I am gonna stand my ground

I seem to have so few psychological resources left nowadays.  Every day now feels to me like I'm hanging by a thread.  And yet every day, I somehow make it from my bed for another day in the trenches, and make it back home again.  I don't even know how.  But I do.

I guess I just have to keep on doing this every day.  Maybe it will get easier.  Maybe not.  But I don't see any other choice. 

At least music can still inspire me a little.

Can't speak

The good feelings were short-lived.  I got yet another kind of awful news from Hometown that I wasn't expecting.  One of my cousins, a generation older than I, has been felled by a stroke.  The right side of hir body is weakened, although not paralyzed, and zi cannot speak.  No telling yet what the long-term prospects are for recovery.

It's so hard to grieve these things by myself, in a town I wish I weren't in on a good day, let alone today, with almost no one around to whom I would even mention these matters.  I want to curl up in a fetal position and have someone I love hold my head while I sob.  But there is no one like that here.  I won't even have a therapy appointment until next week.

Zi is pretty much the last one in the family I'd expect this to happen to.  Zi is zealous about watching hir diet, getting regular exercise, and living with almost Buddhist-like moderation.  We've been close since I was a baby.  We've always shared the same sense of humor, and traded terribly corny jokes with each other.

And now zi cannot speak.  And neither can I.

Maybe I'm not crazy

I had a revelatory meeting with my therapist today.  Zi tracks my weekly responses to a questionnaire about various aspects of my emotional and mental health, and today zi showed me a graphical representation of my overall state, week by week.  Basically, the graph demonstrated that, on the scale of zero to rubber room, I was only about a fourth of the way up the scale even when I felt my worst, and I've been getting steadily better since the semester began and I had hard-and-fast work to do, instead of having lots of free time all day long to fret.  I'm a lot healthier than I worried I might be.

And being a busy professional academic makes me healthier.

Dig that thought.

I'll say this for myself: as much as the details of my current position annoy me, and as much contempt as I have for Ghosttown at large, I can honestly say that I love doing my job.  And, as I can now demonstrate in my teaching evaluations, my students can see it.  Maybe, just maybe I can even make that come through in my book for my readers.

Contentment

Due to a canny combination of cut-and-paste from my dissertation and some fresh writing, energized by a book I started reading this morning, I ended up adding about 3,000 words to my manuscript today.  If only I could keep up such a pace every day!  I'd actually have a full working draft of the book in ten days. 

Just saying aloud that I could, theoretically, complete the first draft of my book manuscript within two weeks puts a very specific image in my head.  I mean, it's not gonna happen.  Too much other stuff to do, unpredictable bursts of creative inspiration, emotionally debilitating news from Hometown that could come at any moment, etc.  But still.  What a thought.

Plus, I enjoyed an hour-plus-long phone conversation with a dear friend from DOU-Town this evening.  She's one of my friends from the trench warfare of grad school: she is one of the very, very few people in this world with whom I have hung out long-term in three different countries.  There's nothing like catching up with old friends.

I actually feel okay enough about what I did today to relax with a glass of wine, and not feel obligated to try to do anything work-related tonight.  I should make a habit of this.

RBOC: First week pandemonium

I feel like it's bad form to just throw post after post of random bullets of crap on the blog, but there are times when you can't get it together to do more than note everything flying at your head.  (And then duck.)

• I kind of feel like I will never again hear good news from Hometown.  This past week's bad news was so out of left field that I hardly knew how to process it.  I'm used to two or three different kinds of bad news from home, but I discovered a new kind this week.  Fuck.
• I feel like I'm clicking into the brute survival mode that got me through my last semester of dissertation writing.  For months now, I've been laboring with the unhappy sensation that accomplishing everything that I have to do might kill me.  Somehow, I have transitioned into survival mode, which feels more like I am going to accomplish all this even if it kills me!  Once again, it is life during wartime.
• This means that I suddenly feel more capable (because I have to be so), and therefore a little less tragically depressed.  I can actually laugh to myself, rather than cry at the fact that one of my students emailed me in confusion, upon learning that zi could not buy books at the library.  Just when you think you've heard it all...

Now, for the more positive bullet points:

• My Pseudology of Area Studies course seems to be off to a good start.  I scared away a few students who admitted to themselves that this class wasn't for them, which means the total registration now stands at fourteen: excellent size for seminar-style discussions!  I rather suspect that almost none of my students will do the reading for the next session, even though I went to some lengths to point out that this stuff is heavy-duty.  (That was one of the scare tactics.)  I've accepted that most students need to feel some heat under their asses to start studying for real, so they will likely find out this week what it feels like to sit in dead silence, waiting for someone who actually read the piece to say something.  Like I told 'em, I can outwait them.  And if that doesn't tell them to study, the quiz they'll have to take this week should drive home the message.
• I'm getting a little detached and less emotionally invested in the success of my students in Introduction to Pseudology.  This makes me happier.  Most students in that class take it to knock off a distribution requirement, and they don't really give a fuck.  I'm going to teach those classes, do them well, and not lose sleep about how they do.  I've made the syllabus easier than last time, and the tests are fucking jokes, so I rest easy in the knowledge that passing the course will be pretty easy.  Those who want to learn something for real will do so, and the rest should be able to slide by with little trouble.  I've made my peace with that.
• I was planning to forego conferences for this year, since I was so wrung out (and broke!) from last fall's double-header.  But this morning, I got an email from a senior colleague inviting me to join hir panel, which zi and another colleague are organizing.  Both of them are heavy-hitters who have written crackerjack books that I have not only read but studied closely.  And the theme of the panel is on one of the big theoretical topics I've set myself to develop from my field research!  After catching my breath at the thought of how much money I'll have to spend to go to this year's Big Giant Pseudology Conference, I admitted to myself that I'd be a damn fool to pass up this invitation.  I'm psyched at the thought that I might get to sit on an invited panel alongside scholars I admire, and pleased (albeit a little scared) that this means that I must attack this paper with a lot more theoretical rigor than I devoted to the one I gave last year.  
• Speaking of research as well as life during wartime, today is one year and a day after I began one of the strangest, scariest adventures of my life.  But an adventure it remained, for me, and led to some fondly remembered times with some old friends and some new friends — Shedding Khawatir and her husband foremost among the latter.  The whole business, as vexing as it can be to analyze professionally as a pseudologist, is going to shape my career for years to come.  Now that I listen to the song I keep name-checking, I'm a little stunned to recognize some lines as things that have actually happened to me.  The sound of gunfire off in the distance, I'm getting used to it now.  I've got some groceries, some peanut butter, should last a couple of days.  Trouble in transit, got through the roadblock, we blended in with the crowd.  I hope I make the best of all this.  I hope my friends back in Research Country do, too.  Al-sawra mustamirra, y'all.

