Well, that's it. I'm just not spending any more time on this effing teaching philosophy. It's funny--I'm at a point in the semester where I've actually done just about everything, but now the little stuff that's left is taking me forever to do because I just have no motivation. Whatever. Tomorrow is movie night! I'm spending tomorrow grading my students' finals, and then my work will be just about done, and I will bask in the doneness and eat popcorn and watch Jane Austen adaptations with my friends from the German department. It will be awesome.

Last day of National Poetry month! It's been fun, getting myself to do this again.

( 'There Will Come Soft Rains' by Sara Teasdale )

I love these end-of-the-world poems. I've gotten pretty into Sara Teasdale this past year. I've been plotting out this big X-Men fan fiction around Emma Frost in which she and Professor X have a book club and read Sara Teasdale. I know, that's up there on the list of silliest things I've ever said, and yet. And yet! Maybe someday I will write it.

I've got a dreadful case of the "I don't want to do anything" blues. Still, I graded another third of my students' presentations (I'll finish those suckers off tomorrow morning before the exam or I'll eat my hat.) I also started putting our group's final course design project together. I still need to go through and add some stuff, put page numbers in, double check that all the formatting is consistent, etc., but I think I've made a good start on it. Still need to write the goshdarned teaching philosophy, though. :-(

( 'I Once Knew a Man' by Lucille Clifton )

So, I just read this poem, like, three times in a row, and it left me with a different feeling every time. I like poems like that.

So, today I was pretty useless, academically speaking. I feel like I've been mostly asleep all day. I did my laundry, though, so that's something, and I made some delicious eggplant/potato/zucchini casserole for dinner, so I won't starve to death next week. (I should have renewed my supply of macaroni and cheese while I was at the grocery store, though. I have a lot of desserts around, but not a lot of actual food.) I'm planning to head to bed pretty early, though--I'm still pretty burnt out. I got up at 4:15 AM yesterday, wrote a paper, administered a final, gave a student an oral exam, worked on my exam list a bit, met with Professor A about my list, and came home to bake some lemon tarts. It was a long day.

Last night was fun--I went over to work with my composition pedagogy group. We've got most of the necessary bits, and I feel like we're all past caring too much about it. We spent a big chunk of the night eating delicious food--one group member made a mushroom and fontina quiche, another brought nice rosemary bread, and the third brought white wine, while I provided the dessert, and while I can't say I enjoyed pondering our final course design, I did enjoy sitting around shooting the shit with my group. And eating. I'm a fan of eating.

( Poem 670 by Emily Dickinson )

Two papers: Finished and turned in.
Me: tired. Really tired.

Your poem tonight:

"Spring Light" by Wang Wei

Silken willows along the meandering river are lines of smoke,
With warm air, water of the cold valley evaporates.
Spring light is like this embroidered path.
Now I hear clear music, stirring even the beautiful clouds.

Trans. Tony Barnstone, Willis Barnstone, and Xu Haixin

What a beautiful mental image.

Urgh. Project: Productivity failed utterly today--perhaps not so terribly surprising, given how burnt-out I was by the end of yesterday. So it's early to bed, early to rise again tomorrow for this procrastinator of a grad student: by cracky, that German Romance paper is gonna get done.

( 'Song on the End of the World' by Czeslaw Milosz )

Today's poem brought to you by my tenth-grade literature textbook, which is where I first encountered it. (And the Mary Barnard translation of Sappho, and Arthur Rimbaud, and the Epic of Gilgamesh. I hated that class, but by jingo I loved that textbook.)

Poop on a stick am I tired. I've been up since 3:30 working on my Latin paper and I turned it in at about 6:00. It ended up being 12 pages, which...heck, it was supposed to be a 10-20 page paper, so, whatever, 12 pages is in that range. Boy, doing source criticism on medieval Latin texts using databases is a job and a half. The Brepols database has a lot of texts, but for a lot of works, they just list the citation, so you have to track down the text in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica or the Aristoteles Latinus database just to figure out the context. Then, once you figure out the context, and you work out what you think is a likely source, then you have to track down manuscripts of the source in a big old collection of medieval library catalogs, and then, if you're like me and can't figure out all the Latin place names in the Latin catalogues, you have to get onto Orbis Latinus and figure out what the contemporary place name is and then Wikipedia it to figure out where THAT is. Eh. Stupid paper. Whatever, I've got a pretty good grade in that class, and Prof. B seemed to think I was more or less on the right track when I presented on my paper topic on Monday. He wasn't like, "Man, you screwed THAT up, anyway," so I'm tentatively optimistic about the whole business. Ugh. I'm so tired. At least the PMS isn't shrieking at me at the moment.

I cussed in my French class today. Not, like, at a student or anything, but they were doing board races as a review game, and one team was SO CLOSE to correct, and I told them they had just a little mistake, and they changed the wrong thing, and I was like, "God dammit, no." But at least I didn't drop an f-bomb like one of my students did when she got an answer wrong. I guess it was just Casual Cussing day in French 101. I should have taught them some French cuss words.

I should go to bed.

( 'Marrying the Violence' by Marty McConnell )

Oh, that's great. "Make me a building, a garden of calcium and mineral in bloom." Very vivid and immediate.

Note to self: Do actual updates about my life on the weekend, when I'll have time. The whole point of restarting this LJ thing, even when no one reads it, is so I'll actually remember my life later, since I seem to have a very difficult time sometimes remembering things that I don't write down.

It'd be okay if I forgot most of this week, though. It's just me failing to get stuff done, over and over. Urgh.

( 'Eros Turannos' by Edwin Arlington Robinson )

Yeah, tonight's gonna be another short entry. I'm tired and cold and I've been awake since 4:30. I hate the end of the semester, I really do. I just have to get through this week, though, and things should calm down a bit. So that'll be good.

Anyway! Tonight's poem is one of those that I found floating around the internet and liked. One of the good things about keeping a log of them like this is that hopefully one day, when I have the time to do some pleasure reading again, I'll be able to look back at these entries and track down some of these poets and read more of their work.

( 'They Lied' by Ellen Bass )

Jeezy creezy, the physicality of this. I love it.

Gah. I must assume that I will get through this semester having finished all my papers and whatnot, but at this point I don't know how it will happen. Argh.

Well, that's enough of that. For tonight's poem, I thought I'd go for something completely different: something written this century! Something that comes with a spoken performance!

( 'What Women Deserve' by Sonya Renee )