A Writer’s Diary Entries From Mid-January, 1999
Wednesday, January 13, 1999
9:30 PM. I let my class go fifteen minutes ago since we were all getting tired. I’m still one chapter behind, but I hope I can catch up next week.
It’s drizzling out, and I heard it may rain all day tomorrow. Maybe I can stay in bed in the morning since my only class is at Boca in the evening.
It’s been a long day, and I’m very tired. Last night I dreamed about my credit cards, which may suggest that I’m getting dangerously close to the kind of credit card chassis that took up so much of my time a decade ago.
In another dream, I wore a hospital dressing gown with the back flaps open as I drove through Rockaway on July 4th so I could awaken Grandma Ethel at her apartment. Right now I’m ready to go back to dreamland.
Struggling to awaken at 5:30 AM, I forced myself to exercise at 6 AM. A little more than an hour later at Nova, I got on the computer.
Todd Gittleman, one of my Language 2000 students, never got his grade last semester – but I finally handled the problem today. Somehow when they transferred to Banner, the new grading system, Todd’s name and those of fifty students in other classes were missing from the final rosters, Ben told me.
Teresa emailed that she hadn’t yet heard back from Camille. She was planning to leave for California this week but said this trip feels funny since she’s going by herself and not with Paul.
Another new student popped up in my 8 AM Language 1500 class, and now I’m at the cap of fifteen students and will not let anyone else in. I’ve got a really nice group, but I don’t expect much from their writing.
However, one student, a Palestinian kid named Mo (Mohammed), showed me a really powerful essay about the death of his cousin by Israeli troops during the violence when the Israelis opened that stupid tunnel.
In class, when I talked about authority lists and what people are experts in, I gave the example that Mo was an expert on Palestine – and I deliberately used that term.
I want to see either a country called Palestine or, as Edward Said suggests, a binational Arab/Jewish state where all citizens have equal rights. But given the failures of Netanyahu, I’m afraid that violence is the only outcome, no matter who is elected to succeed him. (I’m assuming Bibi will lose the election in May.)
I’ve got a nice mix of students in the 8 AM class: a good balance by gender, race and ethnicity, but not age. These kids seem so young to me – probably because they are.
Back at home, I read the Times and printed out yesterday’s U.S. Supreme Court decisions and a couple of articles on Lexis.
At 12:30 PM I had my eye exam at Sears. I have to go back to have my pupils dilated, but Dr. Martinez, the optometrist, said everything looks good. She said I’ll probably always be able to read by taking off my glasses because my nearsightedness is so bad, but my prescription hasn’t changed.
I can continue to wear contact lenses because I have spare pairs, but I’ll probably wear them less and less – mostly when I go out and know I won’t need to read for extended periods.
When the eye exam was complete, I picked out a pair of Guess frames that are sort of like the ones I have now but in the smaller oval shape that people wear these days. The glasses should be ready by the end of next week. I charged it all to my Sears card, of course.
At home, I found that the video of Go Tell It on the Mountain wouldn’t play on the VCR. I’ll try to find another library’s copy.
Rather than go out walking late this afternoon, I lay down to rest for tonight’s Organizational Communications class.
After dinner, I went over to the campus and put an outline of the chapters on the board before class. (The Maltz Psychology Building has whiteboards with markers rather than the chalkboards at the other Nova buildings.)
Two new students showed up late, and one from last week was absent tonight.
I think the class went okay, but I felt self-conscious teaching “effective listening skills” when I know that I could be much more of an effective listener than I am now. Of course, listening actively and empathetically is very hard work and also time-consuming.
Although I’m definitely good at self-disclosure – at least for an American male – I need to respond to people less directly and judgmentally. I also tend to use the strategies of using probing questions and smoothing things over to avoid conflict rather than reflecting back what the speaker said and allowing her to continue expressing herself.
And I’ve got what Tom calls “teacher’s disease”: I talk too much.
(I also write too much.)
