24 Hours

But, I'll have to act soon, because my internet time has been reduced to next-to-nothing. It now coincides neatly with my morning bowl of muesli and my cuppa tea. I can't afford much more than that. Internet is like television: it sucks you in and it takes too much motivation to get out of its grasp. I just don't feel like I can risk the temptation at this moment.

Suddenly, I am drowning in work. My first way to combat stress is to freak out over my paperwork. Although I was notoriously messy in high school (never with paperwork though, my friends, never with paperwork), I've gotten quite clean in my old age. And, I'd actually venture to say I've gotten terribly anal about my paperwork, whereas before I was just "neat." I don't really like this aspect of myself (anal is just not a good adjective in general), but I do like that my papers are so purty. You should see my filing system, kids!

So Sunday was spent on the phone catching up with friends while simultaneously reorganizing everything I could possibly refile, rewrite, rearrange, or recycle. How good does that feel? Sooo good.

Now all I have left to do is all the work. Right, that part. It's like a huge gun, and I'm staring right down its barrel. That doesn't feel quite so good, though.

No matter. I'll be fine. As they say in Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead*: "I'm right on top of that, Rose!"

I finally came to the conclusion a few years ago that doing the work is better than dealing with the stress that comes along with not doing it. I would rather overwork and feel confident in what I produce/learn than underwork and feel anxious about the whack job I've done. So, I decided, I just have to do the damn work.

Today was spent: early morning bfast with the internet, off to school for a lecture on the French morphophonological system (don't know if that's a word in English, but it is in French... how ya like it?), off to the library for research for a few hours (librarians are such bitches in this country, even with that fake-ass plastic smile strapped across their faces. I can see right through them and hear their inner dialogues, "Why won't this stupid blond girl just stop asking for shit already?" "What? She wants yet another file? God, this girl is annoying..."), back to class for a two-hour lecture on predicats and quantificateurs, off to the grocery to buy some essentials because we've been stahving in this house, up the six flights of stairs to put away groceries, over to the desk to start the Arabic, back to the kitchen for a snack after three hours of steady work, back to the desk to work again for another two.

Now, I've given up and am just trying to calm down the adrenalin I've been going on all day in order to keep up the pace. Tomorrow, everything starts all over. Early morning trip to the library, evening class, several hours of work to follow. Wednesday, it should be more of the same. Next week, I start teaching (for real this time). So it's pretty much going to stay at this rhythm until I leave for Christmas.

I have adopted the What About Bob* philosophy: baby steps to the school, baby steps to the library, baby steps back to the house, baby steps to make myself sit down and do all this damn homework, baby steps to make up some lesson plans for next week. Baby steps. I can do it, provided I keep my notebooks in perfect order and color-code everything.

*Not quite sure about the references to such bad movies. Must be some sort of coping mechanism.

PS On a totally unrelated note, the BlogforAmerica site for Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean asked Americans to donate $360,000.00 to finance a tv ad that would counter an ad made by the Bush team. Dean's site gave us from last Friday to Tuesday (tomorrow) to come up with the cash, and the fundraising has already gone through the roof: at the time of writing, the total has already come to $431,968.53, with just under 24 hours left to go. It's a pretty cool thing to witness the success of his campaign on a daily basis.