Pursuing Calefaction

I marked the general holiday season for my students Wednesday, the last day before spring break. I say general because humanity has been reveling in the equinox for quite a long time, in many guises and traditions. Passover has begun, and Easter approaches, but, too, Nowruz is still a thing. For my students I brought cookies and pop, and after they took their quiz we had a snack and relaxed a bit. We also talked about the Hilaria, the ancient Greek & Roman festival celebrated around the vernal equinox. It’s spring. Why not rejoice in it? We all have our reasons.

Today is a rest day for me. I have many tasks still to undertake, but I am taking this day for myself. The Sidhe is traveling to see her parents, so it’s just us boys–myself and Dalek–and I plan to do a significant amount of nothing. Minecraft beckons, especially potently now that I am playing on a server with a couple of friends. There’s House of Cards on Netflix, which I hear is quite worth my while. I borrowed a book from a fellow teacher, the Silver Warriors (by Michael Moorcock), pursuant to a discussion we had about fantasy writing. It’s been a long time since I’ve done reading for pleasure. But all of these things are only going to be pursued in even temper. No rushing about trying to maximize my fun. That would ruin the whole thing.

Joyous feast days to you all.

When I was in college, Thanksgiving and Spring Break felt more like stays of execution than actual breaks wherein one took time off. Because of my inability to not procrastinate, they became periods when I would frantically rush to catch up on all the backlogged work I had still to complete, or more likely, freeze up in panic and still not get anything useful done while pretending to be enjoying myself with my friends or family or whatever.

Now that I’m teaching, it seems nothing has changed at all.

This week was spent trying to teach while recovering from the plague. (Rather unsuccessfully, I might add. I’ve been coughing up my lungs all week, and the students don’t seem to be getting it.) Two more days remain in class before the end of the quarter and the start of spring break, and I hope to use them to the students’ advantage. I feel sometimes like many of them are trying not to learn–but I cannot believe that is true. Even though the simple fact is that many are not doing their homework. Which only snowballs the difficulty going forward. If you don’t practice a language, you simply cannot learn it effectively. I cannot be bogged down by the students who won’t try. But I must also look at my own practices. Am I providing enough encouragement to dig in? Am I truly offering out a lit candle by which my students might light their own?

Which leads us to the problems that I must address over spring break. Two–or more–months of apartment cleaning, much and more writing to be done for my literacy intervention class, lesson planning galore, grading…and somehow getting my head into the correct space to teach Latin again. I feel ready to give up. I would already have done so if I weren’t on the hook for the education of almost 100 individuals. I now know why teachers burn out. Thanks to our new glorious Republican administration in NC, it’s going to be easier still. But I am not giving up yet.

Well, the crud got me, too. I made it through Wednesday without too much difficulty, though the aches started Weds. evening. But Thursday I was rapidly headed downhill, and by 5pm, it was all I could do to drive home. Even had to bail on a school commitment. I tried so hard not to be That Guy. I wanted to wipe the slate clean, to get a fresh start. But a flake’s a flake, even when he has good reason. To have been handling money for the elderly and children would have been patently irresponsible. But I am still Mr. Flake.

So I made it to school on Friday, and my students experienced some excellent, and even topical, Roman culture! Which is to say, I put in a movie. It helps that it was an early release day, so only hour-long classes and no lunch, but all the same, the day nearly wrecked me. Adding fuel to the fire, I had a deadline for some paperwork to be completed. Fortunately, there’s access from the employee Web site, so I went home, started burning up, and then at 9pm finished my paperwork before settling into an uncomfortable, cough-ridden sleep.

This is where I praise the Sidhe. She took care of me last night, whiny-pants that I was. And she did so like a trooper. I am so very unworthy. She’s out at the store right now getting me more juice, while I stay in bed. Getting up, even with DayQuil, pseudephedrine, and advil on board, is challenging at best, so she put on Star Wars for me and headed out. True love, I tell you

When I use a little more of the dwindling supply of medication I have, I am reminded how much less of a functional human I am without them on board regularly. I box myself into corners that aren’t even really corners–but they seem as substantial as the iron bars of a prison cell when I’m in the hole. But medicating is like a drop of soap on greasy water. It just clears the mind, at least the surface, and allows me to get back to doing important things instead of stressing over the trivial.

I had to close off the open-posting policy on my wiki yesterday, making it effectively a glorified content management system rather than a truly open platform. Only registered, whitelisted users may now make changes to the Calefaction Wiki, because of spammers defeating my textchas even when I change them. It’s a point of pride more than anything, but I don’t have time for shenanigans. You win, spammers. Now DIAF.

Crazy ride ahead this week. Fortitude!

Not for me, but for the Sidhe. I am taking care of her today while her body wages war on a sub-microscopic invader. Well, haven’t gone to the doctor yet, so we don’t know if it’s actually the flu. But the symptoms, speed, and severity seem to line up. Thank goodness for weekends. We went to see The Great and Powerful Oz last night on our date, and one word sums it up best: shallow. Alas, it had moments of beauty, but beauty is sometimes only skin deep.

These last couple weeks have been a serious challenge. I am basically working 12-hour days again, as I was at the vet clinic, and even though the physical toll on my body is less, the mental strain is greater. I am solely responsible for what happens in my classroom. Lesson plans, homework, quizzes, tests, classroom discussion: it’s all on me. Then throw into the mix a number of students who aren’t doing the work, and causing trouble for others to boot. Oh, and grad school marches on, meaning that two days of the week I must leave school right on the dot to get to another school in time to carry out a literacy intervention, which I am also responsible for planning and executing.

