I don’t know what else to do / I would rather do anything
Tuesday 18 December 2001 | I like a cookie
Shawn Colvin’s actually talking about singing a sad song of abandonment, and how she’d rather do anything but—but this epigraph refers instead equally aptly to what I don’t want to do today, which is mark 25 essays. Actually, make that 26, since a student from last semester just turned in his final essay a mere 6 months late. For those who couldn’t give a flying monkey, I teach comp and developmental English (what we used to call remedial) at a tribal art college. Which is ordinarily the kind of job someone with my background and lack of training in anything else useful would gag to have, but in my case I’m about to start my fourth semester and I’m burned out as hell. There are a lot of other reasons why I don’t want to mark papers, as well:
1) the sun is shining and it’s gorgeous outside;
2) I hate marking papers at the end of the semester, because at least at the beginning of the semester you can pretend that the students just don’t know better, but by the end, it’s kind of sickening that they still haven’t picked up what you were trying desperately to teach them all along;
3) I have some kind of weird back problem—apparently my spine is twisted in three different places, according to the physical therapist, though it only hurts when I lie down to sleep at night, which for those of you who don’t know, would normally be about 9 hours, but it’s now closer to 4 or 5, since everytime I turn over I wake up both myself and my longsuffering spouseling;
4) there’s this whole thing with wanting to be a full-time Zen student, about which more later; and finally,
5) I don’t want to I don’t want to I don’t want to I don’t want to! This is what the child in my brain starts wailing right before a big end-of-semester paper-grading marathon session.
I thought that I had something else witty to say, but no matter how scintillating it is/was, it’s only postponing the inevitable, so I might as well get started. Buh.
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