An e-mail from a friend made me realize that y'all probably aren't getting an accurate picture of my life at the moment. There are various things to note:
- I am almost entirely off-line at the moment, and have been for a few days now, and probably will be until at least December 29th, when I get to Vermont, and possibly January 9th, when I finish at Vermont and go back to Chicago, because I don't know what kind of net facilities they have there. So only the most urgent e-mails are getting dealt with. I'll try to plug into Jed's ethernet at some point today and catch up a bit, but I'm probably going to stay essentially very behind.
- I promised Bob that I'd have a first draft of TA by Christmas -- to do that, I need to write roughly 5000 words a day for the next few days. I wrote 4500 or so yesterday, so I'm reasonably on track, and I actually do think this is fairly do-able. But it also means that absolutely everything else is getting sacrificed to finishing the draft in time. Just so you know.
- I'm feeling super-stressed, for no good reason that I can tell. Maybe calling them panic-attacks is slightly too strong, but for most of the evenings in the last few weeks, I've had hours of high stress. Feeling like my heart is racing, like something is terribly wrong, even though I know, rationally, that nothing is wrong. Having lots of difficulty falling asleep, waking up early from nightmares. My evenings have just been shot, making it impossible to concentrate on work, and difficult even to watch tv or read something fluffy. Kevin has been such a trooper, spending hours every evening just holding me and calming me down. David and Jed, also similarly helpful recently. Really not sure what's up -- possibly just all the job interview / book draft finishing stuff. The current plan is to try to ride it out through the interviews and the ten days teaching in Vermont that follow, and then, if I'm not feeling better in January, possibly go talk to someone then, see about whether they think I need to try taking Paxil or something else for anxiety. There's absolutely nothing actually wrong, as far as I can tell -- my life is amazingly good. It all seems biochemical, somehow, whether stress-induced or otherwise. When I'm not having these stress-outs, I'm very happy.
- Journal reader Robert H. (who may be my oldest reader, at somewhere in his 70s, I think) reminded me that it's the 9th birthday of my journal. Happy birthday, journal! If you'd like to celebrate by telling me your favorite entries of the last year (or last few months, or last few weeks), I'd enjoy hearing that. Though I might not get online again to read your responses for a bit.
