During the time that R. was in Washington—the most recent time, that is, the last ten months he spent on active duty there—we had a running gag over the phone and via email in which I would tell him, among other things, that “those kitties is too sad if you don’t come home.” You have to hear that said in an appropriately goofy, within-a-couple-only voice, the kind that’s endlessly amusing to the couple involved, but that’s utterly unfunny, and in fact pretty embarrassing, when used with anyone outside the pair.  The upshot of the gag was, basically, don’t come home on my account—I would never be so selfish as to ask you to do something like that—but the cats really need you here.

The funny thing about it now is that I thought I was kidding.  I was miserable with R. gone, that I knew.  But the cats—well, the cats were traumatized for a whole variety of reasons—the move to the new condo, the new-construction smells of the new condo, the location of the new condo near the railroad tracks and the noises that produces, the intrusion into the new condo of various construction people, bringing all kinds of smells and noises in with them.  After all, they say that cats are much more place-centered than they are people-centered, and so any behavioral disruptions seemed to me to be pegged to their new home.  And behavioral disruptions there were:  little Alice has been even more skittish than usual, and super-needy, and Henry has taken on this whole alpha-male routine, hissing and swatting at anyone new who comes in, aggressively defending his territory from all intruders.

It had gotten to a pretty upsetting point of late; I took the cats to the vet for check-ups and dental work, and the veterinary assistant was ashen when she returned them to me, saying that the two of them had had a “bit of a tiff” when she put them back in the carrier, and that Henry had been “a little mean” to most of the people in the office.  Despairing a bit, I asked her advice, and she steered me toward some kitty pheromones that might help soothe any anxiety he was feeling, as that anxiety might be the root of the aggression.  I said I’d give it a shot.

Less than 24 hours later, R. came home.  In the car on the way from the airport, I told him about the vet, and about Henry’s anxiousness and aggression, basically trying to prepare him in case he was on the receiving end of this behavior.  The two of them had had several go-rounds when R. first moved in, and it took weeks of R. being the sole provider of food and treats for Henry to begin to figure out which side his bread was buttered on.

We walked in the door, however, and Henry walked slowly up to R.—not the speedy, nervous, checking-out of the intruder I’ve seen for the last several months—and when R. bent down and offered Henry his hand, he sniffed it in a friendly fashion.  Within an hour, R. was petting Henry, and their relationship was right back where it had been back in October.  Most amazingly, two of my former students came over yesterday, and while Henry was a little nervous with them around, he was very well-behaved, on the whole.  And Alice—Alice is always sweet, but she’s often been frantic with a need to be petted over the last several months.  For the last several days, she’s been calm, too.

It could well be the kitty pheromones.  But I’m pretty convinced that it’s R., that those kitties really were too sad if he didn’t come home.

Which is to say nothing of me.  Everything’s been positively rosy and glowing in Claremont since his return.  And we’re heading to Hawaii tomorrow morning, so the forecast for the next ten days looks great.

A couple of days ago, I received first an email message and then a phone call from an L.A. Times reporter doing a story on the white women in peril phenomenon.  We had a longish and interesting conversation, of which one small snippet appeared in today’s paper.  The article’s not bad, I think, and I think I managed not to embarrass myself.  But I’m left, as always, thinking “but that’s not the most interesting thing I said,” and “I’m not quite sure I put it exactly like that.”

But whatever.  The good news is that being quoted in this article has netted me email messages from one old friend, of whom I’d completely lost track, one slightly less old friend, from whom I haven’t heard in a long time, and one conference acquaintance.  I’ve been quoted before, but this seems to be the first time people actually noticed.

