This week in my Margaret Atwood seminar, while discussing a short story from 1983:

Student A: How old was she then?

Me: She was middle aged.

Student B: No, she wasn’t. She was born in 1939, so she was REALLY OLD then.

Me: She was over forty years younger than she is now, though . . .

Note: I’m currently five years older than Atwood was then.

I was really hoping to have a strong start to the quarter–I was especially hoping to have a deep-cleaned house, since this quarter will be so busy.

The universe, of course, had other plans. While in Vienna for a conference, my medicine bag was lost (stolen?) and my phone straight up died.

And I’m really sick from something I caught on the plane back, so today the classroom is my dirty home. I will greet classes 342, 343, and 344 on Zoom!

It’s been a difficult few months. Some of the household stress isn’t mine to share, but I’ve been ill, with three separate trips to the ER.

Luckily, I’m more or less stable now, and I’m leaving the country tomorrow. For the first time in five years, I’m returning to Oxford to teach. The class is new, though. Instead of fantasy literature, we’ll be doing a writing in film studies course.

We get to watch some lovely things together, visit the Wilton House (featured in Outlander, Bridgerton, the Crown, etc.), and have Dr. Liam Creighton do a guest spot. Vanessa is my on-site coordinator, and we get a few days in London before we head to Oxfordshire.

Fingers crossed for continued stability!

A week ago, my husband made me go to the ER, due to an injury. They noticed a growth while examining me, and said I need a biopsy (which will happen Tuesday).

I was in so much pain on Monday that I couldn’t really walk, but held my three classes and my office hours over Zoom.

I’ve also been juggling appointments (my primary, my therapist, my allergist, my chiropractor, since I woke up yesterday unable to move my neck).

Getting a med I needed took four not-quick phone calls and two visits to pharmacies.

This is all on the heels of weeks and weeks of extraordinary stress about work, family health issues, and family conflict.

This has definitely made me less sympathetic to a student’s proposal that college instructors should allow students to miss 2-3 classes per term so the students can sleep in.

For the fourth or fifth time in my career, a parent reached out today. She didn’t identify which student is hers, but it’s someone in my premed writing classes. She said students were upset about the “volume” of essays in a short time.

I wrote back, explaining that we only have three essays in the quarter. I told her when they were due and why they were spaced the way they were. (One is a scaffolding assignment for another, for example.) I also stressed that each assignment was on the syllabus from before the class started, with instructions and due dates.

And then I told her this:

“On the first day, I also shared my own experience with being overwhelmed in college (students in my circumstances have a less than 1% chance of getting a bachelor’s degree). I asked them to talk to me if things started going wrong, if they started falling behind, etc., saying that we could work it out together. I explained that the only way I got through college successfully was communicating with my instructors.

“Thus, I’m really disappointed by your email.

“Rather than the students engaging with me, someone’s mother has been dispatched.”

The mom got back to me. She said the context I provided, which her kid left out, assured her that I was reasonable about my expectations and schedule. And she apologized.

Two stressors have risen in awful prominence lately.

First, health. (Warning: this is gross.) Several weeks ago, my gastro doc asked me to do a cleanse, to determine if I have IBS-C (her guess) or IBS-D (my guess). It’s D. It’s so D. Now, after the cleanse, my diarrhea is so much worse, both in frequency and, grossly, consistency. I have to carry wipes with me to the bathroom, if I hope to be able to put clothes back on after I go.

Naturally, the clean up takes a while, and at work, the lights (on timers), turn off before I’m done.

Yesterday I was dealing with that, and then when I went to bed, I turned my head and my neck went out. It was extremely painful: I couldn’t control my tears, in addition to not being able to move my head. Hubby had to lift me up so I could take medication; the lifting made me scream.

It was the third time in the last five weeks that my neck has done that.

So I’m exhausted, and I’m worried, and all of this is exacerbated by my other big stressor:

Work.

The university is up to something. All UWP lecturers are being moved to the Writing Center, we’re told. The profs in my department heard the news at the same time.

This decision, about how writing will be taught, was made without input from a single writing instructor.

It has also been made without the larger senate being notified. It really seems like having most of the courses in a department being taught by people outside the department, not to mention gutting a department that serves all undergraduates, would be something the senate should have to vote on, right?

(It’s not the first time campus-wide decisions about writing instruction have been announced to us without us being given any advanced notice, the opportunity to advise, or without the senate being informed.)

The university is not being forthcoming about what this change means. In fact, they often claim they can’t answer our questions because we have a union, which is 100% bullshit.

