It's Wild...It's Wonderful...It's...Carbondale?

Today, I saw some things. I think the absurdity speaks for itself.

1. A real live road runner running across the field by my house.
2. The first live woodchuck I've ever seen, running under a dumpster.
3. My 11th grade boyfriend.
4. My 12th grade English teacher.
5. An insert in a book I checked out of the SIUC library thanking the university for loaning the book to their college. The insert was from Judson College, the place my mother went for finishing school in the late '60s.

Dr. F, or How I Learned to Stop Teaching and Love the Undergrad

Today was my first day of class, v2.0: the TA Edition. That's right, I'm a Teaching Assistant.

Here's what that used to mean to me as a WVU English grad student: serving as the instructor of record for two sections of basic writing; crafting a syllabus; lecturing and leading activities for 3 class sessions per week; grading all assignments, from quizzes to one-page essays, to 10-page research papers; putting cute stickers on said assignments; looking fabulously professional.

Well, now I'm a SIUC MCMA grad student. Oy. Remember that guy I wanted to use to beat everyone over the head with about a week ago? Me neither. But he was there. I checked the records. And he kept calling us "graders."

So thanks to that guy, here were my expectations of being a TA: grading 60 papers, quizzes, exams, etc. per week. Period. No brain or cute heels necessary, just a red pen. And not a sticker in sight.

And then...there was Dr. F.

The coolest professor/faculty adviser ever.

Yeah. I said it.

Let me explain my duties as a grader for CP 360: Film Analysis. No. There is too much. Let me sum up: no frantic syllabus creation; grading only half the papers, as Dr. F prefers to share the work; answering e-mails; creating powerpoints based on the chapter that week; watching one film per week in class; participating in weekly class discussions; potentially lecturing for one chapter's lesson; tutoring one-on-one any students having trouble with the writing assignments; torturing and/or horribly embarrassing the students who are talking, texting, or otherwise not paying attention in class.

Bad news: No stickers. And undergrads are still undergrads. They still whisper during lecture, laugh at all the wrong moments in a film, and actually stand up to leave while Dr. Fis still lecturing in the last 5 minutes.

Good news: I still get to wear heels, despite the fact that Dr. Felleman seems worried that I'm going to fall, I'm going to get to lecture in a film class, and I have full permission to torture rowdy students. Oh, yeah.

Still, why do students do these things? They're paying for the services of a professor, and yet they don't want to be there. Any other service, and they'd want to get every last ounce of their money's worth. Some days, I think that we should start calling professors hookers. All the job descriptions could secretly stay the same, but maybe kids would stick around just to see whether the new name matched the performance.

New ideas in pedagogy. Clearly not my field.

In any case, this week, we watched Martin Scorcese's "Life Lessons," one of three segments in a collective film called New York Stories. Let me just say, Nick Nolte is never not creepy. Ever.

Still, the film was amazing and chock full of SUPER overt symbolism. I mean SUPER. I'm fairly certain you'd have to be an amoeba not to get it. Just maybe some of the students will be able to articulate something coherent about it. If they're infested with amoebas.

R.I.P., MLA

After 3 days of Graduate Assistant Orientation, in which I learned how not to sexually harass someone or drive a student to suicide, I finally got to go to something useful: the Mass Communications and Media Arts Graduate Orientation. I got all gorgeous in a sort of secretary look (blue pencil skirt, black turtleneck, blue bobby socks, black patent oxford heels, and my little telephone earrings), and made my way over there. The day was going to be awesome, I just knew it.

I didn't melt from the heat the instant I stepped outside my door, so I decided to try a shortcut. And it worked! I made it there in 15 minutes, unlike the 30 minutes it was taking me to go the long way. Yeah, efficiency.

Once I was there, the day at the college of MCMA went stupendously well. (For those of you wondering, MCMA is, in fact, a college in and of itself, kind of like Eberly College of Arts and Sciences. Within it, there are 3 departments--Cinema and Photography, Radio and Television, and Journalism.) I met all 10 of the other doctoral students, immediately forgot most of their names, but was still welcomed into their circle of smokers for chatting/bitching purposes. It's so nice to finally have a bitch group. I missed that.

Anyway, long story short, I got all orientated as to what I have to do as a doctoral student. And along the way, I got some wonderful, stupendous, marvelous, couldn't-possibly-make-me-happier news, and then I got the news that may devastate me for the rest of my life.

First, the good news. No math. Yep. That's right. All the former Ph.D. students had to take quantitative research methods and inferential statistics. No longer. What this means for me is that if I want to just sit in a room and think about Freud and the sociology of death while I write my dissertation, I can!

HOORAY!!

Okay, now on to the bad news. According to the Ph.D. handbook, the college of MCMA uses only Chicago or APA styles of citation. Let me rephrase that, because I'm still having difficulty wrapping my head around this.

According to the college of MCMA, Ph.D. students should NOT use MLA format.

NO MLA!?!?

For the uninitiated, let me explain. When scholars do research and write about it, we're required to note exactly what source which information came from in order to avoid plagiarism and give proper credit where it's due. So let's say I quote a book in a paper I've written. In MLA format, after the quote, I would need to put in parentheses the last name of the author of the book the quote came from and the page number it was on. Then, at the end of the essay, I would need a list of citations for all the sources I'd used, properly formatted according to the standards of the Modern Language Association.

