It’s finals week, so I have a lot to grade. I leave to teach in the UK in less than a week. I’ve been swamped by my McFarland book proofs (there were four chapters with severe, page-number affecting mistakes).

And yesterday, the publisher of my other book just sent proofs that need to be reviewed asap.

Don’t tell me I can get it all done. I can. And will. I’m really good at working myself to death.

So, friends, I need you to tell me to take breaks, to still take time to do my yoga and PT exercises, to breathe.

In 2017, I taught my first seminar on Doctor Who. This term saw its first regeneration.

Lessons from my class:

Some of the students are just as ambivalent about technology as we are (this comes as a relief).

Many of them were amazed by the revelation that the Daleks are stand-ins for Nazis. (I sometimes forget what surprises freshmen, in terms of literary analysis.)

A few of the students hadn’t watched any Doctor Who before. They all reported liking it, but a couple said they weren’t going to watch the whole series because it’s too many seasons (and they’re just talking about doctor 9 on) to catch up on.

Lesson: some of this generation are quitters.

I let the students vote for themes to discuss in the last few weeks–this doesn’t always go well (the same thing happens in my Simpsons seminar). One of the themes they picked this time was happiness. A few were frustrated that class discussion kept going onto what makes us unhappy (what did they think was going to happen?).

In our poll on scariest monsters, the weeping angels won.

In our poll on best doctors, David Tennant won.

Martha and Clara were both lambasted by many for being our least favorite companions, but many students came around on Martha after I pushed them on it one day. They like that she’s a doctor; they like that she chose to leave–to move on.

We all love Donna.

We all love Jack.

We all love River Song.

In fact, the spin-off series we want to see most is The Adventures of River Song.*

I’m disappointed that none of the students took me up on the challenge of writing the fan script explaining Jim the Fish.

My favorite comment in the whole quarter?

A student’s observation that the humans who travel with the doctor are his emotional therapy animals.

*I’ve spitballed a few alternate titles:

Dr. Song, Non-Medicine Woman

Professor Song and the Temple of Doom

Kiss of the River Song

Melody/Song

For Whom the Angels Weep

Alias River Song

Bringing up River Song

River Song and the Chamber of Secrets

It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad Universe

I Walked with a Time Lord

Touched by a Time Lord

River Song’s Guide to the Galaxy

Red Lipstick Diaries

Interview with an Assassin

A Wrinkle in Time and Space

The Woman Warrior

The Professor is In

Welcome Back, River Song

Not Mostly Harmless

Spaced

River Song’s Adventures in Wonderland

Mapping the River Song

Let the Right River Song In

Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous

My Big Fat Gallifreyan Wedding

Lost in Tardis Translation

Professor River Song, Actually

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Assassin

River Song of Arabia

River Song’s Web

Educating River

Spoilers!

The Diary of River Song

Are You There Doctor? It’s Me, River Song

Diatribes of a Mad Professor

Doctor Song, I Presume?

Hello, Sweetie

Love’s Labors Lost

Close Encounters of the River Song Kind

[Note: almost all of these could also be porn titles]

My black cat, Thoth, thinks I’m his mother. He suckles my ear at night before he falls asleep. Once, Dante suggested I wear clip-on earrings to bed, to try to stop him.

A very frustrated Thoth went to the top of my ear and suckled, hard, almost like biting.

Sometimes, when I deny him my ears, he tries my nose or chin.

But that’s not what makes me a bad cat mom.

I don’t bathe him. And he really wants me to.

He sometimes hops up and hugs my face. In other words, he puts his arms around my face and presses himself against me for a moment, just like a hug.

Then he starts bathing my face. He’ll do a couple licks, and then he presses his face against my mouth.

That’s how cats teach each other about bathing.

I’m not going to lick my cat.

He hasn’t given up on me, but he must think I’m really stupid.

Or stubbornly untrainable.

