Look at her go!

31 October 2023: Absolute highlight of the day was seeing this news about one of our fantastic English-Education graduates. 

Long Monday...

30 October 2023: Long, long Monday--a day that I thought would have me home by 5:30 turned out pretty differently, with me getting in just before 8:00. And so much to do tomorrow, still. But I guess, on reflection, it was a pretty good one. Not a long post--sort of vague, I know--but it's about the best I have in me tonight. 

Revisions submitted...

29 October 2023: Excited to cross this off of my list: submitted the revisions for our "Year's Work" essay this evening. I imagine we'll get it back one more time--when it's in the proofs stage--but usually, today's step is the last big one. 

Much needed dumb fun...

28 October 2023: Slept in a tiny bit, did some housework, took my walk, and then picked up Amy and headed to Hagerstown. Indian buffet for lunch and fun dumb movie (Five Nights at Freddy's) combined for my kind of break. Came home, did some more housework, and then read Helen Hunt Jackson criticism for awhile. Now settling in to watch some a movie on TV. Tomorrow will be a busy day, but that's okay. 

Helen and Emily

27 October 2023: "I wish I knew what your portfolios, by this time, hold." --Helen Hunt Jackson in an 1885 letter to Emily Dickinson (qtd in Crumbley 752).

Really enjoyed this little piece by Paul Crumbley about Jackson and Dickinson's correspondance. It's full of great nuggets and a larger point about how differently the two women thought about the exchange and publication of poetry.

Works Cited

Crumbley, Paul. “‘As If for You to Choose’: Conflicting Textual Economies in Dickinson’s Correspondence with Helen Hunt Jackson.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 31, no. 6, Nov. 2002, pp. 743–57. EBSCOhost.

Texting with my brother...

26 October 2023: My brother texting me about Netflix's The Fall of the House of Usher--and our subsequent text conversation about all things Mike Flanagan--is one of my favorite things from today. I don't imagine our tastes overlap all that much beyond the Yankees, old music, and certain movies from our youth (no shade to either of us!), but they sure do line up when it comes to Flanagan. We both like Bly Manor the best, though I do need to rewatch Midnight Mass, because it's awfully close for me and I suspect it's the higher achievement (though that doesn't necessarily equal "my favorite").  

1402 good things...

25 October 2023: 1402 good things...

1400 straight days of 10K+ steps, which really is something. 

1 former student/current Shepherd employee who I am very fond of, telling me she prayed for me last night. I almost wept right there in the hallway.

1 current student who used the phrase "thunderstorms and fireflies" in place of "apples and oranges" and I just thought that was the most wonderful thing. "That's your Appalachain showing, my friend!" I told him.

One year to go...

24 October 2023: My manuscript is due a year from today. I finished off my entry on gothicism a few minutes ago (three entries this month--with a week to spare) and feel pretty good about hitting my goals for this semester. If I can do the same next semester--and that's a big if--that will leave me nearly six months for the introduction, some of the apparatus, and editing/revision. Those six months include a teaching-, admin-, and possibly advising-free summer, something I haven't had in the entire time I've been at Shepherd. In other words, right now, everything looks good. 

Today has been really hard in a lot of other ways, perhaps evidenced by me still being on campus at 7:30, I was so far behind on my goals because of other work-related concerns, so a little sense of achievement and control over this one thing makes me feel better. But I did want to highlight one more spot of bittersweet happiness. I finally got a picture of Jo printed and put it in a frame at work. This did mean displacing the frame's former subject--I just can't have pictures of cats who are now dead in my office; too many awkward moments with curious students--but I don't think he would mind.

Goofy...

23 October 2023: Had a delightful discussion of the book of Jonah today in my Bible as Literature class. One student's comment that the book is "so...goofy?" really set us on fire, in a good way. Because it really is a goofy book--and that makes it fascinating. 

The Butterfly

22 October 2023: Our little book club discussed James M. Cain's The Butterfly this evening. I am glad to have read it, but it's strange and disturbing little book. Living in West Virginia since 2007 also no doubt shaped my response to it. Cain depicts the potential for violence that runs through masculinity and religious zealotry, especially when it intersects with poverty and social marginalization. But most of the characters seem underdrawn.

I like this little excerpt from Paul Skenaz (which I found on Wikipedia) that says better than I could my own feelings about it: "The Butterfly confirms the way that Cain himself is a victim of, as much as a writer who profits from, the stereotypical forms of social understanding and visions of gender that dominate the American mind." 

Anyway, like I said, glad to have read it. 

Working on the Gothicism entry...

21 October 2023: Just really got a kick out of this bit from my reading for my entry on Gothicism: "But in this way we must also remember, as Loman reminds us, that whenever we conjure the ghost of Freud, we must also welcome Marx to the seance" (Falfak and Haslam 15).

Work Cited

Faflak, Joel, and Jason Haslam. Introduction. American Gothic Culture: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Joel Faflak and Jason Haslam, Edinburgh UP, 2016, pp. 1-22.

