The (Re-)Action Post

I tend to be far more reflective than I should be. (Which is probably part of the reason why I have this blog in the first place, but never mind that.) So when the week nears its end, I like looking back and seeing how things have gone, in the interest of both self-improvement and maintaining regular posts on this purportedly regularly-updating blog. (Naysayers be preemptively damned: Dickens got paid by the word, so if he can justify writing for quantity's sake, so can I.)

My two main threads of the week have boiled down to education and music, though there are lots of branch-offs to each of them. Perhaps the reason education is so much at the forefront of my mind is the fact that this week, workwise, has been unbelievably stressful, and it's my own fault. My trip to Jersey last week gave me the opportunity to put some extra work in on my annotated bibliography (which was due on the 17th but I was allowed to hand in yesterday), but the downside is that work came at a rather late moment in the process.

In my own defense, it wasn't entirely the fault of laziness. The major problem was a conflict of messages: my professor admitted that the whole thing was a rather derivative exercise, and that, in order to make it meaningful, I should connect it to a project I would write for another class. At the time, this worked out fine because I had been planning to write the paper for Reinventing the 19th Century on Tom Stoppard's brilliant play Arcadia. In the time since the bibliography turned into something I could no longer easily ignore, my topic changed to writing on a much more recent text -- Shari Holman's The Dress Lodger -- about which no critical writing existed. That, coupled with the fact that my sci-fi paper is shaping up to be more about music than about any of the texts we're reading, didn't give me a whole lot of critical material to read and annotate (the requirement was 10 sources). So while I did save much of the work until the last minute, it was a function of having to do a project that was less than important and also not about something particularly relevant or interesting to me or my potential research.

In a word: bleh.

What the whole experience has highlighted for me is just how much work I need to do on improving my time management skills. I had conjured up a rudimentary strategy for getting all my work done in a timely manner a few weeks ago, but after missing the first three days of my schedule, it fell by the wayside -- because it's always easier to let the abandon the sinking ship than to try and patch the holes instead. The result, though, is a decent amount of forethought but little execution: thus, I write much of my annotated bibliography in the post-midnight evening hours. This is a problem for my sleep schedule (which I've become rather fond of lately) but it's an even larger problem, I learned, for Danielle, who notices my insane level of stress and gets very upset by it, even if my demeanor doesn't necessarily change that drastically while I'm under said stress. The last thing I want to do is have my shitty work habits affecting those around me, and especially not her, so I really need to get to work on this.

It doesn't help, though, that I constantly feel like the work I do in the classes I teach is equally insufficient. Granted, I could probably do more prep for my classes, but what I've noticed with the college students as opposed to the high school students is that there's less pressure here: you do what you need to do, and the time manages to find itself slipping away -- when you think the introduction to your class has taken 5 minutes, it's actually taken 15. The plus side is that I'm not wasting time disciplining students who didn't want to be there, like I frequently did with the high schoolers, but the other side of the coin is that I feel infinitely more responsible when they don't do well now. I get the sense that, while the annotated syllabus and other supporting materials are helping me from day to day, I just don't feel like I'm doing enough to help them become better writers, and I'm frustrated by what I think is an insubstantial job on my part. I'm going to take a far more hands-on approach to this next paper and hope for the best, but my irritation is beginning to reach a fevered pitch.

Reflecting on my teaching, though, has got me thinking about my old teachers, like Mrs. Leogrande, Mr. Moore, Prof. Wolfson, and Prof. Knoepflmacher, many of whom I'd sworn to keep in touch with after I left their classrooms. In fairness, I've been doing pretty well at keeping up (at least on an annual basis) with Mr. Moore, but it seems like the others have fallen somewhat by the wayside, and it feels like shit. It feels just as shitty as the realization that many of the friends I've had over my life have, in some way or another, become marginalized or, worse, marginalized me. It's not a good feeling, and I have to believe that I'm not the only one who feels so bad when people you knew and cared about start slipping away. On the other hand, it seems to happen so often that I guess people know how it goes and can deal with it -- does that mean I can't? Should I have to? And what can I do about it if I'm just as guilty myself?

Amidst this mass of insecurities, I've found a little bit of solace in my music. This week, I acquired two CDs I've been anxiously awaiting for some time: the new Coheed and Cambria disc, No World for Tomorrow, and the new Jimmy Eat World release, Chase This Light. I can't really comment extensively on either, as I haven't given them especially thorough listens, but they each do radically different things for me, even though my initial gut reactions to both have been markedly similar.

In both cases, I've felt a bit disappointed, particularly because these are two bands I very much like and think are capable of truly wonderful things. But on both of these discs, I sense a certain amount of complacency, as if they've done these things before and, most disturbingly, done them better. Yet I feel totally contrary feelings about each disc.

I listen to the Jimmy Eat World CD and I struggle to try and quickly learn the choruses and verses to sing them aloud. Danielle, who's not a big fan of either band, was subjected to some of Chase This Light the other day and noted that, while she thought it sounded like everything else Jimmy Eat World has done, she was glad it made me happy. And it does. Sure, it doesn't really do anything radically new, but it settles rather nicely into a sort of comfort zone that feels genuine and warm, and it's what's drawn me to Jimmy Eat World all along.

The Coheed and Cambria disc, however, frustrates me because I find that I've yet to find a disc that's lived up to the expectations I had since I was blown away by In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3, their second album but the first to which I was exposed. Missing from this disc (and, in my opinion, from their last disc, the interminably titled Good Apollo I'm Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness) is the sense of being in a true epic, with long, intricately composed songs and bombastic riffs and arrangements that feel huge. Instead, on No World for Tomorrow (which technically is Volume Two of Good Apollo), I feel a bunch of tracks that have very classic rock-style riffage, but nothing especially epic or deep. Song structures are, at their core, A-B-A-B-C-B, with little interesting variation, and no especially memorable solos or lyrics. There's nothing like the title track of In Keeping Secrets..., an 8-minute long epic that navigates styles and tempos with ease and features an abundance of crushing guitar parts. Even the single, "A Favor House Atlantic," refused to follow simple verse-chorus form, instead traversing a less-mundane A-B-A-B-C-B-C-C form -- not so here. While I promised I wouldn't go into full-blown review mode, I feel let down by what strikes me as something far more simplistic than what Coheed and Cambria typically promise with their album concepts. But maybe I need a few more listens.

I feel like I'm whining a bit too much now, so even though I feel like I have more I meant to say, perhaps it's time to step away from the keyboard. I'm sure I'll reflect even more upon whatever's on my mind before the next time I sit to post again -- and, hopefully, I'll have found myself seeing things from a slightly brighter perspective.