First Day

Yesterday my husband and I got up, had coffee and breakfast, watched a bit of news, and then he went upstairs, showered, and dressed for work. I did not stay in my robe and nightgown all day (though I did on Sunday!). Instead, I got out some mail and did some painting. Right now I'm working on some wooden pieces, but during the night I got a great idea for a painting that I want to do soon. First, though, there is the landscape and the abstract triptych I want to do for my son's new house, and there are three unfinished portraits I need to work on, plus another half-blocked-in landscape I started some time ago.

My new painting is going to be called Scene of the Crime. I won't describe it here, lest someone steal my idea (all my hundreds of artistically inclined blog followers, ha!). No, it won't have a knife in it at all. It won't even have a six-year-old boy pointing his finger at someone and saying "bang" (which got him in trouble at school--such a threat!)

It feels strange not to be prepping for the semester. No nagging emails to get my syllabi into the department. No urgent emails from students wanting overrides into my classes. No reminders of all the many things I need to do. No overwhelming sense of fatigue even before the semester begins. I'm still not sleeping worth a damn, but then, that's menopause for you. At least now when I wake up during the night, I can plan artwork and novels and sewing projects! I could not help laughing the other day (bitterly!) at a survey listing university professors as the "least stressed" occupation. I would insist that they are one of the more stressed occupations, unless one is the kind of professor who lectures in a monotone from his yellowed notes and gives scantron tests (or has a badly paid grad student grade essay tests).

I had a teaching dream the other night, similar to, yet slightly different from, the ones I've had in the past. I was in a classroom ready to teach (if you can call having a thumb drive with my materials on it being "ready to teach"). My students never came in, but another teacher and her class did come in. I told her that I thought I was supposed to be teaching in this room during this hour, but she went right ahead and set up. She did let me check on the computer to see whether my class location had been changed, but I could not find either the class or my name on the schedule of classes. That's kind of scary. I'll bet some of my students this coming semester who had planned to take a specific class because I was teaching it are scratching their heads and asking, "Huh? What happened?" I hope they complain. I hope the new department chair gets inundated with questions and complaints.

I can't believe that He Who Must Not Be Named is now the honcho. I'm laughing inside, though, because I am a firm believer in what Truman Capote had to say about answered prayers. He said it wasn't the prayers that went unanswered that should concern us. Instead, it's the ones that seem to get answered that ought to scare the heck out of us. Here I am, feeling like Brer Rabbit, begging the fox not to throw him into the briar patch. And there Honcho is, about to slap at Tar Baby. Just wipe the grin off my face, if you can. Though I am more than happy not to be there now, I can't help wishing I was a fly on the wall so I could watch what happens.