We do sugar o'er the devil himself

I've been teaching V for Vendetta in my fiction course this week - the graphic novel, that is - and while I typically meet with a great deal of resistance to the comic form, the students never seem to be able to stop talking about it.  I find it amusing that from among the myriad complaints arises insightful commentary and the startling ability to relate the story to our history and our present.  What a lovely thing.  

Speaking of lovely things, my class last night was observed by my former writing coach/advisor to my undergraduate program in creative writing.  She is in her 60's now, and in the interim of being her student and now, we've become friends and I respect her a great deal.  She has slaved at Metro for 40 years with few thanks and (I assume) a paltry paycheck for her services; she is a brilliant poet and a unique woman, but in spite of her grousing, I know for fact that she is far too bright and worthy to have stayed at Metro so long except by choice.  She does it for the same reasons I do it, and it is in large part because of her that I am where I am now.  All faculty must undergo an observation each spring in our department, and names are drawn for this purpose.  We are to have a different person each year observe us in different classes, etc.  I was delighted of course to find out that she would be sitting in on my class this year.  She drove to the satellite campus, stayed the entire three hours (compared to the average 15 minutes I have gotten every year prior), and said she really enjoyed the graphic novel discussion and had looked forward to watching me teach.  It was akin to a parental kudos to hear that I "had come a long way" and that while she "wasn't surprised," she was "delighted to witness my artistic, natural style" in the classroom firsthand, and this means more to me than any comments I have ever received since I began teaching.  

It somehow feels like after all these years, I've finally officially impressed her - this woman who gave every single piece of my writing a "B" because if she gave me an A, I'd stop working on it.  She gave me A's in the end, but for years the B's infuriated me when lousier writers got A's.  I see now, of course, that she was right: give the A to the person who doesn't care to work harder; give a B to the one who will edit and rewrite and perfect endlessly to encourage rather than discourage.  It's an odd theory, but I find myself employing it regularly.  I'm happy in my job, and that is really saying something when I watched my parents struggle through daily work under the assumption that work is something one has to do and no one ever said it should be enjoyable or fulfilling - you just did it and shut up about it and watched TV all evening until it was time to go to bed and wake the next day to do it all again.  No wonder they were always such unhappy people.  

Despite being busier than a one-legged man at a butt-kickin' (<--some southern colloquialisms never leave me, sorry), I'm in a decent mood the last couple of days.  I suspect it has much to do with the fact that I've been sleeping with Prince Valium of late, and drinking less (but better) coffee during the day.  Amazing how much better one feels when "English teacher coffee" is avoided.  You'd think that with Kaladi and Starbucks (two of them, no less) within spitting distance of the English department that we could manage to have some decent joe, but alas, it's the pre-ground, canned, ten-cents-per-metric-ton stuff that comes from Costco and is either made so weak that it can scarcely defend itself or so strong that it has a viscosity rating.  Neither version of which bodes well for the cranky and sleep-deprived zombies we become halfway through a term.  Good coffee and sleep definitely diminishes general snarky-ness.