Last weekend, I finished grading my SCC lit class, which leaves me with just three courses for the next three weeks. And then I’ll get a whole week off before my summer courses start. (My goal, in addition to finishing my three courses successfully, is to prep my June course well enough that I can actually take that week off from work.)

The end of the SCC lit class could have gone better. One struggling student cheated on both her last paper and the final. Another, who needed an A+ on every remaining assignment to pass, skipped assignments, turned in a research paper without any research in it, and then turned in an incomplete final AFTER I’d turned in the grades.

(Did he tell me he needed another day? Of course not. That would entail communicating with me.)

My comedy students’ final is soon, so I need to write my routine, since I’m the MC.

A beloved colleague brought my attention to a temporary fix the DOE might have for people like me, who paid an incredible amount of money to the “wrong” plans. So I’m filing for that. Do they want ink signatures from UCD to prove I have worked there all this time? They do. Is the website confusing, because it says I’m not eligible since I, like everyone else, is in automatic Covid deferment, but then also have a paragraph about how I should ignore the giant warning on every singe page about that, since they’re the ones who deferred me? Yes.

I tried Jupiter Rising, but didn’t like it. Tried Invincible. Might like it. Tried Hacks with Jean Smart. Fucking loved it. Started Ted Lasso. Will binge more soon. Couldn’t quite get through Army of the Dead last night. Started and finished this season of Shrill, which is awesome. Watched Jason Alexander et al in The Sisters Rosensweig via Zoom and The ABCS of Love via the Sacramento French Film Festival.

I’m mourning Paul Mooney and Charles Grodin.

My upper division students are struggling, because I’m making them write a grown up argument (one in which the thesis is actually debatable (for reasonable people) and defendable, and one that works to inform and persuade its intended audience, and one that fully and fairly engages with counter-argument).

You’d be surprised how many draft theses are unconstitutional, EVEN AFTER I SAID IN THE VIDEO ABOUT THIS THAT THEY SHOULD NOT MAKE UNCONSTITUTIONAL ARGUMENTS.

I spent 9 straight hours giving feedback on drafts on Thursday. Then, I tried to join some high school friends for a Zoom reunion, but I felt so sick with exhaustion that I had to go lie down.

The most stressful thing this week, though, was another visit with my TMJ dentist.

I told his assistant that I wanted to talk about getting a lower night guard and/or a dental device for mild apnea (since the dentist is convinced my tongue is in the wrong place when I sleep). The dentist was dismissive of anyone who’s vouched for lower guards. (“Well, I guess your friends have made literally thousands of upper night guards like I have, right?”) But he agreed to let me have a lower one and “run [my] own little experiment.”

But, I said. If you think I need that apnea dental device, shouldn’t I get that and not use any type of guard?

We came to consensus on trying that first. I have to do a sleep study for insurance to approve it.

Then he brought up all the other things he wants to do: the frenectomy, sawing down some of the protruding bones in my mouth, braces, etc.

I said I’d like to go in stages since I have other doctors who want to do things to my body that are also extreme.

We left that conversation with him knowing nothing more about me, but with me knowing about all of his surgeries. Sigh.

He said to get the sleep study done and then we’d do a scan for the device.

When I was alone again with the assistant, who had been in the room the whole time, he tried to schedule me for a scan for a lower night guard.

“That’s not where we landed,” I explained. “We need to schedule a scan.”

“For braces?”

No.

Once I got him to realize we were trying for the apnea device, he wanted to get the device going right away.

“Don’t I have to get the sleep study first?”

“I don’t think so. They’ll want to study you with it in.”

“But the doctor said I needed the study before insurance would authorize the device.”

“Oh, yeah. That makes sense.”

He scheduled me for a scan next week, saying we can do the scan without authorization, but I don’t trust him, so I’m calling tomorrow to talk to someone who can parse conversations better.

Overall, though, it was a good week.

My son and I celebrated the end of his first year in grad school with a sushi feast.

