No writing yesterday but for some notes and now I’m here in the adjunct office… Saw something yesterday, a video by a guy I’m not so much a fan of but I certainly respect his entrepreneurial edginess. He spoke of Monday and how everyone whines about it and how they’re missing out on opportunity, that they’re alive and they need to wake up to what’s around them and what they can do, and they just need to work and make the moment their own– oh how it feels amazing now to write, it’s own form of medicinal with this coffee and all these papers around me– which reminds me, I need to submit that piece to NPR, the perspective on being an adjunct, but I need to garnish the piece with an image, that or this stack of papers, what always follows us and– oh that video… Yes, well anyway I just found it encouraging but what I’m after as a writer is unfettered and unqualified autonomy. While in the parking lot I took a picture of the empty lot to show what some adjuncts experience and observe on their teaching days, if we’re not between three campuses teaching six classes like that lady I met at PC, the Humanities Professor. My waking this morning is gradual. I’m not pounding the coffee as I can usually be seen doing. Yesterday at the winery, a bit slow but just enough to keep me thinking about wine and how I’m only going to do the ‘wine thing’ at my pace and with my vision and writing style… Independence is what I’m after, with any and everything.

Ugh, these stacks of papers.. not really prep’d for the 1A, except for a sentence-by-sentence and paragraph-by-paragraph approach to what they brought today, 3-5 pages of writing, typed, for workshopping and expansion.. words, too, having them focus on singular words.. and debating– or not debating but interacting with each other on a critical level concerning their topics. Have to think further, and I have to cut myself off from this session in a bit so I can outline the fluidity of what I want to “teach” today. Will work up a rubric for them, by next class.. but for now they should be focusing on the consistency of their arguments, and the paragraphing (balance and length and depth, what have..).. Just keep encouraging them to write, and to not forget about their voice and why they chose this topic. Should be posting this to teaching blog, but that’s another new thought of mine, and one that I’m certainly following through with: the teaching blog will stop when this term concludes. I have to focus on the bottledaux concept and what that can build into.. opportunity and I’m with that opportunity as an adjunct, and how this guy in the video said to make it, whatever your ‘it’ is, make it yours and your own and don’t let anything lower you. I usually don’t consider much of what these motivational types state and affirm but this bloke made a little sense, I supposed.

So many adjuncts whine, and I’ve been one of them and may have been this semester but no where near what I used to be. Now I’m making it mine, now I’m using it ALL as writing material, blogging about it and capturing my early of early mornings any way I can, like taking a couple seconds to snap a still outside my car, of the empty lot, signifying that it’s all on me, that I’m in this by myself, that I can make this into my own story and don’t have to succumb to ANYTHING– 6:26, think I’m ready but I want to empty some of these papers and odd books (which I don’t know why are in my bag), the Poets & Writer’s Issue, and everything else into the car. “Travel light always,” I remind myself. Coffee reservoir lowering, and I’m more awake, the speed increases and I’m ready to be that speaker at the end of the semester not the visibly exhausted adjunct. No, I’m here very much alive and refuse to be refused! I’m speaking, with words and thoughts and– Think it’s time for a new Comp Book. I restarted from the first sheet in this particular, writing on the back of already accessed pages, but it just looks cluttery, sloppy, not me. Restart, I say to myself and I will. OR, I can use the legal pad I took from the mailroom, from our insulting supply cupboards. Yeah, I’ll do that..
What a morning so far for the writer.. seeing what I see and believing in Self as I do. Wish I could spread this to other adjuncts, so they don’t have to gripe and complain and the can see themselves as brilliant, and the tenacity is all you need, as Bob Coleman told me nearly 16 years ago. How has time escaped as it has? Bastard…
At this point, this is probably just being read as adjunct/writer bafflegab. Feel something coming for the day, another in this saga of revelations and what’s to be held for the writer and what I can do for myself, more so that something ‘awaiting’.
Looking at the lot picture.. and I’m here, on campus, ready to teach and be seen as ‘the professor’.. what a powerful position, and what a helpful one! For these students that find English and writing and Literature impenetrable, here I am to introduce new, more Human and encouraging approaches. That’s the problem with many of these full-timers, the approaches and embraces and practices of pedagogy are outdated and simple stale. No one can say mine are such.. no one!
Walk to car, then come back to pack and teach, pen at ready, close semester with explosive lectures and ideas and don’t tire, ever! Dive headfirst into your coffee and teach and scribble and think MADLY!

He assembled his elemental and mental assembly, prepared, growling with ardency, no one could do what he did nor how he did it nor with that vigor, he knew. (6:39AM)

(5/5/15)