Reason Breeds Insanity

This may sound bad, but I think I am skipping out on one of the greatest loves of my life, Hillary Clinton. She is going to be in Muncie tonight and I don’t think I am going. I have fifty annotated bibliographies to grade, and I have to speak on a panel in the morning about becoming a graduate student at BSU. I am sure Hillary will be fantastic, but I am not sure that I can squeeze her into my schedule.

I am ready for this semester to be over, and I am sure my students are as well. We are working on their big research paper, and we are struggling along together. They struggle because they don’t want to write an 8-10 page paper with much less direction than they have been given before, and I struggle because I have never taught college students before. I want them to have some amount of ownership in their papers, but I feel as if they want me to tell them what to write and how. I am trying to teach them process, with an acceptable product, but they want the key to creating an A product. The key is honing down a process that you can live with! If you excel at the process, the product will usually be one that is acceptable and just needs a few adjustments.

I got a tattoo in San Francisco. It is a piece of wheat toast, a strawberry jam heart, and some mint leaves. I love wheat toast; in fact, it is one of my favorite breakfasts. The mint leaves are there to add a bit of color. I plan to get a half-sleeve done on that arm eventually. I want it to be able to be covered by long sleeves, but show when I wear a polo or a t-shirt. This tattoo is a good start. I got it done at Lyle Tuttle’s Shop in SF. Tuttle has tattooed several famous people: Cher and Janis Joplin to name two of them. He doesn’t do tattooing anymore, and he sold his shop to another owner, but he still speaks at conferences and pops into the shop occasionally. My tattoo artist’s name was Doug, and he did an excellent job on it. The jelly looks shiny, and the toast looks like wheat bread. I love it. I think it might be my favorite tattoo yet!

I haven’t gotten my pictures developed yet, but I am going to take them tonight and drop them off at Walmart so that I can pick them up next week when I get paid. I am going to get them all put on CD, because I want to use the pictures for gifts for friends and family. I thought they would be more worthwhile than wasting money on souvenirs. Hopefully, they turn out well. I think I may have one that I will want to blow up to hang on the wall—Golden Gate Bridge in the sunset on the way back from Alcatraz Island. There is even a sailboat in the picture. I hope it comes out as good as I think it will.

It is raining again this morning. Although I missed the last big bout of rain, I still wish it would go away. I like the sun. I walked the dogs this morning and when we got home, they, along with my coat, were drenched. I spent a few minutes toweling them off only to have them shake and fling their stinky dog wetness all over me and the garage! I saw the male merganser again this morning without the female. I am hoping that soon I will see a whole little troop of babies floating out in the middle of the pond with them. I love baby water fowl; they are so cute swimming along behind their parents trying to learn how to waterproof and preen.

I am considering consolidating all my blogs down into one, but I am pretty sure that no one who reads this one would be interested in reading my research. In fact, unless you love reading queer theory or fat studies, I am pretty sure that you won’t be interested. My friends and I have decided we are going to a fat studies chapbook this summer; hopefully it will contain critical work, poetry, memoir, and art. We are going to self-publish it through the English department and present about it at the first Friday forum next year if GSAB will let us. I am pretty excited, we are finally beginning a creative community at BSU like I had imagined graduate school for English to be! I am working on some creative pieces, but I think I am going to rework my conference presentation so that I can try to publish it in a respectable journal. We’ll see how that works out.

Today is going to be consumed with grading and reading. I am supposed to meet with a student to help her with her thesis statement for her paper. I am learning quickly that I wish high school teachers would give their students a bit more independence in their writing, because college freshman can’t conceive of a writing world where their teacher doesn’t tell them step-by-step what to write. Sad really. I am leaving to go to school in a few minutes and I will be there until 615 tonight. I really hate the long days, but next semester will be worse!

For the fall I am taking three classes, teaching two, and auditing one. On Mondays I have theory of creative writing from noon to 3; on Mondays and Wednesdays I have fat studies from 3 to 415; on Tuesdays and Thursdays I have creative nonfiction workshop from 330 to 445, and I am auditing Native American literature from 5-615. I am hoping to teach at 10 and 11 on Monday Wednesday and Friday or at 11 and 1230 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Basically, I will be a recluse for the semester. I may actually die. Just kidding, but maybe.

I just finished reading excerpts from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and I am working on finishing it in its entirety. He will always be someone whose loss I mourn in many ways: he had conviction, he admitted mistakes, he changed his views, he was passion embodied. I can only imagine the state of race relations today if Malcolm X and Martin Luther King had not been assassinated. I know there are so many theories about each of their deaths; there are probably enough to fill several filing cabinets, but I tend to believe, as I usually do, that their deaths were some type of government conspiracy. I am sure that the idea of King and X joining forces in the late sixties, as they had planned to try to do, scared the shit out of the predominantly white government. It should have scared them. Combining the passion and brilliance of two of the greatest reformers in this country’s history, would surely have caused worldwide change. I frequently wonder how much further we would be now. Would there have been a Jena 6? Would there black men pulled over by the police for simply being black? Would it even be an issue that the democratic presidential nominees are a woman and a Black man? Would we racially idealize any ethnic group? Would we still need the United Negro College Fund? How much more progressive could we be? How little would the color of a person’s matter? Would we be fighting in Iraq? Would we respect Muslims? I can only imagine.