A beloved friend got me an amazing gift:

And I am celebrating that, as of last night, it’s no longer been a year and seven months since I’ve had sex with another person.

Yay vaccines!

I was so wrapped up in the rest of last week’s wrap up that I forgot to mention one of the most exciting things. I dreamed about Dan Savage, of the Savage Love Podcast. I tweeted about it, and he mentioned read and responded to my tweet on the show!

This last week, I was busy with UCD starting up; I welcomed classes 301, 302, and 303!

Two bummers this week: I was searching for my documents on the internet (something I do every once in a while to protect my intellectual property). I discovered one of my students last quarter stole 11 documents and put them up on Course Hero.

Think “stole” is too harsh a word? Students uploading to Course Hero have to say THEY are the copyright holder of the work.

So yeah. Stole.

Their code of conduct explicitly forbids sharing our materials, and I make a huge deal about this in class, since I had a student put a draft I shared with them online, which later led to me being accused of plagiarizing my own work when I tried to submit my piece to a journal.

As I was searching, I got sucked into the black hole that is Rate My Professor, which I know I should never read. I’m going to blame my mild OCD on obsessing over this. All I’ve been able to do the past couple of days is to argue with the naysayers in my head (“WTF? All the other students said this course was organized gorgeously! I got unprompted compliments! And if you were having trouble, why didn’t you tell me so we could fix the problem instead of yelling to the universe that I need to be fired?!?”)

Are there good reviews too?

Yes.

Do I know more students like me than hate me?

Yes.

Objectively.

Do I try to fight the negative voices by remembering I won the teaching award?

I do.

Does it help when I’m trying to sleep?

It does not.

In other news, I have indefinitely postponed the back surgery I was going to do this week. I have had many procedures similar to this one, and I’ve never gotten a bad feeling, but intuition says no to this one.

I think it’s because I know they will use this procedure to try to talk me into a nerve burn, which I don’t want.

Thus, intuition is like, “hey, let’s NOT go the medical center for another “this will only rarely paralyze people” thing when it’s just going to lead to an argument you don’t want to have.”

My treadmill came last night. Predictably, the not-quite-English instructions may have had us oil the belt incorrectly. The instructions also don’t include anything about changing the incline or the height of the handlebars, so I’ll have to do some tinkering, but my thighs already hurt from overdoing it.

Or doing it wrong. Not sure.

This week, I also bought the new album by my new favorite band, Tele Novella, I got my oil changed, we survived a flat-tire-on-the-boy’s-car wrench in one of the days, I made my first lohikeitto (Finnish Salmon Soup) of the season, and I tried two new recipes: lemongrass chicken (in the air fryer) and spicy cajun shrimp.

I got my post-Easter ham this morning, which I start playing with tomorrow.

I got my second vaccine! I could tell it was going to fuck me up, because I got numb in my arm, neck, and face right after the injection. Luckily, I had planned taking the next day off, which ended up being my only day off in Spring Break.

It was perfect for bingeing The Bureau, my new addiction.

My son and I have also decided to rewatch this little show called The Simpsons. Since we only get through a few a week, it will take a few years.

I saw two stand-up comedy shows and caught this month’s Sacramento French Film Festival offering, The Fantastic Journey of Margot and Marguerite, which was, as hyped, fantastic.

I did my taxes, got everything ready for UCD classes to start tomorrow, pulled my hair out over two problematic students at SCC, and attended a webinar on equitable grading.

I tried two new recipes:

Tumeric Black Pepper Chicken with Asparagus

Pork Chops in a Lemon Caper Sauce

And I got another air fryer.

Yup. Another air fryer.

I got a small one to experiment with a few months ago, and I fell in love with it. Lately, I’ve been disappointed that when I want to cook meat, potatoes, and a veg, I have to choose just one for the air fryer. I’m also thinking ahead to summer, when I will want to cook without heating up the kitchen. The air fryers don’t add much heat to the kitchen, and food cooks really fast in them.

