, she does not have a baaaabbbyy, like I do, but hers are young indeed. So far this morning, I have posted some poems online and edited some too. I have to decide to dedicate myself to it all, yet, but certainly I can work on it when I feed baby in the mornings, instead of checking my facebook again. That is a good place to start.

Speaking of facebook, someone tagged a photo of me with Danzy and yikes! I look like I'm pregnant again. I assure you, I am not (probably not anyway). Hm.

I know that the cycle of writing when you can/taking care of little kids/writing when you can/etc. leads to madness. Some people can't handle it. See: Sylvia Plath. I am not sure if I can handle it either, so perhaps I will try to take a casual, but productive path. It really can't hurt to do email submissiions when they are free and take two minutes, right?

I want to submit to Rattle, Thrush, um. I could start there.

Away, away, away now.... to check my facebook and see if someone commented on my poems.

Baby Grows Up. My Students Do Not.

On the heels of a plagiarized essay about plagiarism, I find myself looking for distraction as I grade more papers. I look to amazon, etsy, facebook, babycheapskate.com, sweetjuniper.com, quodshe.wordpress.com, but never pacingthepanicroom.com (too much navel gazing).

I look all around the interwebs, and nothing is more interesting that my own baby, who I appreciate even more today because he took two good naps! Amaaaazzziiing! And because I went to visit my aunt in the cemetery today. I brought her some beautiful yellow mums to brighten up her gravesite. There is no stone there yet. It's as if no one wants it to be true.

Anyway, I tried to look for another aunt that I lost before I was born. She was only a baby herself. Instead of finding her, I found this sad sad sad baby row at the cemetery. The stones had birth and death dates in the same year. There were lambs and angels on them. So sad.

These are the times when I try to focus on what is really important. These are the times when I am most productive in my grading, because in the big scheme of things, these freaking grades don't matter at all.

By the way, I am back.

Here I am again

Well, I had this plan, and it was to write. I think I got too complainy, although none of the stuff I wrote was exaggerated or untrue. I decided that I would be happier in 2011. I'm doing well so far. My baby is sweet, my teaching load is not too bad this term and I have dreams that might come true some day in the forseeable future.

I'm starting to piece together my poetry book which I hope to submit to one of those first book contests. I'm starting to lose weight although I am also starting to bake a lot of cookies. More on that in the future when I see which way it goes.

If only I could do Zumba with baby in the carrier.

Goodbye, Dr. No.

This is a brief note to express my gratitude to Dr. No. His blog, Acadamnit helped me to see the lighter side of being a college professor. I loved that he gave personalities to various fonts on Microsoft Word. And that many people could relate to his love/hate relationship with his job as a professor. He showed that being a professor is not only a job, but it is a way of life. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, but it's always better with a smile.

Is all of Generation Y Lazy?

Today I'm going to gripe my ass off about my students. Maybe it's partly me, being tired of grading and tired in general and stuff. But, seriously?

I have required my students to write a 5 page essay about a popular trend, explaining the trend and 3 possible causes of it. Then they needed to choose the most likely cause and argue for it. So, this paper requires a bit of background and a bit of arguing.

I have read about 8 papers so far and not a single one has followed the directions. I gave these directions written, orally and in a model that we did together in class. Some classes even did a practice one themselves.

The papers I got are about 60% quotes and they read like articles on that trend. Then they interviewed their sisters about the trends so they could get up to their 4 required sources. 7 of them have no thesis. The one with a thesis does not state that they will discuss the causes of their trend.

Do I still have to grade 70 of these? OMG OMG OMG.

I should post the assignment sheet here so you can see that it's not unclear. Crap.

It's more expensive to be poor

People write sometimes about how it's expensive to be poor and they ususally cite something about the high fees for cashing checks and buying money orders. People in poverty still need to do some of their own banking even when they no longer can afford to have a bank account. For them, what's the point of having a bank when they live their week based on how much cash they have? Why just put it in to take it out again?

Personally, I have thought about this as well, but I have too many bills to deal with the hassle of money orders.

Here is another reason why it's costly to be poor. I just found out that my type of government heatlh insurance is not being taken by my OB-GYN. My baby is coming in one month. There are now NO doctors who will take me because I am too far along. Trust me, I called, and they don't want to mess up their little schedules for me.

So now I am stuck at the only place which will take me... the office with the doctors who work at the hospital. This place is loud, dark and kinda dirty. I will have my baby in another hospital from the one I planned on. I will have to share a room there with someone else for 4 days. Originally I was going to have a room, dvd, couch and WHOLE SPACE all to myself. Not now.

Also, I cannot get in to see those new doctors yet. So my baby is missing his non-stress test this week. Hopefully its sorted by next week since this kid is a comin!

Such a situation has or will cost me stress, more time, and perhaps a bit of monitoring of the baby. This all happened because someone didn't check out my insurance well enough. When I started going to their office 3 years ago, it was all fine, but they tell me that something changed.

I'm not sure anything changed. It's still more costly to be poor. Don't even get me started on the costs of buying things in bulk so that you can save money on them in the long run. Or on coupons that make you buy 2 of the products in order to save money.

"With what scholars now call hyperbolic language..."

I'm going through old essays to find an example of how to use various sources together to prove a point. I'm afraid that my students will get stuck on my academicese, which already sounds weird after 1.5 years out of grad school. Historical modes of production anyone? The terrain of aesthetics? Virgil’s arguably inauthentic background? A glossy poetic? O What does it really mean!