Restlessness
A blink and a long week later, I find myself on the verge of another Monday morning, locked, on a headache of a Sunday night where the time lags and there is little else to do. Restless about sums it up - pushing past the point of sleep deprivation all week and then finding a calm to it, finding a way to get by and even prefer short naps to long sleeps, and even finding a perverse satisfaction in tweaking by on a steady diet of work and morning coffee. Now it's another Sunday, it's sticky humid, my skin is red and itches from an imaginary rash, and I can't help but be annoyed at how often other people seem to overestimate the dryer's strength, leaving me a heap of soggy clothes by the time I bring down my laundry and run out of clean socks. So much is restlessness now. My hair is more blackish roots than not and needs to be dyed again, something about that, bizarrely, always makes me feel exhausted. There aren't enough minutes in the day and there aren't enough days left.
Now that it's behind me, I think that this crazy finals-frenzy of a week was an intense closure to this summer. There is a kind of camaraderie that grows around and between being prisonnerred together with other people. So in a single a week where I managed to work close to 80hrs I went from being somewhat disconnected to this job and this experience as to being wrought with guilt about quitting my job. I feel more guilt than I should, but I couldn't help but feel like I was abandoning something. Granted, I've left other jobs knowing that I'd learned something unforgettable (either about myself or a tangible skill) or had some kind of transformative experience (leaving college...) and I hardly think that one more job on my W2 is going to qualify as somehow this pivotal important life experience, and forgive me for being melodramatic, but I think this week forced me to let down some of my reservations or hesitations or elitism and enjoy this experience for what it is. In that sense, I actually liked being flung back into a longer than the usual work week that diligently obeys the 9-to-5 boundaries. But it was nice to form fast friendships, eat lunch with different people, and even get up early in the morning and work on decisive projects. In all of this, I was reminded of my shockingly control freak tendencies and this is all probably a sign that I couldn't stand working at a job where I have so little responsibility or influence much longer than I already have.
Anyway, this whole remodel is behind me (and I am buying a minidisc player to celebrate and treat myself) and I can cross off another week on my calendar. Moving still feels distant and I haven't really had the time, energy, or gumption to mold myself into a better-prepared student or teacher. I've been reading a UChicago Press book of shortcuts for first-time college teachers. Reading this book makes me truly appreciate my instruction at Middlebury because almost every suggestion in the book appeared in my collection of classes or in different teaching styles. Teaching is a craft and I am itimidated (maybe overly so) by the premise of the first day, especially the introductions and expectations speech. I think nothing bothered me more in college than professors who reportedly valued one thing and then graded giving preference to another, or professors who were inconsistent and unclear. Knowing how much that bothered me, it is one of the things I would like to most avoid, but there is a lot to balance simultaneously, it is still a very new thing for me. First impressions are important to me too and right now I feel like too much is completely up in the air. The public speaking textbook should arrive this week and once I have that, I think I'll feel relieved, at least I'll know the nature of what I am teaching and then can worry about the teaching part.
Tonight, to pass the time and wind down from this whirl of a week, I've been reading
Afterglow, Francis Davis's conversational interview with Pauline Kael. I am enjoying it and at times, it touches on the kinds of conversations I've had with my grandmother lately. Granted my mother can't go off on spiels about writing controversial reviews for
The New Yorker, or "the magazine" as its known to insiders, but there is a lot that can be taken from older people reflecting on their lives and experiences, especially if you can really get them talking... right now I am putting a high value on conversation. This week I felt like I was talking up a storm, asking lots of questions, and breaking ground with essential strangers. I've felt conversationally confident and get wrapped up in meaningful tangents with customers or coworkers. Instead of writing introspectively this week, I've turned my attention outward and found that many have been lured by my bait. I am in a good place to move to a new town and make new friends... I'd like to finish this slim book before bed. Since tomorrow is my first day after a long week and will be the only day off for what I guess will be the next seven days, I have high expectations of what I'd like to get done.
posted by lmjasinski at 12:27 AM
