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It might be guessed from the fact that I work as a scholar of English language and literature that I spend much of my time on my butt--and such a guess would be accurate.  Planning for lessons, grading papers, reading books and journals to stay abreast of developments in my field (which I need to do a bit more than I have of late), and writing, writing, writing all have me planted firmly in a chair, often for ours on end.  That my butt is, by several reports, fairly bony complicates matters.  Accordingly, the quality and comfort of the chairs I use are concerns.

One of them is an older chair, a chair with a wide seat artificially narrowed by the construction of the chair-back.  Sitting in it pinches my butt a bit, creating a discomfort that forces me to shift around frequently.  In doing that, I find that I put uncomfortable amounts of pressure on the bones in my ass, both hip-bones and coccyx.  The chair literally becomes a pain in the ass for me--a circumstance I cannot help but find funny to discuss even as it annoys me to endure.

It has not always been the case that I have had to endure bad chairs.  One I have owned I purchased for the immense sum of ten American dollars when I was twelve or so; it was a rocking chair from a local thrift shop.  The spring at the back of the rocking mechanism was broken, so it would lean back to a precarious and eminently comfortable angle, cupping me as I sank into its brown velvet upholstery for hours of reading--and some other things that I perhaps ought not to discuss too openly (I was twelve when I bought the thing).

I got ten years out of the chair before I moved to Louisiana to begin my graduate work.  It stayed around the house for a while after, and my parents "fixed" the spring so that it would not lean so far back.  But, as all of us got older and things changed, the chair finally fatigued out and was discarded.  Too, none of us had room to keep it; my parents had their own furniture, and although my dorm room was large, it also had to handle my needs as a graduate student--and that meant it could not take the wonderfully comfortable chair.

I am sure that there is some metaphor in this somewhere, some tacit statement about the nature of the world and of humanity's place within it, or else one about my place within humanity and therefore also that of the populations of which I partake.  Indeed, I can think of one or two without any trouble.  But I am not going to trace them out--at least, not now.  Doing so would do no good, for me or for anybody.  And my ass is starting to hurt.