Warming up

to another Friday – my favourite of days.  Not because it’s the end of the week – this is not a TGIF post – but because it’s a reading day.   A day devoted to reading my work and not students’.  

Although I enjoy teaching enormously, the  rhythm of a teaching day is not mine.  The rushing from class to office to class, being yanked from one topic to another by questions from left field; the need for constant diplomacy as one turns down proffered wrong answers to preserve the face of the answerer; the requirement to engage in phatic communion  with a patina of the erudite with the colleagues one meets in the corridor; these are not parts of my natural habitat. 

So I welcome a day at the desk, divided by dog walks  into sensible nameable parts like morning, afternoon and evening. 

Project: Return to life

And how daunting a project this seems, at the moment.  After the first full night’s sleep for over a week, I’m left in no doubt how much is still left for me to catch up with: my list of tasks for today is short; the tasks are simple; but I feel completely overwhelmed.  

 

I’ll turn to sure-fire antidotes: a long walk with the dogs by the river (the beach is more, tempting but the tide is in); a large glass of freshly made carrot juice; a lazy spell with a good book. 

 

And by then,

given the time of year,

it’ll be dusk,

and this

sleep

i

ness

will seem

almost legitimate. 

 

 

It’s the difference between stress timing and syllable timing, on reflection.

My last lecture of the year

... and it was a shocking mess.   I’m very disappointed.   The cause of the mess? The university server: I couldn’t access the set of slides for the lecture; and had the choice of either creating a new set of slides and so rewriting the lecture; or recreating the slides I chose the latter option only to find the file was too large to transfer to a USB (the reason Id uploaded it to the university server in the first place).  I’d so looked forward to introducing 1st year UGs to one of my favourite topics but lecturing became a nightmare.

So tonight, after two nights of not enough sleep and two long, panic-ridden days at the desk, I’m too tired to think.  More disappointment. I’d planned to relax with a light but good novel …

Another new start!

I read something about procrastination today which might help me dissolve mine. This, because I have yet again been made very aware that I have some time to myself, so haven’t got any excuse for not writing, yet am still not writing anything. The fact that procrastination is understood as having deeper and more complex causes than laziness, say, or disorganisation made me feel slightly better about myself. Because although not-writing and ostensibly not-doing everything else, I’m actually expending an inordinate amount of energy on beating myself to a mental and emotional pulp over the fact.  A waste of time indubitably, but not the kind of time-wasting that people immediately associated with someone who is congenitally impunctual and who only beats deadlines by stealthily creeping under the wire.

Causes of procrastination included the belief that it is best to be seen as perfect, and for anything less than perfection, it is better to appear to have produced the imperfect through lack of effort than lack of ability.   Certainly I am victim to both of these misconception – which is ridiculous, given that each day I am privy to the many and various ways in which students approach their work, and that it is usually blatantly obvious who is working with ability and who without and that there is a great deal of merit in producing a competent piece of work as a result of application to sheer hard work even when it doesn’t zing with evidence of unusual ability.

I could probably come up with a plausible explanation of the roots of this mistaken belief of mine.  One only has to look at responses to my work while at school to understand why I find it hard to request help; the responses I had from family members when stuck  because of inconfidence.  But since that’s not likely to interest anyone other than myself, I won;t bother with that here.

My task here is to let myself fail – no it isn’t: it’s to let myself be seen as imperfect.  This is why I hand on to my student status I think. As a student I am allowed to struggle and fail and so forth. I;m allowed to risk myself putting myself in a losing position because I have nothing to lose. 

Now I’m supposed to be an expert and somehow not expected to experiment – or rather I am expected to experiment but only if I don’t fail.

It’s the lack of sympathy and understanding and support  I hate the most.   The feeling that people are waiting for an opportunity to crow – the feeing that I’ll only get sympathy if I establish how much worse I am than anyone else.