Wiederarschholung

"It's not me," I keep telling myself. But no matter how many times I repeat the mantra, I remain convinced that it is me after all, no matter how bald the protestations to the contrary. What's worse, this conviction insidiously works its way into the part of my mind that prevents me from doing dumb things, restraining my powers of restraint. Soon I'm trying to intervene in the situation, even though I still recognize that intervention may well be the least desirable course of action. Then, when my gesture of engagement is ignored or repudiated, I become indignant over the fact that my efforts go unappreciated. Finally, I end up back where I started, only with a twist. Now I insist out loud that, "It's not me," even as it dawns on me that it is. The best part is that this conviction, initially false in the majority of cases, now turns out to be correct. In the end, I've managed to turn falsehood into truth by becoming the bad guy I'd imagined myself accused of being.

In the Rushes

Today was a good day. Skylar was feeling well enough to go to school again. I finally got to ride down Campbell with Kim again. I read theory for two hours in the morning after dropping her off at work. I volunteered in Skylar's class again and really helped two of the children struggling with the phonetic approach to spelling. I had a great talk with the Bean, who was too tired to stay the whole day at school, as we drove down to the U of A, about the difference between herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores, culminating in a discussion of the teeth mammals in each category have. She got to say hello to lots of people in the English Department before Kim came to pick her up. The job talk I went to was excellent and the Q&A even better. Dinner at Kingfisher with the candidate and two junior-faculty colleagues was a delight. And my cold seems like it's starting to diminish in intensity. It was a day of pleasurable rushes. But the rush under which all the rushes were neatly subsumed was the rush of my first caffeinated coffee in weeks. There are few things I like better than returning to my sweet-smelling vice after one of my periodic "detox" periods. On hectic days like today, father's little helper is very helpful indeed. I often think how strange it is that anyone figured out how to make coffee in the first place. I mean, to pick the beans, dry them, roast them, crush them and then pour hot water on them is hardly the most logical thing to do, particularly since they have no food value. For all that, though, coffee was an ingenious discovery. I can almost taste tomorrow's cup now.

Boon or Bane?