Recovery and Re-entry

It was mostly in the neck. The effect of yesterday. And in the wildly vivid dreams swirling through my rattled brain all night from the vast amount of information I took in, and spewed out, yesterday.

I use my priceless, microwaveable Bed Buddy every day, but today it has lived around my neck like an albino fox fur chomping its own tail.

Today I played hooky from my office hours, since no one can possibly have anything pressing the first week, right? I go back to the long, long day tomorrow. Those who do not know what it's like to lecture in front of a class for 75 minutes at a time, 3 times in a row, pooh-pooh my work hours, tell me I'm spoiled, roll their eyes when I say how drained I am at the end of the third class. When I'm not  lecturing the whole time, I'm running a writing workshop, trying to maintain the precarious balance between too gentle comments and too mean, not only from me, but from each student in the room, jumping in to save the writer of the moment when he/she looks like he/she might die from discouragement or despair, and jumping in to tame the obnoxious student who jumps in with a cerebral comment like "This sucks," and keeping the whole thing going at a fast clip. Then I go home to start reading, grading, prepping for the next time.

I've worked fast food jobs, retail jobs where I was standing on my feet all day, home health care jobs, magazine editing jobs, and have spent entire days tearing viciously stubborn vines off the side of a brick house. No job wears me out like this one. I do love this job. I am grateful for the job. I love/hate the students. But it's a mental and physical endurance test for an old cow like me, especially the first week of the semester.

Zapping the albino fox again.