What I'm Working On

Snow day!
Last night, they weren't predicting much of anything until noon, but I woke up early and we already had an inch. I ran 2.5 miles, read a little bit, and by 8:00, we had three inches. Southern is closed for the day. The kids feel cheated becuase they had the week off anyway, so we'll throw them outside and then walk down the street for pizza at lunchtime. Should be fun.

The dog, however, is not much fun on snowy days. She wants to be outside playing in the snow (she's from a winter litter), so she's bouncing off the walls. Literally. It's a sight to see. She runs around the dining room table at full speed, then hits the patch of hardwood floor between the area rugs and skids into the wall head-first. Then five minutes later, when her dazed look is finally gone, she does it again.

Even some treadmill time isn't going to work off her schnauzer puppy energy today, I fear.

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The timing for this diagnosis turned out to be pretty good, in a way. I'm finishing my three-year term as department chair, and for the first time in 17 years, I'm not teaching anything this semester. (And for the first time since spring 2001, I'm only working 12 credits, the equivelent of 4 classes, the standard work load at Southern -- I'm not teaching an extra class, or supervising internships, or working with someone on a thesis, or directing independent studies. Just doing what I'm required to do -- for once.) The English department is so large (about 100 teachers and 3000 students each semester) that I'm given 12 credits just for administrative work. For the last 2.5 years, I have taught a course every semester on top of the admin work, so I've been doing at least 15 credits, sometimes more.



So the timing has worked out well. I'm only working 40 hours a week instead of the 50 or so I've been working lately. It's a little less stressful, and the "extra" free time is letting me finally work on some writing that I haven't been able to do for a few years. It's nice to be able to write again. Part of the writing I'm doing is the scholarship that's a required part of being a professor. Some of it has been some non-academic writing projects that I've been putting off for a while.


But some of the writing has been about the lymphoma experience. The blog is part of that writing, of course. And I'm working on a couple of short pieces that I may submit to different publications about how the diagnosis has affected me.


Then there are some of the other pieces that I am envisioning that probably won't go anywhere. Given the lack of cancer humor out there, part of me thinks that means that there's a ready market for some of my ideas. But the rational part of me says there's a lack of cancer humor because most people won't find it very funny. Go figure.


One idea I had is based on Dr. Seuss's The Sneetches. If you don't know the story: some of the Sneetches have stars on their bellies, and some don't. The star-bellies think they are better than the others. So the non-stars get stars on their bellies, and so that makes the star-bellies want to remove their stars, so then that's the cool thing to do. Eventually they all change stars so much that they all get mixed up about who had or didn't have stars in the first place, and then they all get along and realize they're all the same anyway. It's a nice story.


So my idea is a picture book where, instead of stars on their bellies, the two groups have either Hodgkins Lymphoma or Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, and they fight about who has the better color support ribbons, and then they come to some solution where they realize they're all in it together, except in my story there's some little illustration at the end that shows everyone with Non-Hodgkins is way cooler. But that seems inappropriate, so I'm still working on an ending.


My other idea is a version of the awesome 1979 classic "My Sharona" by The Knack. But my version is called "My Lymphoma." Sing along as you watch the video:


Ooo my little swollen node, my swollen node,

When you gonna shrink down, Lymphoma?

Ooo another doctor run, a doctor run,

My doctors are all over the town, Lymphoma.

Never gonna stop, I'm relentless

Oh I'm gonna beat you up, beat you senseless

You're my, my, my, my, my-a woo!

M-m-m My Lymphoma.



There's, like, three more verses in me, but that's what I have for now.