I Need A Vacation!!

bitchy-whine-complain-pooh-pooh-bungle-bear. ::pout::

I'm cross. I'm tired. I'm overworked. I'm managing beautifully, and it never fails to amaze me what people can accomplish under pressure. By people, of course, I mean me. My work is always done, and it's never late. But I am soooo tired. I didn't get a break at Christmas. I was too busy dealing with the ins and outs of my sister's breakdown, catching up on hundreds of pages of literacy crap that I'd gotten so very behind on, and completely revamping my syllabus. I think I took off for Christmas dinner and for Christmas day. Otherwise, it was work, work, work. I get my Spring Break the last week of March. But, I'll be finishing a major essay then, and it isn't as if I can stop working my nonprofit job.

Sometimes, there is just too much to carry.

What's really bugging me is the fact that I have to take summer classes. Summer classes really piss me off for two reasons. For one thing, they're only about 6 weeks long. So I always feel like we rush over things. I feel cheated of my time. Second, full semesters are really wearing on a person. Things are due so often both for my own classes and from the students I teach that there really isn't time to do extra work on, for instance, your syllabus. And a teacher who really cares will go back over things at the end of each semester, see what worked and what didn't, and make adjustments. My syllabus now is 100% better than it was last semester, and I can already see where I want to rearrange things for next year. I need that time over the summer to actually get to do that.

Complicating things further, I may be reassigned out of 101 to teach 102, which is more argument and rhetorically based. Which means coming up with all new stuff! From scratch! New readings, new assignments, new everything. It takes a lot of work to design a course from scratch, but that's what they expect you to do when they boot you into 102. If I'm taking classes, especially compressed ones, I will barely have time to turn around. Then, there's the small matter of fact that the summer classes end only three or four days before fall classes begin. No decompression time.

ARGGHH!!

My lovely mentor has also managed to screw me over for summer on top of the complications I'm already facing. (More on that in another post. I really need to get that rant out of my system.)

So. I need a break. A real break, not a pretend break where I don't have to do all the things I do in a day but still have to do some of them. My Director/Buddy calls them "running away days." I've got two choices. And I'm going to figure out how to take both of them. I can leave sometime between May 1 and May 17, before our golf tourney fundraiser and the start of summer classes. I can't be gone that whole time, but I can potentially take a week. And I can go the week of Christmas. Dante leaves for Florida for Christmas, and he's gone for a week anyway. I might as well go somewhere else during that time; it's depressing to be in Kentucky when he's not there.

I don't think I'll get out of the country this year. My secret wish is to go to Ireland next summer, which is one reason to take that extra class this summer. It frees me up of my obligations (except for reading a few books) to school so that I might actually get a summer off. But I know one thing. I want to go somewhere warm. Somewhere fun. Someplace that doesn't look like Appalachia. I heart Appalachia. But I have to live here. I want to see something different, for a change.

I am open to suggestions. But I think for Christmas, I'm going to Puerto Rico (and yes, I know that's technically "out of the country", but not really. You know what I mean!).

Different. Warm. Not West Virginia. I've no idea where to go for May. I'm thinking maybe Maine.

Heck if I know. What're your favorite places in the U.S.?

-- Virgil (tired-pooh-pooh-bungle-bear)