Misery

20 October 2023: 

[Catch-up post...]

What a delight it was to see my former student (and now, my friend) star as Annie Wilkes in Misery at a local dinner theater! Hannah, Cory, Amy, and I went together and it was just what I needed after a very hard and long week. 

My kind of math...

19 October 2023: Erin texted me this picture today, explaining that Krista had to write her own word problem. Amazing.

Comfort TV...

18 October 2023: For the five days or so, all I want to watch is the first season of Veronica Mars. (Extra Hot Great did a segment about pilot, so that's part of the reason why.) At the end of these long days, when all I want to watch is something very good, very engaging, and very familiar, it is hitting the spot. So it's an episode or an episode and a half or just a half an episode until I head upstairs, take my bath, and then lay down. Then I switch to an Abbott Elementary episode I've watched at least a dozen times and, Lord willing, drift off. 

"Your Baby Never Looked Good in Blue"

17 October 2023: After a meeting on campus, I stayed up there, working in my office until I got my entry on E. Pauline Hopkins done. Felt great to check that off the list(s). That's two entries in October already, so I am ahead of pace for getting that third one done this month. Since it isn't one that will require as much reading/reseach (it's on gothicism, not a specific writer or book), I hope I can use the "extra" October time to get a head-start on a couple entries that will be more demanding as I move into November. 

Anyway, thought I'd use this post to highlight one of the 80's tunes that powered me through that writing session. 

8...

16 October 2023: Long day, so it feels okay to have my post devoted to simply pointing out that after today, I have eight Senate meetings left. 

"The Tenas Klootchman"

15 October 2023: “Then I will go to her, and be her mother, wherever she is….We will be but exchanging our babies, after all” (507).

Re-read E. Pauline Johnson's "The Tenas Klootchman" (which means "girl baby" in Chinook) for the first time in nearly twenty years (?). Some of the pieces I've re-read for my book's entry on Johnson have been kind of haunting me, like "A Cry from an Indian Wife," which seems depressingly familiar as war rages in Gaza. This is not a criticism of the pieces, of course--rather a testament to their enduring power. 

But "The Tenas Klootchman," in which a dying mother gives her baby to a woman who has already lost her own little girl, makes me want to sob in a good way--and judging by my faded marginal note, it did the same all those years ago. 

Work Cited

Johnson, E. Pauline. E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose. Edited by Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag. U of Toronto P, 2002. 

Fresh cut...

14 October 2023: Got my hair cut this morning, which also meant a chance to catch up with Isabelle, the very nice woman who has been cutting it for years. She was telling me today about when she was a little girl growing up in Peru and just always loved doing hair. She knew it was what she wanted to do. Her dad, who sent his seven kids to private school, wasn't thrilled that that was her dream, but later, when she would visit Peru after immigrating to the US, she would cut his hair. Also, like so many little girls (not me, ha!), she loved experimenting with her own hair--and other peoples'. 

She mentioned something she had told me before--that everyone she knew had "black, black hair," but she wanted to be blonde. She saved up her allowance, bought a bunch of peroxide, and stuck her head in a bucket. It didn't look great and her mom wanted to kill her, of course. 

"But when I was walking to school and saw the sun reflecting off my hair...I was so happy..."

Love when people speak in simple yet profound poetry. 

Fall Break Friday...

13 October 2023: Considering a day successful if I've pushed back against all the bad vibes and ended up somewhere in "neutral vibe land." And that's where I am tonight, I guess.

That's enough of a post for today. 

When Evil Lurks

12 October 2013: Took in a 5:20 showing of When Evil Lurks today. What a movie! Makes Exorcist: Believer look even less impressive that I thought it was. Really liked it, but also, don't need to see it again--which speaks to its quality and effect in a good way. 

These dreams are a little on the nose...

11 October 2023: Made it to Fall Break, barely. Another very hard day. Still dealing with fallout from academic priorization. And more Senate-related stuff. And then we heard about a colleague's battle with cancer coming to an end. And one of my best friends got some bad news about her beloved cat--a very good cat, indeed. 

As for the post's title, well, here's the dream I had early this morning. I was on a boat with a bunch of people, but more like a pontoon or something with no railings on the edges? These three little girls--including a baby--are near each other as the boat nears a dock. It bumps into it and the three little girls tumble into the water--dark, dark water. I jump--along with some other people--in to try to save them. I am able to grab one of them (not the baby) and she clings to me as I swim upward. The water is so dark and keep swimming and swimming but the surface takes forever to appear. Finally, we make it out and are pulled on the boat. And then I look down the other two aren't out yet. It's already been a long time--and those girls were so little. Just this terrible sense of gloom and horror. 

So yeah...a little on the nose.

Very relieved to have four days of no alarms. Just going to try to stay home, work on my next entry, and give my soul a break. 

7:40 at my desk...

10 October 2023: Today was not a great day. News about academic prioritization rolling out. It is all so sad and frustrating. 

