Working Without Work

Yeah, it's been that kind of weekend. Though I do not go to work today, I'm working today. As I have been all weekend. You see, Parent-Teacher Conferences are this week, and that means that my grades are due on Tuesday. So the weekend has been spent slogging through the piles of ungraded quizzes and labs that seem to build up with uncanny regularity about this time every quarter. Today I’m mostly just compiling the whole quarter’s worth of work into a numerical grade for every student and then coming up with a comment that sums up their academic performance while giving them each some advice on how to raise their grade. For some of them, it’s tempting to simply write SHOW UP TO CLASS!! in as large a font as humanly possible. I’ve managed to restrain myself so far.

The weekend has not been entirely work-filled. For instance, I’m currently taking a break from grading so I can blog. So there. Saturday, I headed into Midtown in the evening to meet up with my parents, who were in town for the weekend so Dad (affectionately known in my family as Old NoHips McRugbyWounds) could attend a conference on higher education. They were staying at the Hilton, which for $200 a night will give you a room slightly larger than my bedroom in Queens. I met them there and we walked out into the chilly night air to head to dinner. This is one aspect of life that they’re definitely not missing now that they’re in Alabama. Luckily for NoHips, I knew a place nearby with a fine selection of scotches (Art-History knows it too!) so we were soon eating and drinking and catching up in the comfort of the St. Andrew’s.

It’s strange to have my parents staying the night in the city. When they were still in Bethlehem, it made no sense to fork out for a hotel room when their own bed was an hour’s drive away. It’s just another manifestation of the wholesale change that’s accompanied my parents’ move to Alabama.

The following morning, they hopped a cab (NoHips was in no mood to take the subway) out to Queens so that Ma could see my apartment. She has a thing about needing to see the spaces where her children are living. JimmyLuke and HungarianPhrasebook were around and the whole lot of us ended up heading out for brunch together. This was HungarianPhrasebook’s first encounter with the ‘rents, and she took it remarkably well, considering JimmyLuke is practically an adopted son in my family.

The ‘rents headed back to Manhattan: Dad for the conference, Mom for the shopping. I retreated to my cave and continued to grade. That evening, I headed back into the city again for dinner and drinks with the ‘rents. It’s not often that I get a three-meal trip out of them, so this was special. This time, we found a place that I had never actually tried, but which turned out to be excellent. Maison looked like a French brasserie from the outside and we soon found it to be a restaurant full of les gens français on the inside. It’s always a good sign when the customers in a restaurant are from the same country as the food. NoHips and I shared a massive stack of oysters, clams, shrimp and crab called “Le Gourmand” that was exquisite. Ma ordered a crepe, pronouncing the word in such a perfect French accent that the waitress assumed she was French. It was like we were all back in the street fair in Bayeux thirteen years ago.

So today ends a three-day weekend which, except for my three meals with my parents, hasn’t amounted to much of a break for me. And now I feel that I should probably get back to that pile of grading that still remains. Damn.