Mark
John’s dad, Mark, came for a nice visit today, and bought us something like $4 billion worth of non-perishable groceries. Yay for parental handouts!
Sure there were the inevitable fights over “Do we really need four giant kegs of emergency water in our pantry?” (Of course every parent thinks hurricanes are imminent, and their kid will die if they aren’t immediately presented with flash-light batteries and bottled water upon moving into student dwellings). However, you cannot argue with the glory that is free goods, so whatever he shoved into the cart, we took.
(Except for his pesky and resilient notion that, though vegetarian, we must still eat tuna, so he must buy us a flat of the stuff. This we vetoed. He suggested it at least four times. Each time we explained. This has been going on for years. Some people never seem to realize that fish is not just a swimming vegetable, but actually something with a face – thus contravening the notion of vegetarianism. And it also violates good taste, as fish is as wretched a substance as the human animal has ever chewed upon.)
The only mishap occurred when, while I was trying to store the giant vats of spring water in our cramped storage closet, I gave my big toe such a whack that my children may be born without their nail on the left big toe.
Still, yay for handouts. And I may scoff now, but if their does come a hurricane, I will be glad for those jugs. Unless, of course, I am forced to leave them behind as I flee for safety. Which I almost certainly will. Dang.
Marking
All of my students’ final papers were due by midnight on Wednesday night. Via email. I have been receiving tons and tons of my doom every hour, flooding my inbox and presenting me with the logistics of how to download 50 papers without crashing Laurier’s email system – widely considered to be one of the worse university email systems in this hemisphere since PINE gasped its last.
One highlight? One of my more gifted students seems to have completely missed some sort of message and analyzed Triumph of the Will (1935) as a Jewish piece… I don’t know if I failed or civilization has. One way or another, this time next week I may have given up education and hit the roads of rural Japan (does such a thing exist any more?) with a begging bowl. Surely this world holds nothing for me, any more.
Marks & Marx
Had my ritual studies course tonight, despite my possibly gangrenous big toe (I limped all the way to campus, sour that I had not an audience to witness and validate my pain). A couple things developed in the fall-out from my Groucho Marx presentation.
The peer evaluation comment that almost had me drop out of my program last week (someone accused me of perpetuating anti-Semitic stereotypes by studying them) turns out to have been the work of someone who, quote, “had to write something down,” and had no idea that I would take it seriously. It turns out that he had no major qualms with my paper, and, as he was getting marked himself on his critique of my presentation, wrote that out of a lack of anything else to say. So my life was almost ended over someone’s nervous gushing. Wonderful! That validates my trust in life and luck.
On another flip of fate, the same prof who dinged me with an A- for that presentation offered to help me work my research into an article this summer. I am uncertain about this whole thing. If it was publishable, but only an A-, what would this guy do if my paper was actually good? Or bad? What was it, again? What happened? Who am I? What am I doing?
Huh? Wha? Shuh?
Oh, the world is a scary and horrible place, and I am at its mercy. Charity ruins toes. Nazi propaganda is Jewish. I suck and I’m brilliant.
I don’t know what to believe any more. I may as well enroll in Business College.
I think my brain just melted, and I’m not even sure that’s a bad thing.
I just don’t know.
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