I am unmotivated in Candy Corn on the Cob (October 2019)

It’s 2:30 pm, it’s Saturday, it’s going to be a long week, and I’m unmotivated to begin. I’m wearing a sweater and pajama pants. I think I washed my hair Thursday. I feel invaded. The children have been in and out of my bed and currently, the cats are in it. I am very invaded, I think. My printer toner is “low” and I have a ton to print again. Only, I don’t. The Creative Writing professor has lost ALL of this week’s readings. (Again.) I’ve emailed him every weekend since mid-September to ask where the readings are…I don’t feel very confident about this.

(I know where they’re supposed to be, and I know they aren’t there. I can search his entire instance of Sakai. If he posted them, I could retrieve them.) (Unless he never marked them as “live” content, which is possible.) But I feel, if me emailing him every Friday or Saturday has become a norm, then maybe he should take ten minutes on Thursday to see if the readings are *there. * It’s not my job as a student to tell him that the supplies are missing. Or is it?

Perhaps I am spoiled. My other professors show up when they’re supposed to and make sure you can find what they ask you to have, write on, and bring back. This one is eternally late (we’ve been making 15-minutes-and-we’re-free jokes, and once we got to 13 minutes, we were actually packing up to go!) And this is, of course, far from the first time we haven’t had our assigned readings. I would fuss, but honestly, what would it change? I think it’s somewhat obvious that he doesn’t quite live on Planet Earth. That’s okay, but I’m irritated because that’s my fiction he’s got there, and I…am really protective of my writing.

If I can’t trust you to post some articles on Sakai weekly, according to the list you made, can I trust you with my fiction? Noooo.

Anyway. I motivated myself to print what I could for school this week, two short stories written by classmates. I need to workshop three because I didn’t do Joy last week. Joy is going to be hard, because Joy’s story is up my personal alley, clever, cute, smart, and grammatically correct. What the fuck do I criticize? I’m going to have to talk images and symbols, I guess, and I hope she doesn’t find that dismaying. She wrote a great story.

I want to go out somewhere, but I only have a half tank of gas until Halloween. That’ll do school easy, but it won’t leave me anything for fun, which popping off right now would be. I am trapped. I fucking hate being poor.