(NB:  It seems a lot of folks arrive at this post whilst searching for the terms “lapsarian” or “post-lapsarian.”  If you’re hunting for something like a working definition, I eventually mounted one over here.)

Were you to see me on the street today, you would probably put your spare change in my hat.  Heck, you might even give me a hat to put change in.  That is how pathetic I look today, and it is an outward reflection of an inward state.

In good sooth, I don’t feel especially bad; in fact, I have many reasons to feel good.  On Thursday I learned that my mother had successful surgery, an eventuality we’ve been dreading since October, and her prognosis is quite good (admittedly, it would have been nice for the doctor to tell her this several months ago, as he apparently knew it all along).  I also finished my principal grading for the semester yesterday afternoon.  I’ve got essays coming in on Monday and exams on Wednesday, but I am well ahead of the burial curve. 

Nevertheless, right around 4:00 yesterday afternoon I felt my mojo waning, the proverbial puppet-with-snipped-strings feeling.  Whatever forward momentum I had was lost, and profound inertia set in.  We’re talking watching-Ghost-Whisperer-without-flipping-channels inertia.  It was just that bad.

When I feel the faceplant coming on, I prefer not to fight it.  For all my faults, I tend to brood efficiently, and it doesn’t take me too long to plumb the depths of my beleaguered psyche so long as I sink quickly.  In fact, right around 10 o’clock, staring at the ceiling at the beginning of what promised to be a sleepless night, the motive for these doldrums occurred to me:  I don’t know anything about anything.

Admittedly, this is a specially qualified kind of benightedness.  Just as Saturday morning disc jockeys don’t seem to grasp that they’re not hilarious, and just as a film critic can actually commit the opinion that Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantánamo Bay ”goes after easy targets and goes soft on the harder issues” to paper without the least trace of irony (I am, alas, not making that up), it is possible to feel quite competent without actually being competent.  A good brood, however, tends to puncture that bubble of seeming, leaving the brooder with existential gum in his goatee.

To wit, I’ve been thinking seriously about The Next Steps without having the faintest clue how to take them.  I would be more precise, defining the trajectories of nextnessitude in question for the sake of clarity, but I don’t think I can.  The Menacing Next pervades just about all of the professional and personal enterprises that line my horizon.  I have a decent grasp of what I want and ought to do, but a sense of how to do it?  Not so much. 

I started jotting down the things I need to figure out how to do earlier this morning, but it almost triggered another faceplant.  Between the house I want to buy, the tenure and promotions I’d like to earn, the collection of scholarly essays I’d like to edit, and the novel, chapbook, and monograph I’d like to write, the learning curve seems unnervingly steep.  More tragically still, that’s technically the “easy” stuff I have on tap (“easy” here meaning “terribly difficult but at least kinda quantifiable”).  I’m thinking really big, which suggests to me I might be wise to invest in a smaller skull.

I have world enough and time, to be sure, but the lump sum of my ambitions sometimes overwhelms me.  I fear there’s a reason that the latest search term that directed some poor browser to my blog was “what are some bad results of lightning?”