oh cripes

I don't know what it is - probably just some dumb hormone related thing, or allergies, or some stupid thing messing with my head - but I'm having a really hard time this morning. I've actually shed a few tears and it's not 8 am yet, so that's not a good sign.

I got up, did my usual workout, washed up, and as I was digging through my dresser drawers, I idly thought, "So is this what I'm going to be doing for the next 30-odd years? Hauling my ass out of bed far earlier than I want to, doing what amounts to a forced-march for an hour to try to stave off weight gain and other health problems, and then have to spend time searching for socks that match?"

Brain, don't go there.

Because although I can take the thing one day at a time, thinking about the sheer weight - the day-in, day-out - of getting out of bed early, trying to find something I want to wear, preparing my sad little lunch, going through the day (and yesterday wasn't a good day), coming home, thinking, "yay, I have an hour and a half to do what I want," doing it for 30 minutes, realizing I'm too tired to keep going, and going to bed - just exhausts me.

And yeah, yeah, yeah, I know there are lots of people who have it worse. And yeah, yeah, yeah, I should be happy.

But there's one thing - well, more than one thing, really - eating at the edges of my consciousness. In another year or so I'm up for Full Professor. And I'm beginning to worry I've not done "enough." Because on my campus, "enough" can be a moving target. And we have a new president who'd bringing in new administrators, and I'm frankly scared they're going to change EVERYTHING and suddenly what looked like "enough" before is now "you've got to be kidding"

And it's not helped by the fact that, on my campus, you don't get to stay permanently on "graduate faculty" - you have to "prove" yourself every three years. And they changed the burden-of-proof, and made it a lot tougher. And I didn't do one of the five or six things on the list - at least not in the form that it's expected - in the past year. So I'm DENIED. Graduate faculty - NOT YOURS.

And I've done what I can to try to repair it, to try to ask to stay on, but they don't seem to want to hear it. (And the killer? I got the message after 3 pm yesterday. I teach pretty much from 8 'till 3 today, and then have afternoon responsibilities at church. And they want the information before tomorrow. This is very very very very typical of people from other departments - they assume we're all sitting on our butts just WAITING to jump up and provide them with documentation, so it's perfectly OK for them to ask the day before they need it).

I forwarded the e-mail to my department chair and kind of threw up my hands and said, "I can't deal with this right now; if it's essential to me making full professor someday, I will try to deal with it, but I don't think they've given me enough time"

And I know. I shouldn't be so tied to the desire to make Full Professor. But you know? I've not done much with my life. I've not married, not had a kid, not traveled much, not been in plays, not made a record, not published anything that people outside of a tiny narrow field would ever read. Everything I do is pretty intangible, and so it's kind of nice to have some sort of outside validation that I actually did something with my time here.

Some days I have to admit I feel like if I fell off the edge of the earth people would only notice because they'd start complaining: "What's up with ricki? Why hasn't she done those things she usually does for us? She OWES us! She's SUPPOSED to do those things!"

And yeah, I also know that's not true. But it kind of FEELS like it's true right now. I feel like someone's got a hold of each limb of my body, and they're all pulling, trying to get a piece of me. And there's no "me" left for me - I went to bed at 8:30 last night because I was so exhausted. And when you get home at 5, and have to fix dinner, and have to do the dishes, and have to go to the grocery...going to bed at 8:30 doesn't leave a person with a lot of mental recuperation time, and that's something I need.