In the end

Yesterday afternoon I met J for a drink at a nearby pub. It seems like such a civilized thing to do as an adult person, to drink beer while the sun is still in the sky. They encourage this behaviour, you know, by selling $4 pints, which was okay by me. We each had two pints and I was still home by 5:30. J is getting married next summer and I have threatened to wrestle with his mother for the right to walk him down the aisle. I mean, this isn’t a joke. I am going to start weight training. J is one of my favourite people in the world, so much so that I am willing to fight his mother, who I also happen to think pretty highly of, apart from her insistence on being involved in her son’s wedding instead of me. 

J told me about his father-in-law (to be) dying from brain cancer. He chose to end his life using MAID and J talked about going to be there with him at the end of his life, supporting his partner through this. This story was particularly significant because J and I normally laugh together, only laugh together, because J is one of the funniest people in the whole world. And most of the time when we get together we just make each other laugh. But yesterday was different. He told me that they are talking about adoption, which is incredibly expensive if you go through a private agency. And he told me about being sent out to buy potato chips because that was what his future father-in-law wanted to eat for his final meal, and wandering around the grocery store trying to decide which chips, because no one had specified. And wanting so much to get it right that he bought every kind, bags and bags and bags, so as not to disappoint.  And for some reason this was the part of the story that made me spill over. And that’s not something we have done together before either. And when we hugged goodbye in the parking lot we said I love you, and that was also new for us. I think we are both growing up. 

Whatever the cost, I will pay

The pharmacy after dark. The elderly - and safe - shoppers looking for compression socks and reading glasses have gone to bed, and the opiate addicts have awoken. A young guy with a tattoo that covers his entire neck and some of his chin ignores the line and drops into the chair you take when you are invited to consult with the pharmacist. The pharmacist does not look at him but knows he is there. No eye contact. Gives him the methadone drink. It seems wrong that there is no privacy for this interaction- but maybe they don’t want to be alone together. I don’t know. 

I am at the pharmacy after dark because I forgot to pick up my migraine medication earlier in the day, when I meant to. Although I considered it, it’s not really a medication I should skip for a night. Doing so is likely to bring on a morning migraine, the dizzy kind. I didn’t remember I had run out until I was getting ready for bed, and annoyingly this meant getting dressed again and going out when I wanted to be in my pajamas. I didn’t bother putting on a bra. (What’s the point when you’re wearing a winter coat anyway?) The pharmacist looks me in the eye when he asks what I need. My lack of neck tattoo is working for me. 

I don’t want to be around the neck tattoo guy either. It isn’t that I do not understand what brings him here - I really really do. I lived with my sister while she was spiraling down the same pathway. I lived in the same house with her as a child, the same house that may have caused the whole trauma that made her start. I don’t know anything for certain but I am familiar with the genre. It makes me sick to my stomach. Not in an ‘I’m better than you and you disgust me’ kind of way.  More like an ‘I know you and it makes me so sad to recognize you that I can hardly breathe’ kind of way. Sometimes I think I am done with all of that heartache, and sometimes a kid with a fucking neck tattoo can make it all rise up in the back of my throat and suffocate me while I’m standing in line waiting for my bloody migraine medication when I just want to be at home in my pajamas. 

Whatever. He’s taking methadone, and that’s several steps further down the road to recovery than my sister ever attempted. So maybe I should celebrate Neck Tattoo Guy, smile at him. Give him a fist bump in front of the rack of compression socks. Or at least make some fucking  eye contact. But I don’t want to. I want to make it to the liquor store before it closes. I want to get home and get back into my pajamas, take my migraine medication, and pour a big glass full of Irony and Hypocrisy, and drink deeply. And congratulate myself on dodging another migraine, whatever the cost. 

