The Adjunct

I know that we are already two weeks into January, but I’d still like to take a moment to affirm my resolutions for this new year.

Last year I made ten resolutions, and managed to accomplish about half of them (this website being one of them).  Not bad for someone who spent several months with a cast on his foot!

The biggest promise to myself this new year is to never again make the mistake of last July, when I committed myself to a six day a week intense workload.  This is another reason why not all of my former resolutions were met, let alone the lack of regular updates to this blog.  I found myself being offered more and more classes, and considering both the economy at large and the fact that my state was firing adjunct professors left and right, I accepted everything I could.  The paychecks were great, but my life was hell.  I never saw my wife, was tired and exhausted and cranky all the time, and at the end my health just shattered and I barely made it to the end of the semester.

Never again.

Worst of all was that I started to hate my job.  The quality of my work went downhill, something that did not make me happy about going in to class everyday.  Also, I began losing all my patience with my students as well as the rest of the college staff.  Doing something that you hate is not how I want to live my life.  I love teaching, and I need to not only keep my hours reasonable, but I need to remember that the recurring frustrations of the job are something to be laughed off and left behind; not taken with you the cost of your own personal joy.

So that’s one resolution, I suppose.  The rest are either new, or continued from last year.

Shall we go backwards?  Nah, these are in no particular order.

*Approach my job as a fulfilling and joyful part of my life.

*Get in shape; lose weight.

*Finish editing my novel.

*Write those two short stories that I’ve been dawdling on.

*Start new novel.

*Actively seek publication for my writing.

*Learn Spanish.  Yes, Spanish.  I was born and raised in Los Angeles and it is fucking shameful that I don’t speak this.

*Take fencing lessons.  Doesn’t that sound cool?*

*Get readers together for English 1A, 1B, 2, etc (I’ll make a post about this later, but I have a rather fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants style as far as reading materials and associated quizzes are concerned.  I grab articles out of yesterday’s newspapers, rotate short stories, etc.  A more solid collection for each class of reading assignments, and their related quizzes and writer’s journals, will ensure more organization and less prep time on my part).

*Buy a house and get some chickens for the backyard.  Yea, you heard me. Why do you think I took so much work last year?  I had something in mind to save for.