Quotidian Terminal

In a comment to a semi-recent post of mine, Joanna mentioned the day-to-day of the end of the semester. To which I can only say: yes, yes, yes. As much as I love teaching, it’s the end-march now, and we all know it, final papers and exams and the last endurance-rush to grades. When I was a smoker, it was yellow fingers and caffeine and bleary eyes from too much typing, scant sleep and parties too and trying to cram everything into not enough days. My freshman year, Carnegie Mellon was generous: they keyed the on-campus soda machines to a quarter a can, and stocked up on Jolt Cola. No such luck here, but the computer lab monitor is a little more easygoing as long as the students make at least an attempt to hide the cups of coffee they bring in, and most of us are smart enough to keep the cups down out of sight on the floor. The brittle weariness starts to feel like a J. G. Ballard story, and like you they’re all tired, but then you get those last-minute glimmers, the students who suddenly decide to compete with one another on how many weblog entries they can do, the ones who know they’ve worked hard to help their classmates and their classmates recognize it. That’s it, for me; that’s what always makes Fall semester better than Spring semester, because it gets so dark and so cold here in New England, and there’s that terminal sense to the quotidian activity of the semester’s end, the windy nights when I’m on campus until 8:30 and my car ices over, the dim early mornings — but, yeah, it’s about us, all of us, and the writing, and that’s a good thing.