Now animated by a yogic comment from Hattie, I can keep on saying things and drawing pictures, these always having been some of my first goals in life.
The immediate additional causes of my current malaise: a) so many students, including graduate students, need remedial work, but we are keeping up a certain fiction … which makes teaching very draining; b) that is fatiguing and there is not enough replenishment to counterbalance it; c) not enough adult conversation. Underlying these causes are the anxiety driven by lack of resources and the fatigue caused by efforts to get some. These problems are all too common. And this is the precariousness a professor suffers – consider the adjuncts.
It is enough to activate every dormant reeducated bone I have – those bones that say what could you have done not to deserve this, where have you gone wrong – unless I am extremely vigilant. I have to practice luxury, calm, and voluptuousness (this being my new mantra) at all times and in all ways, and I have to remind myself of my new five year plan every fifteen minutes, I do believe. When I think of it long enough to visualize it I relax completely and feel happy, because it is so feasible – it is not an empty promise or hope, it can be real. I am trying to learn to live inside that vision. But the vigilance itself can also be exhausting in the context of so much precariousness.
Meanwhile I had an interesting confirmation from a student-friend, about destabilization, related to what her daughter, a professor, told her about the anxiety and confusion – the destabilization – of having been advised to follow all advice but her own. I had written it here in more beautiful detail but WordPress blinked and I lost the paragraph. This one is its placeholder.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
But it is so difficult to juice up each day, put on the right illusion and mask. Here is what I wrote up over here:
http://profacero.blogspot.com/2008/10/and-boiling-down.html
Somehow it seems to me it shouldn’t be so difficult to feel some level of happiness and ease. Somehow it seems to me that it isn’t that I am “depressed.” Somehow it seems to me that it is all really untenable: although when I have said this to friends and family they look so horrified and hurt that I backtrack and try to whip myself into being a professor again.
It all really does come down to all this low level teaching, terrorism when not mere patronizing behavior from supervisors, not enough money to get out of town most weekends, lack of library, dead atmosphere in town, etc.
That is, it all comes down to real things. But I tend to think it is all something wrong with my spirit, that I should be able to get over this and around it, that I should be happy with it all the way others are, that I should not long for points west or for the city.
And: If I only had some reason – like being from here, or having a family to support and having some reason related to them to be here. But I am only here out of pressure. If I had ever been able to have savings … ! If I had more faith in myself … !
And also: I have had another of those conversations with someone who likes teaching, in which I said I just found it draining and sad, for the most part. But when I told her WHAT I was teaching she turned up her nose. “In my university we have other people to do that.” From which I conclude: she likes teaching LESS than I do, not more.