My first night with two air fryers, I put a layer of green beans down in the big one, topped with a grill layer of chicken breasts.

The smaller air fryer got the potatoes. In 20 minutes, I had this:

I also discovered that I don’t have to do a boil and slow roast of pork ribs for them to be tender. They take 20 minutes in the air fryer.

Finally, Graymalkin got a new box. He’s a very happy boy.

Last week definitely had more ups than downs. This week, not so much.

The bad:

Both the boy and I had to deal with medical b.s. Mine included driving all the way to Sacramento with a migraine, to see my TMJ specialist, only to be told that my appointment had completely disappeared from their system.

I’m also prepping for some facet injections in my back. The pain clinic and I are sort of at a stand-still. I don’t respond well enough to the treatments we’re trying, and they’re also a little dangerous (since I’m so young, I shouldn’t have frequent disc injections). They want to burn the nerves in my lumbar spine, but I’m unconvinced, both because nerve pain isn’t the only thing going on and because I’ve had a nerve burn done in my neck, and it backfired. Instead of my brain saying, “we’re not getting pain signals from her neck anymore, so let’s not make her feel pain,” my brain said, “holy fucking shit! They BURNED HER NERVES! Let’s send the regular pain signals and the pain one should feel after being burned!”

The facet injections are a compromise, basically. They’re hoping to show me, through it, that a nerve burn would work there.

Anubis decided that two family members having health problems wasn’t enough, so his urethra got blocked. Now we’re monitoring his pee, and Dante has to help him keep is clean (Anubis’s surgery to widen his urethra has helped, but not quite enough.)

We didn’t get to really celebrate St. Urho’s Day, due to the chaos.

In other news, I took a break from celebrating getting out of medical and consumer debt to check on how those student loans were coming.

Borrowed: 133,733

Paid back so far: 88,744

With interest, what I owed Tuesday: $154,213

My laptop’s keyboard is starting to have sticky keys. Apparently, it’s a known issue, and they should fix it for free, but the fixers say I have to be prepared to be without it for a couple of weeks. My desktop can’t yet do Zoom, so I’ve had to order a web cam with mic before I can get the laptop into the shop.

The meh:

My 300th college course began this week! It’s an intro to lit class at SCC; unfortunately, it’s an 8 week class. And while I got rid of a few units (postmodernism, the Southern Gothic, and fairy tales), it’s still a challenge to do a semester course in half a semester.

5 of the 26 enrolled students didn’t respond to emails or log on to Canvas the first week. Half of the rest are already failing because they haven’t turned in the homework. I’ve reached out to everyone, and most are telling me they just didn’t think the course would be time consuming. When I explain that they would have physically been in a room with me for 6 hours and 40 minutes each week if we were in person, and that they should therefore be prepared to do at least that much (which is much less than the Carnegie expectation of 20 hours/week for this class), they are shocked.

I’m not shocked that they’re shocked, but I’m disheartened.

Many of my students are working full time and also taking a full load of courses, which an 8-week course isn’t compatible with.

Half of the students hated “Hills Like White Elephants,” and I had fun reading their interpretations of what the “operation” was. The most creative was that the American wanted Jig to join a prostitution ring. I also included “Bullet Points” by Jericho Brown in this first week, to show them that poetry isn’t just dead white guys writing about daffodils. Most of the students loved it; the one who wants to be a cop found it offensive.

Next week, we do plays: Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune and Mr Burns: A Post-Electric Play. It’s my first time teaching the latter; I’m cautiously optimistic. Am I having them watch the “Cape Feare” episode of The Simpsons first? Of course!

I finished my four Winter courses, and I got the syllabi and Canvas pages up for my three Davis Spring courses, which was quite a feat. There were a couple of days, including yesterday, when my brain broke.

The good:

I got to see the Sklar Brothers and Grep Proops perform virtual shows.