Friday, January 15, 1999
9 PM. Riding down Pine Island Road just now, my car window open to the mild breeze, I remembered how lucky I am to be spending one last winter in South Florida.
In the Northeast, where I’ll be next winter, the severe snow and ice storms continue; people are without power or unable to leave their homes.
Alice emailed that after she and Peter couldn’t get a flight out this morning, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival people told Peter that he’d missed so much of the conference that they shouldn’t come to Orlando at all. “I was looking forward to this trip to Florida,” Alice wrote, “and I’m not taking this disappointment well.”
I haven’t heard if Teresa was able to fly out to San Francisco. But the bad winter weather up North tells me I need to make the most out of the next few months down here.
Waking up at 5 AM, I exercised an hour later even though I’d squeezed in an extra half-hour workout yesterday.
As I picked up the Times when I left the house for Nova at 7:30 AM, I noticed that one of the GOP impeachment managers, Rep. Asa Hutchinson, was pointing to a chart labeled “calender [sic] of job search activity,” so when I got to my computer, I emailed a letter to the New York Times, wondering if their front page cover photo’s misspelling by the House Republicans is representative of the slipshod nature of their presentation.
After my class, I tried not to discuss impeachment with that buffoon who teaches history who’s one of the adjuncts I share my office with. But after hearing his uninformed, stupid opinions, I couldn’t help myself.
What makes this guy an idiot is not just that he’s a right wing ideologue. For example, when I criticized Rep. Henry Hyde, he said, “Yeah, well, he is so fat he looks terrible. What a lardass!” So then I found myself defending Hyde, saying his appearance wasn’t relevant to anything.
And when I countered Hyde’s statement that Clinton couldn’t deal with powerful women by pointing out that Clinton appointed women to important cabinet positions, this guy’s reply was: “Yeah, but Janet Reno and Madeleine Albright are really ugly!”
Where does Nova find people like him to teach history classes? It’s no wonder this guy spent 25 years working in the post office.
My 8 AM class went okay as we went over the first chapter of Our Times, the reader, which was a study of the 1996 freshman class at U.S. colleges. It was interesting to see how my students compared to the students in the book. While they seem typical of the materialistic, conservative freshmen of the past few years, those adjectives are a gross overgeneralization.
Surprisingly, none of my students smoke cigarettes (or else wouldn’t admit it) and few of them drink beer – though most of them do drink.
After they turned in their essays, I briefly looked the papers over; most of them seem fairly interesting if not very well-written.
I left Nova after checking my email and writing back to Alice and to Sat Darshan, who said the Phoenix spring has already begun (“our nicest time of year”) and that Kiran is growing. She also mentioned that Tandeep said he liked me so much that I was welcome to stay with him if I visit Montreal.
I drove to the Barnes & Noble in Pembroke Pines, where I read the Times over iced tea for a couple of hours. That store is set up exactly like the one in the Ahwatukee Foothills of Phoenix.
After buying some frozen food at Albertsons, I came home for lunch. The networks aren’t covering the Senate trial, so I was able to catch the first twenty minutes of One Life to Live after the last twenty minutes of All My Children on ABC. As little as one viewing every few weeks keeps me up on those soaps.
I took my car in to have the oil changed and went back to Nova to play on the computer until 4 PM. (This morning Santa gave me the key to the department office.)
When I returned home, Mom told me Larry Brandt had just called to tell me that he needs someone to teach American Literature at the American Express headquarters in Plantation on Fridays and Saturdays every other week starting two weeks from tonight.
I told Larry I’d be happy to do it if he could get approval for me to teach an additional course. He said he thought he could and that I should stop by on Tuesday.
This would really give me a big teaching workload, but the class is scheduled at a time when I’m free and will get me out of the house more. It also should give me another $1,750 – meaning I’ll be making a gross salary of $10,700 for this winter semester.
