11:56 a.m. - August 08, 2002
Exit university left, exit everything else right
I am done. I have the offer, signed already, to return next summer, a standing invitation for a fast-tracked position when I have the Ph.D., or a deal allowing me to teach not as a graduate student but as a faculty member should I transfer here. The compliments would be better suited to a bagel; one compliment is enough for me, but laying them on too thick bothers me. I came here unaware of the politics surrounding my selection as a professor and did my best, so that there is only one voice yet raised against me, and that is even tempered by my supporters. University politics are tricky and subversive but I find sincerely trying my best to have trumped them all. It's all a game, and I rarely lose; I did not anticipate things turning out like this, and will admit I'm thankful the summer turned out the way it did.
I will miss my dean, the clerks, Marti, my T.A.s, my little office with its views and creaky chair. I will miss the experience and feeling of confidence, determinism, and the satisfaction of knowing I truly did put all I had into the mix instead of taking the half-assed road so often traversed. Perhaps I drove the students too hard, expected too much, had unrealistic expectations, but that is okay. The intrinsic emotion I'm feeling right now is exhaustion of the good variety, something I haven't been in a while.
I leave Saturday for my trip to the outer banks and marshes of North Carolina and the accents and trails of South Carolina. This will be a good time for me to be alone and process, to think and reflect. There's much backed up in the pipe and it needs an experiential outlet. I want to think about Spec and what that experience taught me, and redefine goals and interests and motivations and ambitions in light of current uncertainties. I want to read Paradise Lost and Paradise Regrained on the beach and put things to rest.
People have remarked on how happy I've been for a few weeks, but that isn't the case at all. I'm sad and hurt and simply do not know how to deal with and process everything, almost as if overload hit and I shut down the emotional part of me, even with Marti. If I was a different person, or if this was Before and not Now, I would pursue something more than friendship. Despite her invitations, I played oblivious because that's not something I need to add to the combustion pile just yet; when she said Next time you're here, you'll stay in my bed I laughed it off and said I prefer hard floors to soft mattresses and she laughed, saying I figured that, because I'm the same way. My mattresses are the firmest available we locked eyes and yes, we both knew there is more than a spark. What she doesn't know is that the spark is gone on hiatus until I can put things back together again with myself.
I am unbelievably angry with myself for wanting him despite everything, angry because I trusted him and that evil feeling of See I told you so from the pit of Everything Bad inside is shrill like a klaxon and yet instead of running from people, shutting away and self-consuming, I want more than that, I want to trust more people and fight the advances of what used to be, when I was impervious and confident and utterly lonely. Perhaps that's why the alarm is shrill, because it feels the death knell on the ramparts.
Let us hope.
