is what they call it. Every kid showing up to campus for the first time scrambling to get into a course, any course, that fits, and all of them having fits about it. Tomorrow: close-outs, when the second, more urgent scrape takes place, and not a damned thing I can do about it, for it is not my job. No. My job was to feed them Saturday night, to calm them, reassure them, prepare them for the crunch, and to meet with them today, all day, my ten hours again given over to the someones who need the time more than I do. One can say so for a long long time and have it be true. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow I'll think of them and wonder if I did well enough to look up courses and plan for the ineluctable shift: today's hours undone by tomorrow's outcome. All is well for them, though I'll wait for their notes and hope they have something certain to look forward to. Tonight I come home and look for my life, as usual, in the house: phone messages, mail, email, an absurd triangulation--phone, computer, doorstep, now what?--I should wash dishes. I should finish my work. I should paint, write, watch tv, do something to bring myself pleasure. I should ... what? I talk on the phone and feel almost myself again. Rick calls from LA. Tom calls and I raincheck again. Ted calls to say there is class tomorrow night, and I dread the energy I won't have to kick and scream with the black belts. I have a virus of some sort fogging my head and don't have the energy to placate the restless child who would like to rage again about having to go to bed after not having a day to herself before closing. Go to bed, you. You are living in my sleep, as it is, greedy thing. Dream: I'll write to you and the cousins. We are sick because you know no end of it.
It hits back.