I might as well do it since I’ll probably need money badly very soon. It’s not like I have any friends or a lover to keep me occupied, so why not be a workaholic? The class is Survey of American Literature, which I’ve enjoyed teaching three times before at Nova.
Tuesday, January 19, 1999
7 PM. My long weekend is coming to an end. I graded all the papers for tomorrow except one late paper I either left at the office on Friday night or misplaced. This morning I marked up four pages at the bookstore café and I did the rest this afternoon.
Last evening I read and highlighted one of the chapters for my Organizational Communications classes, and I’d like to do the other one this evening, but I’m tired and my eyes hurt.
This morning I picked up my new glasses at Sears, and the stronger prescription makes me a little queasy and hurts my eyes. If I can’t get used to these, I’m going to ask them to put in a lens with my old prescription.
While I like the look of the lenses, I’ve never liked seeing things very sharply, and in the past I’ve sometimes been unable to adjust to new glasses – for example, the progressive lenses I got before I left for California, which made me dizzy.
This afternoon Mom and Dad had an offer of $183,500 for the house from a young couple who came here on Sunday. Dad took their $500 deposit and said he needs to talk it over with Mom and Jonathan, who is still at work and hasn’t heard the news yet.
This couple lives nearby, and although their house isn’t sold yet, they don’t need to sell it first to buy this house.
So I may end up in Florida in April after the rest of my family leaves. I’ll have to find a place for however many weeks I have to go in the term.
But I’ll deal with that down the road, and it’s certainly possible they won’t leave until the end of April, when I’m plan to go up North.
I’ve got to find out how I can keep my Florida address so I can get the June $1250 payment on my creative writing fellowship from the state.
I guess that’s easily solved with either a plain old change-of-address form or by taking one of those Mailboxes Etc. mailboxes that have a street address. Or else I could use Aunt Sydelle’s address in Aventura.
Mom and Dad seem a little stunned by the unexpected offer to buy the house. As I had thought, they really hadn’t accepted the fact that they were moving to Arizona.
Mom expressed worries about the cats who live outside and also said, “What if we get out there and Marc moves to Las Vegas?”
This morning I was up at 6 AM after a night of bizarre dreams. Although I wrote four of them down, they don’t seem worth recording now other than to say they were kind of obsessive.
I decided not to go to Nova today. Instead, I called Larry and he confirmed that I’ve got the American Lit course at American Express on alternate Fridays and Saturdays.
This afternoon I went out walking from 4:20 PM till 6 PM, when those people were coming over. I came home feeling tired, headachy and queasy.
Today’s sunny and warm weather was beautiful. As I emailed Teresa from the Davie library, I really have to treasure the days of this winter.
When I was here last January and February, it was quite cold and rainy because of El Niño, and I’d walk around downtown Davie in the late afternoon all bundled up, with my breath visible in the chilly air.
By contrast, this January has been indistinguishable from June in New York City during a good summer.
Teresa said that her family celebrated her sister’s birthday on Sunday at her aunt and uncle’s house in Floral Park.
She said she was surprised at the sophistication of her nephew, who mentioned seeing the foreign film Life Is Beautiful at the Paris Theater: “You know, the one across from the Plaza,” he told Teresa.
“I guess I need to stop thinking about him and Heidi as little kids,” Teresa said.
She said that Paul has made extra money sanding roads this winter, but by Sunday it had warmed up and yesterday was raining.
In the Senate impeachment trial today, Clinton’s counsel Charles Ruff began his defense opening statement. And at 9 PM, Clinton goes on TV with his State of the Union address.
I’m going to leave the preparation for tomorrow night’s class until tomorrow. In the morning, I’ll try to get to Nova by 9:30 AM.
As I was taking my usual long walk around this afternoon, at one point I found myself thinking: “I’m coming to the end of my life.”
Weird.
Thursday, January 21, 1999
10 PM. My classes last night and tonight went all right even though I don’t have the familiarity with the material that I probably should.