Before you crash

Tomorrow is the first day of my holiday, and so I booked myself to fill in for C for a day, because heaven forfend that I should take a day off. I have trouble slowing down, like a downhill skier who needs some runway (is that the right word?) at the end of the race to lose the momentum that threatens to make them crash into the boundary fencing. I will ignore the nagging inner voice that asks me if I want to work five in a row because, why not be productive? I have plans, other plans.  I have a book I want to read and I have time to read something that isn’t a psychology textbook or a peer reviewed journal article written within the last seven years (because everything written prior to that is trash). I want to read a quirky little book about time travel written by a Japanese writer.  He’s not Haruki Murakami, but really, who else can even come close? We shall see. There has been a lot of buzz about this book, and if you travel in the nerdy sort of circles that I do, you’ve probably already read it and moved on to the sequel. Please don’t tell me it doesn’t live up to the hype; I don’t care.  I’m reading it anyway. 

Objective wonder

When students hand in their papers to me, they often write my name as “Dr. LastName” instead of just using my first name, as they do in class.  I feel compelled to correct this misconception; I do not own that title. I always tell them so on the first day of class. It is meant to be a point for us to bond over.  I understand how you feel, dear students, as I am also a student struggling to understand stupid APA7 and wondering why we can’t just have done with these old fashioned restrictions anyway. They don’t hear it. They keep writing Dr.; maybe it is meant to be aspirational. And maybe it works. I am one year deep into the three years, and I do not think I am going to quit.

My mother emailed their annual Christmas letter last week, a custom I loathe. It’s possible that I loathe it because she never remembers my existence when she is recounting all the wonderful things the family has been up to in the last year. But my nonexistence is also one of our special family traditions and it applies not only to the Christmas letter but also to death notices and autobiographical books in which I do not exist although I have stubbornly continued to suck up oxygen that could otherwise be used by plants or to fuel tire fires. (Or to blow your house down.) Maybe the actual reason I hate Christmas letters is that year when K sent a real Christmas letter in an envelope which exploded in a sun shower of red glitter when I opened it, and then added insult to injury by encouraging me to “vote Conservative” in the upcoming election. That was pretty revolting, but as I compare the two things, maybe my unrelenting invisibility really is the bigger problem. 

My vacation starts in a week, which feels unnecessary since everyone around me is on vacation at the same time.  If they are all on vacation there is nothing for me to do, which would make it a rather lovely time to be working. But I am still in the honeymoon phase of the new job at the university (not worth noting in the Christmas letter) and so I am not taking advantage. Maybe next year I will be more wiley about this. 

For what it’s worth I believe I have figured out why  the university hired me even though I was only in the first few months of doctoral studies (also not noted in the Christmas letter). It’s undoubtedly because of my background and recent certification (not notable) in conflict resolution. Because frankly, one of my colleagues is a pain in the ass. And it is my role to learn from her and take over her position while she moves into another department. Not fighting with her is my super power, because everyone else does.  I don’t plan to.  I don’t engage with this kind of stuff at all, not because I have any special certification but because I am not invested enough to be bothered. This is conflict resolution in action, approaching with a Buddha-like sense of detachment.  Whatever man. I’m cool. 

Joe B

 Today I was remembering spring break 2019 when we went home for the holidays and then didn’t come back into the building for several months. The counselling team members were each assigned a quarter of the staff with whom we were supposed to connect, by phone, and check in to make sure they were okay. Emotionally okay.  One of my favourite moments happened because of this.  I called dozens of colleagues and listened to all their anxieties.  It was exhausting. At the end of the list, I texted Joe before calling because I don’t like receiving (or making) cold calls.  I asked if I could call him and he said he would call me back in a half hour.  I went outside to dig in my garden.  And half an hour later, my phone rang.  He stole my line, saying Hi, it’s Joe; I just thought I’d give you a call to see if you’re okay. And I thought he was serious, and felt this warm wave of fondness for Joe and his unanticipated sensitivity in noticing that I might also be having a hard time. And before I could thank him for being so lovely he busted out laughing and said, Just kidding.  It made me laugh really hard. Joe is funny in different ways than he means to be, but I still like him.