Decided to stay here and pound out this Mary Austin entry for the book, along with some other work. Write, write, write and work, work, work on the things I can control. The things that make me a bit happier. The things that distract me. 

So it's 7:40 and I am sitting at my desk on campus. Will head home soon, but that entry is done. Tomorrow? Well, we'll see what tomorrow brings. 

49

9 October 2023: Today would have been Ryan's 49th birthday. 

I've been dreaming about lost loved ones lately, including last night. But not him. I am not sure why. 

Not a single day goes by that I don't think about him, that I don't think about the loss. I think what's on my mind most today is that it can still be so sad--and that the loss casts such a shadow over his whole life. It reads as the conclusion you could (should?) have seen coming, maybe. I don't know. Maybe that's silly. It almost certainly much too simple. 

I do wish I could have some kind of vivid dream of him, but more like a flashback. Some video clip of him the way I am trying my best to remember him. The version of him that slips away again and again, swallowed by the narrative of how it ended. But maybe that's a silly wish, one that would just fill me with more sadness. I don't know.

I guess what I am saying is that this year, on this day, I am just sad when I think about my brother. 

Scared, but also nosy...

8 October 2023: Had a guy over today doing some electrical work. Veronica was, of course, in deep hiding. Jo, though, did the thing she does when she is scared--hides under my chair. She's scared, but also nosy. And it does make my heart soar that she feels safer around me.

After a while, she got very brave and kind of wouldn't leave the guy alone (shades of Bing and Wes when repairmen were here). Had to stick her in the bathroom! 

Grading joy...

7 October 2023: Stopping myself mid-grading this morning (when I have so much on my to-do list) because I just have to write about the ENGL 204 student whose exam I just graded. He sits mostly by himself and never says a word, but I just knew he was paying attention and absorbing the material. We will make eye contact sometimes and he doesn't even nod or anything, but I know that, because he won't break that eye contact, that he is sort of telling me that he is intrigued, he agrees, etc. (And yes: I should/will start asking him to participate more--the old, "You look like you agree! Want to say something more?")

Anyway, he just nailed this midterm and it makes me want to cry, I am so happy. It's a rough time on campus, but my goodness, what a gift this young man has given me. Now I need to make sure he knows how great he is at this. 

"notable for having a big boat..."

6 October 2023:  I think I had forgotten how delightful these Bible as Literature midterms have the potential to be. Here's another excerpt that cracked me up: "Noah is notable for having a big boat, and he and his family surviving the flood that wiped out life on earth, but Samson can kill one thousand men with nothing but a donkey's jaw bone he found lying on the ground." Something about Noah being "notable" for his "big boat" is so funny. And Samson? That guy always kills (pun intended). 

Preach it!

5 October 2023: "This story not only allows Tamar the autonomy to choose her fate, but consequentially reveals a critical look at the asinine conventions of a patriarchal society in which a man can sleep with one prostitute as much as he pleases while also threaten his own daughter-in-law with murder if she becomes one herself." --a heck of a sentence from one of my student's "Bible as Literature" midterm exam. 

She also added a hand-written alternate title for her essay: "Bad Girl Bible Club." 

Trying to be better...

4 October 2023: Another long day in a stressful week/semester has me verging on being grumpy and annoyed with anyone who isn't a bestie or isn't a student in one of my classes. And that feeling of grumpiness is not fun. Not a fan of it or the kind of person it makes me, even when I hide it. 

So, I am actively working to fight it. (Which is not the same as "supress it." That just makes it worse.) 

(And yes: I know this is a "burn out" symptom, but it's a bit more complicated than that--and perhaps less dire long-term.)

Just writing about it actually helps. I need to keep myself aware of it and work through it. I can do that. 

"The Return of Mr. Wills"

3 October 2023: “Mrs. Willis had lived seventeen years with Mr. Wills, and when he left her for three, those three were so much the best of her married life that she wished he never came back. And the only real trouble with Mr. Wills was that he should never have moved West. Back East I suppose they breed such men because they need them, but the really ought to keep them there” (Austin 51). 

Got such a kick out of this passage from Mary Austin's story, "The Return of Mr. Wills," which I read today--along with a bunch more--while working on my latest entry.

Work Cited

Austin, Mary. Western Trails: A Collection of Short Stories. Edited by Melody Graulich, University of Nevada Press, 1987.

Midterm week...

2 October 2023: Kicking off midterm week with an 11.5 hour day on campus, but at least I got just about everything on my list done before I got home. The exams don't start coming in until Wednesday, so I am hoping to use tomorrow to get a lot of work done on the next book entry (Mary Austin) and on the Year's Work essay. We can do this...

Bring on Bob's Burgers!

1 October 2023: Pushed and pushed myself through a boring task that I should never have had to do this evening, but it is done. Better be done for good, but we'll see.

What a nice surprise to see that a new Bob's Burgers episode tonight. Feels like a reward for getting my weekly "Book/Year's Work" list done, trimming the front bushes, and knocking off just about everything else on my daily list.