Out-of-Office-Reply

I was feeling pretty good about myself this morning: I'd found what I think will be a great little "memoir" piece on disability which I can use in my English 2010 courses to call attention to this year's writing conference theme on disability; also, found an online copy of "Speech sounds," a short story where a disease of some sorts has caused everyone to have a speech disability to use in my SF class to also support the writing conference theme (btw this took some searching dexterity as I had to locate the publishing history of Speech Sounds and then look up several of the books on Google books till I found one which allowed access to the story--just sayin).

And I fleshed out the first month of my new 2o10 schedule which is going to use Odell's updated textbook, now called Writing Now and my newly conceived methodology--basically, to spend more time with fewer genres allowing students to make their "choices" within each genre rather than choosing amongst genres for their final portfolio. For the non-writing teachers reading, don't worry if this last paragraph made no sense at all.

So, I was feeling pretty good about my accomplishments until I sent an email to the Writing and Social Justice committee to share the reading I found on diversity--almost everyone's email bounced back "Out of office Autoreply." WTF???!!! Seems most everyone is still partying and I'm sitting here, on the last Saturday morning of the break, working. I mean I don't even know how to set up an "Out of office" reply because I don't think I've ever been away from my email for long enough to worry about it. Is something wrong with me? Should my life, outside of my job, be more compelling so as to take me completely away from my work?

Well, I worried about these tough existential questions for about 2 seconds and then settled down to get a bit more work done. I'm done vacationing and I vacationed hard (as hard as a non-drinking dad of three can): trip to vegas with family, many xmas family engagements, chinese for xmas eve, night at the Anniversary in with my wife, lotta movies (Avatar, Blind Side, The Road, The Brother's Bloom--an excellent comedy btw, Watchmen, Valkyerie, Paper Heart--not so great), several snow/ice hikes.

So, to all those out-of-office folks, I'm officially ok to be getting some work done--it brings me peace to do some thinking about the spring, to have a foundation laid before I jump full on into work on Monday.