This weekend I had a first that I never anticipated: my spouse-thing loaded my stuff into the car and drove me up to school. As opposed to my parents doing it, or me doing it myself, which is how it's always happened. And then he did the unforgivable and left me there. Granted, he took me to get a second bookshelf first, and took me to the really big grocery store that I can't walk to, and carried all my heavy stuff up to the fourth floor. But when we ran out of weekend he left, and I sulked. And then I realized how much I have to get done, and I stopped sulking and started panicking.
I've said before that one of the unfair things about academia is that January is smack dab in the middle of the year for us, as opposed to the new beginning that 'most everyone else gets. It also happens to be, I realize now, a serious crunch time: there are funding deadlines, and coursework deadlines, and submission deadlines, and tax deadlines, and all kinds of other nasty deadlines, and all I want to do is sleep until it starts staying light out for more than six hours of the day.
In the plus column, I now have the module outlines for both of the classes that I start teaching in exactly one week! Teaching is a special source of terror for me, because it highlights all of the cultural differences that I usually get to blissfully ignore. What do I call my superiors? Is the thing I'm teaching technically called a module, a class, a seminar? Am I missing something that a person that was educated in this system would take for granted, and that the system takes my knowing for granted? Luckily, both my course conveners are incredibly sweet, so I'm hoping that the term won't be an unmitigated disaster. And, as terrified as I am of any occasion that involves me interacting in person with anyone that I'm not married to or sibling to, I'm actually kinda excited that I get to teach. It makes me feel like almost a real adult.
Also in the plus column, one of the three modules (classes? sections? pluots?) I'm teaching is Intro Creative Writing, and, as long as I don't change the graded work guidelines, I get to put whatever I want on the syllabus. Funnily enough, 'my future creative writing class' is something that I've thought about before, and I even have a file where I've been stashing favorite exercises and handouts from classes I've taken, just in case I ever get to teach my own. I say 'funnily' because last summer my mother was shocked that I'd never done the same for 'my future wedding.' Diff'rent strokes, Ma.
Speaking of weddings, I've meant for a while now to write something about that, because it was a seriously surreal experience. When we got engaged at the beginning of the year I told Dave that I was worried about all of the traditional trappings, and he told me I was being paranoid; six months later we got one card too many addressed to 'Mr. and Mrs. David W---' and he went off on the most wonderful rant against the patriarchy I have ever heard. But that will have to happen after I've written the syllabus for my (!) creative writing class.
To Hemingway, or not to Hemingway? That is the question.
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