Gloomy

9 April 2011 For the last week I have felt an illness coming on and also at the same time extreme dread over the impending publication of the bogan book. I have become exactly the person I have laughed about for decades, someone who has been desperate to be heard and be taken seriously on various levels and now the options are finally coming my way I am neurotic and terrified about them. I wonder if getting very close to turning 46 has anything to do with it as well. Probably the creeping illness has been the main problem. Also the necessity of applying for promotion, or rather, the decision made somewhat whimsically a few months ago to apply for promotion and the incredibly tortuous work that has gone into that process, which has essentially got me nowhere. I don’t often feel this way but for the last week and a half I definitely have felt this way, and it is highly irritating and self-defeating. I feel like I need something or other to get me out of this mindset I am very much uncertain about what might be good for that though. At least we are half-way through the semester. So I have been under the weather – people have been telling me I looked bad for a week or so – and then it finally went to a full-blown cold or flu or something yesterday afternoon. Mia has had something similar for the last few days too. I have been in bed most of the day reading a Nicholson Baker novel called The Anthologist which I think I bought at the discount book warehouse a few months ago unknowingly in preparation for a day such as this. I am not sure if I enjoy the novel or not – it certainly is not a page turner but I have returned to it five or six times and then drifted away from it, so maybe it is good. I have also read the paper, some music magazines, watched The General and To Kill a Mockingbird on my laptop, and I think that’s about it. I have a major conference paper to get done by the end of the week, this stupid promotion document,* and I was supposed to get another paper done in the next few days but plainly that’s not going to get done ahead of the major (Helsinki) conference paper. Also a lecture on Monday and another one on I think Tuesday or Wednesday or sometime. I’m not sure of the details I just feel ill.

* Some months later I looked at this again and that 'stupid promotion document' as you called it, Doofus, got you a freakin' promotion. You should get ill more often.