Democracy Awakening discussion...

20 February 2025: Got to share a stage with three of my favorite women this evening--Hannah, Sally, and Stephanie--for a discussion of teaching our Common Reading book. As expected, it was fun and interesting and the time flew by. 

Another win...

19 February 2025: Long day, with this cold--both my head cold and the freezing weather--lingering. But what a delight to see the women's basketball team pull off another confernence win, this time against an opponent who they lost to by a lot earlier this season. Still a ways to go, but I keep saying their record does not reflect the way they've played. 

A little lighter...

18 February 2025: Pushed and pushed myself this weekend and today to grade and grade and grade. (No time or energy to do any on Monday.) At around 4:30 today, I finished all but three of the papers that came in on Friday. (The three that came in late can wait for tonight or even Thursday.) 

And when I realized that they were done? And that the book was in? And that I already sent in a conference abstract? And all my classes for tomorrow are prepped? That essentially nothing major is pressing on me?

That's a sense of lightness that I hadn't felt in a long time. Feels great. 

Yes, there's a list of things I need to get to. And this cold is still zapping my energy. But this little bit of lightness? It's quite nice. 

Monday night off...

17 February 2025: Fighting off a little cold or something (since Saturday night). Slept awful last night. Today was good and busy, but I am wiped out. So the plan is some TV, a bath, and an early-ish bedtime. I have 18 ENGL 102 essays that I want to grade by Wednesday, but they can wait until tomorrow. 

Grading, grading, grading...

16 February 2025: Yup: that's the story of today. Not (really) complaining. Actually feeling pretty good about the progress I've made. 

All of those "after February 15" tasks...

15 February 2025: The list of things I've been adding to an "after February 15" list is really big. But I am tackling them today (having submitted the manuscript proofs yesterday). Graded some ENGL 102 papers (so many more to go, along with the first set of ENGL 301 annotated bibliographies), did some work for the HLC team I am somehow a part of (again), and am about to finish up my SSAWW proposal. 

It's a different kind of overwhelming, but I can't complain too much. It will all get done and I am blessed and grateful for this work I get to do (well, most of it anyway).

Proofs sent...GULP!

14 February 2025: My Valentine's Day gift to myself? I just hit "send" on the proofs. This has been such an emotional and anxious process for me. I could have spent another week reading and re-reading, but I had to stop. 

Off they went.

Not exactly chair-dancing, but laughing at the song that came on Pandora when I hit play--that is play when I type this--is "Human" by The Human League. The chorus?

"I'm only human

Of flesh and blood, I'm made

Human

Born to make mistakes"

With that said, at 5:37 on a non-stop Friday, I need to get onto some other work. Quizzes to grade, classes to prep...and about 300 pages of student papers that came in today.

But that book? It's done. 

Almost done...

13 February 2025: Pretty long and busy day, especially for a non-teaching day. I am both wired and tired, writing this after 10:00 p.m. 

But worth pointing out that the book stuff is almost done. It has to be--the deadline for returning the proofs is Saturday. The number of things I've been adding to my "after Saturday" list is intimidating, but I also kind of can't wait to start tackling them. 

How I've Spent My Snow Day...

12 February 2025: Proofing, proofing, proofing. Course prep for Friday. Emails. A million other things. And proofing, proofing, proofing. 

(Shoveling took maybe 5 minutes, plus the 10 my neighbor came over to chat in the driveway.)

Jo cannot believe we are still doing this. Lots of trying to disrupt and lots of protest napping.

Snow day!

11 February 2025: For the first time in all of my years at Shepherd, I am unqualifiedly happy about the snow day tomorrow. Due to some pre-planning and serendipity, I've been able to more or less let every class avoid any annoying online "learning" to keep us on schedule. Just telling 80 students to enjoy their snow day? Feels good!

And the bigger bonus? I get to keep working on Round Three of proofing the book. All. Day. Long. 

Grateful...

10 February 2025: Asked two of my best friends for help with a big task today and they immediately said yes. The relief I felt (and am still feeling!) was the good kind of overwhelming. 

So grateful. So blessed. 

Second Round of Proofs: DONE!

9 February 2025: Someone is very glad this book stuff is almost done, even if the author is absolutely certain there are more errors lurking.

"Would I burn palaces?"

8 February 2025: Re-reading the book during this last round of proofing has me stopping again and again in amazement of how strikingly relevant nineteenth-century American women's writing is for our moment. This isn't surprising, given how much of it emerged in moments of national crisis, but some of the parallels are especially poignant. Today it was "The Palace Burner," by Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt. 

Would I burn palaces? I'd like to think so, but I sure don't know for certain. 

Heart Eyes

7 February 2025: Made it through the week of conferences. Tiring, busy, at times stressful, but also really rewarding and fun. 

Also rewarding? Taking a little break to see Heart Eyes this evening. What an absolute delight of a movie! It nails the rom-com and slasher tropes. Terrific acting and chemistry from the leads. And under two hours? So much fun. 

"into another world..."

6 February 2025: When I wasn't conferencing with students today, I was proofing my book. Found myself moved all over again by this passage from Margaret Fuller's letters: “When I write it is into another world, not a better one, perhaps, but one with very dissimilar habits of thought to this where I am domesticated” (Letters 125). Fuller, I explain, wrote towards and for the world she imagined. It's inspiring.

It is a profound experience to re-read these pages in these dark and troubled day, not because of my writing (ha!), but because so many of these women continue to inspire me as they wrote and wrote and wrote through their own troubled times.

Work Cited

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth, Cornell UP, 1983.

A bit better...

5 February 2025: Still feeling a lot of what I wrote yesterday. Didn't sleep well. Woke up at 4:00 a.m. and it came crashing right back. But got up, went to work, conferenced with a bunch of students, taught a bunch more, talked with friends...and it helped. 

Sometimes the noise is just too loud...

4 February 2025: Busy day today; 12 conferences, some book proofing, trivia... Since the election, my work and things like trivia are what have helped me get through the days. And I am grateful for them today. But my goodness: all this evil and cruelty--nightmare after nightmare after nightmare--is hitting me so hard tonight. It's overwhelming. 

Week of conferences: day one...

3 February 2025: "I went from social distancing to infantacide..." --a statement from one of my ENGL 301 students that sounds absolutely unhinged out of context. (She was talking about two sources for her annotatad bibliography about Wuthering Heights.)

Anyway, one day down. Four to go. 

First round of proofs: DONE!

2 February 2025: Finished the first round of finding mistakes in the proofs and entering the changes. That feels pretty good. Of course, I am convinced that I missed a bunch, so I will try to go through it one more time between now and the February 15 deadline. That might sound like a lot of time, but I've got so much teaching-related work coming at me that it will rough (including nearly about 45 (!) student conferences this week). 

Still worth pausing and celebrating getting this first round done. 

Index: Done! (Done?)

1 February 2025: I think I finished the index today. I am just not going to overthink it (she says, immediately doubting that decisions). 

Anyway, had a "helper" with me this morning. She switched to "distractor" pretty soon after this, a role she has played on and off the rest of the day.