There are few sensations more ominous than the sore throat, and particularly the throat that is sore in that peculiar spot where it meets the soft palate.  This is never a portent of good, in my experience, and nearly always means that I’m coming down with a cold.

The sore throat started Wednesday night, but I had premonitions of it on Tuesday, when I spent seven hours conducting interviews in a miserable hotel meeting room, a room too ugly to be used for overnight guests, with horrid gold wallpaper, prints clearly purchased from what a friend of mine used to refer to as an art-by-the-pound sale, and an ancient air conditioning unit, without which the room was stuffy, but with which the room seemed full of mold spores.  Not, as you might guess, an ideal tradeoff.  Every time the a/c would come on, I’d feel my sinuses begin to close, and the glands near the base of my jaw begin to tighten, and I just sensed that things were not going to improve from there.

Somehow, though, miraculously, I survived the interviews and the three-hour meeting that followed, and then my night class after that.  And the next day, perhaps just punchy with exhaustion, perhaps relieved that the interviewing was at last done, I was in a fabulous mood, had two pretty good classes, attended a wonderful poetry reading, and rolled on into my dinner meeting ready to do business.

And about halfway through the meeting, the sore throat kicked in.

I went home that night, took some zinc and drank some herbal tea, and actually felt somewhat better, if not great, yesterday morning.  And so I let my guard down, thought that I’d managed to fend it off, and failed to continue with the zinc as I should have.

The sore throat is back.  And I’m exhausted and achy.  And on the one hand, I want to say “thank goodness it’s the weekend!” But on the other hand, damnit, it’s the weekend!  I have a three-inch thick stack of grading to do this weekend, plus a book that must be read; I can’t lose my focus to snot right now.

Incidentally, it has not gone without notice that in the new post categorizing scheme I’ve concocted, “general whining” is out to a significant lead.

As I’ve mentioned before, as of December 17, I’m outta here.  Between now and then, however, there remain:

• Five weeks and three days.
• Ten teaching days.
• Seventeen class sessions.
• Four sessions of office hours.
• Five committee meetings.
• Five meetings with a program administrator.
• Four department dinners.
• One set of Ph.D. orals.
• One faculty forum.
• One faculty meeting.
• One graduate student conference.
• Two teaching workshops.
• Three curriculum revision meetings.

And what is for me the kicker:

• Eleven job candidate campus visits.

I only wish I were kidding.

Oh, yeah—and there’s going to be some grading up in there somewhere, of things including:

• Sixteen final drafts of shorter papers.
• Sixteen final paper proposals.
• Twenty-five rough drafts of final projects.
• Sixteen rough drafts of graduate term papers.
• Sixteen final papers.
• Twenty-five final projects.
• Sixteen final graduate term papers.
• One senior thesis draft.
• Two final senior theses.

It would be bad enough even if I weren’t sure that there are things that will be added to the list as time goes on.

The other day, I was unloading a 12-pack of diet Coke cans into my refrigerator, and about halfway through the package pulled out one that felt… wrong.  I couldn’t have told you why at first; something about it just wasn’t right.  I froze, can in hand, hand halfway to the refrigerator shelf, trying to figure it out.  Was the can mushy?  No.  Bulging?  No.  Dented?  No.

It was light.

Lighter than the rest, by about a third.  And if you turned it over, it made more of a sloshing noise than any other the other cans.  I assume that what’s happened is just that the can-filler failed to fully fill the can, but there’s nonetheless, if you’ll forgive the pun, something uncanny about it.  I put the light can on my countertop, and keep picking it up every time I pass by, checking to make sure that I wasn’t just mistaken, that the can is really less than full.

I’m not sure why this has me so unnerved.  It has something to do with the failure of the machinery involved, which isn’t supposed to fail.  But beyond that, there’s a nagging sense that if the machinery can fail to fill the can, it could also fail to prevent something else from getting into the can, something that shouldn’t be in the can at all.  And right behind that is the thought that perhaps my can isn’t two-thirds full, but fully full, just with Something Else.

So part of me is wondering if I’ll ever work up the nerve to open the can and find out.  And part of me just doesn’t want to know, thanks.

Grrrr.

