Song: Ten Thousand Hours x Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
It's official. We're two weeks in and this semester is going to prove to me that grad school is not the breeze that last semester let me think it was. For starters: teaching while also taking three classes is no joke. I have to make sure I have 80 minutes worth of material for my students to discuss, while also making sure that I've completed all of my work for my classes. AND for funsies, I teach at 10:30am on T/TH which is 11.5-12 hours after I've finally gotten home from class the night before.
BUT it's not all bad. My book lists for all my classes are awesome, for one. They are so good that reading two to three books every week might actually be manageable because I'm enjoying it. I just finished (re)reading Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and that book is still the bomb, even more so as an adult, I think because, of course, there are a lot of things I didn't catch as a fifteen-year-old. Sunday night, I'll be beginning Notes on No Man's Land by Eula Biss. I'll update you on that once I finish (so by Wednesday).
What am I taking? (1) Postcolonial Writing and the Nation - a literature course. (2) Nonfiction Workshop - of course. (3) Arts Criticism - a form and theory class focusing on critiquing all forms of art through writing. Thirteen books, countless supplementary readings, one paper, one essay, one book review, one Q&A, one personal-critical hybrid essay, and a final project in arts criticism. It'll be fine. With the exception that the topic of my essay is Breasts and I have too much material and things to discuss to fit within my restrictions (20 pages, 4,500 words), so now I have to figure out how to fix all of that, write a beautiful essay and revise it twice by Wednesday.
Meanwhile, I've been off my submission game, so I need to revise everything I wrote last semester and send it out to places for potential publication by May because most submission periods end around then. Also because I'm trying to set up a cycle of revising old pieces and some things just can't be revised anymore and it hurts. Where to submit, where to submit? The best part of this problem is that my creativity has replenished and I have more ideas than I can get down on paper because the semester began and the increase in stress makes me more creative.
I'm sure I can handle all of this...now, if only I could learn how to read unbothered on the train like a real Chicagoan...
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