1:45 am EST

Slow day at work, at first anyway. I have lots of things do to: return phone calls, work on my syllabus, etc. But somehow, I can’t bring myself to care. I feel apathetic, lethargic, and my tooth hurts. So I spent the afternoon on everything. I was going to node some more G.I. Joe figures, but then I was shocked (absolutely shocked!) that there was no node for The Bicycle Thief. So I just had to add one to the database, and following that I’ll probably put that grad school book learnin’ to work by doing a bunch of nodes on Italian cinema. It’s certainly a more noble endeavor than nostalgia tripping by noding G.I. Joe characters. And dammit, I still owe Sylvar a write-up on Richard Wright to replace the nuked one I narced on ‘cause somebody was plagiarizing. Remember kids: Write your own stuff.

Met the new hire at work today. She’s a former social worker from Georgia who’s in the Student Affairs master’s degree program. She’s in charge of the online "Cyberorientation" for new students. Great, it’s bad enough that teachers are being replaced by distance "learning", now academic advisors are too. But she seems nice enough. The acting director has asked me to assist with her training, sitting in on meetings and helping her and so forth. It’s optional, but I’ve blocked out my calendar for all of it. Hell, if they’re going to pay me to go to some meetings and do nothing, who am I to argue?

Spring orientation. What fun, but at least it’s two and a half hours of overtime. The room was packed to the brim, and there’s still one more orientation to go. One guy sat at one of the advisor’s tables, and when one of advisors asked him to leave and sit with the other students (we need these tables to work, otherwise we wouldn’t care), he was a real asshole about it, bitching and moaning about how somebody should have told him not to sit there five minutes before. I was working with a student already, but it was all I could do to not curse that idiot out. Jesus Christ, sit down and shut the fuck up, we’re trying to do our job here, bitch.

On the way home, I remembered that I had forgotten to ask about one of the advisors who had gone into the hospital before New Year’s (this was my first day back since NYE). I’m sure I would have been told if anything serious had happened, but I still felt pretty guilty for forgetting.

Watched Man on the Moon tonight. Wow.