It is remarkable how a week away from teaching can completely throw you off your game. Here is how it works (and this is a lesson for writing as well): As you are ramping down in those last few days, you start thinking about how wonderful the time off will be. In essence, you start looking forward to the vacation and are no longer thinking about work. Then there is a week of wonderful not working. Then work arrives and, instead of jumping back in at full speed, you have to wind back up again and get things going. Essentially it is not until the second week back to work that you are fully firing and ready to go.
Except this is the first week back.
I found myself scouring the internet for something to read in lieu of getting out of bed. Nothing–Not even new information about football, or breaking news, or anything of personal relevance jumped out at me. So, I played a few games on my phone, haggled over prices on eBay (looking for my next major distraction), and eventually fell out of bed.
There is an app on my phone that allows me to grade from my phone. A brief glance at the embedded iphone tracking data would indicate that I’ve used the app almost not at all. It’s still there and available and I should use it right often to grade. I don’t. I didn’t this morning or even now as we slide nervously towards the afternoon. I’m not working even now. I’m blogging for ten minutes as a way to do something as I find the ability to work as an academic beyond my immediate grasp.
I thought about calling this post ‘ramping up’ but i am not actually doing that. In fact the post has a double meaning, because I was supposed to be posting an assignment about Hugh Howey’s Dust and I ‘knocked that off’ in order to write right here. Trust me, it’ll make you giggle later. Maybe. At present I am experiencing what I like to call ‘the cold start’ because it reminds me of the time my good friend couldn’t start his old car. We wound up putting a blowtorch to the engine block to get the thing warm enough to turn over. My brain needs a blowtorch. Soon.