just another girl on the IRT

i have been all manner of scraped, suctioned, ultrasounded in an effort to figure out what's up down there. the man who did the ultrasound today took one look and said, oh....you have a retrograde uterus.

i believe that i live in a retrograde universe right now. i have been wanting to give the whole campus the finger this week. i have had a couple of run-ins, some really dumb, at least one more significant.

we had a big faculty meeting on monday morning. after which, my acting director came along to my office and "whispered" to me that the senior woman, the chairperson of the history department, has been annoyed by the way that i call her by her first and last name. he "whispered" this right before i went into my 11:00 class. i hate those moments just before class -- i need to sit in green room and eat from the craft table. i need to be playing the guitar and fucking matt damon. (which is btw: the song i had in my head while i was getting probed and wanded today). just before class, especially one i have never taught before, i need to be totally chill. his "whisper" unnerved me. it also made me wonder if this woman can't even tell me herself that my name-calling bugs her what else am i doing? so i started to flip out. i wrote him later in the day and he assured me that in the words of julian of norwich, all shall be well.

then in class, this little skinny knucklehead started poking holes (what he thought were holes) in eric klinenberg's amazing book, heat wave. it threw me, in part, because his concerns were about stats and tables. that taps into an area i am not trained in, and i feel wobbly. so, i made like the great women who trained me to teach: i told him to put it in writing so that i could see precisely what he was arguing. i then made like mary berry and replied to him exactly once about it. one of my local jasons, the actuary, helped me look at it and jason confirmed that this was a totally specious argument.

the highlight of the week: butler county voted to pay a higher levy to help support children services. whew!

i can't even remember what happened yesterday but i am so sure that there was some more bullshit. probably because of the clintons.

then today, a colleague expressed his concern about this totally bullshit clip art on the front of a pamphlet entitled: "Guidelines for Faculty and Staff in Responding to Critical Student Behavioral Situations" that featured a white man responding to a Black couple in a clinical setting. he wrote the Provost and was still awaiting a reply. i fished the pamphlet out of heap of mail in my snail mail box. my blood boiled. the whole thing was so stupid especially when i realized that this was some stupid boilerplate CYA brochure that the Institutional Response Team (IRT) and University could say that they distributed if a kid acts out here. so i sent an email in which i analyzed the image and pointed out my concerns. guess what? it's been 12 hours and the IRT has yet to reply.