I went in to my old work today to fill in for a counsellor for a day, and I felt like a minor celebrity, with visits all day from people who wanted to say hello. I had agreed to go to a social thing with the staff after work and when I agreed to do it, I was thinking that having worked at home for a long time I would have energy and interest in this.  But I found that by the end of the workday, I’d really had enough and couldn’t bring myself to go. I bailed, just like old times. 

Yesterday there was conflict at my new workplace, really the first conflict that I have seen since I started there 8 months ago. I do not think it is over and I am interested to see how things unfold. Because I am so new I still feel relatively uninvested in the issue that has occurred and don’t feel like I have huge stakes in how it turns out. My goal is just to be autonomous so that I can work without being distracted. 

I’d rather have a bottle in front of me (than a frontal lobotomy)

 I notice that November is difficult again. It was always October I dreaded the most but now November has grown heavier somehow. Of course it has everything to do with falling back into early darkness; we love that extra hour when we fill it with unpaid sleep debt. We love it for 23 hours until we note that it’s mid-afternoon and it feels like bedtime. November has been a month of dreams and I wonder why so many dreams, so many dreams.  Unsettled souls, mostly mine perhaps. I should like to tell my dreams to A, who is the Jungian therapist in our group. But that would be boundary crossing, and you know how excellent I am at maintaining my boundaries.

On Saturday I will be teaching all day, and I haven’t gotten comfortable with teaching adults yet.  I don’t know if I can get comfortable with it. It feels arrogant somehow, to pretend I know more than they do when we don’t know if that’s true at all.  I always anticipate students (like myself) who aren’t so sure this teacher knows anything about anything. Teaching teenagers is different, because they’re easy to predict and easy to beat to the punch(line). In a roomful of teenagers I am sharp and hilarious. With adults I am nervous.  And I don’t know if they think I’m funny or if they think I am a psychopath.  Today when I designed a template for their research paper, I wrote in the “diagnosis” section that they should describe the symptomology and treatment, but acknowledge that they (we) are not qualified to diagnose.  Or perform certain treatments, like prescribing medication.  Or performing frontal lobotomies. Or exorcisms. … and then I stopped typing and asked myself if this was at all appropriate.  And couldn’t be sure in the least, so  I left it like that. But I am wondering if someone will be offended.  Also, I wonder if students will actually read the template.  I may be modeling myself after my advisor, Dr. Jo, who is clearly nuts, and who said, “Goodbye, goodbye, have a nice life” as if we weren’t going to be seeing each other again in a week. Crazy Jo who concluded the meeting before that one by asking, “May I please be excused?”

In which we describe our sad

This is Saturday, a saturated day. I might describe my sad as heavy sad or heaving sad or heady sad. But it might be saturated sad. Or creeping sad or sad on toast. Any way you breathe it in, it comes out damp and grey and cold. Inhale.  Outhale.  (Can you breathe when I stand this close to you?) It is not necessary to make time or space for this conversation. I wonder why we do it anyway. 

So break my heart if you must (it’s a matter of trust)

Friday was a day that felt like a muddled dream, with my shoulder bag heavy with four bottles of olive oil and the shiny new DSM-V-TR still in its plastic wrapper.  I walked all along Coal Harbour wanting to stay outside even though the bag was hurting my shoulder, and at Waterfront I could not, of course, resist the guy singing Vincent outside the station.  I had to sing with him, I think, by which I mean it didn’t feel like it was optional. 

There were two women who talked to me after my presentation; both shared things that were too personal to talk to a stranger about. That kind of thing is odd, but really, it’s not just my profession, it’s my soul. It’s the way I have always moved through the world I think, wringing things out of people that they may not have meant to say. But I treasure those pieces. I do not take them for granted. Your emotional hangover is safe with me.  I will make breakfast for you and rub your temples while I ask you about your heartbreak.  I only want to know because I’m comparing it to mine, looking for a window through which I can see myself. We are all looking for ways to feel less alone. 

