From the Past: 13 January 2015 The D*mn Beep

In fall 2014 I began adjuncting after teaching high school for 17 years. I desperately needed a break. This series will examine my ramblings while I had my students write for a particular amount of time during the first year I taught composition. These will be curated.

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It is a good thing that my mother told me to ignore my brother and that he would eventually go away and leave me alone. It did not work for me. He still continued (and continues now) to annoy me, but it did prepare me for teaching, a profession in which flexibility and a deaf ear are sometimes the most important qualities an educator can have. For over an hour the system in the portable has been beeping. Fortunately, I had some data analysis to do, and that kept me from paying too much attention to the beeping. But dear, sweet Jesus! It was still going when E- and the Girls came in [third college]. I think we all thought we were going to go insane, but then it magically stopped. Praise Jesus! Thank you so much because we have another hour in here. Maybe the alarm wore itself out, as in broke its own ability to make sound. Whatever it was, I am so thankful.

As for my first class today, thanks to J-, I managed to get to [second college] by 9 a.m., and she was early because her first class was only fifteen minutes long. We had a good talk, and I told her that L- and I had the proposition of a living arrangement for her. That sentence sounds weird, but I’m going to keep going. She’s going to pray over it and let me know.

[Issues related to husband’s family] [comparison to my brother]

If I want to get theological, none of us is white; we are pretty much all grey sheep, or as Hawthorne put it, pink….neither white nor red. I wish I could remember the name of that story. Her pink ribbons as a symbol of the fact that she was neither pure nor rotten but human. That is why he was a published writer, though he did work many jobs as well as write, and a lot of writers do not end up seeing the money during their lifetimes.

I need to put together the [family member]’s birthday gifts: cold, hard cash…literally.