We Mark Days Only After They're Gone

In a few hours, I have to go to the vet to pick up one of our rescue cats. I mean, he's fine or, like, fine-ish, since there's a reason he's at the vet, but we had a scare. I guess it was 1 AM. I was dead fucking tired, since I'd been up doing last minute grade submissions, and had something of a plagirism concern I simply can't verify - all the grades are in and I'm finishing off a hard cider, and Kay's like... doing litter, I guess, and our cat was peeing somewhere he really wasn't supposed to and, second, peeing blood. I was going to say, "an uncomfortable amount of blood," but doesn't that go without saying? You never see blood in your pee and go, "Oh, okay, cool. That's not too much blood."

If you do, that's bad.

At the risk of being overly obvious, there's never really a good clock-time for this, but Kay determines that he has to go to the vet, and we both determine that this is not plausible at this time of the evening, so I'm up again at 6:15 AM to take him to the vet. All told, I'm not jazzed about the time between yesterday and today, but it's whatever. I'm fuckin' tired. I'm not really getting any good sleep, lately.

Technically grade are due today - well, were due today - at noon, so I'm done with all that. I've done literally everything I could think to do that would help, but I still ended up failing students who just couldn't seem to get some critical work in. Overall, though, I would say that things generally went well. Maybe too well, in some cases, as I ended up handing out more A's than I actually wanted to, but it's a product of how I structured the class and assignments, coupled with the fact that many of my students genuinely showed impressive progress in their writing. Students who came in and didn't think much of their ability to write came out doing markedly better while students who figured they were going to do well and started out by blowing the class off ended up sweating for their A's and B's (or C's). I put an astounding amount of energy and time into the class, which the students seemed to notice, but the emotional labor was equally taxing to me.

I've taken a few days "off" in order to get my shit in order - cut the grass, sweep the house, do laundry, take care of myself, and do research reading. It looks like my thesis is narrowing to an analysis that's rooted in a kind of post-colonial marxist reading that analyses how William Gibson constructs the identity of culture and communities in his Blue Ant trilogy - especially focused around his internalized socio-political and cultural views. It's really not a particularly negative reading, nor one that I really think he'd disagree with himself - just an acknowledgement that the white, technocratic West that's situated around the former Soviet and US powers isn't the world default, even though it ('it' as a kind of universalized gestalt idea of "the West" which, The Soviet Union railed against but mirrors - I understand that this is dangerously broad, here) constructs itself as such. I mean, the dissonance in that is something I'm looking to write on. I don't have it fully parsed yet.