Thus begins my semester away.

And why, you ask?

My advisor is going to Philadelphia this coming semester to work with another scholar on a book on presidential rhetoric and foreign policy, and she asked me to work for them as a research assistant.  I’m excited, humbled, a little anxious, and sad.  Excited to spend a semester immersing myself in presidential rhetoric, humbled to work for/with such exceptional scholars, anxious because of the unknowns (and the 11′ x 14′ room might have something to do with it), and sad… because I’ll be away from my best friend.

When the opportunity to do this came along, JPJD was even more enthusiastic about it than I was.  ”Of course you need to go!” he said.  During this whole graduate school process (applying, reapplying, getting in, starting, teaching, researching, thesis-writing), he has been my biggest cheerleader and encourager.  I wouldn’t be doing any of this without him, and I’m only embarking on this “semester away” because he is behind me, pushing me, and believing in me.  No “opportunity” is worth sacrificing my relationship with him.

So, if you’re up for an adventure, this blog will take a new turn the next few weeks.  I’ll be updating this week as I pack up my life (JPJD refers to it as “sending my baby to college”), fly to a new city, and embark on four months of presidential rhetoric, U.S.-history-sightseeing, and weekend jaunts around the East Coast.  Oh yes, we have grand plans (including a romantic rendezvous in New York City).

But for now, I’m concentrating on making our house a happy home, filling our freezer with meals, having almost every piece of clothing clean, and relishing every moment with my man before Sunday morning.  It’s the least I can do.

Scenario One: library with bright fluorescent lighting, sitting solitary-ly at a big table / study carrell, headphones in, only water allowed, and you got really mean glares if you even so much as opened a Frito bag.

Scenario Two: cozy dorm parlor in the Victorian style with pink carpet, a fireplace, the option of BOTH a hot pot for tea and a gourmet Godiva coffee maker, cheese and apples and chocolate, jazz / Norah Jones / editor’s choice mix playing in the background.  The best part: I was with dear friends.

Now which would you choose?

Over the past two months, this whole writing process has made me realize just how much I miss that parlor.  Don’t get me wrong — my office and desk are great, and I absolutely love my married life.

But there’s something about that parlor . . . that togetherness, camaraderie, mutual support and encouragement.  When you were convinced you would be THE ONE who finally failed that Dante paper or Middle Eastern History final, there were those dear friends who reminded you that it would be okay, that life would go on, and that you felt this way on the last paper you wrote.

And you want to know what’s really ironic?  I find myself trying to recreate that scene as I write now.

I eat cheese, crackers, apples, and chocolate.

I wear slippers.

I have my iTunes playlist.

I paint my nails (yeah, we used to do that, too).

And I drink tea, the kinds we used to drink.

I meet with my advisor to discuss my thesis.  The conversation morphs into what I think I’d like to write my dissertation on (I don’t know, especially since I now have dreams about Roosevelt), a conference presentation I’m giving on Friday, the seminar paper I should send out for journal consideration, the remaining thesis chapters and deadlines.  I was kind of overwhelmed.

Me: “Well, I hope I can make it through.”  I was kidding.  Sort of.

My advisor: “Don’t give me that.  You are young and strong.”

So for the rest of the semester, that’s what I’ll be telling myself.

I am young and strong.  I AM young and strong.  I am YOUNG.  I am STRONG.  I am young and strong.

I did.  Fever, aches, sore throat, head throbbing . . . that sort of unwelcome bug.

So instead of going to a birthday happy hour tonight, I’m here in bed, listening to Mozart, cutting/pasting relevant portions of the “Chats” into my content chapter outlines, and drinking green tea with honey and lemon.  A nap may soon be in order.

But I’m sure my students will be delighted to have an afternoon off and away from the joys and exhilaration of my “citations” lecture.

And when JPJD arrives home?  Julie & Julia, how I’ve missed you.  It’s been a while.

This week is the first week I’m really sticking to my schedule.  Last week, between meetings and first-days-of-class and learning how to get from TAing to Teaching in eight minutes flat, it was a little hard to stick to my color-coded semester plan.  But September 12 marks the beginning of a new school week and, I must admit, I’m rather excited for the challenge.

