Last night, I could not sleep

There was a bag by the door, my hospital go-bag.

It’s been waiting for months, because of Covid.

It was joined by a new bag.

The evacuations were only two towns over, and I had to be ready to leave.

My phone was beside me, left on.

But I couldn’t sleep, because I was afraid I wouldn’t hear it.

There was already ash in my mouth, smoke in my already weakened lungs.

If I slept, how soon before the fire was at the door?

I thought about what would happen if I had to grab one of the bags.

About how the President would never hear my name, just a number about evacuees or the dead someone would try to get him to listen to while he was golfing, tweeting about tires, embracing QAnon, retweeting racists, wishing pedophiles well, testing out new words to call Kamala, blaming California for being in a drought, a heat wave, and a lightening storm all at once, wishing the citizens who live here ill.

This post is not about how Republicans, who decry “cancel culture,” are trying to “cancel” Dolly Parton because she supports BLM.

It is about how learning Dolly Parton supports it should maybe make you reconsider. Dolly Parton doesn’t hate white people, the police, ‘Merica, or Jesus. She understands that “Black Lives Matter” doesn’t have an “only” in front of it, which is why she said, “of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!”

If you don’t support BLM, it’s likely because you’re believing the Republican racist lies about what it means.

(Or you’re a racist.)

This post is also about how if you’re no longer a fan of Dolly Parton for saying, literally, that white asses aren’t the only ones that matter in this world, you have never been a fan of Dolly Parton.

You may like some of her songs, but you don’t know her.

Dolly Parton HAS ALWAYS BEEN PROGRESSIVE.

Her first movie (for which she memorized the entire script, cause that’s how she thought it works, which makes her even more adorable than she already is) was a #metoo film, decades ahead of its time.

Dolly Parton believes in helping the poor. Her foundation has given away over a million books to poor children, has rebuilt homes lost in natural disasters, and given scholarships to needy children.

She has also been active in animal charities and AIDS work.

Dolly Parton believes in science, which is why she donated a million dollars to our quest for a Covid vaccine.

Dolly Parton supports gay rights–when I last saw her perform, before gay marriage was legal, she made sure the whole audience knew where she stood.

Dolly Parton gives a shit about immigrants. Way back in 1980, her album, 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs, featured a song about the dehumanization of guest workers and the undocumented, “Deportee.”

That song broke this little girl’s heart.

If you are surprised by Dolly’s support of BLM, you were never her fan in the first place.

Dolly, never go away.
Promise you’ll never go away.

Ever since Melissa and I started working on our textbook, we’ve been paying a lot more attention to what our students do and don’t know about source use.

Before, I was guilty of thinking they knew the basics or that they would pick them up, the way I did, along the way.

They don’t know the basics, which is why I’m so glad I take the time to teach the fundamentals.

Recently, I created a 50 question true/false pre-test, just to gauge where they are.

I’m not reproducing all of the results here, but the data should help explain why, when we say, “you have to use academic sources” or “you have to use reliable sources” or “you have to use peer-reviewed sources,” they don’t follow instructions.

This is from two classes of upper-division UCD students:

Reliability

50% of the students think Google Scholar only shows reliable sources (they don’t know about predatory journals).

Peer Review

50% think all academic sources are peer-reviewed.

64% think everything in a peer-reviewed journal is peer-reviewed (this is why they cite book reviews in journals, instead of articles in journals, half the time).

Citing

52% think they only have to cite quotes, not summary and paraphrase, to avoid plagiarism.

60% think “common knowledge” is a fact everyone knows.

Rhetoric

67% believe the appeal to ethos is about appealing to morality (it’s credibility).

What’s an academic source?

50% think anything they get via the university library is academic.

52% think all class materials (lectures, PowerPoints) are academic.

52% think fact-checked news is academic.

64% think dictionaries and general encyclopedias are academic.

67% think poetry is academic (33% think novels are too).

One question defined the difference between as academic and nonacademic sources as one of audience. Academic sources are for academic audiences.

62% marked that as false.

I hope they do better on the post-test!

Thoth is still really, really unhappy about being stuck inside. He yowls whenever one of us leaves.

And at about nine every night, he goes back and forth from the patio to the front door, crying, to let me know he wants out.

I’ve even had to show him that doors to water heaters aren’t mystical portals to the outside.

He only stops crying when I take him up to bed.

This week, though, he’s crying AND totally freaked out.

