I had to get up at 7.20 this morning, so I could be at work by 8. I think that’s the earliest I’ve crawled out of bed in about a year.

Driving through the suburbs just an hour after sunrise sure was weird. There were long shadows everywhere and the sun was in my eyes, so it was like late afternoon, but there was still dew on everything. And there were all these other people around waiting to catch the bus, or driving their kids to school. I sometimes forget that, on a normal day, most people are already at work while I’m still eating cereal.

Anyway, now I’m sitting here sulkily doing my “journal” assignment for professional writing. I basically have to write 300 words for every teaching week, discussing what I thought of the lectures and readings and so on. It’s a cheap, dirty, blatant trick to put pressure on students to attend lectures. Since these are at 9 a.m, I haven’t been to a single one this semester, and don’t even know where they’re held. So I have to bullshit my way through it. Not only that, but I have (like an idiot) left it until the last moment. Instead of writing one entry per week I’ve let it accumulate like a menacing snowdrift, and now I have a backlog of six weeks to do and it’s due on Wednesday. I do this, without fail, every time I have a journal assignment. Last semester I had three simultaneous units that demanded a journal, which made for an interesting night of OH FUCK THEY’RE ALL DUE TOMORROW.

I also need to come up with a plot outline for a science fiction story by Wednesday, and a write a scene from it. Not to mention an 800 word piece on “rammed earth” housing, whatever that is. It’s a wonder I have any time to murder homeless people at all.