If you look up to the right, you’ll see a new box: Word Count.  Today marks the transition on my “How to Write 1,000 Words a Day” plan from notes to actual text. ACTUAL TEXT.  As in, I have something on the screen!  And that’s where I am.

I plan to update the count daily, mostly from my own gratification and motivation.

More first-week-of-school stories to come, but for now, it’s time for lunch, responding to emails, and prepping for this afternoon’s class.  We’re going to talk about the difference between a reporter/critic and the seven elements of descriptive analysis.  I’m quite excited.

I like knowing what to expect.

Today was relatively uneventful: work in my new (quiet) office, eat my peanut butter and honey sandwich, walk down the destroyed-for-three-years-for-construction street to the copy center only to find out that Dr. Persuasion ordered the materials for class and decided to charge the department (and not us).  Since we didn’t have to fork over cash for the course packet, we celebrated with Starbucks instead (yes, Pumpkin Spice Lattes are back).

The uneventful-ness remained until 2:15.  Eagerly anticipating my Presidential Rhetoric Seminar with Dr. Persuasion (read: the class I have been waiting my entire life for) at 2:30, I cleared my desk, grabbed my notebook/pen, and made a stop in the kitchen.  As I opened the refrigerator door, Dr. Persuasion appeared behind me, proudly sporting the scarf my colleague and I brought her from the archives in July.  We exchanged pleasantries, I told her how nice it looked, how glad I was she liked it, etc.  And she was off to class.

I’ll admit – I was flustered, excited, and momentarily distracted.  Somehow, as I reached in to safely position my string cheese and carrots from plain view, I forgot where my head was in relation to the door.  **BAM**  I think I saw stars.

But really, who hits their head on the school refrigerator door over presidential-rhetoric-scarf-excitement?  Me.

I swayed a bit, collected myself, and marched confidently down to class.  Or tried to.  And for the next two hours, tried to ignore my throbbing head as I sat, looking at aforementioned scarf.

Depth perception.  Ah, if only I had depth perception.

One of the things I love about my program is the ability we have to teach many different classes.  I “mastered” Public Speaking during the 2010-2011 school year, Introduction to Communication Theory over the summer, and this fall brings the joys of Analysis of Argument.  Over the past few weeks I’ve had more than a few people ask me what the class involves, and before August I responded truthfully: “I don’t have a clue.”  Post-vacation it’s been, “Well… um… we, uh, analyze arguments” (when accompanied with a mischievous smile, it makes everyone chuckle a bit).

If I were to sub-head the past two weeks, it would read something like “The Weeks In Which Rhetorical Expressioner Teaches Herself Analysis of Argument So That She Can Write Her Syllabus And Teach Analysis of Argument.”  I’ve never been good at short titles or subheadings.

I realize this is an obvious statement and I realize that I had better get over this real fast, but at times it is a very inconvenient truth that a teacher must know what s/he is going to teach before s/he teaches it.

Dr. Persuasion, in one of her early books, laid out the key difference between rhetorical critics and those-who-want-to-be-but-are-not.  She calls it the Critic/Reporter question.

A critic asks how something was said, where a reporter asks what was said.  A critic wonders why, but a reporter wants to know who/what/when.  A critic searches for the motive; the reporter, simply the facts.  A critic looks at what is implicit in a text/speech/piece of rhetoric.  The reporter is concerned with the explicit.  A critic writes an analysis providing depth and color commentary; a reporter paraphrases the play-by-play found on the surface.  The critic is a detective, the reporter a police-officer.  And, finally, the critic looks at what is persuasive, asks questions of morality, right/wrong.  The reporter stays objective (or, apparently does), focusing on the amoral aspects of a text.

I’m really good at reporting.  I want to be a good critic.  This is where she says I need to “earn my spurs”.  It takes boldness and courage and depth of understanding — things I’m not always sure I have.  I hope I’m getting there.  That is my biggest stumbling block in this whole thesis process.  I’m really good at telling a story, but not very good when it comes to analyzing it as a critic.

I suppose that is what you go to graduate school for.  And, as JPJD reminds me, Dr. Persuasion has been doing this for over fifty years.  I’ve been doing it almost a year.