I haven’t been trying as many new recipes as I’ve wanted to lately. There’s just way to much going on. So I’ve been doing family favorites and variations on themes–doing a hoisin flavored chicken rice bowl instead of teriyaki, for example.

I did get the chance to enjoy these Shrimp Enchiladas from Mel’s Chicken Cafe.

I tried the chicken recipe below, but it just didn’t work in a crock pot–I want to try it the right way soon.

One Pot Spanish Chicken and Potatoes

To make up for the lack of new recipes to share, here’s a family favorite.

Appetizer Meatballs: 1 large bag frozen meatballs; grape jelly; bbq sauce. Mix and cook in a crock pot on low.

by D’lana Pearce

On June 15^th, 2019, I will be a college graduate. This is supposed to be the culmination of my hard work and yet I find myself dreading the future. I have a substantial knowledge on inequality (racial, sexual, and gender), I know a lot about colonization, political processes and corruption, what ATP is and how it works, cellular death, regression analysis, integration, and what a comma splice is (though I still have them in my writing–no one is perfect). However, I feel unprepared for the future. I have a large amount of student loan debt (well above the average), as well as credit card debt, and a general concern for life outside of the cushion of being a college student. I find myself asking a lot of questions, most of which don’t even pertain to college but are things I will have to learn quickly to be successful. Some of my questions are for far in the future but others I am stressed about at this very moment. I find myself up late at night, distracted by my thoughts about what I will do with my life once I graduate. I worry I will make the wrong career choice, professional behavior, or financial decisions and all my work in college will be rendered useless.

Some of my questions are:

1. How do I focus on health and wellness with a busy schedule?

2. How do property taxes work?

3. How do I understand my health insurance benefits?

4. How do I know if I am making enough money to buy a house?

5. Is better to not get a tax refund (and not owe anything) or to get a refund?

6. Is it better to have a will or a trust? At what age do I draft them?

7. How often do I *need* to go to the doctor?

8. How do I prepare for a professional interview? I’ve worked various minimum wage jobs but I have no idea what to expect when I go into interviews for a career.

9. What exactly is business casual?

10. How should I manage my personal finances?

11. What jobs value the skills my major teaches?

12. How do I network?

13. How do I apply theoretical course concepts to a job? I find it hard to believe that Karl Marx will be a daily conversation topic and yet I learn about him in almost every Sociology course.

14. How much do employers care about what I have posted on social media?

It’s not that I would expect a college to have a course teaching these things. In fact, many of these questions cannot be taught in one course. However, as I find myself pushed into the real world, I am finding that everything I know is not nearly as useful as I thought it was. It’s scary to find yourself in a position where you must make decisions that will truly alter your life with almost no experience and no textbook to look for answers in.

A few months ago, I devoured We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. Knowing that the title is true makes me sad. I want to know Irby. We could make cocktails and talk about dating with chronic pain. And then make more cocktails and talk about everything else.

This week, I read Irby’s first book, Meaty.

If you’re reading this, you’re the kind of person who should read it as well. Irby is both funny and touching, unique and relatable. She is also a great writer. Most of the essays are standard biography, but others play with form.

It was in one of those chapters, one that talked about characters in a tv show she’d like to make, that I saw myself:

Nell’s caught in the trap of being smart enough to be pissed about all the societal pressure to find happiness through a mate and money, and bighearted enough to yearn for real love and companionship in her life. She’s caught between believing she deserves a life mate and believing it’s a complete impossibility; between believing prosperity and fulfillment are attainable and her dim economic prospects. She’s been burned many times before but is too resilient and/or deluded to abandon hope entirely. (83)

(I’m pretty sure “resilient and/or deluded” is in my medical records somewhere.)

I love these books, and the recipes she includes for things like spicy flourless chocolate cake are not the only ideas that I’ll carry with me after reading them.

I can’t count how many times I’ve been dying.

I don’t remember all of them–I started being hospitalized for asthma when I was two.

