PTSD

"Have you got anything with a happy ending?...nice people? or funny animals? "*

I presume E is off home (half of us gets to see their family every once in a while, you see) and will be popping in every once in a while. In the meantime, you will have to make do with me. After pulling an "all nighter", for grading of all things, I am too knackered to make much sense. Or, rather, I shall make even less sense than usual.

So, in unstructured form (but with handy quotations to guide your way), here yous go:

"Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable, let's prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all."

I have, finally, finished grading. Ah the joy. If you ever want help in "compartmentalising", talk to me. I've been working full-time (legally, of course), attempting to sleep and grading in between. My time is measured in chunks of "how much of X's paper will I be able to grade if I don't eat brekkie?" and "Can I forego lunch during my 'lunch hour' and grade?"**

"What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?"

I have, however, not yet entered my grades as I am now contemplating them. One of my fellow students told me that to give a student a "B" was to consign them to the rubbish heap of undergraduates whose future will be ruined. Not having gone to uni here, I'm a bit worried now that I may have been rather harsh with my grading. To change or not to change, that is the question.

Too bad the days of rapping kids across their knuckles with a particularly sturdy ruler have gone.

"They were written to be impossible to reproduce in terms of cinema,... And if you are going to make them into films, please try to make them into better ones, than the ones I have been cursed with thus far."

If you are planning on going to the cinema this holiday, don't bother to watch Eragon. Instead, (re)watch LOTR and write a letter petitioning the Uptown cinema to have all three of the LOTR series back-to-back showing during the XMas and New Year season. It's not like there's much else for those of us non Xmas-celebrating, non-family visiting, fairly depressed types to do over the next few days.*** I may even miss grading.

"Life. Don't talk to me about life."

I bought a copy of Steamboy today to cheer me up. While I still think the ending's corny, the incongruity of anime and broad Northern accents is always good to watch. Next on the list--Serenity, Monkey Magic and a series of Hamish MacBeth.

"42 is a nice number that you can take home and introduce to your family"

LilSis2 is supposed to get here tomorrow. Or Saturday. I will know when she gets here, I suppose. Since neither of us has a phone that works, communication is always an experience that remains quite complicated rather than being the straightforward business it is for most people.

"Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious."

I, obviously, am not doing much of a job of being conscious today. Next time, a more substantial post, I promise. But, like many of our (PTSD-related) promises, it is more likely to be broken than kept.


* Yes, cheating again. It's a bit of dialogue from Death to the librarian bloke sometime towards the end of the Sandman series.

** the answers: 1/3 since grading long papers requires telling the kids, in great detail, where you wish they'd really thought things over before putting them down on paper. This, therefore, becomes a painfully slow process; if plan was to eat cereal, then 1/2 a paper, if plan was to make eggs and toast, then nearly one paper; if plan was to make baked beans on toast, then one paper as, for some reason, baked beans takes a while to warm up.

** Though I was reminded today that this comes out on Xmas Day. Clive Owen and Chiwetel Ejiofor. If I had done the casting myself, it wouldn't have been better (except I'd have added Ewan McGregor, perhaps? As an academic who offs himself sometime in the middle of the film? Then I realise Mr. M has played most of the roles I would have cast him in: drug addict, dole bludger, nightwatchman, writer, Jedi, odd musician, lonely writer, and so on. But, not an academic).

posted by Priya @ 12:16 AM