early morning cranky

I dunno. Yesterday was fine, but now:

I had a dream last night about post-tenure review. The fundamental storyline was that every time we went through, we had to be found lacking in some way, and at one point I wound up at a meeting and everyone else was in costume and playing a role, and I hadn't been told to do that, and I wouldn't have wanted to anyway, and I thought "Oh. This is how they get me: they don't tell me stuff and then I'm 'in trouble' for not doing it."

That makes me angry because this process should NOT make my lizard-brain become suspicious of my colleagues and start thinking they are trying to sabotage me because they aren't, but lizard-brains aren't logical.

I woke, wondering: "Okay, so I take on a couple extra committees these next few years. Then what? Will it be my scholarly productivity that's not good enough, or my teaching?"

But yeah. It's called a "developmental" process but I fear that it is going to push people to find things "wrong" with people. That there's like some quota of "wrongness" we have to fulfill and if everyone in a department is pretty good, they have to look for small things and magnify them.

I don't know. I just wish for once I could feel secure that I was good enough.

Then I turned the tv news on ("What fresh Hell can this be?") and it was one of those "health segment" things and the chirpy presenter reminded us all "Adults need 2 1/2 hours of moderate exercise every week!" and proceeded to tell us how we should never be doing anything (outside of sleeping, I suppose) where we couldn't also be doing leg-lifts or arm-pumps or some such thing.

And yeah, I got close to three hours of exercise last week, but it just makes me SO TIRED. Nothing we do is ever enough. If you ate five servings of vegetables daily in the past, now you need to eat ten (Yeah, no. My digestion rebels at around seven and I have to hold down a job). If you're getting a half-hour of exercise per day, why not an hour? If you're coming in on Saturday to work, why not Sunday, too?


And yeah, I know this is my perfectionism talking. And I suppose the "2 1/2 hours of exercise" is aimed at people who don't do any exercise at all. But every time I hear something like that, I really do feel like the stuff is aimed at me, and at how I'm not good enough, and every moment I take to just be me instead of trying to live up to someone else's expectation is something I'm going to regret.....


And Act 3: The new "Feed the Pig" ad with the disapproving mom: "You buy 'fancy pants' peanut butter? Shoes with TWO buckles each?"

Good heavens. I get that there's humor implied but taken literally, the ad seems to be saying: you are not allowed any enjoyment above the mere minimal requirements to live; invest that money instead. (And what? When you die your heirs are then told to take THAT money and invest it?).

And again: I get that it's aimed at the people out there who have no savings and who spend super-frivolously, but to me it sounds like an awful way to live: "What is the cheapest brand of whatever I can buy, and invest the thirty-five cents I save over what my preferred brand would cost?"

I have a hard time with the whole "measuring out my life with coffee-spoons" thing, and this ad seems to promote it.

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ETA: watched a little more of the news. I shouldn't be so hard on myself, if for no other reason than that my reaction to seeing a Sikh man out in public would be to say to myself (if I even noticed him), "Oh, there's a Sikh man" and that would be IT.