Planned mileage for week: 14

Actual mileage for week: 9

Planned number of run days: 4

Actual number of run days: 3

Long run for week: 3

Aches, pains, complaints: No aches or pains.  Just complaints.  I managed to get myself out of bed the first morning of my conference in plenty of time to go run before the first interview, and so was all kinds of proud of myself.  But two late nights followed that, one when I just couldn’t get to sleep, and one when I stayed up until all hours of the morning talking with a former student, and neither morning was I able to countenance the long run.  And this week is already off to a bad start.  Here’s hoping posting this snaps me out of this missed-run streak.  Because the running has felt fabulous, and has definitely been an attitude improver.  Which is to say that my attitude has gone from so abysmally bad that I’m ready to pick fights in the hallway to just so bad that I’m ready to gripe at the drop of a hat. 

I’ve had several conversations with folks over the course of the week, conversations that were mostly about my stress level and general bad attitude, that resulted in my confessing my dread of the conference trip I’m taking this weekend.  I’m going to the conference to do interviews, and not for either of my primary programs, but for a tertiary program that I’ve been somewhat loosely affiliated with for several years but that has come in the last two-plus years to take up increasing amounts of my mental and calendrical energy with astonishingly little in the way of payoff.

The one part of this trip that I’ve really been looking forward to is, perversely, the travel itself—the airports and airplanes and hotel.  Each time I told someone this, this week, I’d get that slightly squinty “that’s weird but I’m too polite to say so” look, so I’d trot out my usual aphorisms about how well I work on airplanes.  Which only resulted in more strange looks.

Oh, but I do:  I work like a fiend on airplanes.  I’m in mid-journey right now (yes, IAH; yes, President’s Club) and on my first flight I was able to crank through commenting on an entire batch of student papers.  Granted, the papers were pretty brief, but they’re done.  And the reason why is so simple it’s almost embarrassing:  no distractions.  The movie, as usual, was not worth watching; more importantly, though, there was no phone or internet access.  No one could contact me to ask me a question or, god forbid, to do something.  I was stuck in my seat in that little metal cigar tube, miles above the earth, surrounded by strangers, with nothing but that stack of papers on my lap to distract me.  I cranked up the iPod, got out a pen, and just got to work, totally focused and clear-headed.

A colleague of mine told me yesterday about the amazing work she accomplished while yo-yoing, Benny Profane-style, through the Bay Area’s train system; an inexpensive day pass would result in real increases in productivity.  Alas, plane tickets are too expensive for such yo-yoing, but the effect, when I get to travel like this, remains—something that will always make me look forward to the trip, if not necessarily the destination.

Do you ever have fantasies about running away?  About shelving this whole academic (or corporate, or whatever) life, maybe moving to some other city, and just doing something different?

I do.  Not so often that I think they should be taken terribly seriously, and nearly always coinciding with some big pile of grading that needs to be gotten through.  But I do fantasize from time to time about chucking this whole grind and going back to bartending.

I tended bar at a restaurant on Bourbon Street for a little less than a year, just after the job in Hollywood that ought to have been great but wasn’t, and just before going back to grad school.  Undoubtedly I’m romanticizing this job in undue ways:  I’ll stipulate right here that it was without question the dirtiest job I’ve had (yes, if that’s the case I’ve been quite lucky, but I stayed pretty permanently sticky, those months), that it came with tremendous amounts of drudgery (not least among which cutting fruit for garnishes every time I opened and polishing that damned brass bar top every time I closed), that it paid terribly (tips generally suck at bars in restaurants, because everybody wants to transfer their tabs to their tables, so that the waitrons wind up with the real benefits), that it resulted in way more hangovers than one girl should have (NOLA service staffs are notoriously hard-partying), and that it was probably only tolerable because I was fairly certain, as I waited for the results to come back from my grad school apps, that I had an out date, that I would not be spending the rest of my life in the service sector (or that branch of it, at least).

But nonetheless.  I think a little more frequently than perhaps I ought to about what it would be like to walk away from the academy and to head back behind the bar.  There would be many fewer meetings.  Work at the bar would be confined to the bar, without the need to continue working at home.  Days off would actually be—and this seems pretty incomprehensible at the moment—days OFF, and would be unaccompanied by guilt about the work I ought to have been doing.  I would make the drinks.  I would hand out the drinks.  I would not need to make the patrons prove that they’d drunk the drinks, or to test them on their own drink-making abilities.

Sure, all those downsides to my previous bartending experience remain, along with the too-frequent need to deal with obnoxious drunks and the other insults and injuries of the service industry.  But during periods like the one I’m in right now, with more work to do than can conceivably be done in the hours available, with more pointless meetings taking up more and more of my time, having the fantasy available—knowing that, if I really need to, I could totally blow this joint and do Something Else—helps.

That and knowing that, as of December 17, I’m on sabbatical.

So what are your escape fantasies?  What gets you through?