Anxiety!

I have 28 days left before my exams are due.  The weekend before they're due, I'm giving a conference paper at the last Berry Southern Women Writers conference--not awesome timing, but I've been twice and loved it so much that I couldn't not go to this, what they're claiming will be their last.  My paper is on Scarlett O'Hara, which I'm writing about in one of my exam essays, so there will be some nice overlap.  I won't have to completely stop exam writing to churn the conference paper out, which is nice.

I have three completed shitty first drafts, which I'm quite happy to have.  My southern paper is the best going so far--although I'm having trouble not just writing the whole thing about Ellen Foster, because I love it so much as a novel, and there's so much to say about it.  My gender paper I keep bugging my professor about, because I want to make sure that the texts I use fit within the parameters he laid out for the paper.  I spent about 12 hours yesterday wrestling with my American paper--the one I feel the least in control about--but after finally letting go and freewriting for a while (you know, what I tell my students to do), I finally stumbled upon something resembling a thesis-like-thing for it (as I reported about another rough draft on fb: It's thesis-y.  Demented and sad, but thesis-y).  I didn't put the computer away until midnight last night--and then I read some more Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick.

So felt pretty okay about my progress when I went to bed last night.  Today, however, the news and fb are all full of hurricane stories, and Isaac looks like it might come close to New Orleans (on the anniversary of Katrina!  Joy!).  I feel a lot of anxiety about this, as seven years ago was quite a difficult time for me.  Even though realistically speaking, in Baton Rouge what we would most likely have to deal with is power outages and refugees, the ramping up anxiety around here is very easy to catch.

I went to jazzercise to try to work out some of the anxiety, and while I did get a good workout, it was the kind of teacher that makes me wish I could wear earplugs so I didn't have to listen to the inane comments they make.  I don't give a good goddamn what celebrity is dating whom, and the only other thing she talked about was the hurricane and how long the gas lines were.  I went there to not think about anxiety!

Although, I do sometimes daydream about how incredibly bored people would be if I were in charge of the inane chatter.  I could talk about Downton Abbey, and Inspector Lewis, and how surprisingly boring Amanda Palmer's collaboration with the Flaming Lips was...omg!  What ever is going to happen with Bates and Anna?  Will Matthew and Mary actually go through with the wedding?

I've got my lesson plans for the week done, too, though I'm feeling so less than excited about teaching right now.  The combination of awesome teaching this summer, my current anxiety levels, and the fact that it's first year comp makes it hard to get that excited.  However, I'm kind of okay with not being jazzed about it.  Ebb and flow are to be expected, I think.

End of Spring Break

Oddly enough, I can't seem to find a video clip from Heathers, of Veronica's dad asking how spring break withdrawal is coming along.   Oh well.

Tomorrow is the first day back after this terribly late spring break.  I'm mostly happy with the balance of work and not-work I achieved, although I'm still erring on the side of not-work.  I'm quite pleased that I met my goal of finishing the 518-page Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, an edited collection on my southern list.  It took a while--after getting through that behemoth, it only took me a day to read The Color Purple (which I'd read before, but it's been years.  Plus, it has the line, "The lord don't like ugly" in it, which is pretty important to my work).  I also finished the abstract for the Berry Southern Women Writers conference I've been working on, and got that submitted.  And I polished up a paper to submit for the department writing contest, which has tomorrow as its deadline.

In not-work news, we went to New Orleans Thursday for the book release/Eudora Welty's birthday event at Maple Street Books.  There was wine, champagne, cheese & crackers, and birthday cake.  The book, which is about the restoration of Welty's garden in Jackson, is a beautiful coffee-table book, and that author was quite entertaining.  I love Welty people.

I slept a lot the last week, and worked out a decent amount.  Knitted some.  Put away my clothes and suitcase that was still out since the SSSL conference.  Wore my pajamas until 3 and 4 in the afternoon many days.  Repotted some seedlings.  I also discovered that there's a jazzercise location much closer than the one I tried when we first moved here (as much as I love jazzercise, there's no way I'm driving 45 minutes each way for a class).  This one's in more the 15-20 minute driving range, which is much more reasonable.  And the student rate is $25/month, which is cheaper than the Y, which I was considering joining.  I love jazzercise.  So, I intend to try it out this week.  That would be fabulous if I could start going to jazzercise regularly.

I also managed to go a week without washing my hair, which may be a record (yay for ponytails!).  I shall now go and wash my hair in preparation for returning to school.  Still, this week is logical fallacy week in the classes I'm teaching, which is a not-labor-intensive week for me.  It's a nice way to ease back in.

In which I try to not too much of a yogahead, but I'll probably fail

The last couple of days I've had several moments of paralysis, where my to-do list feels like it has so many top priority things on it that I've just not been sure what to do next.  Sure, I'm a big believer in do the next thing, but it's been hard to figure out what that next thing is.  Ironically, my to-do list seems a bit shorter than normal, but everything on it is important. 

Part of the difficulty has been in taking on this new class, though the benefits of the second class so far seem to be outweighing the negatives. Though it's the same class I've been teaching, this group seems so much sweeter than my other class. Perhaps it's a function of their being new and shiny, but--so far, at least--no one's been reading the paper in class or been nearly as chatty as my other class.  And I enjoyed the challenge of figuring out how to transition them to a course schedule that more closely matches the other class I'm teaching.  As soon as IT can figure out how to get me access to their grades, I'll then need to figure out how to integrate their previous grades with the ones I'll give them.  Midterm grades are due Tuesday; while it would be nice if I could submit them on time, if I can't, I can't.

I'm getting better of letting go of such things. I've been working on expanding my Wise Blood paper I gave at SAMLA into an article-length piece, with the intention of submitting it to Southern Cultures for their music issue.  However, its deadline was March 5, and last week I realized I wasn't going to make it in on time.  I had a finished, article-length version of my Edith Wharton paper that just needed its citation style changed for a women's studies journal which is having a special issue on fashion coming up; as that was quicker to finish, I focused on that, and was able to submit it on time.  Last week in writing group, I brought an abstract for a southern panel at MLA that's focusing on southern sexuality; that's a big priority, too.  Between my professor's comments and my awesome writing partner's comments, I was quite happy with how it turned out.  I continue to really appreciate my writing group/partner--having a reachable goal each Friday has been working really well to keep me on task.

Anyway, despite these accomplishments, I have kept hitting the wall of not knowing what to do next, which gives rise to unpleasant feelings of anxiety.  This anxiety has the snowball effect that I then keep doing work, and haven't been nearly as active as I'd like to be.  I have been doing other activities--my mandolin has been played, and over the course of several work breaks, I've made a bonnet for the Jane Austen Festival this weekend.  Still, I think the anxiety and fatigue have been interacting in a way to make me reluctant to do anything active.

I broke that cycle today, and did the online pilates/yoga class I like a lot this afternoon when I got home from a good day at school (the positive feedback loop thing).  I noticed, though, at the end of the video, how much I missed savasana, that wonderful pose at the end of yoga classes where you lie in corpse pose, usually while the teacher talks you through a relaxation exercise.  Happily, it occurred that nothing was keeping me from doing that myself, so I laid down on my mat and spent probably ten minutes walking myself through conscious relaxation and paid attention to my breathing.

I felt so good afterwards.  Though I've always felt suspicious of the yoga talk that savasana is needed to let your activity "sink in" or something, it occurred to me that such a pause is a good thing, and perhaps that's what I've been needing in my not knowing what to do next.  I get so into crossing an item off my list that I immediately move on to what's next.  I'm now going to try not going on immediately to the next thing--rather than do the next thing, I may try, do something, pause, take a break, do something else.