Spring came.

I took The New Yorker‘s recommendation to watch The Bureau, which is excellent.

I had many students thank me for my work last quarter. A few of them realizing how much time I spend writing to them and talking to them is the only thing that makes it worth it. One student wrote this:

“I have never had another teacher like you before. You terrified me for all of the right reasons. I kept feeling called out in the beginning. I used to write papers for the grader instead of the purpose because of their biased writing styles. In fact, I used to do everything to please other people because I thought that is how life works. I know now how incorrect that way of living is. Maybe this wasn’t your intention, but I understand how I want to live my life from now on. You taught the class with humor, honesty, and empathy: three characteristics I strive to perfect one day. There was never any bullshit, and for that, I am so thankful. You taught the class not only how to become better writers, but also how to be better people.”

I’m pretty sure “[terrifying] for all of the right reasons” should be on my tombstone.

I didn’t get this update out yesterday, because of a migraine. Since migraines are awful, let’s start with the bad:

• Migraine, surrounded by crazy tension headache days, including today.
• The hail on Wednesday scared poor Snowball.
• Fighting constipation for the third month in a row. 🙁

The Meh:

• I started seeing a new acupuncturist, which is good, but I had weird hip spasms later, which is bad, but may be unrelated. The guy’s name is John Frink. Pretty sure I’m going to call him “professor” on accident at some point.
• I put a great seasoning on some lamb, but the cut wasn’t great. Nice seasoning on some pork chops a different night, but needed to take them out two minutes earlier (both in the air fryer).
• I put the hammock back up, although it’s still a little too cold for it.
• I had to say goodbye to my courses, which is always bittersweet. There are usually one or two students whom I’m glad I don’t have to deal with anymore, but there are often more students whom I’ll genuinely miss.

The Good:

• My college roommate’s audio play was available for a listen!
• Another former student got into the grad program of her choice.
• Gilbert Gottfried made me laugh way too hard while doing an impression of Bob Dylan as Elmur Fudd, having chased Bugs Bunny off a cliff.
• I was able to see the Cesar nominated shorts via the Sacramento French Film Festival.
• I made a good Green Curry with chicken.
• I attended a pre-conference focused on Atwood.
• I got five new-to-me books for $10 at the friends of the library sale.
• I’ve decided to stop having one side of the bed be where the books accumulate. After decades of sleeping on the side of a queen mattress, I’ve moved to the middle. The cats like having more space on both sides of me.
• It’s the end of the quarter, and many students have thanked me–for designing the course so that they couldn’t do the work without doing the readings. They told me they skip the readings in their other courses, and were at first upset that they couldn’t do that in mine, but now realize that they did learn a lot from the readings, the exercises that accompanied them, and my copious comments.
• My union was able to force the UC system into providing us with Covid protections!
• As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I finally got out of medical and consumer debt (I’ve been paying $1028 a month to do so, for many, many years)!!!
• And just this morning, I got a beautiful painting, from a wonderful friend.

This last week kind of exploded on me. I got a last-minute assignment to teach an intro to lit class that starts next week. I’ve taught the class before, but not online, and not just in 8 weeks.

But I think I worked out how to do it, and I’ve just finished the Canvas shell, so now I can think about what else I did this week.

The Best:

Ellen Forney gave a talk to my writing students, which was wonderful in all sorts of ways, but possibly the best was when she admitted that she was apprehensive about how to do Marbles after she’d decided to try. My students often think good writing just happens, when it’s extremely difficult. Being reminded that even great writers struggle was important for them.

I had cleaners come in and give my house a much-needed reset. Between my ridiculous dust allergies and my awful back, I just can’t do the deep work. My house never stays clean for long, but having it somewhat cleaner helped me focus while my mind was spinning with the lit class.

I decided that because I get SO excited when it’s time for a new issue of Science Fiction and Fantasy, that I would treat myself to a subscription to Asmimov too!

