Well, here it is, just past 8:30, and I'm ready for the national anthem to come on to signal the End of the Marcy Programming Day . . . (and if you understand that reference, then you are just Too Damned Old). I've gotta push myself to stay awake long enough to get Emma from driver's ed in a few minutes.

Then I'm coming home, putting on the jammies, and curling up with a glass of wine and my book club's book. I'm feeling quite happy that I managed to go running earlier today! At least I don't feel bad for not having done that! (And I was starting to feel bad. Not guilty bad but physically bad.)

I'm puzzled about this fatigue, though. I do think a lot of it has to do with the fact that teaching is just downright tiring. I hope I get acclimated after a while; I know that I'll always have that expenditure of nervous energy before I actually go to class, because teaching is performance, really, and you have to get up for a performance. But I do hope that the moves all come back, and that things smooth out a bit. At the moment I've kinda trapped myself into some routines that are not natural for me; I'm finding myself having to do way too much record-keeping (attendance, in-class activities, online quizzes, etc. etc.), which I'm not good at. A highly organized and minutely detailed class is fine if you can keep up with the organization and detail. Which I can't. And not keeping up is worse than no organization or detail at all. (Almost.)

I'm still feeling pretty well on top of things, but I notice that my feelings about the nine-to-five way in which I've constructed this job are changing. This week has been a relatively light one for me, and I have not wanted to be in the office as much as I have been; I wasted a whole bunch of time on Monday morning, and I felt bad about it. When I worked at Pharmacy, just showing up was good enough, some days. But now, if I show up and don't do anything, I feel like I've wasted time that I could have spent either really working . . . or really playing, which is what I should have done on Monday. So I think I'm going to take it nice and slow and lazy tomorrow, when I don't have to be in Lansing until noon.

I'm noticing that I'm starting to worry that the students don't like me, and I remember that before the semester began I vowed not to let that bother me when it cropped up (which I knew it would). I think this worry is unfounded, mostly - but it's a product of circumstances in some ways. These people are very adolescent, most of them . . . by that I mean that they are self-focused to the extent that they can't perceive the effect that they have on others. For instance: I asked them to write about their second papers, and one woman wrote that she just doesn't like to analyze movies very much; she prefers just to watch them for entertainment. This strikes me as a pretty absurd thing to tell your teacher, who has given you an assignment to analyze movies. But of course she couldn't see that.

I suppose I'm feeling down about this tonight because my second class schlepped over to the library this afternoon, when they weren't supposed to: We went to the library a week ago, and on our way out the door I put up a sign saying that's we were meeting (in case there were latecomers) - and the sign, which I completely forgot about, remained on the door until today, when it threw everyone off . . . they were pretty unhappy about that. I don't blame them, but geeze. It was an honest mistake. If you were dealing adult to adult, the other person would get over it. Instead, they responded by talking in class, giggling, and other low-level annoying behaviors that I had to counteract. I hope this was a temporary aberration.

In some sense, I can't trust the responses I get from them - I have to forge ahead, believing and acting like everything's fine. (I suppose I'll see at the end of the semester whether everything was fine or not.) It's a lot like parenting, where sometimes you just have to hold your breath, grit your teeth, and smile. When I was weighing the pros and cons of taking this job, I remembered these kinds of encounters, and wondered why anyone would trade interactions with adults who appreciate you for interactions like this . . . Time to remember Frank's sage advice. When I expressed some concern about the new job, he said, "Marcy, don't be silly. Don't let those things deter you from your goal. You don't stop riding your bike to work in the rain, do you? You don't stop riding your bike in the snow, do you? Of course not. You have a goal, and you accomplish it. Obstacles are just things to be overcome."

I think of myself riding my bike in the snow a lot.

I'm sure I'm making a mountain out of a molehill because I'm tired. It's about time for that wine and book, I think; Emil picked up Emma so there's nothing standing between me and my jammies . . .