And Now I Smell Like Chlorine

A week and a half. I get the feeling things are going to go this way from now on, and if nobody cares, so much the better.

Spent last week starting up the new semester, thus proving to myself (once again) that in the main, students who sign up for the Spring/Summer classes tend to be far more unreasonable and unprofessional than those who sign up for Fall/Winter or Winter/Sping. By Friday I'd already had to report a guy for discipline problems--he verbally threatened someone else halfway through a lecture, because the other person was clicking a pen in what I can only suppose he found an offensive manner. Oh, and then there was the chick who walked in, looked around and announced, loudly: "There are no computers!"

Me: "Nope."

Her: "That's going to make it really hard for me to write!"

Me: "Oh, do you not have a computer at home?"

Her: "Of COURSE I do, I never said THAT."

Me: "And...there are other computers here that you have access to, right?"

Her: "Well, not all the TIME!"

At which point I explained--probably not very sympathetically, grantedly--that my assumption was that since I hadn't been scheduled in a room with computers for the last three years of my teaching career, she would probably be doing most of her writing elsewhere, on her own time. (And no, I didn't add: "What are you, five?" to that explanation.) But I guess that wasn't sympathetic enough for her purposes, since she said there for the rest of the class rolling her eyes and snorting, while looking as though she'd just bitten into a lemon.

The weekend was taken up with visits and other stuff. Yesterday, Mom took Cal and I up to her friend Brenda's to swim in the outdoor pool, which Cal turned out to love, and that's good; meanwhile, I started working on a story I've had outlined but lying fallow since 1998. In it--to cut a long story short--"I" kill "Janina", which is a little awkward, and explains why I've had so much trouble approaching it thus far. Nevertheless, now that I've decided to embrace said awkwardness head-on, I really like the way it's going...yes, it's got that more-than-touch of meta, a writer writing about writing, but I think it'll redeem itself through sheer emotional weight. That's the idea, anyhow.

So. "The Jacaranda Smile", count thus far: Roughly 1,500 words added to roughly 2,000 words of notes. Reason for stopping: Sleep, then school. Plan for tonight: More of the same. And we'll see if the result strikes my friends like more of me "coasting" if/when we get to it.

Okay, off to remove the chlorine from my hair. Best to all.

Part Two

And here's the other thing, while I'm far enough out of the house to get away with saying it...

Steve's officially working from home now, which mainly boils down to him making himself available "for work"--should there happen to be some--from roughly 9:00 AM to roughly 5:00 PM. Unfortunately, since they've already put in business-level highspeed Internet for him (plus a second phone line) in order to make this efficient, that means that most of what he sems to do is to hang around surfing, obsessively checking and posting to various Conservative/Catholic blogs. And the reason that I mention this right now is that as far as I can gather, that's exactly what he must have been doing when I phoned home a few minutes ago to ask how things had been going with, oh, I dunno, his SON. Who, by his own very stiff admission, he's currenly IN THE SAME DAMN APARTMENT WITH.

Yeah, agincourtgirl's there too, and all. But even so.

Okay, enough of this. I've got at least one more class to teach before I can go work out until it doesn't bother me anymore.