I hope when you think of me years down the line you can’t find one good thing to say

Jesse had some kind of kidney emergency, not full failure but some serious danger. (This is how Justin died, in connection with his diabetes. Carolyn died shortly after having to plan a funeral for the third of her three children. Can you imagine?) It strikes me as tragic that Jesse felt that he had to make some sort of public announcement clarifying that the kidney issue wasn’t brought on by street drugs nor by a suicide attempt. But these are the assumptions people make when one lives a certain kind of life and it isn’t like there’s not a cooling trail of bodies behind him, passively and actively having chosen death over suffering. Jesse is almost fifty now (fuck) and he’s still a teenager in my head. An idiot teenager who had some sort of prescription mishap that hasn’t been clearly explained and honestly, I do not want to know. Jesse is someone I love but I also find him exhausting. 

.

Twin high maintenance machines

Did you know that Jack and Meg were lying about being brother and sister? They were married. I only heard that they had lied when they got divorced. I wonder how that story was meant to serve them and whether it did. Jack and Meg aren’t important to me, but I think it’s interesting when people tell big lies that don’t have a clear rationale. When I lie it’s because I want to be less noticeable, so the lies come out like, I’m fine, nothing for me, all good, very comfortable, thank you. 

Once I accidentally lied to the night caretaker.  He came in to my office to empty my trash can at the end of the day, and started a conversation that I did not understand.  His English is probably very good but it’s fast and the accent is strong.  I felt rude asking him to repeat himself again and again and so I just agreed with whatever he was saying. It turned out he was asking me if I was going to watch the Rugby Sevens, which I absolutely was not, but he was very excited for me when I said yes yes mmhmm.  And from then on he asked me a lot of questions about my passion for rugby and I couldn’t bring myself to tell him I know nothing about rugby so I tried to learn a little so I could say something that would make sense.  He was so pleased to have these conversations that I felt like I was doing the right thing by lying. 

This wasn’t what I started out to write here.  I meant to talk about the academic writing process and my lofty goals to publish a billion nerdicles about psychobabble. Maybe later. 

on the intimate intricacy of fiction

For some reason the air conditioning in the conference was set to an Arctic temperature. All throughout the day I wrapped my thin cotton scarf around my legs, my shoulders, my legs again, trying to get warm. Wishing I could go home. J offered her closing reflection while I stared at my knees; they were mottled and blue, gooseflesh prickling under my hemline. Wearing adult clothes again, listening to adults talk about professional things and pretending to fit.

The conference ended and I slipped from the Arctic to the Sahara; the hot asphalt in the parking lot felt soft under my heels, my seatbelt buckle burned my fingertips. I was still shivering as I cranked the air conditioning on and opened all the windows. Hot air and cold air merged. It takes time to adjust. I was hot and cold at the same time. It gave me an irrational little prickle of annoyance.

I turned on the radio. I listen to CBC when I'm driving, like an adult, but not because I am an adult. Only because I cannot, can NOT bear Nira Arora. Michael Ondaatje was being interviewed. I wonder if you know he won the Blue Metropolis Grand Prix. (Why would you know this? I only know this because of CBC, I only know this because I cannot stand Nira Arora.)  

He was reading excerpts. He was answering literary questions. Eleanor Wachtel asked him about Running in the Family and I realized I could not remember what it was about. At all. By this point the air inside my vehicle had reached something I could breathe, making it possible to roll up the windows.  Making it easier to listen more to Ondaatje and less to the world outside. 

Eleanor Wachtel asked Ondaatje about The Cinnamon Peeler and he talked about why it existed and I wondered if I could remember that part of the book, because I remember loving that part. I wondered if it was still somewhere inside me. (I hoard these kinds of things inside me, buried maybe under the dusty metal wheel full of slides.)

 I did not have to try to remember it because Eleanor Wachtel asked him to read it. (This is another reason I like CBC, because it has the attention span for a long poem. If T.S. Eliot was alive, Eleanor would invite him to read all twenty stanzas of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.) 

The Cinnamon Peeler is a beautiful haunting poem. I breathed in Ondaatje’s voice. 

