She’s not sick, I can see, and she can’t teach 90 minutes or even a full two hours of material? I’m an adjunct, quite aware that I may never be full-time, and I’m the sickest I’ve been I think since 2007, and I ran out of time with the English 5-ers. I didn’t have anything close to “enough”. Am I bragging? Maybe a little. Am I bitter? Why wouldn’t I be. But I don’t want to spend this hour fuming, or hurling inner sour barbs. I want to think about the semester and what I want to do with it, how I want to lecture, and how I actually just handed back all those papers on-time— The full-timer came in, I told her I overheard her talking and that it was hard to teach so early. She says she’s teaching a 1A from 7-9. I told her about my 5 from 0730 to 0900. She said she couldn’t do that, “I’d really have to be on my game,” she said, “5 is more Literary and Philosophical where 1A is more mechanical, or at least the way I teach it.” Well, I thought, “shouldn’t that make it easier, more patterned and less welcoming to variable and tangent?” Her eyes were low, “Nice to meet you… Get yourself some coffee.” She answered, “Oh, I don’t drink coffee during the week.” What the hell? Why are you doing this to yourself? The coffee might make it easier. But of course, being so aloft with her full-timer/tenured presence, she can’t agree with me that coffee might help, or even concede to a minuscule entertain of breaking her asinine ‘no coffee during the week’ bullshit, to help her teach better. To be stronger for her students. No, full-timers don’t have to do that. “And,” I thought, “you’re a full-timer, why do you take these morning 1A’s if they’re so torturous?” She told me she’d been doing them for years… Again, WHY? I don’t understand the mentality of these full-timers, most of the time. And I don’t want to be that. I want to be this, the one writing, the one having it HIS way. She also made a remark about me working here at this head of the conference tables: “So you like working here, not in the—”
“In the cell?” I said.