Every Day is Doomsday from Here on Out

Dear Lord, I don't want to go back to teaching tomorrow. My sleep schedule is still shot to hell, so I'm going to get no sleep tonight. And then I'll probably return to a group of freshmen who will be equally exhausted from the potent combination of holiday travel and Sunday-after-Thanksgiving cramming. They will be uncommunicative and surly, and we're going to have to talk about the abstract concept of "making an argument" vs. "presenting a fact." I already hate them.

I also hate them for the fact that they want to do well in my class, so they're all going to miraculously appear at my office hours this week and next, eating time that I could spend writing my own goddamn papers and such. What they don't know - and what I'm often tempted to tell them - is that I already know what most of them are getting. I have 65% of their grade tallied at this point. Thanks to the ham-handed grading system here at UW, that makes anything beside a major deviation in the final project statistically insignificant. They only have to pass the "Did you royally fuck up this assignment?" litmus test, which for the majority of them consists of only turning in a final project printed in English and covering more than one sheet of paper. That's it. Game over. I'm packing my bags, and I'm out.

Speaking of packing bags...

Today, I occupied the first few useless hours of my day with this site about, well, packing. Seems like it makes sense. Completely useless for stuffing my travel backpack, to be sure, but worth trying out on my trip back to my parent's house. Perusing that took about 20 minutes, so I spent the rest of my time picking through the guy's Annotated Packing List. On the positive end, doing that helped to remind me of some key things I had forgotten to put on my own list: tweezers, a sewing kit, a compass, and - God knows how I forgot it - Band-aids. (I had Neosporin but not Band-aids...WTF.) But the downside was that I got severely depressed for a few hours.

This is the opposite of JR. She gets happy thinking about our trip, because she has the ability to project herself into the future - or, rather, she has the ability to empathize with Future-Jessie. I do not. Future-Kevin is an abstraction to me, someone completely disconnected from me, here, right now, stuck grading freshman writing while his toes slowly freeze in his woefully under-heated apartment. This lack of empathy with a future version of myself is, I also think, a contributing factor to why I procrastinate. Present-Kevin tends to dump a lot of shit on Future-Kevin (just as he's doing right now) simply because he cannot visualize and/or empathize with that future iteration. There you go. Case solved.

So, what I need to invent is a window that will let me look into the past, so that Present-Kevin can look through it and see how miserable Future-Kevin is whilst he comments on awful student concert reviews at 2:30 AM. Why can't science do anything good for me for once?