My GPS woman's strident voice cut in to announce that we were to follow Hastings Street and I crested that slight incline and began to descend upon East Hastings as the cinnamon peeler described me bathing under rain gutters, monsoon. 

Here on the upper thigh, (GPS says go straight for 11 kilometers) … There are 11 kilometers of road and sidewalk ahead of me swirling like a rock concert - - but they are not dancing to music. Their tents have been taken. They are just swirling... aimless, listless, homeless. (.. but we don't say homeless.) 

The cinnamon peeler helped the honey gatherers. I say it with him, this is how you touch other women. It is so hot outside. My breath is caught... as if not spoken to in the act of love. 

The zombies are staring through the windshield at me. The air inside the car is unbreathable again and I am shivering. They know I see them. They know I know them, hungry ghosts. It is not an accident to seek another route when you aren't distracted by Michael Ondaatje. 

Sometimes you end up here when you let yourself drift. Sometimes these ghosts break through the calm. My heart has lifted and crested and crashed. The GPS lady interrupts Michael Ondaatje again to tell me we are approaching the highway. (.. ... As if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.) This is how I get home.

She told me she was hollow

it pleases me that my dreams still evoke the kind of longing that feels exactly like being 23, the kind of bottomless ache that cannot be sated except for during the kiss, only for the brief moment that it lasts, the ache just recedes enough to reveal the waterlines and then the tide washes back in. it feels like drowning in a shot glass, windchime in a hurricane. it crushes the air out of my lungs gently and i am so grateful, weepingly grateful that i can still access this ache because i love the way it feels to be so caught up in the somatic, forgetting everything cerebral. my brain has matured, it is all words and paragraphs, dry and compact and scheduled order. all this predictability, i think, until a mouse scampers through it leaving tiny precious handprints, my heart abruptly swells and recedes and swells again. and i do remember what it is like to want something so much that it feels like i will die. i will die. i remember that aching loneliness, i embrace it. it has everything to do with the present moment when i can remember the taste of it, the dull echo of it, the darkness and the still. when real life is satisfying and calm i am grateful for this aching memory and this hollow dream.

Dogs love me ‘cause I’m crazy sniffable

It seems I have quit my job. Not the one where I lie on the floor and pretend to walk on the ceiling of the theatre. (I quit that one too, a long time ago.) People sometimes used to say things to me about teachers being saints, almost as often as people said things about them being assholes. Both are true, of course, at times, and sometimes the opposite. No, I quit the other job, the counselling one. I could not possibly have used up all my empathy, but I quit it anyway, this job that was so exciting and important to me for that time. And then it became a grind, the scheduling and the arguing about things that I don't believe in anyway. When you belong to these big systems you are supposed to defend the rules even when you can make no sense of them, even when you can barely follow them yourself. So I have quit that job, I really have. (I am not a person who quits jobs, although I seem to have quit two jobs that were big jobs.) There is a new job to replace the old job, a bigger job, a job where I make big decisions and hire people and tell people what to do and how. All of this seems impossible and wrong. I don't yet recognize myself in this space. Most of what matters is not different. J is older now, considering marriage and whatnot. I did not save her from the brokenness that was waiting to swallow her when she was twelve. I tried. But also, I didn't know how. I love her but nothing about love erases that kind of pain. And maybe my brand of love isn't soft enough to cushion this kind of sharpness. I have a sharpness about me too; maybe it softens over time and maybe it doesn't. Maybe I learn to let go, maybe I learn to forgive and take deep affectionate breaths right into my centre, and maybe I never learn that because I can write a good enough paper to pass the course on self-care without actually doing it. The reader can decide. I quit the job that defined me so I would have to define myself anew. This is where I find myself when it might make more sense to think about the best five years before retirement and pensions and those sorts of things. It is a luxury that I can afford not to care about this in the least and indulge myself in doctoral studies while colleagues are counting years of experience plus age equals eighty-five, no ninety, no wait. No magic numbers here. Just done and depleted and drained. My parents like to tell me that they are spending the inheritance - they also like to assure me that we will be taken care of. I never count their money; I can't keep track of my own. There have been some terrible mistakes. It reminds me of the summer in Invermere. I wonder how many times I can fuck up the same way without learning the lesson attached to it. (There is no answer to this.) There have been moments I have made other people's lives better. I have helped some people. I have sometimes been unable to see past my own story. Different things drive me now. It takes time to learn who I am in this season.

