My husband, who never gets sick, has been sick all week. "I feel better today!" he says each morning, but then he is back in bed by the afternoon. I haven't seen him like this since 1999. No consistent symptoms -- occasional fever, intermittent headache -- but this crushing fatigue and a persistent conviction that the house is freezing cold.
It has made for a strange and lonely and worrying week. I am going to urge him to schedule a doctor's appointment on Monday, I think, unless he's much better tomorrow.
I am in limbo at work. The college committee that makes promotion decisions normally meets right before the start of the semester and issues decisions immediately thereafter. This means they would, in normal circumstances, have made the decision on my promotion portfolio more than two weeks ago. Every time I get a new email I wonder if it's the one. "Maybe the dean got sick and it was hard to reschedule a daylong meeting," I tell myself. "Maybe one of the decisions required them to consult the legal office or the provost," I tell myself. "This is a great place to practice detachment," I tell myself.
I flinch a little every time I open my email.
The substance abuser to whom I am closest is doing Dry January and I have been trying my best to be supportive. Just between you and me and the internet, I am tired of worrying about her future and tired of trying to help her deal with her issues. "I'm not making a permanent commitment," she has said very clearly. I have learned over the years that my emphatic pronouncements are unlikely to be useful to her, so I'm telling you instead: it seems like the height of folly to abandon the effort after 31 days. And yet-- sometimes people we care about make decisions we hate.
I do not get to decide what she will do on Thursday.
Work is always full of service responsibilities in January and February: admissions portfolios, search committee responsibilities, annual evaluations. My judger is in high demand. This semester I have 136 students, and a correspondingly heavy email load. I am going through the motions in the office, unable to muster much enthusiasm. I am trying to wrap up a huge and daunting paper with a co-author who is not especially helpful. I sit down and attempt to describe what I've done, and I struggle to put words in a row. "It's just going to get rejected," I tell myself, feeling pre-defeated.
All of my colleagues are friendly but only two of them are actual friends, people I get together with outside of work. Both of them are on sabbatical this semester, so work feels a little strange and lonely too. That's part of the problem.
Another part of the problem is that the weather has been appalling this week: brutal cold, followed by juuust enough warming to allow an ice storm to drift through the region, then a further thaw accompanied by steady rain and ubiquitous mud, ending with oppressive fog. It was so thick last night that I went the wrong direction on the highway, at the beginning of a trip I've made hundreds of times. We haven't seen the sun in days. I know that some of my glumness arises from a lack of outside time and exercise, and yet here I sit on the couch again.
This morning I was reading the beginning of Exodus and thinking about waiting in unpleasant circumstances. There are a bunch of things weighing on me right now that I cannot control. Right now I feel like I am still driving on the highway in last night's fog, unable to see very far in front of me.
But I will keep moving forward, just like I did last night. There are sensible things I can do, so I will do them. I can make a cozy pot of chili for dinner. I can do a streamlined lifting session in the basement with music I like. I can knock out most of the remaining admissions portfolios today. And then I can have some fun, chatting in German with Pete (who is home for the weekend, hurray!) while I work on a happy knitting project for Stella. Check it out: elephant-patterned mittens, with picot cuffs and a Latvian braid.
Okay. Onward. Here I go.
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