Post-Race Blues

I've been doing the professor thing long enough to recognize this particular pattern in myself:

September:  Excitement about the new school year!  Lots of plans and goals and accomplishments ahead!

October:  Whoa, nelly.  I'm kind of saying yes to a lot of things.  But yay!  Still pretty excited!  Doing okay over here.

November:  Oh.  Shit.  I thought I was running a 5k.  I trained for a 5k.  But this a marathon.  No, it's a sprint-marathon.  I signed up for a marathon, but I only have 25 minutes to run it.  Why do I always do this to myself?

December:  Exhausted, bitter, sick.  Take your race medallion and shove it where the sun don't shine, mister.

That's been the pattern since high school, pretty much.  I can almost guarantee you that I always lecture blithely about sagely managing my time and seeking "balance" in September, comment hilariously about my kids' Halloween hijinks and my stressed out response in October, and then I get some kind of high-level bronchial infection in November as a lead up to national conferences (for which I am perenially late writing promised papers).  But I get antibiotics and power through, eat and drink too much on Thanksgiving, and then get the stomach flu in December as I try to wrap up grading and live through epic and inhuman hiring committee meetings.

I refer to November as the "race to the bird," because I'm just trying to stay alive until Thanksgiving "break," and after that I'm half-assing it until Christmas because I've just puked up a lung and my body is giving me the old eff you.

It doesn't take much to set me off post-race, either.  Here are some examples:

Dog hair.  We have hardwood floors. This is awesome because Nolie and I have pet allergies, and we have two dogs.  So we can clean up the dog hair.  But it is not awesome if you don't have time to vacuum twice a week.  Tumbleweeds of dog hair are basically blowing through our house right now because I missed one day of vacuuming yesterday, because I had the stomach flu.

That's how important me and my vacuuming are, people.

The piles.  Piles of clothes.  Piles of shoes.  Piles of homework.  Piles of bills.  Piles.  Piles.  Piles.  I do not like the piles, but they like me.  I am a place-for-everything person.  Nobody else in my house is.  I am unlucky in this way, for many reasons.  I have never learned my zen lessons when it comes to the piles.  I have given up on myself ever learning to be at peace with the piles.  I hate the piles.

Post-sick sheets.  It's not like I puked on the sheets.  But the unmade bed, the rumpled, hot sheets, the sweat smell.  Just, no.  I have been known to pause between bouts of hurling to change them.  Or at least to change them as soon as I'm able to stand upright.  That's how I feel about sick sheets.

The post-sick bathroom.

I can't even.

Another pile (just because it's stacked horizontally doesn't mean it's not a pile).  The books I should have read for that new class I have to teach before placing my book order.  In my defense, I read some.  And some of some.  But not enough.  Never enough.  Which means someone is sure to find out about me and my actual preparation for teaching this fine class.  Perhaps I will even have my PhD revoked and be stripped of my fine office and skinny laptop.

That's what all this is, I guess, the fear that someone will see that I had too much going on there for a while and missed some deadlines and puked all over and had to spend 36 hours in a coma in a stinky bed while dog hair accumulated and Addie's pants all of a sudden ALL stopped fitting all at once and she has two music performances this week and who is this kid's mom anyway??? and the piles overtook us and then we had to come and be rescued from our house by some tv personality who really has it all together and probably gets her book orders in on time.

It's also a little scary how close we feel to unraveling every other minute, or at least how lame my vision of "unraveling" is.  I mean, nothing really bad happened.  We're going to be okay, the dog hair will get sucked up, the sheets changed, the toilets scrubbed, and the book orders canceled and remade.  It's all okay.  I just have the post-race blues and would hope at some point to just get out of the race altogether.