The second extreme is the division between student and teacher.  I’m teaching a new class this fall, which means I have to teach myself the class first so that I know what I am talking about when my 28 students arrive in class.  Or at least, appear to.  Thankfully, I have many brilliant colleagues who have taught this class before, and we all eagerly/freely share syllabi and teaching resources, so I don’t feel quite as alone or over my head.

I want to do it all well — researching, writing, teaching, conference-presenting. I want to be a thoughtful critic, kind but tough teacher, helpful colleague, grounded academic.

Maybe when I finish my thesis I’ll buy myself some cowboy boots with real spurs.

Pause with me as I sip my iced tea / lemonade blend in celebration.

I’ll be honest — teaching was hard work.  I learned a lot about my teaching style, ability to deal with many different types of students, and my success (or lack thereof) of keeping twenty-four college juniors/seniors entertained for three hours from 6-9 pm two nights a week.  But then I remember — entertaining is not my job; teaching is.  I’m hopeful they left with a deeper appreciation of how multi-faceted and diverse communication is and the multiplicity of ways one can analyze even the smallest encounter.

And now, let the thesis writing begin.  Yesterday and today I have been dusting, cleaning, and rearranging my office.  For me, the writing environment is key.  If it’s cluttered or disorganized, I just can’t write.  Can’t.  So I decided it was very much worth the time to make my office a happy-feeling place for the sake of future productivity.

Walking through Target today (in search of a letter holder), I was astonished to find the “Back to School” signs already hung, pointing the way to new notebooks and crayons, lunch boxes and locker organizers, unopened packages of 24 #2 pencils ready to be sharpened into a bouquet (a la Joe Fox).  As much as it horrifies me that school will begin in just about six weeks (and thus new classes and new students and a new teaching assignment), I must admit that I love the newness, the freshness, the feeling of beginning again.  And this fall, this newness means one more semester of work until I finish my M.A.  That thrills me, even though the thesis stands between me and the degree.

But for now, I’ll relish the newness that this “nesting” season brings… preparing for the new intellectual offspring that will come, Lord willing, over the next few months.

It’s been about a month since school ended, and I don’t think I realized how much of a break I really needed.  I’ve finally stopped dreaming about paper topics and don’t fall asleep rewriting paragraphs of my Liberia paper (although they do still need to be reworked).  JPJD and I have been able to spend really sweet time together, and I’m loving the opportunity to do things around the house (laundry, cooking, random errands) that so quickly fell by the way side during the school year.

By day, you’ll find me at home, alternating between being a wife/homemaker and a teacher/student.  I’m teaching a new class this summer, so this dichotomy is particularly true: I’m my own student, learning and digesting the material myself before I teach it to my class of comm studies seniors.  Or, when I’m not grading or writing quizzes or reading my textbook, I’m attempting to digest more than thirty journal articles/book chapters for a conference at the end of June.  By night, I’m teaching in a windowless basement classroom and doing my very best to keep my students from falling asleep (which includes resorting to group skits and analyzing clips of The Office).  On non-class days, I’m going on a walk to DQ with JPJD, re-reading Soldier of a Great War, or sitting on our deck with a glass of wine with my wonderful husband, talking until the sun sets.

It’s funny, how we plan.  I purposely wrote and defended my thesis prospectus this past semester so I could research and write over the summer.  And, I’m still confident that I’ll make good progress (after all, I have all fall to finish before graduating in December).  But right now, I’m learning a lesson I’ve needed to learn for a long, long time: the importance of rest.  It’s okay if my list has remaining tasks at the end of the day.  It’s okay if I sit in the sun instead of hunching over my computer all afternoon.  It’s healthy and good and right to stop, think, pray, and be still before God.

We recently took the StrengthsFinder test, and I’d highly recommend it.  My top three strengths are Achiever, Responsibility, and Discipline: all good things in moderation, but dangerous if taken too far.  Mix these three and you can get a deadly cocktail of ambitious, people-pleasing, never-quitting, ever-yes-saying drive.  I had that kind of summer planned out.

But instead, I’m being taught what it means to rest, laugh, love, be still, be thankful, trust, and wait on God.  He is the perfect teacher, faithful and patient, so tender even as He sees my sin and where I need to change.

“Faithful is He who calls you…and He also will bring it to pass.”

–1 Thessalonians 5:24