It’s that time again

Ah, the first week of class.  Always an interesting compilation of intriguing class introductions, and the equally interesting albeit strenuous period of the teachers’ culling of the herds. 

Oh so you want to take my class with three times the approved limit of students crammed into every nook and cranny, every space against the wall occupied by another laptop carting body.  Well that shouldn’t be a problem, just read this over the weekend.

The funny part about it is that next week in class the teachers are going to have this funny look in their eyes when they pose easy questions to their audiences and receive only sleepy, befuddled stares in response.  We are asked to go into this zombie mode to have even a remote chance of completing the work they assign the first week – and then they inevitably wonder why we are not exactly on point by the time we finish such a gauntlet and walk through their doors.  For that matter, exactly how much coffee would you like me to drink trying to finish all this?  I happen to have given up all other, more effective and destructive, stimulants long ago.  You want me to read faster?  Well, I refuse.  I read how I read and it suits me.  I think about things, go off on tangents, pull out corollaries and points of interest, and fill the margins with a large percentage of what occurs to me as I read the text.  To me, this IS reading.  Anything else would be merely glazing over.  I want to digest what I read. 

I think, in part, this compulsion to break down what I read is a common delusion of mine that I can get anything done in one pass.  The same operation can be seen in so many little things I do:

Yes, I can make it out of the car (while locking the doors), across the street, and over to my apartment – with a couple hundred dollars of grocery bags cutting into my arms (and wrists and fingertips) – and still manage to get out my key and open the door.  Why?  Well two (or five or six) trips would be silly… 

Yes, I can burn off over a thousand calories at the gym (or so the ‘trustworthy’ machines tell me) – practically killing myself for hours on end so that walking back to my car I look like an individual who is quite certainly missing her cane – because going several times a week for a reasonable amount of time and pain would (once again) be silly…

So where does this leave me?  Slightly bitter about being assigned more than is reasonable, but hey, I like the challenge.  I will read everything assigned.  I will read them as thoroughly as if I had several weeks to finish them at my leisure (which ironically would most likely lead to my becoming distracted and therefore reading less of them).  I may be a little run down, but come next week I will be fully functioning as I make it into class.  And, importantly, during all this I will not drop off the face of the earth from all friends, family, and blog associations.