Tuesday, April 1, 2008

So This Is How I Know I'm Not On Vacation Anymore...

The vacation is over. I knew it was gonna end and I was gonna have to get back to the grind, but geez! The first thing that happened was that Tom's cold turned out to be a particularly nasty flu. I felt so bad for him, that he had to travel when he clearly felt so very very crummy. but travel we did. We left Aunt Jennie's and went to my moms, where he spent another day on the couch. The next morning we left for home. We stopped for lunch, and when we walked back to the car, he noticed that we had a flat tire. In a (rare) lucky stroke, he made this discovery in a mall parking lot, so there was a tire place handy as well as a place for us to kill a little time while we waited. This was also VERY rough on Tom, who, I'm sure, just wanted to be home. (I did pick up the new B-52's offering, though, so that was kind of cool)

We got back on the road with not one, but 2 new tires. 'Cause that's just what you've budgeted for at the END of your vacation... Is it any surprise to anyone that it started raining at this point?

We got home and I got in a BIG fight with my mom on the phone. A screaming crying fight - the kind I haven't had with her in years. No sleep Sunday night.

Monday I taught my first class of the new quarter and - while it didn't go BADLY, it didn't go as well as I would've liked. There was just a lot of "business" to take care of and it sort of got me off track. Tom was still sick - his worst day so far, actually. Made up with Mom, though, sort of. (If both of us pretending nothing ever happened counts as making up)

Today was a doozy, though. I skipped my own class. Ask me how this happened, and the only honest answer I can give you is "I don't know". I thought the class was Wednesday night. I planned my schedule around a Wednesday night class. I wrote my syllabus based on Wednesday night meetings. I really thought I had a Wednesday night class. So we're sitting down to dinner around 6 and the phone rings and it's the secretary for the assistant dean - she has a lot of angry students in her office because I am a no show. I just have no idea how something like this could have happened, but it's pretty damn awful. I'd love to blame hormones, since they're easy to blame anything ditzy on, but this wasn't really ditzy. It's not like I forgot. I just - I just had it wrong. I had it all wrong. I am so sorry and so ashamed. I just wish I could figure out how it happened.

Now this is interesting (or maybe not): I took a nap this afternoon, and had my recurring roller coaster dream. It's not a recurring dream in that all the details are the same every time, but every time I am doing something mundane - sometimes looking for my car in a parking lot, sometimes navigating an increasingly bigger shopping mall, this afternoon I was sightseeing - touristy stuff - and I get on a little tram or something to help me find - whatever - what I need, what I'm looking for - and the tram turns into a really wild roller coaster without warning. And it's fun! I like it! But I worry that it's never going to take me where I need to go. When this worry starts to turn to panic, I usually wake up. Today was no exception. Probably doesn't take a genius to figure out the symbolism at work here. Things are out of control.

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