I Am a Blogging Fool

Today is one of those days when I woke up with my forehead furrowed, dreams of being at a book fair where everyone else is busy hawking their books while I lament that I don't have one seeming infinitely preferable to the slog of work that has accrued and must be done before Spring Break Woo Hoo. For the sake of seeing them in all their glory/public accountability/to bore us all silly, I'm listing them out here:

• Dissertating. I want to get Chapter 2 in some kind of order so I can give it to my advisor and be free to cavort in Chapter 4.
• Dissertating Part 2: I want to cavort in Chapter 4 because this will make me happy and because it will be infinitely better to start working in earnest when I feel I already have some notes and schtuff.
  
• Cool Class. I have to write something to model good teacherly behavior for peer response groups. Then I will have to spend time responding to drafts. I figure I can cannibalize some former work and put it into the draft I'm working on. But since I actually want to work on my dissertation, I feel very mean-spirited about this extra writing. Responding is going to swallow me whole early in the week. Why did I ever agree to TA when I could've audited and not even shown up? Stupid, stupid Earnest.
  
• Application for Cool Institute is due at the end of the week.
• Entries for Last Grad School Contest of my career are due at the end of the week.
• Some other crap I'm helping someone out with has to be done by the end of the week.
• Need to work on a workshop that a colleague and I are giving so I don't have to freak out about it later.
  

Okay, maybe that's not so much. Who am I kidding? It's a lot. And I want to go back to sleep just thinking about it. To-Do lists are bad, because they lay out too much information, too much stuff to deal with all at once. But apart from being overwhelmed by the work, I also HAVE to make sure I have a weekend this weekend, I remind myself, because last weekend I was possessed by worry about my interview and didn't rest at all. So I need to do some important relaxing -- not to mention some cleaning, laundry, dishes. Oh god. And one more on my list.

• Writing that makes me feel like I'm alive and not wasting my life.

That's all there is to it. Only my cat has the right idea. He's napping. Surely I should be doing something lovely and indulgent on a Saturday like eating breakfast and reading in bed (a book, not my to-do list).

Especially since what I really want to do is stalk Adventure U's website and tap into my super-psychic powers and send them such powerful signals of "hire me hire me" that they stop whatever they're doing and become convinced that despite a mediocre-to-okay interview, I'm the one they want. This is the worst part of being in the last round before hiring. I know that this is not the greatest job for me. That is, the location is great, and there are really interesting, well fascinating, aspects of this job, but the teaching, the teaching I tell you, is a hard fit. Their program is very structured and values things that I understand but don't really value. But if they don't choose me, it's going to feel like being a wallflower at the Prom and eating alone in the cafeteria with the popular people throwing spitwads in my hair all rolled up into one. Especially because then I will have to tell department people that I didn't get the job, which is one of the very good reasons to go underground and not tell anyone anything while on the market. Going to live with my SO and writing may be the best option (especially since we've had this LDR for a year and still have not lived together), but still not having Adventure U not choose me will likely make me feel like shit. I can't decide whether I should expect that I am going to get the job a la the Secret or assume that I won't a la North Dakota farmer. It's a tough one to call.

We're all under too much strain. Let's all take the day off.

**UPDATE**

I actually did decide to take the day off, it being Saturday and a day of rest and all.