Life in late capitalism can be vexing, alienating, fragmenting, and otherwise frustrating. There are many wonderful things in my life, but I'm more likely to talk about what's bad rather than what's good. I'm going to try to post one good thing here each day, and if you would join in by adding a good thing from your day in the comments, I'd love it--I'd absolutely love it. --RR
10/31: deciding
...not to start schoolwork until the evening in an effort to honor and observe the weekend as a needed break from work. So in the morning I shopped for longboards online with Chris then went for a walk, and in the afternoon I baked cookies (Earl Grey with lavender) and then made arancini for dinner. Luckily, the grading I had set myself went more smoothly than I had anticipated, so I won't be "paying" for my decision tomorrow.
10/30: cleaning
...one of our screened-in porches with Chris as part of our Saturday cleaning plan. The floor really needed to be not only swept but also washed. It looks so much better now that the built-up gunk is gone. And Tilde the Cat had very much taken over the chair where I usually sit when I'm only the porch--which meant that its cushion was covered with cat hair. That's gone now, too, and I'll cover the cushion with a towel for her in the future. Now I'm ready to spend some time out on the porch, enjoying the autumn air.
10/29: felt-tip markers
At the start of the semester my co-teacher and I did an activity with our first-year students that involved giving each of them 4 felt-tip markers of different colors. When the activity was over, we told them they could keep the markers if they wanted. Most of them did. Today in the same class I noticed that one student had all 4 of his markers out on his desk and used them to mark up a hand-out we were talking about. It made me so happy to see.
10/26: some student-related things
One of my students in Myth last week queried the description of Persephone as "slender-ankled." It got me thinking about feet and movement in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter over the past few days, and today I followed up and shared my thoughts with the class. It ended up being kind of relevant to an image we discussed at the start of class, a 2017 etching by Marian Maguire of Demeter and Persephone (visible here). The students seemed to dig into this image, and that felt good. I only recently came across it, and I was excited to show it to them. We then discussed the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, and that went well: I think the poems have been a good change of pace.
Last Tuesday I visited a colleague's class to do an upcycled notebook activity with her first-year students. Today one of them came by to follow up with me about it and tell me how much she enjoyed it. Another one told my colleague that she was also grateful for it, though she realized that she might not have registered the gratitude fully in the moment. That seemed like a very thoughtful, self-aware thing for someone to say, and I was grateful to my colleague for passing it along to me.
10/25: a nice man
...who owns a pizza place in Delaware. He talked with me on the phone this evening when it became clear that someone used my name to order a pizza for delivery there. That whole situation isn't a good thing, obviously, but it was nice to talk to someone who was trying to be helpful. He even called the Delaware police to ask them what to do, and he was very concerned that I look at my credit report this evening and start the reports for identity theft.
10/24: gathering
...seeds for Chris on my morning walk. It turns out that they might not have been the right ones. I also used the old Tupperware container I was carrying the seeds in to collect colorful fallen leaves as well, and that made me feel like a kid in a Pennsylvania autumn again. Except now I don't worry about whether a particular leaf is "perfect" or not. They all are.
10/23: still enjoying
...the banana cookies (recipe here) I made recently to use up some about-to-go-off bananas. I added cinnamon, walnuts, and mini chocolate chips. The cookies have all the goodness of banana bread but without the baking worries that usually come with banana bread (will it bake through? will the center sink? will the sides be too well done but the middle not done enough?). I don't think I'll make banana bread again when this recipe side-steps all those potential pitfalls, doesn't need as much baking time, and tastes great.
10/22: receiving
...an asemic text from my mother, in the style of the asemic letter I mailed to her earlier in the week.
10/21: finding
...Thomas Wilmer Dewing's painting entitled Pandora today (visible here) and discussing it with my students in class today.
10/20: getting more
...grading done this morning than I had thought I would. Thank goodness. I'm still in a grading hole, but one that's less deep.
10/19: finding
...a little piece of candy waiting for me in my car when I got into it to drive home from work. Chris had left it for me.
10/18: typing
...an asemic pen-pal letter for a lark of a postal swap. The page's overall format is what we'd expect for a letter, but it has no words or even letters of the alphabet.
10/16: a trio
...of good things:
- A morning walk, during which I photographed autumn leaves that had fallen.
- An afternoon trip to a liquor store just across the county line with Chris, where we bought some beer (Oktoberfest time!) and Arkansas gin.
- A Saturday cleaning project that stretched into the evening (partly because of the aforementioned afternoon jaunt): organizing and winnowing the arts and crafts cabinet.
10/15: designing
...two new "deformance" activities in which students will remix words from Sophocles' Antigone. And I did an example of one using the opening passage of Sophocles' Philoctetes and an example of the other using words from Euripides' Iphigeneia at Aulis. The students won't do them until November, but it feels good to have settled on a plan and, by making the examples, to have tested whether the activities will work.
10/14: making
...a square notebook using upcycled materials and a new-to-me 6-hole Japanese binding.
10/12: closer to doing justice
...to Hesiod in Myth class today. I felt like last week I wasn't able to give him his due. Today, though, I think the students began to see how his view on the world is interesting and complicated.
10/11: being rewarded
...for going for a walk after dinner (even though I had plenty of evening work on my plate): I saw a groundhog and a tarantula.
10/9: continuing
...the trend of Saturday cleaning projects with Chris. Today we finished work on the laundry room.
10/8: ending the week
...with a good class discussion about Iphigeneia at Aulis. It was especially welcome after some rough classroom moments this week.
10/7: being grateful
...for computer files and past work that I've done for courses. I'm so glad that I was able to find enclitic accent materials that I've developed over the years; it made evening preparation for tomorrow's Greek class smoother than I had expected.
10/6: carrying a zebra
...figurine in my pocket today. A few years ago I'd often carry one of my Schleich animals in my pocket at school for comfort. Today I needed one again. And I even took the zebra out and set it on my teaching table for one of my classes. (The students couldn't really see it since it was behind a computer screen, but it made me happy to see it there.)
10/5: realizing
...how I could articulate a feeling I've been having about how some students are engaging (or not) in classes these days: it's like they tune out as if they're still on Zoom or Teams and can just turn their cameras and microphones off. Although this phenomenon isn't a good thing, being able to put it in words like that was helpful. And it makes sense, given that interacting online via Zoom and Teams had become a new habit over the past year and a half. Now that we're back in in-person classrooms, it's time to change habits, and that can be hard.
10/4: reading
...students' descriptions of hypothetical paintings based on Homer's Odyssey that they'd commission someone else to paint if they had a chance.
10/3: appreciating
...the colors on the fallen leaves, noticed during my morning walk. And we're in the "second spring" part of the season, which means that there's a mix of smells in the air: fresh blooms and autumn leaves.
10/2: continuing
...our Saturday cleaning trend. This afternoon we worked on the laundry room and its chaos of cleaning supplies. I also dusted the shelf of animal figurines that we installed in that room a few years ago. Taking the figurines off, tidying, and rearranging them made me grateful afresh that we decided to put them and the shelf in there: it makes that aspect of the laundry room a bit of lark, and every morning we get to see the animals looking out at us when we iron our clothes.
10/1: a little of both
Recently I've switched my Friday afternoon activity from writing to grading. Today I graded for an hour then wrote for an hour and was glad to do both. Putting sentences together (as well as realizing that I had thoughts to put into sentences) felt good.