Massive muscle spasm, just left of my right shoulderblade, as I was sitting here writing an email message. Can no longer raise my head. Have cleared my schedule until 4 this afternoon, so muscle relaxers are imminent. But infuriating: today is one of my too-few thinking days, and it kills me to have it so disrupted…
Sunday, I think it was, R. and I were driving back into my neighborhood, and he was asking how my finances were. I’ve been what my mother refers to as “condo poor” all year, working pretty hard paycheck to paycheck to keep the mortgage and other associated costs of the new place, all of which (being SoCal) are really more than I can afford, under control. I told him that things were beginning to level out, as they are, and that given the usual rate of salary increases, I should be fairly comfortable in a couple of years.
That is, I said, unless something goes wrong with my car. Nothing can go wrong with my car for three years.
Monday, my car got hit in a parking lot, and the culprit drove off.
Yesterday, R. and I were out running errands, and stopped by my office building so I could pick some things up. We were inside for perhaps ten minutes. We walked back out to the car, climbed in, and buckled up. And when I turned the key: nothing. No whirring attempts at starting. No radio. No power windows or locks. Nada.
It was so beautiful that I almost started laughing: of course I got hit. Of course the car wouldn’t start. Of course.
All things considered, fate was pretty easy on me: it turned out only to be a dead-as-a-doornail battery. We got a jump, drove to my dealer, and they tested the electrical systems and replaced the battery for a mere $130. And even washed the car as a bonus.
And yesterday afternoon I got word from the Claremont PD that they have indeed tracked down the kid who hit me, and they gave me his insurance info. So I should be able to get those repairs made without damage to my insurance rates. (Oh, and when I say “kid”: did you know that people born in 1989 are driving now???)
But let this be a lesson to me: no more tempting fate by getting comfortable, much less announcing that comfort out loud. Henceforth, there will be only a guarded watchfulness.
And, today, gratitude that this is for the moment the worst of what I’m dealing with.
R. and I had gone out to have lunch at a place near my office; I’d walked and met him there, but he’d driven since he was planning on running errands after lunch. Both of us were already grouchy, as things just weren’t going terribly well for either of us, but we had a good lunch, and afterward he offered to drive me back to the office. Being fundamentally lazy, and in southern California, I naturally said yes.
As we walked back into the parking lot, a big black SUV was pulling slowly through the lot, slowly enough that we had to stop and wait for it to go by. That’s not the weird part. The weird part is that there was a guy jogging alongside the SUV, a guy who clearly knew the driver, who was trying to open the passenger door and saying, “Dude, you have to let me in.” The driver was having none of it, apparently, and just kept creeping on out of the parking lot. R. and I watched this spectacle go by and looked at each other. “I wonder what that was about,” R. said.
We walked on back to where R. had parked my car, and as we were about to climb in, an older gentleman parked a little ways away came toward us and asked if that—the car we were climbing into—was our car. I said yes, increasingly perplexed.
“Was that dent in your fender there before now?”
Um, no. No, it wasn’t. And it wasn’t so much a dent as a gash. The guy told us that he and his wife had seen that SUV—the one that just pulled out of the parking lot and was now gone—hit my car and then drive away without leaving a note.
Why, however, yesterday wasn’t as bad a day as it could have been:
Because the man and his wife had taken down the license plate number of the SUV, along with its make and model, and gave us their names and phone number besides, in case they needed to serve as witnesses. Because the Claremont PD, apparently having nothing else to do yesterday, showed up within three minutes of R. calling them. Because the license plate number that the couple had taken down checked out, and because when the police showed up at the driver’s door, he apparently fessed up and gave up his insurance info.
That said, yesterday was still on balance a Bad Day. Here’s hoping that today improves. I’ve still got to follow up on the requisite paperwork and legwork necessary to get the car repaired. And I’ve got several thoughts about CMSs, electronic publishing, scholarly blogs, and the like that I’d rather be thinking (and writing) about instead.
[UPDATE, 11.13 am: Turns out that the actual resolution of the police-and-driver part of this story was a bit premature; we got a message late yesterday that made it sound like it was from the driver’s insurance company, following through on the incident, when in fact it turned out to be from a division of my insurance company, following through on the claim I set in motion yesterday afternoon. As I told them, I’m holding off on doing anything further until I hear more from the police, because I’d really much prefer it if the driver’s insurance rates went up instead of my own. Grrrr.]
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:
And what is for me the kicker:
I only wish I were kidding.
Oh, yeah—and there’s going to be some grading up in there somewhere, of things including:
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.
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?
Tired, headachy, IAH, wi-fi, blah blah blah. You know the drill.
More when I get where I’m going, and when my brain catches up with me.
A junior colleague of mine, not long ago, reported being asked by some senior faculty members how she had managed to participate in a faculty seminar last year. “What did you have to give up in order to do that?” they asked, not so much incredulously as dubiously, expecting to hear that her research had stalled out or that she had taught unprepared.
“Laundry,” she told them. “I gave up doing laundry.”
Another panicky weekend with three times as much to get done as can conceivably be crammed into the days. The bad news is that once again I’ll be beginning Monday way more unprepared for the week than I want to be.
The good news is that there’s a far lower chance of abject humiliation to follow from that unpreparedness.
On which subject, the lecture went well. I’m hoping to continue working on the paper in the coming weeks, and will probably post more about it soon.
When I get some of this other work out from in front of me, that is.
Things that have been accomplished:
– Writing the first draft of a position planning document.
– Catching up on reading and commenting on a backlog of student writing.
– Re-reading the volume of poems for one of tomorrow’s classes.
– Washing, drying, and folding nearly a month’s worth of laundry.
– Responding to a big pile of email, and initiating another big pile.
– Beginning the review of the copyedited manuscript of my soon-to-be book.
– Making a big pot of something I can bear to eat multiple times over the course of the rest of the week.
Things that have not yet been accomplished:
– Re-reading the essays assigned for tomorrow’s other class.
– Re-reading the essays assigned for Tuesday’s class.
– Reading anything at all assigned for Wednesday’s classes.
– Finishing the review of the copyedited mansuscript.
– Writing the lecture I’m giving at the end of the month.
– Writing the big strategic planning proposal I’ve been asked for.
– Revising and submitting the position planning document.
– Drafting the next stage of the curriculum revision document.
– Copyediting material for my volunteer gig.
– Grocery shopping.
– Exercising.
– Breathing calmly and evenly like a person convinced she’s got enough hours in the day to accomplish all she needs.