This is Thoth, watching something intently.

His every muscle is tense.

What’s he staring at?

Anubis has turned into a demigorgon.

Thoth won’t go anywhere near him, but he will stare, trying to figure out what’s happened and whether it’s catching.

After racking up almost $2000 at the vet in the last six weeks, he wasn’t getting better, so I paid for a urethra-enlarging surgery.

He has to be coned for two weeks.

And he’s basically been subjected to bottom surgery against his will.

Meanwhile, how’s blind Graymalkin?

Absolutely fine.

I ran this by my writing group, and they were all on board:

In the last half a year, I’ve had two books come out.

In Fall, I’ll be teaching six classes (after I finish the two I have now), working on the Atwood journal, blogging, doing stand-up, etc.

So I’m giving myself a break . . . from working on a book.

For at least the rest of the year, I won’t be able to beat myself up for not getting that next textbook or nonfiction masterpiece done.

A few years ago, I had an idea that maybe I could illustrate the right and wrong ways to open and close a narrative essay with a choose-your-own adventure-style story.

This week, I finally tried it.

It took way longer than I thought it would, and there was some cussing at the program when it wouldn’t save certain links in the chain, and trying to get all the threads straight kinda broke my brain, but the draft is done.

Wanna play?

https://www.inklewriter.com/stories/14788.

Graymalkin, being blind, doesn’t always know how the bathroom works. He often digs a hole in our tiny back patio space, only to stand in it while pooping outside of it.

About once a month, he misses the litter box.

And when he does, it’s spectacular.

He always manages to let loose what seems like a pint of pee, which goes all over the bathroom. He then tries to “cover” it, which means swiping at the tile floor, spreading it around even further. The pee footprints then go all over the house.

When I woke up this morning, I could smell pee, but it wasn’t my primary concern. My back was really bad yesterday. I could get out of bed, however, to discover where the smell was coming from.

Since I didn’t think I should tackle that with a bad back, I closed the bathroom door and went to put paper towels over the paw prints.

And that’s when my back locked all the way up.

Dante will get home from work soon. I wonder if he’ll want to clean up piss or take me to the doctor first.

When I first started teaching, I had anxiety dreams. I would show up without my materials, without a plan.

All these years later, I’ve gained confidence. I showed up without my book once; it was fine. Classes have gone off track, productively or not, and I got us back on track.

I’ve improvised an activity for the class to do so I could leave with one student, who was in such crisis she needed to see a mental health professional right that second.

My dreams have to work harder to throw me.

Now, if I have a work anxiety dream, I show up to a class that isn’t mine–in a subject I don’t know–but I’m somehow expected to teach. In the last one, I looked at a board covered in Chinese logograms and turned to the class. “Look, I’m obviously not your teacher.” And then I woke up.

But not all teaching dreams are about anxiety. In many, I’m just doing my job. I’ve woken up having given a whole lecture I had planned to dream students. And then I experience deja vu when I do it for real.

But today, I woke up from a dream of creating modules in Canvas, filling page upon page, converting what I would say to what they would read.

I’d prefer the anxiety dream.

It’s with great sadness that I read NPR’s story about the US potentially losing a third of its museums.

Melissa and I adore museums; even the bad ones, like the ones with misspelled placards, entertain us.

Karlissa often deals with jetlag by heading to a museum to stay awake. We make notes and take pictures and talk about the museum book we want to write. We carry stickies to fix the problematic placards.

We were supposed to go to a Museum Conference this Fall, in fact. Melissa would have talked about her monuments and memorials class, while I was going to wax poetic about being the only American in the American Museum in Bath, England.

There’s a paper–or something–I want to write about Museums in popular culture and literature, from the way they’re lovingly derided in The Simpsons (“Hey, kids, I’ve learned that in two weeks the Springfield Museum of Natural History will be closing forever due to a lack of interest. I urge you to see it while you can!”) to their complex portrayals in apocalyptic literature like Children of Men and Station Eleven.

What’s striking to me know, though, is a political irony. Though our museums only get about a quarter of their funding from the government, Conservatives often have museums on their defunding lists. With their current hold on the Senate and the Presidency, it’s unlikely museums will get the help they need.

The irony comes from the newfound hysterical cries from the right to preserve history.

They’re talking about statues, whose didactic power is narrow.

If we truly want to preserve history and to learn from it, we need our museums.