I Have Become Accustomed To Rejection

Outstanding Submissions: 9

Rejections: 1, personal-ish

This is how it is. I look forward to rejections so I have a chance to blog. Rejection has become my raison d’etre. My hair had shown signs of perking up but this week, things have been follicly depressing again. Oh right. Rejection. My hair is rejecting me. My hair is saying, I hate your head and my head is crying strands of hair about it. The other rejection was from The Emerson Review. For the sake of disclosure I will admit that coupled with that rejection was an acceptance for another story but this blog is not about acceptance. I shun acceptance.

I’m teaching what is, essentially, an honors section of tech comm this semester. The students are a real treat–bright, arrogant, funny, chatty.  Despite my Twittering, I am having a blast. It is always great to have an energetic classroom. One of my students likes to correct me, on every little thing. He’s a great student but a know-it-all. I was 19 once. I get it. Yesterday, he came to class with a screenshot of my course calendar from the class website to provide me with evidence that I hadn’t updated my website to his liking. I told him to bring his laptop to the front of the classroom. I opened his browser, we all looked at the un-updated website and then I hit Command + R to refresh the screen and wouldn’t you know? I had updated the website. I don’t think he’ll be “correcting” me anymore.

Another student yesterday turned in a project that was so beautiful and so well-executed. The assignment was to take a really bad handout a real, practicing doctor gives to his heart surgery patients and transform it into a rhetorically aware document that both communicates the necessary information about heart surgery while taking into account context and audience needs. This student created a comic strip, hand drawn and it’s crisp and amazing and to see a student put that kind of effort into the project and turn in something that so perfectly addresses the assignment made me want to cry. I embarrassed her by putting her work on the document camera so everyone could gawk at it.  I mean look:

I have an epic amount of grading to do–technical reports and the heart surgery project. I gave a quiz yesterday because I had the strong suspicion the students weren’t reading the assigned text. I only do this about once a semester, as a little wake up call. I LOVE being right. On one awesome answer that clearly indicated the student may have never even cracked open the textbook, I wrote “You pulled this out of your ass.” Mr. Correction actually brought up my unupdated website (which was updated, in fact) because he didn’t know he had to read the chapter on which they were quizzed. Now, I had announced in class last week the reading and also told them they might want to prepare for a quiz. Short of buying a billboard, I think I got the word out.

I have worked at a lot of different jobs and I’ve certainly made more money but I love teaching so damn much. I love it even when I hate it. I am often asked why I am getting a PhD in Technical Communication, knowing that I’ll never get rich teaching in the humanities but as I finish my degree I can honestly say I have no regrets whatsoever and I also have the time to do consulting and freelance work and whatever so it all works out in the end. And I get summers off. Suckas.

For the past few weeks I’ve been doing what I think is some of my strongest writing.

Thank you all for the very kind responses to my essay in the previous post. An editor I really respect is going to publish it in her magazine and she offered some really interesting feedback. She said that at the end I am evasive about that which was stolen etc etc and that I should just “fucking write about it.” I’m still pondering her advice (which was excellent) because I love the safety of fiction. When you can point to something as a story, when you can say it’s all a fiction,  you can remove uncomfortable things from the realm of your experience and protect yourself, not expose yourself. I could never write a memoir, I don’t think. I used to be very quiet and private and I still am in most ways but maybe sometimes it is good to put yourself out there and just fucking write about things.

I love this table.

I’m moving this summer. I have yet to wrap my head around that. What if no one likes me? What if I don’t make any friends? That would be sad. Will I have any hair left this summer?

HTMLGIANT is having a contest and you should enter.

I love e-mail. I do. Sometimes, I send an e-mail like it is in the middle of a conversation and I end it like it is in the middle of a conversation.