The Borders of Things

Delinquency

I know I haven't posted in a long time. Sorry. Here's the scoop.

On Thursday, Sept. 16, I started 7 days of TA orientation at the UW. I walked into a classroom with about 40 other literary people of one degree or another -- MFAs, PhD students, and regular old not-quite MA's like myself. The first two days of this event were, I think, fairly typical: people spent a lot of time using big words and dropping as many names as they could to try to prove to everyone else in the room that, yes, they were badass. Fortunately, this wore off, and we realized that we were pretty much (with a few exceptions) all-too human: excited, nervous, and fairly overwhelmed by the prospect of having a classroom all to ourselves. I got to meet some cool people; by Friday night, I was defending the virtue of cultural studies over a beer with a medievalist from San Francisco. Overall, it was a good week.

Everything hits the fan tomorrow. My class is at 930 in the morning. As far as schedule, assignments, where we are going, etc, I feel pretty prepared. But what are these students going to think of me? Will we get along; will it be a good experience for all concerned? Most importantly, will they learn how to write? I hope so. We'll see.

Being here is good. Capria and I are both transitioning; so weird things come out of nowhere sometimes. But good things. She is still looking for a job, so if you think about it you could pray that she would find something soon. In the meantime, she's just started collecting unemployment from Tennessee again, which is nice.

I realize that my previous post on the Liberal/Conservative split ended on a really weak note; sorry about that. I'll try to get something more concrete out in the future.

I'm going to go now.