Why professors have...

...grey hair.

Less than half my class showed up this morning. This was a class where a paper was due. A paper I assigned a month ago. A paper that is to be 3-5 pages, typed, double-spaced.

I had one person not get a topic approved, then they e-mailed me midafternoon YESTERDAY to ask for their topic; the ones they wanted had all been taken so I e-mailed them back the list of what remained.

I dunno. I'm getting mightily tired of carrying my own responsibilities plus other people's (things like the "Okay, here are the topics STILL available" but that was easier than saying "no, you can't do any of those" and having to get negotiations back about "well, can I do this one then")

Also, this paper was over a topic I would have regarded as "fun" when I was a student. I get that students here have jobs and families and all that other stuff....but that's why I gave them a month to do the paper. And, I don't know: if there's nothing in your field you regard as fun or engaging maybe you need to find a different field. (I sometimes ask students who are planning a research project, "What in biology really interests you?" and am met with a shrug, which makes me kind of sad. I mean, some of my interests might not translate to easily-performable research, but at least I could tell what they were)

I also still don't know if I have a TA for my lab this afternoon, after the other one got better employment and can't TA for me any more. (As I said on Twitter: "Mongo only pawn in game of life" It often feels like that. I don't think it SHOULD, but it does). Gonna be really unhappy if I have no TA for the hardest lab of the semester AND THEN have to turn around and grade the labs instead of having someone who's paid to do it.

***

That said: I'm supposed to have New (old) Ponies arrive today. I bought my first-ever de-flocked So Soft Pony. So Soft Ponies were a pony fad back in the day - the standard pony with sprayed-on flocking. Cute when new but you can bet many of them aged v. badly - so much that I decided I didn't want to even consider one for my collection because ew. And you can't even wash them, I think, without wrecking the flocking.

BUT. there are some people who take the ones with spoiled flocking and clean it all off, and underneath it is a nice (and rather brilliantly colored) pony. This has become a thing. And while I'm not sure I'd want to go to the trouble of deflocking myself, Ponies in the Sun started recently offering a few of these - one of them being Twist (in her 1980s form: a unicorn with a pretzel cutie mark). Twist is now on her way to me and is supposed to arrive today. Which should make the day a little better.