Spring Break Blues

I got my first official wedding present today. Actually apparently the psycho upstairs neighbors got my first official wedding present. They left it in the storeroom outside of our back door. Getting a "first official wedding present" was almost worth Mikes waking me up at 7:00 this morning when he discovered it there. Almost. I mean, it's friggin' SPRING BREAK. Hello? Does sleep ring a bell?

Speaking of weddings...mine is less than a month away. More like three weeks and two days...and I think I may be a little stressed. WE may be a little stressed. Tempers are short and even the cats are on edge around here. We have to make an effort to remember that we're stressed out and that we can't yell at each other about little stuff just because we're stressed. For example, the other day, Mike was pre-boarding us for our honeymoon and I was sitting on the couch grading papers or something and we had an argument because I had registered under Lucinda Harris which would no longer be my legal name. Silly things.

It is indeed my spring break and I am spending it working. Unfortunately, my spring break also is the "Between quarters" break. So I have to have three new syllabi prepared and chapters read in three different textbooks before Monday. I got sorta bullied into teaching a class I wasn't really interested in. They cancelled my speech class which dropped me from three down to two classes. This wasn't really a problem, though, because they had a Latin American Literature class still available and I emailed saying I'd take that class provided it would work with my schedule. The class scheduler emailed me back and said they had a class called "East-West Signature" that was about to become open. The class is required of all students before they can graduate and the current session was completely full and they still had people who needed to register so they were going to open a second section of the class. I emailed back and said I'd really rather have the literature class. She emailed back and said that the director of the department had recommended me for the signature class. Translation: Signature course, here I come. The problem is, the head of the department has recently found out that I have a Liberal Studies degree rather than simply an English degree. True, a majority of my classes were literature and English classes but I am fully qualified to teach theology and humanities as well. The signature course is a higher level course, so I suppose I should be flattered that they offered it to me. I'm not. It entails me reading a book called, "Guns, Germs and Steel" by a guy named Jared Diamond. I had to laugh because this is a book we already have a copy of. Mike bought this book for his own pleasure reading. At first I wasn't dreading this so much because Mike had the book and I thought, "No problem. Mike can help me get through the book and understand it blah, blah, blah." Then I suggested Mike go through the book and familiarize himself with everything and finish reading it. When he said, "I've tried...like...three times to read that book"....my heart sank. I'm going to be going through a book that my educated, brilliant boyfriend can not finish....with Chicago's inner city youth. Oh yeah. This'll be great. Good times.

School has been stressing me out anyways. Thankfully, the quarter finished up last week. I turned grades in and started working on getting materials gathered for this quarter. I sat down to add a "few details" to my syllabus and have written what is well on it's way to being a multi-paged manifesto. I'm going to have to do a little trimming on it. It's good therapy but I'm fairly certain that administration would not approve of me starting it with the words "I swear to God I will fail your ass if..." It's really sad that I have to put some of this stuff down on paper - it should be common sense. For instance, "it is not ok to come to class 45 minutes late, sign the attendance sheet and then leave." and my personal favorite, "between the hours of midnight and 6am, calling my home phone is off limits."

Next time I promise to blog about Mike's "bachelor" party with his co-workers. It was a riot. It's a story that involves handcuffs, a feather boa, many many drinks and a cake shaped like breasts.