open letter to the professoressa
Tuesday 18 March 2008 | someone left a cookie
Dearest P—
You wouldn’t happen to be awake and checking email by any chance? It’s me, the bad penny turning up after another nine-month absence. This morning I’ve been up since around 5:30 sneezing my head off with some kind of allergies/cold but didn’t want to call in case you were still snoozing (not likely, though) or perhaps it’s spring break there and you are reading, lazing, watching birds nibble at seed, or just breathing.
[takes deep breath herself]
I’m kind of in a state—Arizona, in fact. What a place and what a year—holy moly. Remember when we were talking last year about which grad school offer I should accept, and how we discussed the fact that I should probably not teach comp any more? Well….I’m due back in class at 9:15 today, and am pretty much going to have to set fire to my shoe soles to get my sorry carcass in there. I’d give anything, anything to be able to cancel class today, but am in the already double-plus-ungood position of having cancelled class already three times this semester, which I think is just unconscionable, and probably so do you, for a twice-a-week course…but there you have it.
The fall went okay, but I managed to burn myself out the last couple of weeks of the semester and so this semester has been like pulling teeth, one agonizing week by week. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought about bailing; the carrot that’s kept me going is that next year I should be at least three-fourths free of comp. I applied for and somehow WON a special English literature course of my own invention; and then I’ll be teaching at least one section of creative writing (intro poetry); and finally I get a waiver for one course for assisting Walt Whitman with his private work/research needs; so there could conceivably be only one comp section in my future, or even NONE, which sounds like heaven right about now.
If I flake irretrievably, I risk losing all that. I must keep it stapled, rubber-banded and glue-sticked together for the next seven weeks—I just have to. I have to grade papers and I have to go to class.
AND, simultaneously, I feel like absolute hell, and sat on the floor last night and wept, with the Brujo handing me tissues and medication and empathy, and still it all felt impossible. Now I’ve just had about five hours of chemically induced sleep and should be able to, SHOULD BE ABLE TO, tackle the very small stack of papers at my left elbow. And, I seem not to do so.
It’s so strange: teaching expository writing is, after all, a relatively easy job—it’s not like I’m a prison warden or a union organizer or a diner waitress or worse. But December-February has just been dire as usual, emotionally speaking; and I’m somehow so burnt out it’s shocking.
The very good news: there are at least two super-brainy poets here, Whitman and the Duende, and I have written quite a bit, revised tons, and will do even more over the summer, once I have my heart back from the comp program, who have done their level best to eat it alive. The weather’s fabulous. My significant other is significant and other and dearly beloved—we just celebrated two extraordinarily sane years together. And the weather here is unspeakably marvelous, to me—probably why I’ve held it together as well as I have, for as long as I have (and also probably why my allergies are going nuts—June is busting out all over, down here in Tartarus).
I started sewing, too, which is the most wonderful thing ever! I’d probably have ditched grad school and be working in a fabric store by now, if I weren’t allergic to unwashed fabric (something chemical in which the new bolts have been soaked, like sizing or dye). And then there’s that lure of good courses coming up ahead….and my students, who are relatively lively and bright and who deserve much more from me, I am afraid, than they have been getting….
And now I am stopping this and sending it and blowing my nose and wondering how you are, if you are well. I’ve missed you deeply and just have been either a) working my brains out or b) feeling terrible about not working my brains out, both of which can take up a surprising amount of time.
Love, love, love to you—
PS—I may still call later this morning if I can’t reconcile myself to either marking papers/going to class, or getting admitted to the local psych ward.
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I can’t wait till summer, when I can have you all to myself again!