Unknown Pleasures

Feel it closing in....

December 19, 2011

I didn't realize how drained I was until the last week of the semester. The last few months have been emotional hell. I feel like I've temporarily lost my love for teaching, but this feeling will pass. My threshold for dealing with the usual student classroom dross was minimal. As in all things you lose a passion for, you have to find a way to get it back in a new way. I suspect a lot of my academic colleagues who were hired with me seven years ago may be suffering from the same apathy. Seven years at a job, any job, I suppose, with job security, and you're jaded by the administrative politics; you know which co-workers you can tolerate and who you want to get away from, and there's no other motivation to push through the workweek other than it's a few dollars more for the pension, which you hope to cash in as early as possible. Me? No matter what I'm doing I'm trying to minimize the fail as much as possible. I'm a volunteer writer for a museum which should keep my research skills sharp until I return to grad school next fall.

Thoughts about failure, for a moment. I was watching this six part documentary called Boston Med that followed the careers of these medical interns for a year. There was a baby who needed a heart transplant. The doctor performing the surgery was a renown heart surgeon. The surgeon performed the surgery, but screwed up by connecting the arteries to the wrong part of the heart. Needless to say the guy probably felt like a huge douche, the parents were pissed and ready for litigation, and the hospital has to get rid of him to minimize the damage from all the litigation. So the moral of the story is, even a heart surgeon can make an incredibly huge fuck up. My fuckups last year didn't almost cost a baby it's life. No one expected me to be perfect. No one expected me to be a god.

Day in, day out, day in, day out, day in, day out, day in, day out...

December 23, 2011

It's a couple of days before Ex-mas, and my niece plops down next to me on the bed, ready for the next holiday adventure with auntie. We have to get our holiday shopping done. For some reason, she chooses to go shopping with me instead of the other family members. I think it's because I'm pretty expeditious with the shopping, and I have an aversion to hanging out in malls for more than two hours. One thing I won't be able to avoid is the communal dinners and required face time for peripheral relatives. In the kitchen, my mother and older sister prepare foil pans filled with hot, baked, broiled, fried heart-death food.

Day in, day out, day in, day out, day in, day out, day in, day out...

December 30, 2011

My younger sister had a hip replacement two days before New Year's Eve. Whenever my younger sister, the one with lupus, has a major surgery, it's an unspoken rule that the family mobilizes to attend to her because she tends to be fragile after surgery. So we take shifts staying with her in her hospital room, which is always a private room, getting ginger ale and crackers when she feels nauseous, helping her to the bathroom, combing her hair, driving her home from the hospital. I had a brief moment of jealousy: I realized I wanted to just lie in bed and take opiates all day long without having another responsibility in my life, but that's just a green grass fantasy. I know I would feel like shit having her life. We were afraid she would have to spend New Year's Eve in the hospital, but she came home the morning of. At midnight we toast with sparkling cider at her home. At 12:10 a.m. we give her an oxycontin pill, and she goes to sleep. The rest of us, with the exception of my mother, play XBox until 4:00 a.m.

January 2, 2012

I'm walking down the lane from my mother's house to my sister's house on the "family compound' where my mother and three sisters live. The holiday season is officially over. The condo parking lots are sparse as most of the denizens have gone back to their nine-to-fives. All I have to think about for the start of the day is getting a fresh cup of coffee from my sister's Keurig.
There's something peaceful and dreadful about the end of the "holidays". The emotional cocoon I had been hiding in for three weeks was like a soft, furry buffer that made everything in the outside world slow and fuzzy. Now it's time to make sure I've got my mind right before I get back to the grind.

day in, day out, day in, day out, day in, day out, day in, day out, day in, day out, day in, day out