don't stop

Sometime over the last five months, Thursday became my favorite day of the week. Thursdays mean that there is just one half-day left until the weekend. Standing between me and that weekend is my Friday morning class, which is fifty minutes of easy, and on Fridays I even go into the office early and prep for the week ahead. All this hangs over my head on Thursday, in a delicious way; Oh boy, I think, tomorrow is such an easy day! And then there is Thursday night, with its good television and anticipation.

(It reminds me of when I was very little, when we lived in South Carolina, and Thursday nights I would ask my father to play Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop," and I would dance around our big living room, so excited for Friday! Just one more day! Until the weekend!)

((I get that lots of people, to say nothing of children, would be excited to play "Don't Stop" on Friday, but I was the child who would force herself to eat all her vegetables because it brought her that much closer to dessert, and oh boy, dessert was going to taste so good especially after those vegetables. If we are friends in real life, you probably know this about me. I blame Sven.))

Life in Georgia is full of these small routines: Mondays are long days, and Tuesdays a little easier. Wednesday night, after classes, we go out for dinner and a drink. Thursdays I get excited (though I don't play Fleetwood Mac anymore) and Fridays and Saturdays are okay, usually full of grading and Target runs, and Sunday is a day of cleaning and plant-watering and soup-making, for the lunches ahead. I like these routines, even though every few weeks they make me a little stir-crazy; for someone who craves stability, and control, I also daydream about setting our things on fire and living in Spain for a year. But mainly, this current schedule is just fine.

I have been thinking a lot about last spring, around this time. My time at that school was ending, and while I was ready for something to change, it didn't feel as if anything was going to work out. I had done a handful of interviews, none of which panned out, and though I was tired of the current place and its politics, and our apartment with its leaking roof and loud neighbors, and Michigan with its gray skies and piles of snow, I could not envision the next place. When I read e-mails to friends from that semester, I am surprised at how tired and cranky and defeated I sound:

Later, I went home and cried the sort of cry that is clearly a grief-cry, the type where you're not really sure why, exactly, you are crying except that it just seems overwhelmingly unfair that things are the way things are, and you are angry that things are unfair but also disappointed with yourself for crying over the unfairness, and while all of this is going on you're also just grieving for the lives you used to inhabit and the person you used to be. And then you cry because you hate that things are ending without knowing what things might be around the corner, and you're scared of what those things might be, and you just are sick of feeling like a brittle former version of yourself who hates everything and everyone. 

 and, later in that same e-mail:

If I try to be objective, I can say that it has been a long semester, and that my classes haven't been all that spectacular, as winter classes tend to be, and that even though I tried to prep myself to not get a job it still sucks to not get a job. I can say that it's discouraging to go to your job and try to motivate and reach students at a time when the entire nation seems to hate your profession, and it's hard to work with students who hate you simply because you are the person in charge of the class. 

When I am being objective, I know that I can't take any of these things personally, but then again I know that most of us who care about our jobs also let these things really eat us up, because there is nothing quite as frustrating as putting hours and hours into your work only to have students reject your efforts. And to do this all without knowing what's coming next--to only be able to hope that the next step is a step up, or equal, but not a step back--is just hard. 

That's all. It's hard, and I don't like it.

I have been thinking about this lately because it was eighty degrees on Tuesday and I opened all the windows, and it felt like the first days of spring up north. It made me think of the weeks in March and April last year, when I finally told myself to buck up and shut the fuck up, to accept that I would be fine and life would go on, and, only weeks later, we were offered the positions here.

I was thinking about it because the job here is very much like the one I used to have: there are nice people, and people who make me feel welcome, and there are people who can't be bothered and there are people whose lectures I overhear and think, in a small and petty way, My god I can't believe you got a tenure-track job and I did not, you sound like a fucking moron. My office is hot, and the building is sort of old and gross, but the work is essentially the same and the students as challenging and dopey and great all at the same time, as students tend to be. The workload is much heavier, and sometimes I curse this town, but other times we gather at the pizza place at four on a Friday afternoon, when the thunderstorm is rolling overhead, and order beer and I feel grateful.

I remind myself of these things because it seems important to know that it is always going to be like this, no matter where I live or what I do: some things will be good, and others mildly insufferable, and in the meantime, I will have to try to focus on the work I do and hope it matters to someone. I realize that this sounds like I pin an awful lot of my satisfaction in my work, but I don't mean only the teaching part; I mean the writing, and also the soup-making, and the hoping that I am being a good friend and daughter and dog-owner. That is all work, and the thinking about these things is work, too. (This guy says it better than I ever could. When my students tell me this speech makes them cry, I tell them, Me too.)

Friends and I talked last weekend about this constant longing to be happy and satisfied, whatever the fuck those words mean, and I am trying, as always, to remind myself that the things that chew me up rarely matter much a year or two down the line. Instead, I try to appreciate the small victories: sitting on an airplane with my oldest friend, drinking ginger ale and talking about our parents. Sitting on the deck while the dog sniffs at the anoles hiding in the forsythia. Writing a new poem or two, and getting them picked up. Playing trivia with my brother on a random night in Atlanta. Falling asleep at night in our bed, the snores of human and animal the only sound in the house.

Don't stop.