This ain't no party; this ain't no disco; this ain't no foolin' around.  The war is on.

RBOC: Spring 2012 semester edition

• It's been an emotional rollercoaster for me this week, just like the rest of January.  I'm increasingly convinced that Ghosttown, for a variety of reasons, is actually bad for my mental health.  It is therefore uncomfortable to speculate on the possibility that my only hope of employment for next year may be begging to have my current contract renewed for another year.  Sick irony, anyone?
• My therapist seems to have zeroed in on my emotional distress as rooted in guilt, shame, and self-loathing.  I find myself agreeing with this and, at the same time, wondering, Are there survivors of graduate school who don't fit this profile?
•  The semester kicking off doesn't do much good for my emotional stability, since there's the inescapable fear that I will somehow screw everything up and scar my students.  I'm calming down from that one, as the classes start to knock themselves into shape.  The add/drop period makes everything so chaotic that I have totally abandoned teaching actual material for the first week, since so many people register late.  I feel good about this choice, now that I've tried playing it both ways.  This is definitely the more efficient way to go.  The students may be bored the first few days, just going over the syllabus, policies, study skills, etc.  But hell, it's not like students won't be bored anyway.
• Even faster than last semester, students are dropping my courses (or the idea of them) after getting a look at the requisite work.  Effort appears to frighten them intensely.  I feel I chose wisely this time around by forcing the students to go through the entire syllabus with me so I can explain to them what college professors mean when we say things like "read" or "take notes."  No one seems to arrive at Ghosttown U. with any study skills worth a goddamn, and I figured that out too late to really address it properly last semester.  Now that I'm walking them through the processes en masse, and am forcing them to confront the reality that they will have to read for nearly every single class session, a few more of them seem to be jumping ship during the first week.  
• My favorite example of this so far: a senior came by my office today after class, apologetically explained that zi had just registered a few minutes before, and wanted to know what zi might have missed the first few days.  Zi seemed on the ball, well aware of how college operates, and I was fine letting hir know where we'd be picking up.  I printed out a syllabus and the little sheet I concocted this morning about reading and note-taking skills and gave them to the student, who seemed almost insulted by the thought that zi would have to read such elementary instructions.  I practically apologized as I gently urged Stu to read them through to understand my policies, even though I was sure zi knew all of this stuff already, and explained that these things were intended primarily for my first-year students.  Before the work day ended, Stu had already dropped the course.  I believe zi was on my roster for approximately two hours.
• Not that this is brag-worthy, but I have managed to write bits of my book manuscript more days than not, so far this week.  This evening, I was puzzling over which chapters to focus on preparing for my potential book editor's review, and I suddenly realized, while fiddling the wording of a footnote, that Microsoft Word doesn't include footnotes in the word count.  (Is this a Mac thing?)  I can't for the life of me find whatever widget in Word would change this scenario.  But anyway, I created a separate document and copied all of my footnotes from all my chapters into the body text, so I could see the count.  It expanded my manuscript word count by nearly 3,000 words!  Celebrate!

Tornado?

I am sitting anxiously at my desk right now, during the first serious tornado watch of my life.  We had these things occasionally in DOU-Town, but they were kind of a joke: the landscape, as I was told, did not easily permit such things to form, and tornadoes were exceedingly rare. 

Apparently, that is not quite the case here in Ghosttown. 

I have vast experience in comporting myself appropriately in, say, heavy rainstorms, snowstorms, ice storms, sandstorms, hurricanes, cold snaps, and heat waves.  Been there, done all that.  I do not fear them very much.  (Even though ice storms are a godawful pain in the ass to cope with afterward.)  But I'm afraid of tornadoes.  *whimper*

We're only half an hour into the "peak severe timing" for this tornado watch, and the weather service, which I am now checking obsessively online while I am still blessed to have internet access, says there are already tornado warning sirens going off in half a dozen towns and cities not so very far away from Ghosttown.  There have been periods of intense rainfall tonight, and some high winds.  I've been through all of that many times before, and wouldn't really think much of it if I didn't know the larger forecast.  The peak severe timing – what does that mean, anyway, 'be even more afraid right now'? – isn't due to end for another four and a half hours.  Seriously, until 3AM!  How the fuck am I supposed to get a decent night's rest when I may have to somehow rouse myself to stand in my bathroom as Dorothy's express commuter service rips my house off its foundation?

Needless to say, this is not how I hoped to unwind on the evening before my first day of classes.  It's entirely possible that both professor and students will be frazzled and underslept tomorrow in my classrooms. 

I guess I'll have a shot of whiskey to calm my nerves, and then prepare for bed, where I will sleep with my iPhone by my ear, in case Ghosttown U.'s alert system sends out a "take shelter immediately" warning.

*whimper*