Soaking and sulking
You know, people wonder where I get my idea of a spiteful god. But when I've spent the entire day watching the rain suddenly pour every time I step out of the building, only to taper off as soon as I get back inside, I can but point to empirical evidence.

I'm immersed now in a project that really doesn't excite me: I am agitated,  yes, because I am writing what amounts to a radical manifesto about the irreparable dysfunction of "the university" as we know it, and proposing a sketch of a premise for replacing it. It's hard not to be passionate about how capitalism has ruined education when you've been at the front of the room in public secondary and college education. At the same time, it's disheartening, because I'm writing for a teacher who, for all he has introduced us to these departures in theory and pedagogy, is himself a traditionalist in theory and pedagogy: in short, there's fear I'm going to fail my first core class because I'm being too radical. (I hate to keep using the word, but it's the best one for the task.)

What I'd really like to do is my scholarly annotation of The Sandman, or a reexamination of Shakespeare's sonnet sequence, or something like that. Perhaps there will be opportunities for that, but now things are more complicated. I have so much more to worry about that I'd never seen before. I now have to wonder why the hell I thought I was going to be able to get a job in this broken educational system, and what I thought I would be allowed to do with it if I did get it. It is so remarkably rare to even get a job that allows a reasonable modicum of academic freedom that I have to wonder what Kool-Aid I drank along the line that led me to construct my mental image of my future.

And now I can't because the damn snake made me eat from the tree. (It really is kinda like that - now knowing what I know about the profession, I can't unknow it and go back to putting my head in the sand of a narrow literary specialty and hope to find a comfortable niche in which to spend my career.)

Also, I have had to reset my "X months since my last coffee date that wasn't a date" counter. I do seem to be doing a good job of not getting my hopes up unnecessarily. I'm beginning to wonder something, though... (And this, I admit up front, is going to sound really bizarre and just the sort of thing my hypercaffeinated overworked under-rested brain has cooked up): one of my ex-es (whom I will not name, but those familiar will probably be able to figure it out) claimed that, shortly before I met her, she had 'cast a spell' or something (I forget the actual wording) to bring her a boyfriend. And, voila, I showed up and swept her off her feet. Now, the bad ending to that particular affair leads me to wonder if she might not have turned around and thrown a 'curse' at me or something. It's absurd, but as Rose Walker says in Brief Lives, "I'm not talking about magic. I'm talking about weird shit." And I always did find it weird that her unicorn-glitter-witches-for-dummies stuff seemed to work more often than not. Because if she's hexed me so I haven't had so much as a good date in the past four years, what do I even do about that? Call a Jesuit? Cash in my karma? Ghostbusters?

Feh. I have enough to worry about just this week: one of the retiring faculty is having all the doctoral students over (and just seeing who shows up will be entertainment enough to warrant going), and it's the last week of the first term. Hence my frazzled state: on top of this final paper that isn't going as well as I want, I have a big exam to study for.

Oh, and I read (yesterday?) that I don't have dysthymia. Or, rather, I do - my condition hasn't changed, but the name has been reassigned. Dysthymia is now being used to long-term but mild depression with some severe spikes; what I have (severe spikes of depression in rapid succession punctuating periods of normal moods) is now being referred to as cyclothymia. [rolls eyes] Whatever. The DSM hasn't even been rewritten yet, but mental health jargon changes faster than the weather.