Disconnected
I suppose I don't have much of a need to post much of anything here when I'm in Kentucky because I'm out living. But now that I'm back in Philadelphia, I feel enclosed and isolated.
It's a very cold, silent, and motionless day outside my apartment's one window: a fitting bit of weather. My first week back in this city has been anything but exciting. I'm still recovering from the bit of flu that I caught before I left Louisville, which now remains as a sinus infection--and being that I refuse to use antibiotics unless its life threatening, I'm stuck drinking hot tea, downing vitamin C pills, and taking decongestants around the clock until it clears up (which should be in a few days, by this point). Schoolwise, things have been busy and complicated, but nothing I can't handle so long as I have my magic bag of sinus pills with me.
Remarkably, I am in strong command of my classroom this semester. While I was originally supposed to help teach a bigger course on film with a tenured professor, I got bumped back down to teaching writing. More out of annoyance than anything, I stomped into my classroom on Wednesday, spoke loudly and firmly, and managed to fight back a few bouts of disruptive behavior. No more shy hippy feeling his away around at the head of the class this semester: the beard may be back, but my hair is cut space-monkey short, and I know a thing or two about how things around campus now. I almost felt like literally asking them to "jump" to see if they asked "how high?" back. Discipline certainly isn't as hard to maintain in the college classroom as it is in public school, but we have our own sort of disciplinary concerns at this level and so far I've intimidated everyone enough to behave.
I'm typing all of this on my laptop, the one that overheats a lot, because my main machine, my "server" as I've come to think of it, died suddenly Thursday morning. It was certainly a machine that served a lot of media to my head: I stored all of my movies and music on it, routed my Playstation3 through its tv-card, hooked my stereo into it, and spent hours tweaking it to boost performance. And on my day off, it froze up, wouldn't restart at all: hardware failure, traced to the CPU by my frantic diagnostics. After I'd calmed down, I discovered that my original diagnosis, tragic as it may have been, was in fact correct. I ordered some replacement parts, but there is not telling when they'll get here. And even when they do, I'm going to have to start from square one and redo my entire Linux setup. Will be switching to Debian, however, as I don't have time to recompile everything and reconfigure every last detail for another Gentoo setup.
In the meantime, I've been busying myself with internet radio of all sorts. Talk radio and new shows have replaced television. It's been an interesting transition. I've also been reading constantly, which helps...
...but man, oh man, do I want to score some headshots in Call of Duty.
It's a very cold, silent, and motionless day outside my apartment's one window: a fitting bit of weather. My first week back in this city has been anything but exciting. I'm still recovering from the bit of flu that I caught before I left Louisville, which now remains as a sinus infection--and being that I refuse to use antibiotics unless its life threatening, I'm stuck drinking hot tea, downing vitamin C pills, and taking decongestants around the clock until it clears up (which should be in a few days, by this point). Schoolwise, things have been busy and complicated, but nothing I can't handle so long as I have my magic bag of sinus pills with me.
Remarkably, I am in strong command of my classroom this semester. While I was originally supposed to help teach a bigger course on film with a tenured professor, I got bumped back down to teaching writing. More out of annoyance than anything, I stomped into my classroom on Wednesday, spoke loudly and firmly, and managed to fight back a few bouts of disruptive behavior. No more shy hippy feeling his away around at the head of the class this semester: the beard may be back, but my hair is cut space-monkey short, and I know a thing or two about how things around campus now. I almost felt like literally asking them to "jump" to see if they asked "how high?" back. Discipline certainly isn't as hard to maintain in the college classroom as it is in public school, but we have our own sort of disciplinary concerns at this level and so far I've intimidated everyone enough to behave.
I'm typing all of this on my laptop, the one that overheats a lot, because my main machine, my "server" as I've come to think of it, died suddenly Thursday morning. It was certainly a machine that served a lot of media to my head: I stored all of my movies and music on it, routed my Playstation3 through its tv-card, hooked my stereo into it, and spent hours tweaking it to boost performance. And on my day off, it froze up, wouldn't restart at all: hardware failure, traced to the CPU by my frantic diagnostics. After I'd calmed down, I discovered that my original diagnosis, tragic as it may have been, was in fact correct. I ordered some replacement parts, but there is not telling when they'll get here. And even when they do, I'm going to have to start from square one and redo my entire Linux setup. Will be switching to Debian, however, as I don't have time to recompile everything and reconfigure every last detail for another Gentoo setup.
In the meantime, I've been busying myself with internet radio of all sorts. Talk radio and new shows have replaced television. It's been an interesting transition. I've also been reading constantly, which helps...
...but man, oh man, do I want to score some headshots in Call of Duty.