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.