Giddy

I am strangely giddy today, to the point of being disruptive. I was a jack-in-the-box at a colloquium when I really ought to have kept my mouth shut; it was not for me, but for students, and not my students either. I woke up as I have all week with my stomach in a knot, realizing how far behind I am on editing this divisional newsletter that's coming out in just a couple of months. (It's much, much worse than it sounds--editing text from over 50 faculty members, and that doesn't include *collecting* said text.) Every day I think, "I will set aside the whole afternoon and work on the newsletter," and then I do precisely zero on it because I'm either putting out fires, or...putting out fires. Or blogging. Also I wrote a story for two hours this morning instead of "working," and I did that deliberately. I thought it would calm me down, like meditation, and it did--so I think that's probably the source of the giddiness. The defiant calm in the face of calamity. The insistence on still doing *my thing* despite the strong pressure to just give up writing until summer when everything's over. Or I could just be freaking out.

I talked to a campus newspaper reporter today about the blog I'm doing with my students. I'm obsessed with that blog; it's all I can do to keep from looking at it every fifteen minutes. The reporter seemed to share my enthusiasm, but maybe she was just trying to placate me while looking for an opportunity to edge away.