My New Job

Today I got to go meet my new employer, Dr. Martin Hardeman in the history department at EIU. I will be his graduate assistant and will work anywhere from 15-19 hours per week. He is a very nice man and is excited that I have an interest in Civil War history, history of the South, and historical research. In addition to assisting with grading papers, he is going to have me help him do research for an article he is writing about the Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858. One of the debates took place here in Charleston--that's the city's claim to fame (also that Abe Lincoln's dad and step mom lived right outside of town). I think I will learn a lot from Dr. Hardeman, and I hope I can be of help to him. He was born blind, but had his eyes operated on when he was a baby, so he had partial sight for a number of years, but has since lost that partial sight and is now completely blind. He gets around remarkably well, but says he'll rely on me for reading and typing things for him. He has a full-time assistant named Ellen who is also really nice, and on Monday we're going to figure out what my work schedule will be. Here's a coincidence--Dr. Hardeman went to grad. school at the University of Chicago with one of my BYU professors, Dr. Mary Richards! It's definitely a small world. He was excited when I told him that she taught my History of the American South class, my senior capstone research course, and also my readings seminar on American slavery.

Both Dr. Hardeman and Ellen, as well as three other people this past week, have told me that I have a slight Southern drawl. I tell them that it's just their imagination, and if they were to listen to someone with a real Southern drawl, they would realize that I don't really have one. (One of the other people who told me I have a Southern accent was the anger management lady.)

Several people have asked if we got hit here by the bad weather that blew through Chicago yesterday. Fortunately we are far enough south that we didn't get in on the nasty tornadoes and flooding, but supposedly it's going to get a little stormy here tonight. I learned in Mississippi that if weather.com says "a few thunderstorms may be severe," they are usually correct. That's what it says for Charleston tonight, so we'll see what happens. I feel bad for the people up in the northern part of the state though--they got hammered yesterday, so hopefully it won't rain up there anymore today.

So, last night I finally snapped. I realize that college kids will be college kids, and it's fun to have parties every now and then, but I was getting sick and tired of the nasty music our lovely neighbors upstairs had blaring for the past five nights. At about 2:00 in the morning, it sounded like they were throwing stuff around, things were crashing to the floor, people were stomping around and yelling, and the music was still blaring. I'm pretty sure there was a whole crowd of drunk kids up there. At one point someone was bouncing a basketball in their kitchen. So I played the part of the party pooper and did as the apartment management had instructed us to do in this situation, and I called the local police department. I also yelled "You guys are going down!" but they couldn't hear me. The PD sent an officer out to tell the kids to shut up, and it seemed to work, because it soon quieted down. Sometimes you just have to play the part of the bad guy I guess. I'm usually pretty easy-going about things like that, but the little sleep I'm going to get this semester is too valuable to be interrupted by the punks upstairs. Maybe if I wasn't taking 16 hours of grad. school classes, I wouldn't be so grouchy about the whole deal. Besides, don't those kids ever sleep? Can they seriously function on zero hours of sleep?