Note to self: reread Elie Wiesel's Night

I need to get a copy of my own, too, at some point. But I guess the library will have to do for now.

I do not have time to work on this dystopia* ms. It's stupid to work on it. It's bad, bad, bad to work on it. But by g*d, I'm going to do it anyway. Just for a little while. Just an hour or two this morning. Even with two w-f-h deadlines tomorrow--in a few hours, I'll be good and close that file and open the ones I'm supposed to be working on, and behave myself. And meet the deadlines, even if it kills me. Which it might.

I also think next semester I might schedule my Vermont packets at two a week. I think most other people put them all together, five in one week. But I don't think that's going to be the optimum way of working for me. I don't even think the way I have it now--five packets spread over nearly two weeks--is going to be optimum. Maybe I have ADD, I don't know. I just don't seem to do my best writing-related thinking when it's just one thing straight through. It's like the back of my mind thinks better when the pressure's off and the front of my mind is doing something else--so long as that other thing isn't teaching (like math/English/reading), or yet another family crisis.**

Perhaps that's why--oddly enough--packets are not only not interfering with my own process (so far), but seem to be stimulating it. Of course, it's only been a month or so, so we'll see what happens with that. But I'm thinking it could be because the packets are just writing, and thinking about other people's writing has never really interfered with my process. However, we shall see.



*That's what I need to reread Night for. I want to play around with the idea of mercy, pity, compassion and empathy in a world where not only is there no upside to those things, they're also a flat out liability.

**I also wonder about the feeling-overwhelmed thing people keep telling me about. It was supposed to happen at the residency, but didn't all that much. Maybe they meant physically overwhelmed with exhaustion rather than mentally and emotionally.*** Or maybe it's still coming. Or maybe one good thing has come out of having a life where multiple urgent situations explode all over me out of nowhere: I'm immune to low-level overwhelm-ed-ness. Maybe now it's like a gnat I just brush away. But then again, this is still early days. Maybe it'll get worse when I find out I was supposed to be doing certain paperwork that is now late.

I have a terrible foreboding that I'm not doing some kind of vital paperwork required by the office, and at the end of the semester I'll be in trouble and people will either be hounding me or tsk-tsking and making me feel like sh*t.

However, notice that this foreboding is not quite terrible enough to make me contact any powers-that-be and find out if I am supposed to be keeping up with vital paperwork.




***I did hit the wall everybody told me about, the one halfway through. Except that everybody said "On X day about halfway through the residency you'll hit the wall, you'll be crying, but don't worry because everyone cries on that day, and the next day you'll feel better." And--this says something about me, I don't know what--I didn't cry at all, I just suddenly hated everybody and everything and wished an earthquake would swallow every person at the residency and replace them with other people who didn't yammer on and on about writing all the time. But that only lasted half a day or so, and then I was better. And I don't think I ever stopped yammering about writing while I was there.