February 20, 2014

Mint tea and Handel before morning.

Developed a longing for the pale green dresser I’d left behind (wanting it for use in my office) and hauled it over and up the stairs by myself. I’d been convinced I could not, but I did, and there is some kind of lesson there. It was created to support the printer and contain the various office detritus needful from time to time. There was an old mitten bunched up in a corner of it, and twenty stinkbugs nestled in the creases of the mitten. God outdid Himself on that one.

Have been thinking of the situation at school. I’ve spent thirty years bewildered that my institution didn’t use my talents more (for I do have them, even of the institutional variety), all the while it was standing back resentful that I was not using my talents more on its behalf. I turned away and began my own projects, thinking to find a place in that way, a deed interpreted as my only being interested in my own projects. All so richly ironic. It would be funny if it were not the whole of my academic career. I have been, I think, a superlative teacher, though that is irrelevant on an institutional level, being invisible to anyone who had not been in my class, and obscured by the cloud of misunderstanding I’ve just outlined. I do not know what to do about this, even as I didn’t know how to break through the barriers at the very beginning except to ignore them and light our for new territory. An outcast, I made my own life, and am judged because I did so. I think there are times when it is impossible to know, or to have known, what to do.

Steve the Fish Guy came and took not only the fish, but the whole apparatus, as I probably told him he could. Thus endeth that whole episode. Of course, I am sad. Interviewed a new cleaning lady, heavily tattooed and bringing a reek of cigarettes with her into the house. Hired her because she seemed, aside from that, without nonsense.

Ran into DG at the Y. My pleasure at the meeting indicated I had missed him. He certainly is big.