I have felt on the edge of something for a few weeks now. In strange moments of delirious tedium I find myself lurking at the back of the computer lab, doing deep knee bends while I watch my students pound on the keyboards. Maybe it's just a cold, but I suspect it is another bout of chronic malcontentedness, urping up from my depths like the cold roasted beets I had for lunch. I now associate inching through the term with inching through my concept paper. Interminable, endless monotony. I generally walk around wanting to scream. It's beyond malcontentedness now and into the spontaneously combustible zone. Don't get too close, you wouldn't want this to get on you when it blows.
Har har. Just kidding. I think. TGIF. I've spent the day blearily replacing my too-ancient (2006-2008) sources with shiny new ones, making sure all my sources are squeaky-clean (peer-reviewed), updating my annotated bibliography, and generally polishing this half-assed excuse for an academic paper to the bone, hoping it will finally pass muster. I've got two weeks.Now I'm taking a break from the monotony to step back and engage in a well known teaching ritual, namely reflection. Look at me go, look at me reflect. It's not my normal state, self-introspection. Usually I don't like being that close to myself. I guess I fear I'll catch my own cooties if I peek around inside my brain too much. And I might rile up the evil dwarves that lurk in my mental caverns, who will then poke me with pick-axes, thereby reminding me of the excruciating painfulness of being alive. Poor me, I'm alive.
I am old friends with this feeling of frustration. This is nothing new. Every job I've ever had imploded because of this feeling. After nine years at the career college, I thought I'd escaped the meltdown, but it seems to have caught up with me at last. The only difference between then and now is that I was a lot younger then. My job prospects weren't nil ten years ago. Now I'm moving into the crone stage—you know, where my skin gets all thin and papery, and I can see the veins in my hands under the brown spots. Even more than the physical decrepitude is the mental yawning, the utter disinterest in pursuing anyone's dream but my own. The sure sense of entitlement that says, I'm old, I've earned it, so back the F off. Yep. Crone. And so what, you ask? Let me translate: One word: Unemployable.
I'm balancing on a sharp edge. If I slip, I die. Slipping looks like not finishing this degree. Slipping looks like being fired from my job. Slipping looks like living in my parents' basement—except dad is gone and mom doesn't have a basement anymore, so slipping looks like living in my car, which will be really hard because it is an old Ford Focus hatchback. Slipping is unacceptable. I can't slip. But if I do, what then? Freefall? Or freedom? Hmm.
