In which the light at the end of the tunnel heaves into sight

Say it with me: Two more weeks. Two more weeks. Two more weeks and I'm free of the early class. Which is good, because they're working my last handful of nerves.

On the other hand, today I'm fully in favor of Daylight Saving Time, even though I continue to not understand it a whit--dude, I'm from Arizona, where we understand DST so little that we just gave up on it entirely. After last week's gloomy, pre-dawn wake-up times, today's happy sun greeted me. Just wait, though, I'll be cursing this evening as I trudge home in the 6:00 dark.

And the hotly-anticipated answer to Guess This Text? Troilus and Cressida, by Our Boy Will. Which, yes, I taught last week and with which I nearly prompted a mutiny. There was firm though irritated lecturing on the importance of reading, for pete's sake, followed by a class for which less than half the students showed up. So, today should be fun, then.

In which we play Guess the Text

[Yes, it's a meme-thing, grabbed from Dr. Crazy, she of the miraculous grading checklist. I'll be back with complaints soon, but in the meantime, this can be a clue as to what I've been up to lately, as the book came directly from my bookbag. A clue: instead of the fifth sentence, I had to pick the fifth line.)

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

"Without perdition, and loss assume all reason
Without revolt. This is and is not Cressid.
Within my soul there doth conduce a fight
Of this strange nature that a thing inseparate
Divides more wider than the sky and earth"

In which I am a victim of my own good intentions

Just finished responding to eleventy squillion midterm paper proposals. Every time I do this, I wonder why I do this. But if I can head off one student who wants to write about how this play/poem reveals a Universal Truth about Human Nature, it's totally worth it. I suspect I may still get some Universal Truths about English Literature, but that's more funny than sad and eye-gouging-making, so I'll take it.

Tomorrow=essay grading. All so I can have yet another Fun Wedding Weekend. Why are all my friends and relatives so intent on pairing off in legal fashions all of a sudden? Don't they know that I need my weekends free for lolling about and whining?

Oh, and I made the mistake of looking at my Winter Shx enrollment--35. Crap. So I have that to look forward to.

Lush update: I stopped on the way home from class to restock my Sexy Peel. I love that it's literally on the way home. Makes it less of an indulgence and more of an efficient errand.

In which I become jet-set

I just can't stop with the buying of the airline tickets. No, the rush of three cities in four days has changed me. I'm a jet-setter now. In the next month, I'll be hieing my high-flying self off to such fantabulous ports-of-call as... Pittsburgh! And... Next-to-Nowhere (And West Virginia), Ohio! Jellus? Yes, yes you are.

Classes are kicking me when I'm down, what with that stack of midterm exams and essays waiting for me. And more coming next week, because even though both St. Happy and UChaos are on quarters, they're two weeks off from each other. Stupids. But at least some small part of my unconscious had a hand in my syllabi, as I'm teaching the same play in both classes this week. Which means that I'm only carrying around one slim Pelican edition, rather than the many and multiple copies of two or three different texts that I'm used to. It felt weird, though, so I had to go buy honkin' Arden editions of this week's and next's. Just so I'd be properly ballasted for my commute.

In happier, and more commercial news, there's now a Lush counter in the Marshall Field Macy's across from where I catch my second bus of the day. But, since I've decided I hate my campus office, there's nowhere to stash any purchases. Is it tacky to bring a pungent but lovely-smelling shopping bag to class with me?

In which we resume, yet again

You wouldn't have thought the Wedding Weekend would have killed me so very dead, but it did. It was fun, it was awesome, but it did us all in. Evidence of the fun is on Flickr; evidence of the dead is the radio silence that followed.

But now I'm back, and in the throes of midterms, part one. I've written up the exam, but I'm feeling less-than positive about the essay prompts. And the UChaos class wants prompts for their essays (coming up in a week), as well. Bah. But there's hope: This idea is fantastic, and I'll be implementing it for these midterm essays coming in on Friday. As I mentioned in the comments there, academic blogs are my new, best pedagogy resource.

Oh, and the first sickness of the school year is upon us. Stupid students, who won't stop kissing each other and coughing on their papers. I'm trying to keep faith in the miracle cures of Zicam and Airborne, but I still feel like crap.