It's a wooly sort of day. I'm wearing the newest Bookworm vest and the Cape Cod crest-o-the-wave patterned socks. I'm also wearing a pair of wristwarmers here in my office because they've not put on the heat yet (and it can wait; when the heat goes on it gets too warm in here). Not ideal for typing, I have to keep slitching the part that goes over my knuckles up so that I don't make typing errors.

Didn't do much knitting last night. I am coming to hate Mondays. On campus at 7 am, take a short break at lunch, but then come back and teach what is really my hardest class in terms of involvement and dealing with different situations (and with people who are borderline tearful or more-than-borderline angry because things aren't working out) when I'm already tired.

I'm also - I don't know how to say this other than to describe it as the way I feel it - getting into one of those modes where I feel sort of invisible. (There was a Tove Jansson story I read when I was a child about a little girl who was ignored by her parents and all the people around her, and she eventually turned invisible. In typical Jansson fashion, when Moominmamma treated the girl kindly - so she became visible again - the girl turned out to be a little brat. But the feeling of invisibility, of starting to turn a little pale and wavery around the edges, was an image that stuck with me). Like, the only purpose people see me as having is either as a worker bee or as someone to push responsibility on to. That when I'm the center of attention, it's not the kind of attention I want or need right now. I'm telling myself it's just tiredness, that I'll snap out of it sooner or later, but I just feel this way sometimes - like I'm pretty much the sum total of the work I do, and that's it.

I guess it's a feeling of anonymity - like, there are now 900 knitblogs. Probably five people read mine. Some of the knitbloggers who are better writers than I am or have more exciting lives or do or say more outrageous things or who actually design stuff will get fifty comments on one post, and it's unusual for me to get as many as three. And in teaching - I get so little feedback from the students. I can't tell some days if what I'm doing is making any impression at all - it seems most of the feedback I get lately is "this $(%*$)( computer won't do what it's supposed to. Make it do what it's supposed to" or "I'm sorry I missed class, did we do anything important?" (How I hate that question. I understand the motivation - "did missing do me irreparable harm" - but it always sounds to me like "Was it a typical day or did something meaningful transpire?"). I think the problem is I do so many different things that I can't be a superstar - or even a star - at even one of them. But I don't know. I can't give up my job, it's how I keep a roof over my head. And I'd be unhappy if I gave up knitting or quilting or any of my other hobbies. And as for the volunteer work - the main work being the Youth group - I can't give it up, if I did no one else would step forward to do it and my co-worker would have to do it all herself, and I don't want to put that on her.

Or maybe, as I've said before, I'm just kind of mediocre at everything, and I stay super busy just so I have the excuse that I don't have enough time to devote to perfecting the art or craft of any one thing, and I don't have to face up to the hard cold fact of my own mediocrity.

Gah. I wish that as a student no one had ever praised me, had never expected great things of me. It sets up way too much pressure, too much expectation. Because I feel like I'm not living up to it - that nothing I do is really that important, that after I'm gone no one will even remember me.

I'd like to curl up in the fetal position under my desk right now, but I have an exam to write.