But maybe it’s similar to when I did computer training workshops and was superior to much more knowledgeable people. Remember that University of Miami computer science professor I was brought in to replace to teach word processing to English teachers at Miami Springs High School? I didn’t have his familiarity with technical complexities and so I didn’t confuse the class the way he did.
As an outsider to the technical jargon and conceptual models found in the Organizational Communications text, I just talk common sense when I’m teaching.
Last night’s class had all six students, but the international student, Eduardo (born in Italy but from Venezuela), still couldn’t get the text at the bookstore.
This morning I woke up at 5 AM but drifted in and out of sleep till 7 AM, when I went to eat breakfast.
On Lexis, I printed out from Martindale-Hubble the names of some local law firms my parents can use for selling the house.
At Barnes & Noble, I marked the two late freshman comp essays and read part of the Times.
An article about the gentrification of San Francisco’s once-solidly Hispanic Mission District had me recalling the day I spent with Kerry, Matt and Glori at the taqueria and Dolores Park, and another story on the reaction to the impeachment by people in the ultra-liberal Noe Valley neighborhood also made me nostalgic for San Francisco and the Bay Area. I wish I could have been able to spend more time there last year.
Athena and Kevin, the only two students from last term who wrote somewhat homophobic essays – they were in different classes – were walking together and greeted me pleasantly as I passed them on campus. If they’re dating, I guess they have being anti-gay in common.
Although they were never anything but polite and respectful in person – and today they were even chatty – it still bothers me that these kids feel the way they do. Why should I care? We humans are funny.
Larry Brandt called twice. First, he wanted to tell me about the new edition of the text for Survey of American Literature, and I told him I’d change the pages on the syllabus.
Then he called to tell me to bring in my changed syllabus, so I spent half an hour trying to figure out how to change the pages when I wasn’t always sure what the exact assignment was because some of the old selections aren’t in the latest edition.
I certainly hope Larry doesn’t expect me to give him a word-processed syllabus by tomorrow; I just corrected the page numbers in ink. The students have a writing assignment due on Saturday, the second class, and Larry wanted to be sure I wouldn’t penalize them.
It turns out that this is a new cluster and it’s got about 30 students. Another humongous class. Well, my other BPM classes have five and seven students in them, so I shouldn’t complain. But I had wanted to teach the American Lit course using my own selections.
At least they’ve improved the material from the first time I taught the course four years ago in Ocala and Gainesville. Back then they had all that early crap by James Greenfield Whittier and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and I felt frustrated because I knew I could make the class more fun for the students and myself by making my own assignments.
It’s like the lesson I taught last week about the problem with micromanaging an employee who’s creative, competent and doing the job; I certainly know more about teaching literature than Larry Brandt or whoever at the Business School made up the syllabus.
I took a half-hour walk to work off all my tension, telling myself it wasn’t worth it to get all upset over something so small. After all, this will be the last class I’ll teach for the BPM program.
I just don’t want this to be the proverbial straw on Camelback Mountain; I’m not going to let myself get stressed with overwork. After all, if I do a lousy job, it’s not as if I’m worried that they won’t hire me again.
The woman from the University of Phoenix called – talk about micromanaging – and I told her I wouldn’t be going to the dog-and-pony show for prospective adjuncts, that I was moving to Maryland.
“Well, we’re opening in Baltimore soon,” she said. Of course. The University of Phoenix is taking over the world.
On the drive up to Boca, I listened to news about the last day of the President’s defenders making their arguments to the Senate. One presentation seemed so technical that it reminded me of the first year of law school.
After my class ended early (it’s great to be the teacher!), I stopped off at the main campus to get the keys to go into the Nova MicroLab for a bit before coming home.
I’d gotten an offer for a dental discount plan on my Exxon credit card, and I wanted to check it out on Lexis and the Web. It seems okay, so I think I’ll sign up.
Although I brush and floss every day and eat a healthy diet, I haven’t had adequate dental care for maybe a decade.