give me strength

This is not going to be a fun week, work-wise.

I have my first exam for one class to write. (As I hand back the exams - unlike some of my colleagues - I have to write new, from-scratch ones every semester. Which takes time.).

All day tomorrow is taken up with the Sept. 11 remembrance thing which I now wish I hadn't volunteered to work at. (And after that - I got kind of roped into something. One of the ladies at my church - who is a representative of one of the Major Home-Based Cosmetic Concerns - came up to me and told me that she felt like I needed a little "pampering" [this being after the whole mess with the youth group, which I think - hope - has corrected itself]. Turns out she wants to do a facial and "makeover" on me. Well, I am of two minds. One part of me says, you meet people where they are, and to her, she is trying to do a very nice thing for me, something that she'd regard as pampering. Never mind that I'm kind of touch-averse [the facial] and my general feeling on makeup is that the less you wear, the better - I wear it mainly to camouflage a little unevenness in my complexion. But I feel like if you're pretty to begin with, makeup doesn't add that much, and if you're not, there's not much point - kind of the old painting a mud fence thing. [and I've still not decided which camp of those two I fall into - "doesn't need it" or "it won't help anyway."] So I don't know. I'm going to go, and I'm going to be polite, but at most I will buy a lipstick from her [if there is, in fact, a hard sell attached to this thing]. I'm a long-time Clinique user, I like it, it does well for me, and I'm not willing to change just to make a friend happy.)

I got the WRITING part of the paper rewrite done, and got set to attack the figures. Unfortunately, my idea of "will just take a little work to fix up" and my co-author's idea of "will just take a little work to fix up" are very very very different. What he proposes be changed will require, I expect, about 15 hours of grueling, eye-crossing labor over the computer. And I can't push it off on him as I'm the one who has the software package that allows the map generation. I sort of want to cry; I feel like no matter what I do to the damn diagrams it's not good enough for him. He seems to think I'm magic and the only reason I've not made them PERFECT is because I'm stubborn or something. No, I've not made them PERFECT because your standard of PERFECT is almost impossible given the limitations of the program.

I will be going nuts with grading this weekend. Why did I choose to give a short-test in one class, collect a major homework in another, and collect a project proposal in my third on the same day? (I've made the short-test as much multiple choice as I can possibly justify to myself. I feel bad about that but I fear I have no choice).

Finally - for those of you who teach - how do you keep from Homer-Simpson-style strangling (or at least being distinctly uncivil and chilly to) a student who has a smart remark for EVERYTHING? I feel like I shouldn't be ticked off at this guy because I genuinely think it's how he relates to the world, that he can't be serious about anything, and that he HAS to be the center of attention by making his cracks. HE thinks he's funny, but his humor's getting on my last nerve. The thing is, when I react less than jovially, he gets all hurt, like I'm rejecting him.

On second thought - heck yes, I am rejecting him. I am too tired and too old to put up with a constant stream of peanut gallery remarks.

I've explained to students (including him) on a number of occasions that things that seem like they're funny and new clever remarks (Like: "Not many people in class today! Are you going to give us bonus points for being here?") are actually very old to faculty who've been teaching more than a year, and are not at all funny. (I use the analogy of this: you're a checker at wal-mart. The checkout system's on the fritz and things won't ring up easily. Every time something won't ring up right, the person you're waiting on says, "Oh, it must be free today! Ha ha ha!" I ask them if they would find it funny the fifth time someone said that. Yeah, maybe I should just suck it up and not say anything but I SWEAR I am going to go medieval on someone's backside someday if I hear one too many "Are you going to cancel class" cracks.)

(And I know - were I posting this on a certain bulletin board I visit, a certain person would immediately pipe up that the guy who's annoying the hell out of me is probably an Asperger's Syndrome person, and I should just suck it up and try to be nicer to him. There's someone I know where that's her response to everything - no one's ever a jerk; everyone who's annoying has some kind of syndrome that excuses them. Look - I know all about autism; I briefly had an autistic kid in Youth Group. There's a difference between Autism/Aspergers and being a total git, and I think I can identify total gits when I see them).

And I have a meeting tonight from 6:30 until dog knows when. And I woke up at 4:30 this morning and could not get back to sleep, so I just got up and worked out then, since I would have had at most another half hour to lie there.

Oh, and I had a weird dream last night - one of my colleagues and I were on some island somewhere doing research, and we saw this porthole/door thing. Looking in it, I realized that there was a meth lab set up in there, and that we were probably in some danger to us, because the meth-lab people (who were in there at the time) saw us and gave us evil looks.

Then Fred Thompson (?) came walking along and said, "It's okay. I'll sit on the porthole here and keep the people from getting out until you can go and get the police."

Huh? At least that's better than the dreams I have where I'm trying to find something and I can't, or where everyone's misunderstanding what I say and everyone's angry with me even though I'm trying to be nice.

That said - sometimes I wish I didn't dream, or at least didn't remember my dreams - they tend to be pretty exhausting.