cotton head

Yesterday, I had a full day of online student conferences. By and large, the students were fairly good (only minimal horror/humor stories to tell colleagues at the bar), but online conferences are de-facto annoying. They take twice as long...because there are these dead spaces between me typing in a comment, student reading said comment, and student typing response. This means I can't actually do any multitasking and be productive on something else while awaiting responses. Hell, I can't even get good traction on a game of Spider Solitaire, for Bob's sake!

Day before, I was running in-class conferences and teaching two classes (one of which really enlightened me into the state of American education in a way I really can't explain in a public forum)....so I got no real work done that day either. Wednesday was spent doing more online conferences. Tuesday was a snow day, so I spent most of the time trying to get caught up on a million little things (bills and my scary income tax situation among them) that pile up while I'm doing other things (such as....you guessed it...conferences) when I wasn't outside freeing cars from 37" of snow. I did much the same thing on Monday.

What's the result of such a work week? For starters, my head feels like cotton. Conferences generally do that to me, but this round was did it just a bit more than usual...it was tech writing, which, although I do a decent job at it, just does not critically engage me as much as I would like. Online makes it worse, because I get the lack of critical engagement on top of throbbing eyeballs from staring at my monitor for eight-plus hours.

If only I didn't still have these ideas, theories, and articles floating in my head and no time to start researching them, let alone write them down.

I guess that's why I drink.