And I'm home

4:30 am, on a Saturday. My alarm goes off (Of late, I've lost the ability to wake up moments before it: exhaustion, I suppose). I groan - even though I'm an early riser, usually Saturdays are the one day I don't have to have a set wake time, and 4:30 is stupid early, even for me.

Dressed, ate, packed a lunch (which feels like another insult, except I know how these things go: planning on going to grab something at a "nearby" restaurant would become impossible and I'd wind up reduced to soaking chips from a vending machine (bad teeth) in a soda from another one.)

Set off about 10 minutes of 6. The good news about rural two-lanes for in-the-dark driving is you meet almost no one, so you can have your high-beams on almost all the way, which makes it a LOT easier. By the time I had to get onto 3, it was just getting light.

(I saw both the sunrise and the sunset today while I was driving).

I had maps I had printed off. But, I conflated the two possible routes (177 and 377) and wound up confused, wound up having to pull off into some ranch's drive (it was still too early for anyplace to be open to ask directions). I finally, through some backtracking and a side trip through, I think, Seminole, found my way to 177. (I later realized if I'd stayed on 377, I would have got to Stillwater fine, but I had visions of winding up in Pawhuska or somewhere).

I kept driving, but muttered under my breath, "I'm going to be late. I HATE being late" but then reminded myself:

1. This is 100% volunteer stuff, you are not on a time clock
2. You are the only one driving 3 hours to do this.

But I was still on time.

There was .... a lot of sitting around. Apparently it turns out I am being groomed* to be one of the new editors when the existing ones retire. While having more skills is generally a good thing, most editing jobs of this nature are not paid jobs, so it's not like I could parlay what I'm learning into a new way to put food on the table if teaching college becomes untenable.

(*These days, "being groomed" is not generally a good thing, even when it's not used in the context of a much older man and a barely-of-age girl)

So I learned some stuff. I also found out some of the correcting/adding I did to the historic paper is going to be removed, because the extra information is apparently "too much" and makes it too wordy. Oh well. All that work, all those weekends given up, down the drain. I'm trying not to be bitter about it but honestly: when I take a Saturday to work on something instead of having fun or just recuperating from the week, I wish that work actually meant something.

I am not good with "useless" work, where you're doing it for nothing and you put in a lot of time and it comes to naught. This why I often don't take many risks with research or try to do stuff like design complex things, because the thought of ripping back all that knitting, or spending all that time on a publication that just gets rejected, is not something I can bear with grace.

I will say OSU's library is a beautiful building. (Well, our library - at least the facade of it  and the ground floor  - is the most attractive building on campus, and that seems right to me, that the library be the nicest building). They also have some campus construction going on, which just reminds me there are state schools that are "haves" apparently. (I wish we were not such a "have-not").

There was talk about making sure everything we did was "in the cloud" and stored several places. The guy leading the session remarked, "We need this because if there were a nuclear war" and I kind of muttered under my breath "If there's a nuclear war, I'm not gonna be thinking about post-tenure review." I get he was being funny, but, yeah: not funny to a child of the 80s.

We got ONE paper done. The rest aren't ready to go. (Well, mine SHOULD be: I uploaded the latest revision last week). One may not even be written. So there's going to be more work, supposedly conducted by e-mail. I canNOT give up another whole day, I'm sorry. Next Saturday is for ME. The following Saturday is graduation. And Sundays, I have duties at church.

We at lunch at the desks. That's usual for me these days though I admit it would have been nicer for us all to have decamped to a restaurant for a bit (even if restaurants are fraught for me now, with my bad teeth and my celery allergy and my salt restriction).

I left around 2 - we were basically done but people were hanging around and I insisted that I could not drive home in the dark, and no one seemed to mind. (I got home just as it was getting dark out).

It's a LONG drive. 3 hours, 15 minutes, even when you don't get side-tracked. I drove through a number of smaller towns (and part of Stillwater proper) and there were places that, were I not worried about getting home and were not facing such a long drive, I'd have stopped - a couple antique places, some other shops).

I only stopped to buy gas (And in rural Oklahoma you buy gas when you can, not when you find a good price or your favorite brand. I've never run out of gas, but on a couple of my forays into far northwestern Oklahoma in the past, I came close). So I stopped at some casino-adjacent gas station and had the privilege of paying $2.40 a gallon for "100%" gas. (Had I had a choice, I'd have waited until the Love's here in town and paid at least 20 cents less for their E-10. But I was afraid of running out, even though I gassed up yesterday).

It would have felt less burdensome if I weren't staring down another week of class AND finals AND if it hadn't been a 6 hour round trip but yeah: I hope I don't have to do that very often.

One of the women praised my "tenacity" (mostly: the whole updating the historic paper thing, I think perhaps she was trying to soften the bitterness of some of my work being for naught) and you know? Tenacity, diligence, and responsibility are all stinky personality traits to have. Because they benefit others more than they do you. If I were getting to go on this ride again, and to choose my personal traits, I'd choose to be a lot more FUN and maybe be a good singer and have less diligence and responsibility.

I'm tired a lot of the time these days. I suppose part of it is, yes, I taught four classes this fall, one of which was a new prep, and supervised research, and wrote (and rewrote, and re-rewrote) a paper, but yeah: tired, wishing I had more fun in my life.

(Confession: I can relate to George Bailey a lot of the time, which may be why I like "It's a Wonderful Life" so much. At my best, I can see that yes: being willing to be self-sacrificing to benefit numerous others is a good and desirable thing, and really, George wound up with a good family and close friends and a decent house to live in out of it....but at my worst, I do feel very put-upon and like all I ever do is grind, grind, grind.  And I don't get a Clarence Oddbody to show me how any of my grinding has had any good effect, so I just have to tell myself it does and try to trust....and I'm not good at trusting that.)

But this reminds me of what frustrates me so much about adulthood: a lot of it is doing stuff you would rather not do (sometimes that will not benefit you, and I am SERIOUSLY hoping this wipes out the "service" deficit that my last post-tenure review referred to) and not doing things you might want to do (I REALLY wanted to go antiquing this weekend. No, tomorrow is out: church, and after that there's not enough time, and anyway, many, many small businesses here are closed Sunday and Monday, and I am NOT driving 1/2 hour to hope the antique shops I want to go to will be open).

But yeah. Another frustration of adulthood, especially this time of year: there is no Santa for adults, so you're literally being "Good, for nothing" (a joke the interim pastor we had a couple years ago used to make: being good with no expectation of reward could be phrased as "good for nothing," you just have to put the emphasis a little differently than you would on good-for-nothing). And yeah, it feels like all my life I have been "good, for nothing" - still thinking about how some of my friends got cash for every A and my dad's response was "you're getting an education" which is true, but....yeah.