That seems complicated and scholarly, so let me be clear.

MLA is my best friend. I've used it, I've taught it, I've loved it like a long-lost child. I've spent so many long nights with it, trying to figure out how to properly cite all the ridiculous things my students and I work with, like a poem entirely encapsulated within a film, or lyrics to a song that was never released on CD, or a fake marriage license with a picture of Elvis on it.

And now it's gone.

And Chicago style has come to replace it, like an evil step-citation.

Sigh.

Goodbye, MLA, my dear friend. I'll always have a special place in my heart for you and think fondly of our nights together. And I'm going to bury you in my backyard with a bucket of salt to keep the slugs away.

My First Day of School...sort of...ish.

Today was the first day of what I'm technically counting as school. Let me put that in English. Today was the first day of Graduate Orientation at SIUC. It's official. I'm a saluki. And the day totally matched the feeling I get when I attempt to say aloud, "I'm a saluki."

Here's how my day went down.

First of all, I woke up from dreaming that Janie (my kitten) had gone out to a party, drank too much, and called me on her cell phone to come get her. So, I went outside, and there she was in the field across the street from my house, laying in the grass with a squirrel and crying. I picked her up, took her home, put her to bed, and sat on the floor crying over the fact that she had somehow gotten out of the house without my knowledge. Needless to say, I woke up actually crying and immediately went to find my kitten. Instead, what I found was another slug in my bathtub and little pile of kitten vomit on the bathroom floor. It is my considered opinion that Janie figured licking the slime off a slug was just as good as drinking water from the bathtub tap. At least she wasn't partying with squirrels.

After this, I discovered that I only had 3 cigarettes left to my name. So I smoked all three while drinking my coffee and decided not to buy any more. Then I got dressed. I looked fabulous in a black lace a-line skirt, a black shell top with lace trim, hot pink open-toe heels, and earrings with black lace detail. No tweed yet, but then, it's too bloody hot to even think the word tweed.

In any case, I was all spiffied up and ready to go by 11:00 am. The orientation didn't start until 1:00 pm. It takes half an hour to get there. Sigh.

So I bought cigarettes.

And chain smoked.

For an hour.

Then I dutifully left my cigarettes on the kitchen table and walked to campus, where I discovered that there were actually two orientations going on at the same time: one for Teaching Assistants, and one for Research Assistants. I'm both. And I'd left my time turner in my other bag. So I went to the Teaching session, since I had already gotten in that room, sat down, and begun reading the packet they gave us before I realized that there was a slim possibility that I needed to be in the other room in the next 14 seconds if I wanted to be there in time for the lecture to begin. At this point, I figured I was technically a TA, so they couldn't fault me for being there. (They probably can. They probably already have. This is probably why they haven't processed my tuition waver yet. This is also probably why I hate university red tape.)

That was at 1:00. By 4:30, I had chewed 6 pieces of gum, drank 3 bottles of water, nearly exploded several times, and felt the overwhelming urge to beat everyone over the head with the guy who was lecturing, since he kept referring to TAs as "Graders." Finally, the guy stopped talking, we were let out into the world, and I practically sprint-walked across campus, where I stopped briefly to change my shoes before continuing the 3 blocks to my house.

After 3 cigarettes back to back, I almost passed out. And then I looked for dinner. The food in my house officially consisted of half a head of cabbage, a bottle of Italian dressing, a bottle of maple syrup, and a packet of kool-aid.

So I scraped all my cash together and went to the store, where I bought everything that $16.43 could buy, including more cabbage, milk, spanish rice mix, peanut butter, jelly, bread, and tonight's special meal: chocolate pudding and graham crackers.

It's now 7:00, and I am feeling fat and sassy.

And I have to do it all over again tomorrow at 9:00 am.

Ugh.

A Toast To Our Fallen Slugs

So, school finally starts in a few days. Well, technically, orientation starts in a few days. But I'm so desperate to be back in the academic setting that I'll count it just the same.

It's been a long summer since graduation. Here's what I've done:

1. Moved back to Illinois.
2. Taught Creative Non-Fiction for a week and a half at an academic enrichment camp for kids in Pennsylvania.
3. Stopped teaching halfway through the planned three week session because an epidemic of flu broke out at the camp and all the kids were sent home.
4. Got really bored in Pennsylvania and went to Philly with friends.
5. Danced in Philly with the whitest dude on earth. Don't judge me. He was hot.
6. Came back to my Illinois apartment and began unpacking.
7. Drank a $4 bottle of pink champagne.
8. Painted 3 bookcases and 3 wooden boxes (see pictures below).


9. Drank another $4 bottle of pink champagne while Skyping my besties, who are entirely too far away.
10. Stepped on a slug in my bare feet.
11. Watched another slug eat the slug corpse.
12. Watched a bird attack a squirrel. The squirrel survived.
13. Walked past a guy spot-welding a parking lot.
14. Drank another bottle of $4 pink champagne. Washed it down with a $4 bottle of extra dry champagne.
15. Rescued a slug from my bathtub.
16. Mourned the death of John Hughes by cutting my hair like Molly Ringwald's in Pretty in Pink (see picture below).

17. Freaked out about my declining brain and began reading Freud's Character and Culture.

But here's the good news: it can't get any worse, right? Sigh. Now if you'll excuse me, there's a slug convention going on outside, and I've been asked to take notes.