Dump Day

A full night of sleep. That's what I want.

I'm exhausted and cranky, and the week in the classroom is - unsurprisingly - not going well. Somehow, all my classes have gotten onto different schedules, and my lesson plans working much different in some classes than in others. I discovered today that I was going over something I had gone over the day before with one class that I thought was behind. That's the sort of day it was, the day a kid yells out to me and says, "Didn't we do this yesterday" and another chimes in, "Yes, thanks a lot for wasting my paper!" and rips it to shreds.

I just can't believe how tired I am, and how much I feel like I'm being pulled in every which way. Hands seem to be grabbing for parts of me wherever I go.

A friend looked at me the other day and said, "You know, we're all just concerned, because I think if you really analyze it, most of your issues come from being lonely." And it's interesting, but I have felt lonely before in my life, in fact very lonely, and now is not one of those times. I have 100 friends in Baltimore. I have friends that I wait tables with. I have friends that I teach with. I have friends that I blog with. I have friends who I attend grad school with. I have friends back home in Michigan. I have friends who I've recently reconnected with after years apart. I have friends who I would die for who live ten minutes away and I see once a month. I have a good roommate who is a friend. I have some friends who know me better than anyone has ever known me. I'm not lonely. No, what I'm longing for mostly now is time for myself, time that is nearly extinct this semester, this long semester that hopefully will be over before I know it.

I'm in my Wednesday class now, a class of concern for me because I'm now four or five weeks into it and haven't hardly learned a thing. And it's not because I already know the material, but, rather, because I just am having a hard time finding it in me to care about it. Next week was the midterm, and that was scaring the hell out of me, but the folks here just convinced him to make the midterm online. This is good, because I'm sure I'll be able to figure out the answers to it. Most of the course will be my research and research proposal, and I'm formulating something about reading comprehension and strategies. It would be a huge bummer if I spent all this money and took all these courses and didn't end up passing them and getting my Master's.

Being a reluctant student helps me identify with my students, though. I wish I could tell this professor things that I'm sure the students wish they could tell me: "Don't you have any idea what my life is like right now? Don't you know that just being here in this seat was a major feat? I see you're trying, but can't you make things just a little bit more interesting for me? No, I didn't do the reading. Does that make my presence here useless?". Hopefully it'll pass. I have a sense that most of the class is actually this final project, and I can do that.

My week ends tomorrow, and, ironically, I'm looking forward to my surgery on Friday. I'm looking forward to a day just between me, myself, and my health, the latter of which I have been neglecting. That should help focus me a bit. The surgery is fairly minor, certainly the least of my worries right now in the area of health, and getting it over and done with after so much anticipation is something I'm looking forward to. The only thing that scares me is the whole shaving of my head thing (if you missed it, I'm getting a lumpectomy/biopsy for a lump on my scalp), but only because I'll have to make the decision about going with a patch of shaved scalp or just doing the whole thing afterwards.