Just when I thought I'd heard them all, someone gets creative.

To: Angry Professor
From: Lulu Doozy
Re: Readings

Hello Professor. I am confused by the readings. What exactly are they for?

Lulu

He's a great musician, too.

Hat tip to the folks over at Rateyourstudents.blogspot.com.

It's a living.

I walked into a classroom yesterday for the first time since last June. I felt awful that I had to get back to the work that brings in the tuition dollars. (In my field, tuition dollars usually outpace indirect costs by several orders of magnitude.)

After a break, the return to teaching is excruciating. In the days leading up to the first class of the quarter, I imagine other jobs for which I might be better suited (barrista? paint mixer at Home Depot?) and entertain crazy schemes by which I might reduce my teaching load to zero. I put off my course prep until the last minute. I'm late to that first class, having dragged my feet all the way down the hallway -- dead professor walking! Sometimes I imagine that my pain is so unbearable that taking the break from teaching was not worth the agony of returning to the classroom and I swear I will never not teach again.

So I gave my first lecture. It was fine; the agony is over. They seem like a good class, so far.

In which I find a silver lining.

The Angry Family took a short vacation this past weekend. We found a local hotel with a hot tub and purchased the right to sit in that hot tub for several days. It was great relaxing fun, mostly. However, had you walked through the hotel lobby at 2 a.m. Saturday morning, you would have seen a very sleepy woman reading a very large book with very small print: the complete and unabridged fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. I was that woman.

If I have to be an insomniac, I don't mind having the extra time to read something I wouldn't be able to read otherwise. However, I need to learn when to give up the fight and get up and do it. (A friend in graduate school had terrible insomnia; she never slept at all, as far as I could tell. She spent her nights in the gym and competed as a professional bodybuilder when she wasn't writing amazing papers that she published in places like Science and Nature.)

Happy New Year!

The Cartoon Network is airing a Loony Tunes marathon, complete with exploding cigars, falling anvils, the Acme Co. and canned monster. We're having a lovely day, and I hope y'all do too.