I have quizzes to grade today, and feedback to give to students on a project that is due Tuesday. (Not all emailed me, so that is one relief.) I also must write up a report for the baseline data of the intervention I am conducting.

I honestly don’t know if I can keep this up. But I must try.

Wow, this last year has been a blaze of…something. Last year this time I was hip-deep in the spring semester, and panicking every other day. Now I’m hip-deep in the spring semester, and panicking every day. Progress, of a sort.

The lesson from Xenophon’s tale, of course–be it true or fabricated–is that even when surrounded by a hundred thousand barbarians howling for your blood, your leaders assassinated, your home a thousand  miles away, there remains hope as long as there remains a will.

March forth bravely!

There is little better than making your own beer and having it turn out great. That better is acquiring a well-known and loved beer from another brewer! In this case, the Sidhe and I were at Whole Foods tonight, and I spied with my little eye something that started with…B. As in, Founder’s Breakfast Stout. And for only $8!

Score.

Even as I mope about not being able to go out and about, as is my wont, I find ways to create. The Sidhe and I are making french onion soup in the slow cooker with 6 sweet onions and a half stick of vegan butter, so I figured I would make actual French bread. She bought me a fantastic book, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, some years ago, and I had only used the introductory part thus far (how gluten forms, etc.) to improve my existing technique. Today I cracked it open and am following the recipe to make French bread proper.

What blows my mind is the fact that the recipe calls first for a small loaf of pre-fermented dough. Hey, dog, I heard you like french bread, so I put dough in your dough so you can bake while you bake. That added about 2 hours to an already extended process. (Good bread, you may have discovered, takes time.) But we’re rocking the slow cooker, so I have time in plenty to make the bread for dinner. It doesn’t hurt that I started at 10:30. The second new thing about this recipe is the use of steam. I had never even considered the moisture of the air in the oven as a factor in making bread; I just knew to put the bread in the oven and wait. So I must put a steam pan in while the oven is pre-heating, and flash-steam some water at the first stages of the baking.

I’m now waiting for the dough to rise, so I’ll keep you posted on how this turns out. In the mean time, back to grading tests.

[Update] It turned out super crusty and delicious. I messed up the proof by mishandling the dough, so I didn’t get those enormous air pockets that French bread ordinarily has, but it still tasted like heaven. Gonna try this again some time!

Little room is left for side pursuits when you are burning the candle at both ends. I see this in my friends’ lives, and I see it in my own. I wear a set of blinders–no, truly, a cardboard box with two eye-holes cut out so I can see only what is in front of me. I have cut myself off from Twitter, and I ditched facebook long ago, because the lives and thoughts of other people are so intrinsically interesting to me that I end up doing nothing but watching and engaging in those, at the expense of the things I need to do to fulfill the requirements of my ambitions and the obligations that those requirements incur.

Sparrow and I have had a number of conversations about missing the boat, and the need to build one. I have, just as I was most terrified of missing my biggest boat yet, been granted a ferry ride to the ultimate cruise liner, and yet there are still so many opportunities I must simply allow to slip by. I have tests to grade and the week to plan, so I must eschew the company of my friends in Raleigh tonight. I have a literacy intervention report to write, so I must sacrifice the hope of catching the last show of a local performance of Julius Caesar. Instead, I must stay home and work, and not brew beer, and not play Minecraft, and not talk to my friends, and not expand my horizons. It is this confinement that will bring me to a place where I can do all of those things. But when I get there, will I still be the same person who wants to? Or will I have changed to become someone who, by habit, does nothing but what is right in front of me?

I have become all too aware of the passage of time, and my remarkable ability to waste it away in paralysis. But what cost to my future hopes do I incur by acting on the opportunities I miss today? What cost to my well-being will I pay in the future by practicing austerity in the here and now? Theognis, I think, would understand.

The right answer is to be happy with what I have, and accept that I cannot have everything I aspire to. There is no point–but we keep on anyway.

Or so I tell myself.

Advertising is simply part of modern culture. It’s easy to see on the Internet, even if you (like myself) install ad-blocking plugins and run filters on your email. And if you pick up a magazine these days, half the pages are filled with it. And even the articles trend anymore to being mere vehicles for advertisement, themselves. Everything has a price-tag, and anymore, we have become not consumers but indeed, another product to be sold. Our very eyeballs and, by extension, those micro-seconds of consciousness we spend on either looking at or tuning out this barrage have become a commodity.

I run a wiki, which is predicated on the notion of open access to allow anyone to edit the content therein. Idealism in its extreme, of course, in our era of consciousness-predators. Even having installed software that blocks automated advertisement insertion, I must actively combat the onslaught of people (and, yes, they are humans, though they use software) seeking to pervert my tool for their own greedy purposes. Well, my software has been successfully breached again. I’m considering shutting down the wiki, because it’s easier to give up and not give these people a venue for their predation than to keep upgrading, re-installing, changing.

Supporting advertising as a model of running an Internet site perpetuates this machine. If you want to run a site, throw up a paywall if you want money from people. Or put up a micro-payment donation system. Otherwise, the human cost cannot be calculated.

Man, fuck greed, and anything that enables it. This is why we can’t have nice things.