Busy Busy Busy!

Well. I have been very, very productive today, if I do say so myself. What have I been up to?

1. I took care of some paperwork re: my "reassigned time" stuff for the semi-admin. position. And can I just say again how happy I am that the blog name is still current? How awesome is that. Maybe it's like how profgrrrl claims that blogging something that's lost will make you find it. I called my blog "reassigned time" and it's made me get reassigned time for a whole year!
   
2. I sent some long overdue emails.
3. I created the presentation assignment for my upper-division class, which, hallelujah, seems like it's going to make its enrollment. I feel kind of sorry for my students, incidentally, as it's a pretty brutal assignment. But I think they'll learn a lot from it. And my prep will be minimized (which, of course, is what I shoot for with all such assignments).
4. I scheduled a library session for the upper-division course, which I've not done before in those but which I think is worth the class day. By the way, does anybody remember how in olden times one would only use book sources in a paper because they were easier to get a hold of than articles? This is so not the way with my students, in this age of the internets and databases and such.
   
5. I emailed a VIP in my department, a preliminary step toward the very scary and delicate business of asking for a letter for going on the market.
6. I paid my bills.

I want to take care of more business, but I also am getting a little bit hungry and I kind of want to take a nap and/or play a computer game and/or watch a movie or something. Hrm.

I also decided not to update my real life website with the upper-div. course syllabus, as I'm afraid that if the students saw it they'd all drop and then the course would not be allowed to go and that would just suck. Why would they all drop? Well, I teach in a specialty that doesn't really appeal to the less motivated students, and, well, a lot of students are less motivated than you kind of need to be to read some of the stuff that I teach. And a lot of students lack confidence even if they are motivated, and so if they see the stuff on the syllabus they're afraid, especially if they don't know me. And my class is competing with contemporary fairytales or some such, which is a hell of a lot more appealing than what I teach, at least on the surface.

Why do I teach something that people don't like? Why do I like what I teach so much when so many hate it? Ah, questions for the ages.

I really miss New Kid. Especially because Michael Berube has this fantastic post about evaluations and rate my professor and stuff, and, well, evaluations make me think of New Kid. I do hope everything is ok with her.

Hmmmm.... what else? I have a little bit of a headache. Maybe I should take an advil?

And yes I'm aware it is Reading for Pleasure Wednesday and yes I'll post, but I'm kind of not in the mood. It's because I'm in work mode. It's a problem.

In other news, my diss. adviser sent me a really warm and supportive email about the market stuff. This is pretty awesome, as most of the time he has a very House-like disposition. Oh, I should probably note that this email was two sentences long, and that what made it really warm and supportive was that it wasn't some weird one-word answer that didn't really respond to what I actually wrote. So maybe I'm so used to feeling like the adviser gives me no love that anything seems warm and supportive at this point. (By the way, he's actually been a great adviser - it's just he's not great with email. Or telephones. He's kind of best in person, which is a problem since I am hundreds of miles away from him. Oh, and I need to make him out to be a monster in my head because it's this whole "I'm going to show him or please him or something!" thing I need in order to work. Whatever.)

Ok, this is a silly, rambly post. So I shall stop. Maybe I'll go out for some lunch (cheating on my healthy eating diet) and then do some more work? Maybe I'll go try to procure a binder that's big enough for all of my accomplishments? Hmmmm.