Grading

The only thing keeping me from tearing my hair out while I grade is Ella singing Cole Porter. Here, you can keep your hair too:

Bright spots

So, grading is happening. You know what feels great? When a student who resisted your advice for weeks (months?) and who rolled her eyes constantly and who was certain she had nothing to learn but then later despairs and becomes intensely frustrated by her own work turns in a damn good senior thesis because she actually absorbed what you were saying and used the sources you recommended and ended up really caring about what she was writing and put all that research toward her own ideas.

It's nice to remember that I chose this field because I love teaching. Sometimes they learn, and sometimes you can see that they learned because of what you did for/to/with them. That's what it's for, right?

Maybe she's just sucking up to the guy grading her, and doing it really well. She did cite my dissertation. But I choose to believe that she's actually learning and thinking and growing. And I believe that in 1978 God changed his mind about black people.

Wait, that wasn't what I believe. That was a quote from The Book of Mormon. Close enough. That's my grading soundtrack.

Dead ends

My youngest cousin has graduated from college. He finished school and moved home, at loose ends for a while, trying to become an environmental journalist in an environment hostile to (print) journalists. He managed to get an internship at the Sierra Club in San Francisco, CA, which I believe he will start soon. Unless he's already started. I'm excited for him, and I can't wait to see what he does with his adult life.

My youngest cousin is from Newtown, CT. He has an amazing adult life in front of him, because he was not shot and killed when he was five, or six, or seven. He went through his entire childhood without once being brutally murdered for no apparent reason by a total stranger. I hope he goes through his entire adulthood the same way.

My second youngest cousin is his brother, also from Newtown, CT. He has been an adult for some years now, and is happily living in New York with his girlfriend. I don't know quite what he does, since he's in the big blank world that I do not understand called Business (or is it called Finance? Banking?), but he has an independent, adult life that he enjoys, because, as a child, he was not brutally murdered for no apparent reason by a total stranger.

Their parents, my aunt and uncle, still live in Newtown, CT. My aunt teaches at Sacred Heart, and gave a final exam today before she knew how bad things were. My uncle is a pediatric pulmonologist at Danbury Hospital. According to my aunt, he went to the hospital as part of their emergency response team, but they didn't have much to do. Because there weren't wounded people, for the most part. The children and the adults who were shot were nearly all dead before they could be taken to the hospital.

Before today, Newtown, CT was unheard of. The center of town in Newtown is the flagpole. There are more UCLA undergraduates than there are residents of Newtown. Now, Newtown is on the map,  because children died there, violently, needlessly.

Do you know who else lives in Newtown, CT? Suzanne Collins. She's the author of the Hunger Games trilogy. You know, those books about children dying violently, needlessly. It's not ironic, but it's eerie. I can't help but think of those fictional children, since I don't know the names or faces of any of the real children.

This isn't any kind of reasoned argument. This is a list of statements, because I am beyond thinking. Children are dead. Adults are dead, at least some of whom died trying to protect those children. None of this had to happen. All of it did happen.

I talked about weeping blood in my last post. I would cry tears of blood every day for the rest of my life if I could undo this. Painful, burning tears. That would be no price at all to pay.

I can't think of anything else to say. Zilpha Keatley Snyder wrote the Green Sky trilogy over thirty years ago. These children died before they were old enough to read it. That breaks my heart. Read it, please, to your children, or to any children you know. Teach them about corrosive violence. If they live long enough to hear you.

Moving forward

So, the dissertation is (for now) done. That means it's time to move into job application world for the next few days, until the students turn in their last senior thesis drafts on Friday, and I go back into grading world. Since job applications are so soul sucking and demoralizing, I'm jumping at the chance to work in any other way, and I'm actually looking forward to grading world. Sad, isn't it? Right now I'm enthusiastically helping a former student with grad school applications because I'd rather help ease her soul-sucking demoralization than leap headlong into my own.

The next job application is pretty easy, since it's just a slightly different version of the only one I've done so far, a postdoc teaching first-year writing. The one after that is incredibly easy, since it's just emailing a CV. Once those are done, however, it's full-tilt musicology job applications until I weep blood.

Okay, that's obviously a melodramatic presentation of my situation. I have actually wept blood before, on three occasions (eye surgery is soooo not fun), and this will be far less physically uncomfortable. However, I think I would prefer physical pain and discomfort to this process. I'm not particularly good at competition or at telling people why they should want me. I'm much better at telling other people why they're awesome, and at coping with pain. Not really related skills normally, but both reasons why I don't wanna do this.

Anyway, time to dive in. Wish me luck. Listening to Turn of the Screw is going to keep me focused on the task, I hope, and not distract me like all the Audra McDonald I just listened to...

Completion

Yesterday, at 12:40 PM Eastern Standard Time, I submitted my dissertation to my committee. It feels very strange to be done with it. I celebrated by unpacking the kitchen stuff in the new apartment.

That's all I've got right now.

Changing planes

Just a quick hit to let y'all know that I have moved to DC. Thanks to heroic efforts by the boyfriend and some of the greatest friends in the world, my move out of the old place was a snap and my move into the new place is well underway and seems easily within reach—I got to skip the moving to Arlington step in my moving progression!

Right now I'm sitting in the delightful Coffy Café a few blocks from my lovely new home, grading students' rough drafts of their senior theses. I had to take a break to announce my arrival because Microsoft Word crashed just as I was saving one student's comments and edits and I got very irritated. I regraded her, and am about to start the next, because the sooner I finish the sooner I get to go to go to Smoke and Barrel for teatime lunch!

I'll post for real once the grading and dissertation are done.

Things

Internet friends, I have been absent from the blog for a while. Things have happened since then, things I intended to write about. Like a big national conference in my field that I went to. Like a really important election. A lot of things happened.

But now instead of writing about those things, I am writing about these things:

1. My dissertation needs to be done, edited, footnoted, coverpaged, signed, sealed, and delivered to my adviser by December the 7th.

2. I need to move out of my apartment and into the Mysterious X's apartment here in LA by December the 1st, out of her apartment and into the boyfriend's apartment in Arlington, VA by December the 4th, and out of his apartment and into the new apartment in Washington, DC that the boyfriend and I will share by December the 10th.

Those are the things. You will note that within the span of ten days, I have to move three times and finish the dissertation. There are no other things. Except that on the first of those ten days, I also am singing in a concert. And before, during, and after those ten days, I have a lot of grading to do. And for eight days before those ten days, I will be traveling to the east coast and cannot be packing up here.

This is why I have eaten a lot of Tootsie Rolls and have drunk a lot of tea and have not done a whole lot beyond writing dissertation in the last week. I'm about ten to twenty pages shy of a first draft, and I have about three weeks to get from there to done with a last draft.

Donations of brain cells and sanity gladly accepted. Also please take my furniture and household goods. They are free.