Friday, August 14, 2015

20150814.0626

I am trying to train myself to wake earlier so that I can get more done in the quiet morning. So far, I have met with only limited success; I woke at five today instead of the half-past that had been the case. There were a couple of days with the summer bridge program that I was up at four or four-thirty, and I feel I got quite a bit of work done; I enjoyed the feeling and am trying to recapture it. For although I love my people as I do, I find it difficult to work when they are up and about; the Mrs. and Ms. 8 deserve my attention and engagement, without doubt, and I enjoy their company (when Ms. 8 is not throwing a tantrum, which happens more often now than previously--but that is to be expected). There is tension among providing that engagement and doing the paid work that supports Sherwood Cottage and The Work to which I am called, though; I will not lie by saying that it is not there or that negotiating it is not difficult--although I imagine that others face far more difficulty in their struggles of similar kind.

I imagine also that there will be aspersive comments about my noting the tension. "If it's such a pain in the ass," they might go, "why don't you quit?" If I were to do so, though, I imagine that the same voices would upbraid me for laziness or for breaking with "traditional" family norms. And I doubt that those voices would call for a plumber or electrician to quit the job because of such tension--or a clergyperson of whatever variety, and it is to the cleric that the academic, at least in the prevailing conception of traditional Western higher education, is most nearly akin. The Work is a calling, and the school is an outgrowth of the seminary at its root--for what little good the association does for either side of it.

I imagine more of the aspersion would take a form like "Yeah, it's tough. Always has been. Suck it up like we did." That "sucking it up" is a relatively recent thing, though; many of the older documents available to us complain of many demands upon a person, and release from labor has long been sought by many. And what good has come of "sucking it up," really? Does not noting that a problem exists prevent the problem from existing? Does it feel better to restrain and repress free and open expression? Were things actually better in the amorphous then than now? (The answer to each is "no," of course, although whether it is because things are better or because things are bad in different ways but to the same extent is debatable.)

That I do take the time to vent, perhaps more often than I ought to do, does not mean that I do not do what I need to do. I work at my paid work, and I work on The Work, doing more of the former than of the latter, to be sure, but still doing both. Yesterday, I wrote several thousand words for my jobs; today, I will doubtlessly write several thousand more. (Neither includes this webspace.) I continue to try to move more of them to the morning, when I can write distracted only, perhaps, by the honking geese flying over Sherwood Cottage.

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