The Southern Lights

Got pulled out of philosophy tutoring to help the writing people today, and turducken was the conversation piece of the day.  At first I thought it was because one of my fellow writing tutors, who is not generally known for being ditzy or anything, allegedly believed a turducken to be an actual hybrid animal.  Then, during a rare break in the tutoring action (when my boss had come in the room and shut the door behind her to keep out this one annoying student who has been banned from writing tutoring sessions but will not. go. away.), a chem tutor from down the hall stopped by to extol the turducken as the perfect evolutionary revenge: dinosaurs used to eat our ancestors*, they evolved into birds, and so now we take our vengeance by "stuffing one bird up the cloaca of another bird up the cloaca of another bird -- it's beautiful."

But it turns out that the tutors and advisors are pooling together to actually buy a turducken (which is about $100, but you get something like 19 pounds of meat, so I guess it's not a bad deal) and having a whole holiday feast... on the day I'm going on a field trip to a jail for a class's "final exam."  So when I heard when they were having the party, I blurted out "BUT THAT'S WHEN I'M GOING TO PRISON!"  My boss said, "Well, you should've found a better place to hide the bodies."

Dammit, I've always wanted to try turducken.  They offered to save me some, but I wouldn't be able to come get it until the next day, and I don't think day-old turducken is the optimal first-turducken experience.  Nor is the kind they sell in the freezer case at the grocery store.  Sigh...

Anyway, the prison visit's a week from today, and the professor was talking about what we should and shouldn't wear, and all I could think of was Arrested Development.  I guess I'm going to have to leave my red SLUT tank top at home.

*No, I don't know if he's been watching too much Flintstones or what.  Dammit, he's a chem tutor, not a... paleontologist? I think we're all just getting stupid from dealing with painfully clueless students all day.

So I've had really good luck with bosses in my... let's be overly generous and call it a "career."  Even at the soul-sucking law firm job, my boss left me alone to do my work and wished me well when I quit.  Anyway, luckily enough, this trend has continued at the tutoring center, and the woman who oversees all the humanities tutoring (including writing and philosophy) is really sweet.  Almost too sweet -- she gives lip service to being all strict on the "no walk-ins" policy, but she won't actually turn anyone away, even if it means triple booking us or consulting with a student herself.  She's so laid back I sometimes want to sniff her ever-present Dr Pepper can to see if there's more than just Dr Pepper in there.* 

( She's so sweet, she wants to make sure we're all eating enough roughage. )

*(There's no period after the Dr -- look it up.)

Well, I'm pretty much settled in.  Even hung the posters (many of the same ones from college, but nicely framed -- because I am an adult, dammit) on the walls finally.  I hate bare walls, but I'm also pretty good at finding creative ways to injure myself, so hammer + nails + stepstool/countertop/edge of the couch = disaster waiting to happen.  I should probably get some actual art (apart from a Hieronymous Bosch print because I'm just edgy like that), but I'm rather attached to my posters, even though other people find some of them... disconcerting.  Particularly the Touch of Evil poster with the giant disembodied head of late-era Orson Welles (same one Wilson had in his office on House, BTW, though I had it first).  But ever since college, he's the one I bounce ideas off of when it's really late and I'm trying desperately to write a paper.

Of course he doesn't talk back.  Well, he hasn't yet.  I'm not ruling it out.

Let's see: school.  I have two once-a-week classes and one online, and all seem like they'll be pretty interesting.  (Though I despise online classes.  I didn't think I'd have to take any, and when I found out I did... I didn't react well.  But I'm over it.  Mostly.)  Going to have to adjust back to reading 200+ pages a week, but it's interesting reading and I can do it pretty fast, so I'm not too worried.  I will, however, for my Law, Deviance and Social Control class, have to do an experiment where I go out in public and personally do something deviant and report back on it.  Though -- the professor was clear -- not something that gets me hurt or arrested.  So there goes the fun stuff.  In another class, I have to do a ride-along with someone from the sheriff's office.  I foresee... awkwardness.

I started work at the tutoring center last Monday with no training other than "Here's where you'll be sitting," but I saw a grand total of one student all week.  Obviously, that's not going to last, and when I have five hours of back-to-back sessions I'm sure I'll be praying for the sweet release of death.  But things are run substantially differently than at my last writing center -- primarily, this is not a writing center but a tutoring center for all subjects.  And I'll be doing philosophy tutoring two days a week, so we'll see how that goes.  But so far I've worked with just three other writing tutors and shared space (because of course philosophy doesn't get its own room) with this utterly batshit guy named Simon.  I think he might be an actual professor that does ESL tutoring on the side, but he is... odd.  You might be getting Simon Stories throughout the semester.

( Oh, what the hell, I'll give you one now. )

So of course I did not get to one-tenth of the things I was sure I'd be able to do in the week before classes started, and because of... embarrassing reasons which I may or may not explain later... I got distracted and I already feel like I'm playing catch-up.  But, then, I pretty much always feel like I'm about a step and a half behind, so this is nothing new.  I just have grades riding on it now.  Yay?  Also have to find a social life.  Anyone know where I can get one of those?