Why am I here again?

...at the office, in Aub*rn, teaching, in limbo... take your pick.

This is why I resist coming here. Besides tying me in each time for about 3x longer than I expect, there is always some unforeseen and soul-sucking and needless to say hugely stupid crap to deal with. Yeah, it's my job - sure, throw THAT in my face - on the other hand they're not paying me right now except for benefits, so it doesn't exactly make you feel like being very conscientious in the off months when campus days are so defeating, even if I did get to go to the dentist for free last week.

Good girl that I am, I nevertheless did a few necessary tasks like fighting with stupid Groupwise and updating my homepage and checking (and reading!) mail, both e- and otherwise. I even interacted with the dept. head about a fairly crucial bit of admin. stuff! Well, OK, via email but still, it's checked off the list and since he's German (sorry but there simply are certain stereotypes which actually hold up pretty well at times), I already heard back and was able to apply his advice so the whole thing is off my docket now.

I'm dreading school much more than usual this year and I truly only know one part of what is making that happen on my end, tho of course it doesn't help that a particularly icky student from 1010 signed up for my 1020 for some unfathomable reason (how could I have been so wrong about his displeasure in my class being quite tantamount to my own at his presence there?! I guess there are just some people I still can't read. Or else he couldn't fit any of the other 1020's into his schedule of course.)

Fall is almost always harder to jump into tho, so I guess this is just par for the course but maybe I'm simply more conscious of it this year? Usually I spend the summer in kind of a fog of quasi-complacency about fall, feeling I have ages and ages to get ready and to make all the changes in my teaching objectives, etc., as I'm planning, and then all of a sudden it's August 12 or something and I wake up and realize how very little I'm actually going to accomplish. Maybe being miserable about it earlier on this summer means I'll be more responsible about my preps and more content come August.

Stranger things have happened.

Not often, maybe.