So I managed to knock two major items off the mile-long to-do list, and it’s an accomplishment in no small part because (1) these were the two things that I most dreaded doing, and (2) they were the most pressing things on the list.  (1) + (2) = major guilt paralysis; my inability (or perhaps lack of desire, or flat-out refusal) to complete these two tasks prevented me from moving on to anything else on the list, because I knew that what I really ought to be working on were these two things, and if I wasn’t doing that…

But:  paralysis overcome.  Mood improving, at least slightly.  I still find myself pretty cheesed-off, however, at the fact that only productivity can make me feel any better.  I mean, for god’s sake, I’m Catholic; how did I get saddled with such a heaping helping of the Protestant work ethic?

And this brings me back to a chicken-or-egg conversation that my pal Tim and I had this weekend:  are people with quality x (in this case, an over-developed work ethic and a sense of self much too bound up in accomplishment) drawn to the profession, or is that quality something that is produced in them by the profession?  I suspect it’s a little of both:  something in my goal-oriented nature drew me into grad school, and then that part of me got fed by the culture I found there.  The end result is a severely stunted ability to be happy unless I feel like I’m accomplishing something.

All this is part of my annual (or perhaps semi-annual; I’d have to check the archives to be sure, and frankly, I don’t really want to know how frequently this has come up) grousing about how tired I am of being unable to enjoy my life apart from my work.  This is something I clearly need to work on, though, because while work can sustain me when it’s going well, I need another form of sustenance during the periods when it’s just not, when I just feel like chucking it all and running off to Tahiti…

I was about to open by asking whether there was a physical equivalent to depression, because that’s what I think I’ve got.  And of course there is:  it’s called depression.  Duh.

I don’t want to overstate my current situation; things are just not all that bad.  I’m enjoying being still, enjoying being lazy.  I’m just monumentally unmotivated to do any of the dozens of tasks on my to-do list.  I recognize that if I don’t do them, I’m going to be setting myself up for a period of total panic before the semester begins.  Even so, I just can’t be bothered.  I need to write memos.  I need to write reports.  I need to write proposals.  I need to read things for my fall classes.  I need to finish compiling statistics.  But I just plain don’t want to.

There are other things I want to do—want to continue tinkering with new hardware and software; want to begin sketching out the new project in earnest; want to keep learning the things I’ve begun learning this summer—but the need to deal with the above administrative stuff is interfering.  It’s impossible to think clearly about the new project, for instance, when I know that I’ve got those memos that need to get written.

So what have I been doing?  As I mentioned last night, some chunk of the weekend was spent in getting caught up on Six Feet Under.  I missed an episode while I was in Rome, and another in a fit of exhaustion after getting back.  Through the miracle of the internets, I was able to see them both yesterday, and then last night’s episode.  And, in case you haven’t seen it yet, I’ll say nothing particular—except that, nine episodes into what has otherwise been a pretty whiny, uninspired season, they’ve finally gotten my attention.  And how.

And aside from that, I spent much of the weekend rereading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.  I picked up Half-Blood Prince in the Houston airport on my way back into the country, but when I started it, I realized that I hadn’t a clue where we’d left off.  So some backtracking, and now I’m ready to move forward again.

There’s a theme there, I think:  the need to catch up before moving on.  There are two things in it, though, that leave me feeling like a lazy, ineffectual slug, a feeling that does little to help motivate me to get more done.  The first, of course, is that both HP and SFU are one-hundred percent, entirely about entertainment.  Despite the fact that each, to varying extents, falls within the boundaries of my field, I know full well that I’ll never do anything productive with either of them.  So I can’t even rationalize all this lying around as being even vaguely work-related.  (And that need—to justify doing something for fun—annoys me quite intensely, so much so that the deep irritation I’ve been feeling toward the profession and its policing strategies completely—if, gods willing, temporarily—overcomes my desire to succeed in it.)

And second, the mere fact of such backtracking leaves me feeling like I’m running in place, stuck on my little wheel, huffing and puffing and getting nowhere.  There’s something a little too revealingly metaphoric about it:  having finished the book, having gotten tenure, having run the marathon, having accomplished what goals I’ve had before me, I’m still pounding on, but aimlessly, directionlessly.  Until something, somewhere, simply refuses to go forward any more.