Sunday, August 31, 2003
 

Geez.

The latest worm is making its rounds through one of the university's listservs. I've received it around 130 times now (but am not infected myself). Now I'm being bombarded with requests to be unsubscribed from the listserv; people are apparently doing "reply all" to unsubscribe. At least one person sent out an angry message to tell people to stop sending him the same file over and over. Wonder how many times that brainiac has opened the infected attachment now?

Be good to your computer. Buy antivirus software.

In other news, there really isn't any. Teaching got off to a decent start. I was horribly nervous leading up to the first class, but by the time I stood up in front of them, I guess I'd burned all the nervousness out. The first day wasn't bad because it was mostly policy. I only had one kid who immediately presented himself as a troublemaker; I called him on it; he dropped. Do not test my authority. The second class also went well, which was surprising, since the course material was Ginsberg's "America." I hadn't assigned any actual reading, since add-drop was still going on, so I just handed out copies of the poem and played an mp3 of Ginsberg reading it. A few of them came to some, uh, interesting conclusions about the poem (Ginsberg regrets attending communist meetings?), but they were at least trying. The point of all this was to introduce them to the course themes and to give a rough approximation of essay composition ("look how Gisberg makes a particular argument and supports it with concrete evidence!"), and I think that the light bulbs actually went on.

We start Candide tomorrow. All my previous experience with that novel has been in philosophy classes, so we'll see how I manage to teach it in an English setting. It's going to be odd for me, because normally this would all involve Leibniz & Co., and I won't be able to do that with these guys (though we DID do a bit of Wittgenstein Friday).

I had typed more. I attempted to save. I lost it. Ergh.

We had a girls' night out party last night, which was fun. It was good to get in some entertainment before the semester gets overly hectic. I'm feeling more passive and less high-strung about things in general now. I think that it's probably mostly due to the fact that I'm becoming increasingly sure that grad school is the wrong career (or, rather, lack of a career) path for me. If I could see another option for me, I think I can say that I'd be out of here now. I'd miss the people, and I'd miss the intellectual atmosphere, but I'm beginning to feel that academia isn't "home" for me. Also, I'm feeling more concretely now that the fact of the matter is that I can either quit grad school and have job insecurity now, or I can stick it out and have job insecurity later.

Ah, well. I can't decide about that tonight, mainly because I have lesson plans to write and classwork of my own to complete. Being a student and a teacher at the same time ain't easy.

Unlike the life of Alice, whose main activity as of late has been burrowing under her boogie mat and attempting to gnaw the head off of a small cat.

Back to Voltaire.

Elvisette philosophized at 7:07 PM