see ya

I had sort of envisioned an Irish goodbye by way of departure, but it didn't go that way. My girls planned a thing and the staff came out to it. I have a table filled with bouquets of flowers and bottles of booze. (They got one part right.) People said nice things to me all week long, which was fascinating in a way, because most of my interactions with staff (and students too, to be honest) leave me feeling like I am falling short of fixing whatever thing they wanted fixed, whether that was a schedule or just a whole worldview. Now I am asking myself, based on all the nice comments, if they actually think I am falling short or if that is just my own narrative getting in the way, and making me work a lot harder than I actually should. Regardless, although it was overwhelming, it was also very nice. I briefly felt like a famous person. If ever again so many people say complimentary things about me I will probably be hearing it all from underground.

Ethics and virtues

In a doctoral level Ethics class, over Zoom, a student used the word "retarded" to describe governmental policy around licensure of the counselling profession. The first time she said it, I thought I must have misheard her, but she said it a second time to remove all doubt. No one said anything, not even the professor. Maybe we were all too startled to react, or maybe it's just me who thinks that this word isn't the one to choose for this situation.

Stella

The shift to brighter and more creative things was more difficult than anticipated. We had to put down Em today. I took the afternoon off to be with the family as we said goodbye. Cried for awhile. Then packed it all up tightly and went to the interview feeling soggy and glum. But they sent me an email 20 minutes after the interview ended offering me the job. Which made me cry about Em some more. I miss him so much already, neurotic little weirdo. I don't know what my exit strategy at school looks like yet. But it makes it so much easier not to feel overwhelmed by the tidal waves that keep picking me up and tossing me around. Refusing to attend unnecessary meetings is very liberating.

Shift

Tomorrow is the interview. Current mindset is that I want out of public school forever. This has been a terrible week and a half. I am completely wiped out. The kids are off the wall, but that isn't even close to being the worst part. The staff have gone crazy and I have been spending way too much energy on adults and their toxic relationships with each other. V continues to wage war on everyone, scorched earth. S sent me an obnoxious email about a kid he decided would fail math based on his dislike rather than upon her ability. Three angry parent phone calls, all about things that have nothing to do with me. Two and a half hours of unpaid overtime at the end of the day to get caught up on paper and email that I would normally juggle during the day if I wasn't managing other people's garbage. So. I will need to rest my brain and do a mental shift toward something brighter and more creative and positive before the interview. The way I feel now I may not want to bother giving notice.

Thinking about thinking

✅ V has decided to declare war on K, the adminstrative officer, and when V declares war there are no holds barred. For several days now I have been cc:ed in various attacks she has made on anyone and anything connected to him. She prefaces her attacks with "you are a respected colleague and this is not about you, however... zing!" It's always something people have done wrong by cooperating with K, contrary to the collective agreement. V knows the collective agreement well, and she may be right about all her grievances. It's a fascinating case study, but also, I am exhausted. ✅Today I taught the Masters class for the whole day, which was also tiring. I have trouble keeping straight all the various agreements that need to be signed. I may have assigned credit to students who have not yet handed in their agreements. My teaching partners continue to flake out on me and I continue to pretend not to be angry. Presumably they are counting on this. ✅ My doctoral work is also making me tired. I love being a student, truly, but I am tired.

