Stop it, seriously. Something about being at UB makes my front lobe feel like it's being squeeezed ever so gently. Then, eventually, as I meditate on my two possible remedies, it settles into a nausea inducing headache. C calls this the UB migraine. It might have something to do with the flourescent lights in Clemens. It might be the ambiguously unseeing visages of inscrutable fifth year seniors, taking freshman comp for the first time. It might be the silence, which hums just an octave below regular silence, that fills the room right after I make a lame, English-teacher joke. (Q. What do you call Santa's little helpers? A. Subordinate clauses.) But, seriously, what's a well-intentioned TA to do? Crying's always good. Running is better. Where's the pain-go-bye-bye juice in this whole situation? Maybe some light meditation and stretching?
Of course, this is really just first day jitters. You'd think, wouldn't you, that after....what?...eight some years of teaching writing the initial shock of immersion would be somewhat lessened. I've yet to do the thing where you picture them all naked, but I don't think this would do much for my nausea problem. Sometimes I'd kill for a little fuzzy, blurry-eyed, comp rhet action. Maybe I could convince myself that I'm not drumming thesis statements into unwilling craniums, dulled by too much online poker and reality tv, but liberating my students into their own, individual, snowflake-ness. If only I could get my hands on some of those mini-pizzas that the oh-so-creepy John Ritter makes in the Buffy-verse, we could all just chill out about rhetorical styles and introductory paragraphs, pronoun-antecedent agreement and topic sentences. Somewhere, in the dark, little trolls are cranking the big wheels that make this shithouse run! At least some of us know what's really important, right B?
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Time to play a 'lil Jeopardy!
Clue:
The reason so many English professors are alcoholics.
Answer:
Alex, what is, "The above blog post?"
Correct!
Thanks, I'll take "Blank, Dead Freshmen Eyes That Sink as Deep as the Hallway in 'House of Leaves' for $800, Alex.
Machine elves, not trolls. Tell them, "This head is miiiinnne, betchhhhh."
For some reason, you're not upstairs playing Burnout all night, so I know you haven't reached utter desperation. Oh, and to make your life a living hell, I've decided to run an intricate network of model trains thorughout the whole house. Choo choo!!!!
ohmigod, LMFAO!!!
But seriously, that's only funny because it just might happen. Really, we're all inches away from constructing an elaborate model of the real world so that we never have to leave the soft cocoon of referentiality.
So that's what you've been doing all night up there, B. We can hear you squeaking your gingery way across the floor, plotting the destruction of those unsuspecting--but strangely omnicient--machine elves (I stand corrected). True, also, I'm not playing burnout. Instead, I've got the shoulder thing going on. Do any of you have this? They start out in a normal position, and then, slowly, over the course of five or ten minutes, gather up into a tense hunch. By the time I realize it's happening, I'm bunched up like a little old man. Deep breathing and consciously relaxing them doesn't help. You may laugh, B.E.M., but my innocent ears were once shocked when a very respected professor confided in me her desire to go home and drink herself into oblivion. Her words. Oh yes, hard is the way and long the path that leads from graduate school into substance abuse. At least one thing will go smoothly today.
Insomnia
not sure that the path from academia to substance abuse is long and hard. i know i have pretty succesfully transitioned into it. Well, not yet, really, I don't need an intervention, save the fact that i was informed that drinking in an empty room while IM-ing someone is still drinking alone. Such is.
Shit! Does that mean that drinking while talking on the phone doesn't count? What about drinking while talking smack to the hateful characters in whatever show you happen to be watching? What about drinking while thinking about talking to someone else? Shit!
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