RBOC: Term Preparations and General Lamentations

Lo, the gods smite me again. Trapped in these four walls. Syllabi gnashing at my heels like angry beasts. Hammers, the quietest sound of infernal constructions, ringing through the air ducts.

Attend, thou readers, my many lamentations and awkward pop-cultural references:

• the grand design for my dream course that came to me while driving my crazy uncle around has vanished. The grand unifying idea, the perfect assignments, all of it: vanished. There should be a CSI type show based around lost academic ideas.
  
• I know this will date me terribly and probably throw into question my otherwise impeccable musical taste, but I think we should create a new rule: Van Halen's "Eruption" should never be played with any song but "You Really Got Me" following it. Honestly.
  
• what obscene zeitgeist makes people try to schedule every meeting at the same time? If I ever wanted to offer evidence of some sort of collective thought process shared by a group of individuals, I'd use three University groups all separately trying to schedule meetings at the same time. Nine times out of ten, they'll choose nearly the exact same time on the exact same day.
• Yes, do require more things on my syllabus. My response is as you predicted: I must keep the page limit a constant. And so I can - I must - shrink the font further and further. There can be only one outcome, and this must be your fiendish plan. Eventually, it will be an inky black hole, so dense and laden with useless information not even an education can escape. Others call you mad, diabolical, unnatural. But I see. I see!

Okay, I must work. Seriously.