My school headspace also leaves much to be desired today. I'm prepared to tell the class I'm teaching today that they can just go home, read their Moliere and Wilde, write me a freakin' paper on anything at all related to those things, and we'll just keep the little secret that we never have to meet again and they all get A's. One can dream... the sad part about this is I'm teaching Drama, which I love to do, and the small group I have is great - they're sweet and fun and smart - but they, too, are limping toward the finish line.
As one of my esteemed colleagues accused me of about two weeks ago, I am again doing things in an "undergraduate" manner. Yesterday I played hooky from my afternoon theory course and didn't even tell the prof I was leaving or why. I just got up during the break and didn't look back. It felt wonderful, and even though it was pretty lame on my part, I just couldn't take it any longer. We were talking about Lukacs and Gennette (French Marxists, if you're not in the know there, and if you are, I'm sure you're groaning right about now or trying to re-repress your wretched experience with these writers), and by the time we got to Gennette's mathematical-looking "formula" for fiction, it was either (a) I stand up, crawl under the table and begin rocking back and forth in a fetal position, of (b) leave before I completely snap in just such a manner. There is only so much I can take at 3:00 in the afternoon on a Wednesday in a room full of pretentious Newbies, and it turns out, that was the straw. Right there. Gennette's fucking formula and Lukacs' nonsensical gobbledegook which carries on for many pages and fails to make any marked impact on me in terms of a point. I don't apologize for this, either. So much literary theory is utter bullshit and everyone knows it, but few people are willing to say it out loud because critics such as these who can spew jargon and three-dollar words out SEEM to be smarter and thus the impression is we shouldn't challenge them and their often half-cocked or antiquated ideas.
Clearly my coffee kicked in right about the middle of that last paragraph - did you notice too?
I'm in a good mood, generally, but being here definitely takes it down a notch, like a heavy brick that sits atop my head and blocks the sun from entirely hitting me. A sun spot. An interference. A black hole somewhere in space that affects gravity in the precise spot I sit. My writing life is great - I'm well into a novel that I feel good about and if given the time, could finish the first draft of in no time flat. If I had any time, that is. I'm also really getting into my dissertation, which also feels good. I know what I'm writing about, I have a clear direction, and it's quite different than what I thought it would be. So it goes.
I wish I had a time-turner like Hermione got in the third Harry Potter book, so I could actually experience the same time of day several times just to get things done. Motivation isn't my problem; a simple lack of time is. But one thing I can say that's different now from this time last year, when I had a nervous breakdown, is a change of priorities. I made a pact with myself a few months ago to put things in numbered order of importance in my life, because if the to do list is never going to get done (and it won't), there has to be a hierarchy of what gets moved to the next day indefinitely. I realized that the first things to get axed on any given agenda day were the things that I needed most - the gym, gym classes, cooking dinner, taking baths, massages, hair appointments, and that sort of thing. It sounds silly and girly, but really - why should I always put myself last? My new thing is that I am at the top of the list - I go to the gym no matter what; I eat right no matter what, and if something doesn't get done, it's school work. I sat through a whole week of class without having read one word of what we were talking about and I didn't care because I lost two inches on my waist and my blood pressure was great that morning at the doctor's office. My skin is clear, I am sleeping at night, my jeans are too big, and I feel healthier than I ever have in my entire life. Fuck Henry James. I have things to do and life is too short for ten pages of musing over a Golden Bowl and it's symbolic value.
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