summer is over

I wish "meteorological" or whatever-you-call it summer was over. I wish it was cooler out but it sounds like our heat machine is going to start cranking in time for the start of classes. I hope the building AC holds up but am prepared for hot classrooms.

Tomorrow, at 8 am, is our "faculty symposium." And then the day after that is a 10:30-noon thing. The afternoon stuff Thursday is "for new faculty but existing faculty are welcome" which I am interpreting as a "we are not requiring you to be there" so I am skipping it. Friday is my departmental meeting but it's early enough that I MIGHT, if I feel like it, be able to run out to Sherman in the afternoon.

I dunno. I'm not ready for the fall. I feel more not-ready, ironically, than I do after summers where I taught. (That does not mean I am teaching next summer. Not unless they change how they compensate people back to something like the old system; I'm too old and the way I teach is too much work to make adjunct pay)

I dunno. I need to adjust my attitude. I was not in a good place last evening, and I woke up in the middle of the night after one of those vague bad dreams (running around in a dark house trying to either get away from something or get to something, and I kept tripping over floor lamps and running into stuff, and I guess whatever it was I was trying to avoid was pretty bad because after I woke up I wound up lying in bed shaking and crying a little and having to tell myself I was okay. I finally just got up and turned a light on for a while; yes, it wakes me up, but it does help.)

I think it's the humidity. I can't breathe right when it's this humid and it makes my brain think I'm either anxious or in danger and I react accordingly.

I think just also the news is bad enough. Anything happening on a university campus makes the part of my brain that MUST have Plans A, B, C, D, E, and F through Z go "Okay, what would you do if that happened here? How would you stay safe, how would you keep from inadvertently destroying your career?" and while given the level of diversity of our campus* and the fact that we have a lot of older students and people with families and other responsibilities to attend to, we might not get that but still...

(*Though I don't know, I don't know what UVA's composition was like)

I don't know. If you're an anxious person to begin with, living in tense times is not fun.

I also suspect my anxiety has two other foci:

1. Our research project has failed to yield much in the way of useful results. Germination was horrible, and I think I'm going to send the student home with some extra seed (or have her do it up on campus) where we just do what are sometimes called "rag-doll germination tests" - put the seeds between wet filter paper and see what kind of germination you get, because I'm fearful these seeds (that I've had for about a year) have lost viability and maybe that was what happened. And I feel bad about it because she needs to write up a paper in order to earn her grade, and there's not much TO write up. And while it's not my fault the study failed.....still, I don't know. I feel responsible .

2. I'm worried about my new class. I feel like an impostor because I'm not really an expert in either environmental policy or environmental law and I probably know barely more than what the students do. And it's too late now to either pull out of teaching it or to do much more in the way of preparation. Why did I think I could do this? Why did I tell people I could do this? The other option would have been to try to hire an adjunct to do it. We probably wouldn't have got anyone, but that might have sent a message that "We really need to make this a full-time line and offer proper pay and benefits" and then we'd get someone qualified.

I dunno. Everything feels like such a mess right now. I think part of the problem is that I feel like a lot of things are currently out of my control and I don't like things being out of my control, where I can't really do anything more other than the equivalent of a little "body English" to change their outcome.

I reiterate what I said on twitter: considering the past week (well, 10 days now), I feel like I've aged about five years.

Doesn't help that I have a doctor's checkup this afternoon. My doctor is very nice and all but I can't quite shake the past history of OTHER doctors who scolded me about my weight, or about not eating less and exercising more and I just feel kind of defeated that I don't apparently have the willpower to make myself smaller, that that's another area of my life that doesn't seem to be under control.

(There was a thing making the rounds on Twitter yesterday, what would you change about yourself if you could change one thing? And I would want to be smaller. Not just thinner, though that's a big part of it - but in general, shorter, less ungainly, taking-up-less-space, and have smaller more delicate features than I do. And I know, it's one of those "you want what you don't have" things - like how people with straight hair look at my hair and go "I wish I had curly hair like yours" and I am all YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH EXTRA WORK AND CARE CURLY HAIR CAN TAKE TO MAKE IT LOOK OK but yeah, I wish I were the kind of woman who could shop at "sample sales" and who never had to worry what other people would think if she ordered dessert at a restaurant....)