Last Day Before I See Students

1. Tomorrow afternoon I have the Welcome Week event. Outdoors in 90+F weather. Wonderful. I'll wear my gardening hat.


2. I'm already receiving email from my students. Not surprisingly, as I have nearly 300 of them. Most of them have just been asking logisticsy things, like what the textbook is. A former student wants to game the system by taking my class, and I told him that it's fine. I needed another warm body to register in that section because of my own agenda.


3. My congressman must have escaped the close watch of his staff and has let loose at the word processor with a stream of consciousness rant that he sent to all of us in his district, thanks to the franking privelege. In the part where he opines on the shortcomings of higher ed, he notes, "it takes the average undergraduate over five years to complete what used to take four years. Students often can not get the classes they need to graduate because some professors are not teaching more than six hours a week." He also quotes from the novel Stoner; based on the quotation and his analysis, I think that he missed the point. Also notes my congressman, "Everyone says they are for energy independence, but environmentalists loudly, but unfortunately effectively, oppose any and every type of natural resource production in this Country." Eight legal-sized pages of this stuff.


4. Went grocery shopping today for what might have been the first time in TWO MONTHS. On the way I stopped at the Starbucks and ran into Buddhist Network Guy. He talked about his travels to Tibet and China. Eye-opening. He was at Starbucks with a woman dressed like a yoga teacher and a guy dressed like a woman but not passing AT ALL. The tranny was trying to argue that Stoicism is alive and kicking as a belief system and claimed that it shows up a lot in Star Wars. After I extracted myself from the conversation, Buddhist Network Guy hugged me; I was caught off guard and by instinct gave off the "don't touch me" vibe, making things awkward when they didn't need to be.