I also started The Girl Who Could Move Shit With Her Mind, by Jackson Ford, which kept me up way too late last night. Can’t wait to finish it later!

Finally, the boy and I binged the last few episodes of The Watch, which we adored.

The Worst:

My body is unhappy, which isn’t unusual, but I was rocked by neck and shoulder spasms so badly the other night that it made me nauseated.

I don’t like the way I talk to myself. As I’m in the throes of an amazing story in SFF, a negative voice is berating me for having so many unread important news articles, biographies, and texts for classes. It tells me I’m fat. It makes me feel guilty for hiring cleaners two or three times a year, berating me for laziness, though I can objectively say I’m not lazy.

The Meh:

Coming 2 America was fine–mostly a nice nostalgia piece.

I was going to get my second Covid shot next week, but due to my allergy shots and some bullshit about my allergy office being closed over Spring Break, I had to push it back a week.

My pain clinic wants to put cortisone into my lumbar facets, but those can’t be done until awhile after my vaccinations, and my bursitis treatment has to wait until a couple of months after the lumbar treatment.

Ultimately:

I’m reflecting on this year. One year ago today, I flew back from a conference in New Orleans, to a changed world. It was the last week in the quarter–we were given the choice to move that week online. We cancelled Book Group. I haven’t eaten in a restaurant or hugged my California family in a year.

This week, Ellen Forney said to me, about our getting on well in a Zoom meeting, that she thought we would, after she googled me.

Ellen Forney, the amazing author of Marbles, googled me.

Getting to have a conversation with her was one of the best things that happened to me this year.

I haven’t been good about blogging lately. Like everyone, I’m tired and torn in a bunch of different directions.

But I still want to talk to you, so I’m going to start a weekly (hopefully) best and worst list, inspired by The Bloggess’s Weekly Wrap-Up, which will likely be about the media that’s kept me sane.

The Best I’ve Watched Lately:

• The Watch
• Wanda Vision
• Resident Alien
• Ramy (especially the Ne Me Quitte Pas episode, which can be watched on its own)
• the Calvin episode of Flack, which can also be watched on its own
• Nomadland, which finally helped me visualize Wall Drug

The Best Podcast Episodes

• All of the Parts of the “DC Sniper” debunkings on You’re Wrong About–I didn’t know what this story was about at all–I don’t think any of us did.

Best New Bands/Artists I’ve Stumbled Across:

• Danielle Durack
• Tele Novella

Best Books lately:

• The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
• A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Mass
• Mira Grant’s Parasite Trilogy
• The Witch’s Heart by Genevieve Gornichec

Best moments of the week:

• Geeking out with Ellen Forney
• Hosting the Invisible Disabilities Show for UCD
• Learning a student got the internship she wanted
• Getting my first dose of the vaccine
• Talking about mon chatte in a new stand-up routine with my students

The worst moments:

• Trying to combine a paprika lemon chicken and a garlic lemon chicken recipe–why did it turn gross?
• Learning that Paul, the best doctor I’ve ever had, is retiring.

Tomorrow, Thursday, 2/25, at 7 p.m. PST, the Invisible Disabilities Comedy Show will be performing for the UCD Campus Book Project.

The event is free and open to the public.

Register here.

On Saturday, 2/27, at 8 p.m. PST, I will be performing a brand-new set with my stand-up students.

This event is also free and open to the public.

Join us here:
ucdavis.zoom.us/j/95805414976.

Come laugh with us!

Or cry. Or come to do that weird cathartic thing when you don’t know whether you’re laughing or crying.

For the last ten years, I’ve made a Stalkers mix for my beloved friends for Valentine’s Day.

This year, I had over 20 hours of potential songs. And since we’ve just barely survived 2020 and the start of 2021, I decided this year needed two CDs.

Most of the songs I’ve chosen this last decade are available on Spotify, which means you can all listen to them here.

And now, it’s time to take down my Valentine’s tree.