Why I Am Going to Join the Circus

Okay I'm sitting here at 5pm and I've done none of my work for school tomorow.

So, what's my life these days.

I am ABD in a graduate program I started almost 10 years ago. I have a job that I hate, working with people that I'd like if I were in different school, teaching students for whom I have rapidly developed a deep contempt.

I am turning into a person I don't recognize, because up until this point in my life I've always been a person who finished the things she started and finished them ahead of time. Now, I do nothing and still feel exhausted at the end of the day.

I used to love teaching and think that I was very good at it. I looked forward to leaving the bastion of elitism where I was trained to work with students who would value their education. But, somehow I've come to this hellhole where the students pay alot of money and don't really do much else. And many of them are only functionally literate and the ones that are only have rudimentary language skills...and they've never heard the word salient and they don't have dictionaries apparently. So, I just don't know what the point of is of trying to teach them about social stratification.

And I know it's just my untreated depression re-emerging to take me down to the depths of unhappiness, but frankly there's nothing I can do about it right now. Because I don't even have the energy to find a psychiatrist, pay them a bunch of money and then stress about how my insurance company has created a reimbursement form sure to make a healthy person sick. And it's not that I can't afford it, but it's like why do I pay for insurance if it never actually covers anything except my low cost birth control pill, which I could skip at this point since I never see my spouse.

So, what am I going to do. I am going to turn off my computer, turn over on my sofa and watch some tv and hope that in a hour or so the fact that I am going to be humilated tomorrow when I have nothing to lecture on in two of my classes and I have a hoard of angry New Jerseyans ready to kill me because I don't have their exams graded (even though mind you they are sure to get better grades if they let me wait until I actually feel like reading the crap they've written) will somehow motivate me to work. Of course, this will likely mean that I won't sleep tonight, but who cares apparently some higher power has decided that I don't deserve a Ph.D., to live near my friends and husband, to have a family of my own, to have a career I can be proud of, to be happy more than 10 minutes a year or to be able to sleep on a regular basis.