genevieve is…

I’ve been reading bloggers posts of bad Cs travel experiences (here and here) and so I thought I’d be publicly thankful that traveling home from New Orleans was incredibly easy and uneventful.  I’ve traveled an inordinate amount this year, rivaled only by the other year of my life spent in a long distance relationship.  I know that year I flew 13 times…I haven’t really kept track this time around.

I have a personal preference for American Airlines, and the airline I loathe emphatically happens to be US Airways.  My one really sad travel experience was having a delayed flight that caused us to miss our connection to an international flight, thereby losing a day on an international trip.

I still like to fly, but if I’d had all those horrible experiences I certainly wouldn’t been looking forward to traveling either!

…at least for now.  The last 6 or so months have been pretty overwhelming.  It’s not so much starting the PhD that has been hard, but being on quarters has been really, really difficult.  Quarters are…intense.  Some of the other grad students seem to absolutely take it in stride, but I feel like I’m continually behind, never quite finished reading before a grad seminar, never responding to emails quickly enough, never starting paper research early enough, and never prepared enough to best teach a two hour long first year writing course.

This quarter started March 24, and I’m feeling less freaked out, particularly because I’m only taking one full-blown graduate seminar (the other class is shadowing a faculty member who’s teaching an undergraduate  course in preparation for teaching the same course in the future).  Also, I just got back last night from 4Cs, and putting that behind me is really a relief.

All that to say that I’m going to start writing here again, hopefully.  I doubt anyone is going to read this unless I actually request they do so, but out there in the interweb ether it goes anyway.  Hope things aren’t too crazy for you, interweb ether.

This quarter is going to go by really fast.  We just finished week 2 of the quarter, and it’s honestly just flown by–everything is going really well, but I’m just so busy!  So far I’m really, really happy with the classes I’m taking, the classes I’m teaching, and especially the fact that I got paid a little bit so I could go to the grocery store today.  I actually ended up fasting for the last three days, not because I didn’t have any food or money, but coincidentally I also didn’t have any food or money.  I actually fasted for spiritual reasons, and with the hope that fasting would cause me to be more aware of my body and the food I’m consuming and how I actually feel.

You see, I haven’t been eating terribly, but I haven’t really been eating well either, and I was starting to get stomachaches a lot and attributing them to lack of food when in reality I think I’d just let my system get out of balance.  So three days of fasting later all I can say is that everything I ate today tasted absolutely wonderful.

It helped that I went to Sunflower market and bought delicious things (though I admit I have some qualms about how they’re like supposed to be all healthy and organic but they’re also a chain…I have some notion that health food stores should be like The Earth in Norman or Open Harvest in Lincoln).  Anyway, I had baguette and garlic stuffed olives and sushi (well, that was so-so) and an awesome fresh tomato.  I like yummy food.

Basically just got home from Oklahoma, where I saw many people, some of whom I wanted to see, but most of whom were OU fans going to the game on Saturday.  I did get some excellent social time in on Friday with some peeps in English.  We spent a lot of time talking about Ph.D. programs and first year writing curriculum, which is to be expected.

Saturday Lisa and I went out to a lake near Norman in an attempt to escape from the 90000 excited fans mulling about nearing our living spaces.  It was an absolutely beautiful day and I wish I could have taken a picture of the fish jumping in the lake!  Could there possibly be flying fish in Oklahoma?  Were they just really hungry?  I have no idea, but they were interesting.

This morning I got to go to Summit, which was wonderful, and got treated to a birthday lunch at Johnny Carinos before spending the rest of my birthday in airports or on planes.

In other news, I got into CCCCs, as did everyone at Oklahoma that I asked.  This makes me very excited for a big OU reunion in New Orleans in the spring.  Now I just have to find the money to go!

Today we (finally) talked about assessment. First, Michael presented his impressions of writing assessment, an area he has clearly done a great deal of research in. He actually couched assessment in terms of argumentation, which was just genius as far as I am concerned. After the presentation we had the opportunity to assess a research paper and I thought the paper deserved a C+ or at most a B-. Generally, other GTAs seemed to agree with me. It was interesting, though, because the instructor whose student it had been sort of argued in defense of the student (not in a disagreeable way) pointing out clarifications to us that really weren’t on the assignment sheet, which we each had a copy of. It highlighted for me how important it is to be as clear as possible on my own assignment sheets, or at least to follow them as closely as possible when I don’t have editing control (we must use the assignment sheets given to us by the WPAs).

The best part of Friday, though, was the afternoon, when we got to go to the computer lab for a while and play with D2L Carmen…Scott let me share the floor a bit and I think I’m now on my way to having him know who I am )

Friday evening Scott Dewitt had a party for all of us and sig others at his place which is really beautiful. The party was quite nice.  It feels really good to be on the way to knowing other people in Columbus…I even ended up talking to a guy from Oklahoma for a long time.  He grew up in Duncan.  Mostly we talked about baptists, because Oklahoma was about all we had in common since he’s not in English.  I waver between really liking all the other GTAs and feeling excited to know any and all of them and then also feeling like I have nothing in common with anyone and that I’m never really going to make any friends here.  I think the latter feeling is largely attributable to my own lack of self confidence and was somewhat remedied by actually calling someone on Saturday and going to a movie with her.  I know I’ll make friends, logically, but I don’t always use the logical part of my brain.