Shadow

My first meeting with the team felt very positive. They are either people who genuinely practice a lot of self-care and are extremely mellow, or perhaps they were high. Normally a job interview makes my heart a bit racy and I talk too fast. But these women made me feel calm and quite relaxed. We agreed to proceed to a formal interview in two weeks. I am making a mental note not to say "shit" in the formal interview, as in, "let's get shit done", because I said that in the last one and I don't know if I have the right audience for this kind of thing. Sometimes I forget that other people don't swear all the time. S says that I am going on to meet (and defeat) the Final Boss. I will not swear in her presence unless she starts it. The doctorate program is really happening. I am really doing it. I haven't found my swear-y comrades in there either - yet. I seem to keep ending up working with religious types who are nice enough, but too nice. I like some edges. (I try to keep my muzzle on in there too.)

Wonders

On Friday the director of the university where I work contacted me. She would like me to meet her team, hear how they work together, allow me time to ask questions, and presumably determine whether or not we are a good fit for one another. If we are, then we will have a formal interview. Now this thing looks sort of real, and I am wondering whether I am really going to do this. It would change everything. Really, everything. It isn't often that I intentionally shake up my life like this.

Birthday song

i have this friend who has chosen me even though i would never have chosen him. we are very very different. he is a highly religious man who lives his faith in a thousand choices he makes every day, in his choice to give the benefit of the doubt, his choice to speak gently, his choice to avoid every kind of temptation, and his true and genuine naivete. i say, we are very very different. * he influences me. i am a person who swears all the time, but not in his presence. once, at a staff party, i skipped having cigarettes with my friends because he was with me and i did not want him to see me smoke. i behave better when he is around, i speak better, i make more adult decisions. i don't want to, but he has chosen me. he seeks me out. he wants to sit beside me at lunch. he wants to be my best friend and i find myself strangely unable to disentangle myself from him. sometimes i feel like he does not truly know me, and sometimes i feel like he has seen the true me that no one else does.

Draws a line, draws a crowd, draws a breath

The program has begun in earnest and tech support had finally sorted out the glitches, and I can see my courses. In desperation, I had taken a wild guess at where to start reading and miraculously I got it right, so I was not as far behind as I feared I would be. However, it's fair to say that I do not remember anything about APA formatting and citations, so it took an absurd amount of time for me to write a response to the discussion question for the week. There is a 200 word limit, and yet the question is enormous, and could easily be the topic for a 10 page paper. The question was almost 200 words! I agonized in a way I do not normally agonize over writing, adding and deleting and rewording for a ridiculously long time. But at last it is done, and I am ready, in true nerd fashion, to post my response first thing tomorrow morning. &&& The women I am (supposed to be) team teaching with at the university both bailed on our last meeting. This is typical of them; they have actually cancelled more meetings than they have kept. My insecure inner teenage me wants to assume they hate me and other such self-loathing things, but the fact is they don't know me well enough to hate me and they have been doing this flaky thing since the start. They're just kind of assholes. If I had known this was what it would be like to work with them, I probably would not have taken the job. At the last meeting, they didn't just bail on me, but also on the Associate Director, who seemed miffed. I have a feeling she is going to say something, and I'm glad. My pleas for consideration and professionalism have gone completely unheard. &a&&

Candle breathing

The doctoral program is now open and we are in "preview" week, the time before instructors start giving assignments and whatnot, in which we keen students are meant to be doing the assigned readings and learning our way around the site. Maddeningly, I continue having technical issues that are preventing me from accessing my courses, and the IT folk aren't particularly helpful, so I am not anticipating a strong start. Maybe things will improve. And maybe they will not. I did manage to attend a Zoom welcome meeting, and listened to the various faculty members talk about how I should be using my time familiarizing myself with the online platform and blah blah blah. I took some deep breaths and familiarized myself with the feelings that always accompany big new steps. New schools, new houses, new jobs, new relationships. They all start out glitchy.

Eating pins

in the middle of the night i awoke abruptly. it was that dream again, the one in which C is trying to kill me. C has been dead a long time now but it does not stop her from trying to kill me in my dreams with some frequency. in real life she tried to kill me sometimes too, mostly when we were children and i could outrun or out muscle her, but a couple of times in adulthood too. these memories are genuinely frightening and i think they must be the reason i have this dream. tomorrow we are going shopping for a new mattress. perhaps this will help me to sleep better.