divine angst

I left my computer chained to my carrel and went downstairs to get some tea. Did I mention that I gave up coffee for lent? (NOT caffeine, just coffee, because I actually really like coffee.) So I went to get some tea. Yum! Tea! And I grabbed a tea bag and pulled out exact change and grabbed my cup (all while the girl behind the counter had a conversation with someone else) and filled my cup with hot water from the hot water carafe, and put a java jacket on my cup and . . .

. . . promptly tumped my cup over all over the carafe counter. Gah! Meanwhile, the folks behind the counter were still having their conversation, so I mopped up the mess with the help of the not-so-absorbent napkins-from-the-dispenser, and a kindly stranger (I think he was a professor).

So, OK. Fine. The rest of the day was without incident. I wrote and wrote and wrote while chained to my carrel. And I came home. But first, I stopped at the store to get fixin’s for dinner, including a lovely bottle of Italian white table wine. And I popped the wine in the fridge–in the shelf on the door, where a bottle of wine fits so nicely, and set about preparing dinner. And then I went to get the lemons out so I could zest and juice them and when I pulled the fridge door open, the wine bottle flipped over the shelf bar and . . .

. . . shattered all over my kitchen floor. Gah! Again! So I picked up the big pieces of glass and then swept up the little pieces, and then sopped up the wine from the floor with paper towels, because we don’t have a mop. And when it dried, I sprayed 409 on the floor and wiped it up with my foot and more paper towels.

Dinner still came off OK. But I’ve never felt so clumsy. Well, maybe that’s not true. But it’s close.

I’ve been feeling a bit off lately. I don’t want to say I’ve been feeling sad or angry, because I haven’t. It’s different. For a while, I felt sort of . . . blank. And then I felt very thin, like my emotions were just staying inside my skin. For instance, lately, during the day, I find myself remembering something from my “old life”–like the day the electricity went off and I opened all the windows in our house and laid on the bed in my underwear to stay cool. I remember trimming the bushes in our back patio. I think about doing laundry in our own machines, or about going home for lunch to make a grilled cheese sandwich. It’s the little things I keep dwelling on, too, not the holiday meals we hosted, or the improvements we made. Just the day-to-day moments that were happy and comfortable. And how different my life is now.

I don’t even really know how to write about how I’m feeling, either, because I’m not sure what’s going on, other than your garden-variety stress-induced depression. Because, lately, for the first time, really, I wonder what I’m doing here. I phrase it that way because I still think I made the right choice to go to law school and, in particular, to come to this law school. But sometimes I still shake my head and wonder what I’m doing here. What do I want to do? That conviction I felt a year (or more) ago has been diluted. I thought I wanted to teach; I was sure of it. Now, I’m not so sure. Is it because I’m starting to believe the hype about grades? Or is it because I see other things I’m interested in that are starting to take the place of my old ambitions? Or is it just that I’m tired and stretched too thin?

It’s been a long time since I’ve felt like this–inadequate, lonely, lost–and I don’t quite know what to do about it. The worst part of it all is that I logically know that I am not inadequate, nor am I alone in this, and that I am no more lost than anyone else right now. The mind, though, is funny about how it keeps information from itself; the right side of my brain might as well be in Timbuktu, for all that it knows what the left side knows.