Sick

I began to feel ill last night, but, of course, tried to convince myself that I felt fine. This morning I awoke feeling like the bottom of an old work shoe, but I came to school anyway. I'm going to go home after class today instead of staying in my office, but I'll be up here again tomorrow.

In my previous job, I would have taken the day off. Clearly, I care more about graduate school than I did about my previous job. Maybe that means I'm finally in a field that's meaningful for me. Maybe it just means that I'm more selfish and fear-driven now (less concerned with passing on contagion and more worried about failure).

When I'm unwell, my mind is less sharp. It's harder to concentrate, harder to interpret and make connections, harder to recall facts and passages from my reading. I'm trying to read "Friendship," but Emerson's prose, stilted and opaque at the best of times, reads like a string of non-sequiturs when filtered through this unwholesome haze. It's a little like what I felt at my previous job. After a few years, my work took on the greenish caste of plague: difficult to look at, noisome, and repellent to the touch. I avoided it as a pest house--the needful tasks, wasting away through grimy windows, staring as I passed by avoiding their gaze. Their eyes no longer beseeched . . . they accused.

I live in fear of my academic work evolving into a similar revenant of itself. I began as an actor, but after I'd spent several years trying to make a go of that, it lost its luster. I moved to computers, but after about three to five years I stopped caring about technology. I knew I liked writing, so I transitioned into tech writing and enjoyed it; but, like one of Poe's women, it sickened after about five years.