It's Christmas Eve!

And Mom is already in the holiday spirit!

Sorry for the serious lack of posts lately. I've been spectacularly uninspired since the semester ended, and have mostly been hibernating here at the Happy Kitten Cottage—catching up on reading, playing with the kittehs, and generally being lazy. Got to rest as much as possible, since Spring Semester begins on January 10, and squeeze all the relaxation I can out of these couple of weeks. Pixie and Guy will arrive tonight for our family get-together. Yay!

Friday Kittehs: 12/17/10

From I Can Has Cheezburger? (naturally!)

Today at 12:00pm, the worst semester I've had in many years will officially end. And at 12:01pm, the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of student teeth will unofficially begin. My professor friends say they almost never have problems with angry students—angry e-mail recriminations, nasty reviews, frantic end-runs to the dean because they've got no options left other than to admit to Mom and Dad that they screwed up. Perhaps I'm simply too "nice" and "understanding." Or perhaps my friends are lying.

But I've got it all saved in PDF format: every graded essay, complete with my marks and comments. Heh-heh-heh.

Mother Nature is trying to tell us something.

For years, I've dreaded the approach of the fall and winter holidays. From the time I was in my late teens, I've noticed knots in my stomach and a thick, suffocating layer of dread around my heart and solar plexus the minute the Christmas decorations appear in stores. Which used to happen the day after Thanksgiving, just 15 or 20 years ago...but now is the DAY AFTER HALLOWEEN. So we get to suffer for TWO whole months instead of just five weeks! O frabjous day! But I digress.

At first, I thought it was anxiety left over from my childhood and teen years of shuttling back and forth between Mom's and Dad's houses on Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, and New Year's. As the years have worn on, though, I've realized that it must be something else. I just feel like hibernating during those six or eight weeks, staying home and staying warm, and not out in the cold and ice and tomfoolery. According to American society, I'm abnormal—everyone should just be rapturously happy between late November and early January! But something in me has always told me that I was on the right track. I've never been able to explain to friends, though, why I'd just rather stay home and not make a big deal out of the whole holiday hoopla. The Colonel shares my views on the holiday season; while he loves his extended family, he sometimes takes a camping trip from December 23-26, foregoing the whole "forced merriment" thing and choosing instead to be with Mother Nature. When he returns from the woods, he's in a much better mood than he would be if he had forced himself to plaster on a smile and be around a lot of desperate familial holiday drama.

So I knew the two of us, plus my mom and my sister, had the right idea. But we're just four people in a sea of millions of goose-stepping automatons who march right along, still clueless that they were conscripted at birth by the Holiday Army. Then I read this interesting article included in the "Daily Insight" e-mail I get from Yoga Journal magazine: Winter Wonder Yin —and I love the article's by-line: "An acupuncturist explains why the final month of the year, an inherently yin season, is not the time to indulge in yang activities like shopping, partying, and staying up late." Exactly!

I like this approach to the winter holidays—whether or not you put any stock in acupuncture or other alternative medicines, the idea behind rest during this time of the year is a pretty good one. Dark months = rest and recharge...and American holidays SOOOO go against what we're programmed by NATURE to do. Now that I think about it, I don't know anyone who feels any better, or more peaceful, or more whole, or recharged, or fulfilled after the Turkey Day-Xmas-New Year's blitz. Do you?

Here's my proposal: Fuck the holiday "busy-ness" and hibernate. If you celebrate, do so in a meaningful way that won't stretch your health, your nerves, or your budget...and guard this sacred time of the year as if it were your secret treasure. Because, in fact, it IS. And it sounds a lot better than the usual "sick with a cold, hating the world, fighting holiday traffic, broke as hell, fried nerves due to another family holiday shitstorm" thing!

Chicken Monday: 12/13/10

Ever seen a chicken blink?

Now you have.

Glitches

I'm not sure what's going on, but the last two times I've tried to post from my cell phone, it hasn't worked. As soon as I get it figured out, there'll be interesting [sic] stuff here on E&P once again.

So wrong! And yet so right!

Via DListed, here's the middle-finger-flipping pedestrian crossing sign of Spokane, Washington. If I were walking down the street and saw this blinking bird finger telling me when I could cross, I'd probably fall over laughing instead of being offended. And that would be okay, as long as I was on the sidewalk when I fell over laughing.

It IS cold here. Why do you ask?

This week has brought near-record cold to Small Town, with night temperatures in the upper teens and low 20s. Daytime highs, too, have been chilly for this time of year in the Deep South—we don't usually experience daytime highs of 40 until late January or early February. So it's been flannel, down, fleece, and Polartec on the local (ahem) "runways" this week. As I got ready for bed last night, I realized that there were a record FIVE CATS on the bed. And nobody was starting any trouble, for once. Front to back: Hobo Kitty, Beignet, Joy (showing one reflective eye), Smokey (gray lump directly behind Joy), and Martha Ann. When I got into bed and turned out the lights, Clark joined us and made SIX kittehs on the bed. Will wonders never cease?!? Not as long as the electric blanket's plugged in.

Eleven years of Joy

Today marks 11 years since Joy came to live at the Happy Kitten Cottage. The night Mom & Steve found her, she was freezing and hungry—and LOUD. While she might be a little slower and gray-tabby-er these days, her meow is just as hearty as it was back then. And she grows sweeter with each passing day.

Friday Kittehs: 12/3/10

Clark is most certainly his Mama's cat—he's just as proud as I am to have some spending money for MAKEUP! Okay, well, maybe he's just asleep next to a birthday gift card from Aunt Pixie. Sephora doesn't sell catnip OR cheezburgers, so Clarky-Pie has no use for their silly store.

My Dad always said...

..."Try not to say that you'll never do something—because once you say it, you'll sure as hell end up doing it." He said it from the perspective of someone who hated any dish, whether appetizer, snack, or main course, made with crow. When I quote Daddy's old saying, I usually do so with a big laugh. But this time, I declare my "never again" in all seriousness. And I put it in ink, in my personal notebook, to make it official.

"I vow right now—solemnly swear to myself to make and keep this promise—Never again will I personally give a shit about students. NEVER AGAIN."

I am sick to death of upholding my own and the department's standards and then having to defend "grading hard" (also known as "not automatically slapping an A on anything longer than three pages OR that includes an outside article or two"). I am sick to death of young people whose purpose in life is to remain as emotionally and intellectually dead as possible. I am sick to death of young women who, when face to face with the racism and sexism that permeates their lives in our society, clam up and deny that what they've witnessed is gross injustice: "It's not like that, it's not that bad, those kinds of things don't matter to me and MY generation [family, friends]." I am sick to death of young people who are willfully ignorant, wallowing in their staunch and stupid resistance to a world and a life outside of their own and far happier than even pigs in shit.

To hell with all of it. From now on, I vow to kick ass and take names, fail 'em all and let God sort 'em out, teach and grade—but that is ALL. Once I get in the car to drive home, I plan to leave it all on campus. I vow to do my professional best, and leave caring about how students turn out to someone else. And let the teacher evaluations fall where they may; I'm getting out of this bullshit "Race to the Bottom."

Education is not, and never has been, a race—unlike a race, it's NEVER truly completed, and it's neither a forced march nor a high-speed sprint. I pity those who learn nothing more after they have a diploma in hand. They seldom figure out that the refusal to keep learning is suicide without pills or bullets or blades...it's a lot more painful and prolonged, and most people who die from Quiet Desperation never realize how sick they've been, or for how long, or that they're killing themselves from the inside of their brains out.