Needing of hugs

Nothing is directly awful, but I think I'm at the peak of bad allergies right now so things *seem* awful. I slept....what was it, maybe 9 hours? Last night and I'm still tired. (Which suggests "bad allergies" to me)

Also, I had written up my faculty-development plan (aka Post-Tenure-Review Lite: the thing we have to do every year in addition to the every-three-years big thing we do*). And I hadn't summarized my evaluations because that's the worst part, and then I thought, wait, do I even have last year's evaluations back?

(*Swear to God I think this is all an experiment in seeing how much work we can be made to do until we either snap and quit or get sick.)


And this morning, the secretary stopped me in the hall and said "Oh, I have your evaluations back, they just came in."

(This report was technically due on the 15th. You can tell how stressed and overextended I am by the fact of how far I've missed that deadline)

So now I have to do that.

I'm also in one of my periodic funks of wondering if anything I do matters at all. Between the commentators screaming about "college is useless and it's just a way to enslave young people" and the other people going "look at the Bad People who went to college, so we must burn the colleges down" (granted, that tends to be more aimed at "elite" schools....but....I went to an 'elite' prep school and what might be considered an 'elite' undergrad and so I guess they'd want me up against that wall too?) and the people who roll their eyes in my classes or do 40% of the work and the endless parade of having to do more and more with less and less until I expect I'll be doing everything with nothing....I admit I did not want to get out of bed this morning. Bed is nice. It is warm. No one bothers me there. 

I'm not strong enough right now. I just....I can't. Even though my evaluations are generally good I know there are comments and every negative comment is like a knife in my heart and they've gotten worse over time as people have become inured to the Internet Anonymity where no one knows you're a troll....and I just can't.

I'll have to do it later, when I'm stronger.

(And yeah, this is when I wish I had a very sympathetic person in my life who could pre-read them for me and either go, "Oh, honey, you have nothing to worry about, look, they're good" or sit me down with a pot of tea and make soothing noises at me and tell me that people are idiots.)

I wish I could get out to Sherman this week because I really need some time away from this town but I don't know, unless fieldwork runs very short Saturday morning, when I can. (Sunday is out; I have a small rule about not shopping on the Sabbath and also we have a church dinner anyway)

I know part of my hatred of evaluation comments is that I tend to be too swayed by what other people think of me, and also, as I said yesterday, I am not good at saying nice things to myself so I wish other people would (And I also tend to assume the worst of myself; and so negative comments sometimes just reinforce that).

I can tell with the mood I'm in there would be tears if I tried to read them now, and I have two classes this morning and faculty meeting, and if they are actually running a flu shot clinic this afternoon, I'm going to go do that. And I have piano. It never lets up...