In which I live-blog my continuing procrastination

9:14 p.m.: I'm here, wherever this is, ensconced in my tiny faux-Victorian room overlooking an impressive-looking river. I have wireless, but no phone except roaming. I have water, and yogurt, and snacky Gardettos, and cigarettes, and music. I have 17 pages that need to become 10, and if they could cohere at some point, that would be great, too.

Thanks for the good thoughts and cheerleading. I'll keep y'all posted.

9:56: Ok, earlier there was some kind of air-raid siren, and just now there was some kind of explosion outside that sounded not really like fireworks. Where the hell am I?

I'm now up to 19 pages. This is not the direction I'm supposed to be headed in.

10:51: Holding steady at 16 pages. It seems that I'm writing just as much as I'm cutting. Need diet Coke. Must put pants on.

12:21: Things were weird out there. The QuickyMart had, in its array of bottled iced teas, extra-sweet tea. Apparently I'm in the south.

But now I've read Carl what I have, and pieces are sliding into place. Kind of. Down to 10 pages. We may be in the home stretch.

12:45: Done! No, really! I think it might actually be good! Yay me!

1:18: Final update. Wow, had I only read my horoscope for this week before I sunk into crazyland:

Sometimes, Virgo, you're too damn smart for your own good. You may describe a problem so brilliantly, for instance, that you think you've solved it merely by talking about it, and never get around to actually fixing it. On other occasions your fine mind runs amuck in an orgy of razor-sharp analysis, cutting things apart in order to understand them but not putting them back together again. I beg you not to indulge in these excesses during the coming week. Your intelligence will be soaring beyond even its usual exceptional levels, and it would be a shame for you not to capitalize on it momentously. (Free Will Astrology)

Next up, then, capitalizing on my enormous, exceptional brain.

In which I freak out

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh.

Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhaaaaaahhhhh.

Paper still not done. At least I'm packed. Freaking out.

Someone remind me that I do this to myself, under the stupid idea that I work better under deadline.

In which I am clearly unprepared

So, that conference paper? The one I'm giving on Friday afternoon, after flying to Columbus tomorrow and then driving to the conference college and then jumping on the hotel bed? Still holding at 16 pages gleaned from the much longer essay with a totally different argument. Still lacking its own argument or any connective tissue. Still lacking either a section explaining the title or the scene mentioned specifically in my abstract. And still not writing itself.

And yet, my head refuses to work properly. It wants to flip through the Sephora catalog while watching Top Model. At least I got all my class-related work done today, including a stack of essay grading, some pdf-making, and writing up a quiz and a whole slew of final essay prompts. (Let's not think right now about the final exam I'll have to write as soon as I get back.)

I need my own personal cheerleader for moments like this.

In which I further consider business cards

Paying no attention to the swelling to-do list at my elbow, let's think about Al's suggestion for what else to put on my imaginary business cards. She's going with "Erstwhile Rockstar." Yes, this pleases me. Other tagline options:

• Gal-about-Town
• Better than you
• Grammar Ninja
• Freelance Crank
• Hi.

and a new, strong contender, cribbed from Truewit at Blogging the Renaissance:

• The early seventeenth century: shining Golden Age of EVERYTHING.

Ok, that bit of silliness aside, I now have to turn to the seven remaining items on this weekend's to-do, including such minor tasks as "write conference paper" and "grade pile of midterm essays."

In which I lodge a complaint and pose a question

Item the first: My El station is closing in a month, for an unspecified length of time. Granted, I'm on a stretch where the stations are really close together, so this'll add only a couple of blocks onto my walk to the train, but one of the appealing things about this apartment was the fact that it's only two blocks from the train. Plus, how awesome is it to close a station just as winter, snow, ice, and unshoveled sidewalks are posed to make an appearance? Not awesome at all, actually.

Item the second: Would it be deeply cocky of me to make up some business cards for the conference? Nothing fancy, just something with my name and e-mail address--it seems pretentious to put my university or candidate status on it, right?

Item the third (unadvertised): I got a small travel grant for the conference. This means I can indulge in a large-ish car for the drive from Mid-Sized Midwest City (where I'm flying in) to Nowheresville Conference City. What should I get?

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.