I don’t remember my brother being told to say goodbye to me when I was 21 and suffering from pneumonia, but he did. (My illness also came up in a faculty meeting–my department apparently discussed who would represent it at my funeral.)

All the times I’ve struggled for air run together, in a haze of wheezing.

Every winter until I got insurance (in 2000) was awful; even when I wasn’t in ERs, I routinely woke to what I thought was an orchestra warming up. My sleeping brain thought that was what my lungs’ struggle was.

I am incredibly lucky to have access to care now–and treatment for a deadly condition.

And that’s what I think about when people tell me that I’m probably getting too much treatment.

This week, I performed my Chronic Pain: A Comedy show again. Since people routinely try to diagnose me after shows (as if my comedy is just a secret ruse for free medication consultation), I tried to forestall it this time. When I read out the list of things I’ve tried, I said I was doing it so the audience wouldn’t feel they needed to ask if I’d ever heard of pot, etc.

I didn’t get that response this time. Instead, two audience members (independently) approached me the day after the show to say that I was taking too much medication.

For example, a student asked if I’d heard of “medicalization”–an idea that gets brought up when people say we shouldn’t try to treat problems with Western medicine. He told me that he has had mild hypertension for 10 years, but he doesn’t need meds for it.

Ummm, ok.

Do I like taking (and choking on) a bazillion pills a day?

Nope.

But do I like not having to go the emergency room for asthma since I started taking those meds?

You better believe it.

Have I gone off pills that weren’t working or that were giving me bad side effects? Yup–sometimes even when my doctors didn’t initially want me to.

The ones I’m on all do something.

When I don’t take my magnesium and potassium supplements, my face literally spasms. On the left side.

When I accidentally didn’t put one of my GERD meds in my daily pill container and went without it for a few days, I thought I had cancer or that the acid and bile had just burned a hole through my esophagus. The pain was so bad that I couldn’t sleep. For days.

I know both of these gentlemen were trying to be helpful.

But I had to fight to get treatment. And even after I got insurance, I had to fight for treatment for some of my problems.

Your non-medical opinion, based on a comedy routine, is just another way of telling me it’s all in my head.

Want to see the routine? It’s here.

Many years ago, I burned my childhood journals.

I used to journal all the time.

But when I was 19 and 20, I was in a bad relationship.

I knew he was jealous, which was I was familiar with, since my mother had always been in violently jealous relationships.

I told myself that at least my relationship wasn’t physically violent.

It’s a long story, and there were incredible mistakes on both sides leading up to this, but I was incredibly unhappy. And this relationship had been legalized, which made it harder to get out of.

At this point, I thought I couldn’t get out of it. I sometimes prayed that I would die or that he would, mostly the former because I didn’t want to be the kind of person who would pray for the latter.

It’s hard to hide that kind of unhappiness.

I came home one day to find that he’d been reading my journals. And he was yelling at me about them.

Why didn’t I love him the way I loved that guy I had a crush on when I was 14?

(The guy I had never really had a conversation with.)

I tried to explain how fourteen year old brains work.

And I also tried to explain that he shouldn’t read my journals (trying to explain back then, by the way, was yelling and crying).

He said he had every right to–that since we were married, we were one flesh.

I didn’t have the right to privacy.

I knew he believed that–that he would always feel justified in reading them, whenever he wanted. Every thought I had written down, every thought I might write on the blank pages would be used against me in his struggle to make me into what he thought I should be.

So I burned them.

And I stopped journaling.

It’s been over twenty years–I haven’t gotten back into the habit of regular journaling.

But I want to.

A few of you know this already: Karlissa (Melissa Bender and Karma Waltonen) put a book proposal out in the world earlier this year to write a quirky little book about museums.

We will discuss, among other things, our obsession with gift shops, heists, controversies, carrying post-it notes to fix mistakes, and an elf penis we saw in Iceland.

Fingers crossed!

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