Though I had yet to type anything, WordPress credited me with a word count of 7. I will attempt to fathom this mystery later.
It’s 9:00 on the dot as I launch this post, and the day promises to be an exceedingly long one. I had stocked the hours with errands to keep me busy, but the preponderance of black ice on the asphalt (discovered when I went foraging for coffee) has obliged me to rethink those plans. We can expect gusts up to 45 mph for awhile, and temperatures will plunge down into the single digits later this afternoon. So much for the balmy 30s we’ve enjoyed over the past few days and the mildness I counted on to get me up and moving.
The first day of vacation proper always leaves me a bit disoriented. I wake up at 4:30, work through my morning writing rituals, and finish up in good time to go to the gym and get ready for class. Except getting to the gym (which is perched atop a slope in an area that the university does not bother to plow or salt) becomes problematic come December, and of course I don’t have a lot of class planning to tackle today. I do have a firm commitment this evening–the computer dude is coming by to install a new video card (which looks quite like a phaser) and extra RAM on my machine–but I’ve got a little time to kill between now and then. Ergo, since exam week already caused me to handle the sundry tasks of apartment maintenance (one has to avoid grading essays somehow), I find myself housebound with little to do but snooze. That sounds fine by me, to be honest, but I enjoy enough quasi-Protestant blue-collar guilt to feel as though I should be working on some palpable project. Vacationing is not my strong suit.
I’ve got plenty to do, to be sure, but that feeling that I deserve a respite of some sort is strong enough to inhibit forward motion. All of my catch-22s are homemade. Today’s subject line comes from Tennyson’s “Ulysses”: “Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough/ Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades/ For ever and for ever when I move.” The trick sometimes is moving.
My task today, then, is to shake off this inertia and find some way to resist the vague temptation to “store and hoard myself.” I know of only a couple things that might kick me into motion, but they are not mine to make happen. At least not yet.