Then, this afternoon, my husband told me he met an app developer who has a couple of employees who have also been hired by UC Davis to create an app to grade essays (we would upload our rubric and some general comments and the AI would do all the grading). The developer said grading would take seconds and that it’s obvious the university would need fewer writing teachers.

Of course, writing teachers know that’s not how grading works. Even those teachers who grade with a points-based rubric, instead of holistically, like many of us do, could never trust AI and some impersonal comments to do the work.

AI isn’t smart enough yet. I can’t think of a single writing assignment I have that could be responded to in that way.

My doctors would like me to have less stress, but just writing this out has made my neck tighter. I’m really worried about my health, and I’m really worried about my job. And I live in a country where my healthcare is dependent on my job.

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself telling my students how rare something was:

“In my [pause while I did the math] 25 years of teaching, I have never read an essay that . . .”

I stopped and wrote myself a note: “Celebrate.”

My celebrations are usually low key. Birthdays are quiet dinners with friends and family and small celebrations with my beloved book group. I’ve skipped all my graduations. Four of my five books have come out without a big party. If some friends hadn’t thrown me something for my PhD, there wouldn’t have been a real Party (with a capital P) for just me in my adult life.

In the summer of 1998, I taught for the first time. I realized what I was supposed to be doing: teaching.

Thus, on Thursday, after I turn in my grades for classes 326, 327, and 328, I will see colleagues and former students and raise a drink to a quarter century of a job I love.

The third week of classes is almost over. Most of my students are going to be okay. A couple are not. A few are awesome.

In addition to the usual course load, I’m working with two of my former comedy students to produce half hour “goodbye” sets (they’re graduating): something I used to do before the pandemic. It’s a lot of work, but I’ve known these kids for years, and I want to give them a proper sendoff.

Anubis just got his stitches out, after yet another bladder surgery. An unfortunate bout of diarrhea means we need to rent a carpet cleaner soon.

I saw John Mulaney at the Golden One Center. I love him, but I don’t ever want to see comedy in a venue like that again. It’s too big. And I was seated in the front row balcony–a really narrow space. Every time someone had to pee, I worried one of us was going to fall over to our deaths. Is there a little bit of plastic to protect your drink from falling? Yes. Protection from YOU falling? Nope.

After almost four month, I was finally able to re-start my allergy treatment, at a different clinic. Because it’s been so long, they had to take my dose way down, and I have to go in every week now. On top of that, I still go to my regular UCD place to get my Xolair shots twice a month.

In other words, I used to have two shot appointments a month. Now, because UCD can’t seem to find an allergist, I have six. That sucks.

I got to see the National Theatre Live production of The Book of Dust, at the Tower Theater. They did a really beautiful job with it. It was the first time my friend and former Oxford assistant and I had seen each other in a long time.

I have discovered there’s a technical term for another way in which my body is weird.

I saw my ENT last week, because ever since Covid, or whatever I had at the very end of 2019, my right ear has been off: feeling stopped up, with low level pain. My ears have never been great: any change in elevation, even going to the foothills, is painful. It also makes me look awful: my eyes start to water uncontrollably.

In his exam, my ENT asked me to pop my ears.

I explained I couldn’t do that. He assured me I could. So I plugged my nose and blew.

“Oh, wow. You actually can’t. Nothing in your ear moved at all.”

He used a complex scientific term for what I was supposed to be able to do, one I can’t remember now and which isn’t coming up when I search for it.

I honestly hadn’t realized that everyone else could just pop their ears at will; I just thought my painful ears were part of everything hurting when it shouldn’t.

The good news: there’s apparently a treatment we can try, after we run a few hearing tests. As much as I travel, I hope it helps.

Finally, the Dean said a couple of week ago that if I only had 11 students for Dublin in the Fall, we couldn’t go. I did one last push. And it paid off. My 12th student has enrolled, so Dublin, here we come!

In some of my classes, I offer book club extra credit. Students read a book, and we meet during finals week to talk about it.

Several years ago, I chose Maus for my Writing in Social Justice class.

We had a wonderful discussion, but one moment will stay with me forever. One student said Maus taught her about the camps.

The rest of us were aghast. She knew about the Holocaust, right? Yes, but she had never heard of the camps.

She thought all of the Jews and other people the Nazis didn’t like were simply shot on sight.

She had never watched any of the great films: Life is Beautiful, Schindler’s List. She didn’t know where and how Anne Frank died.

A student dedicated to social justice was missing a key part of history.

That’s why we must not ban books; we must read them.