Which Way to the End?

Well, it's that time of the semester. When both my students and I are effectively sick of going to class, and perhaps moderately sick of each other. I still sort of care that they've learned something--despite the fact that I am leaving my current institution at the end of this semester and joining another and am not really obligated to care--but not really enough to feel any motivation to grade their crappy papers, except to get them over with. Oy. Just oy.

I also found myself very ill last night. Had a whopping stomachache, and then my stomach then decided to..er...empty itself several times, and I didn't get much sleep, and just generally felt crappy. I also went through what is now a standard reflexive thought process for me after the whole appendicitis thing last Sept/Oct, and the two trips to the hospital that were made in response to stomachaches, namely: 1) Preliminary waves of nervousness that could very easily cross over into panic, and 2) Thoughts such as, "Should I go to the hospital AGAIN? I really don't want to go the hospital AGAIN." It seriously was painful enough to merit that thought process, and because it lasted for several hours, I was seriously thinking about it. I didn't go, and I do feel better this morning, but am still a bit queasy, and am watching what I eat, and am wondering whether I've caught some sort of end-of-the-semester-nasty bug/virus. I hope it's the latter.

Work that pays me has also been driving me crazy. Again, because it's the end of the spring semester, and well, universities tend to have lots of big events at the end of the spring semester, and the office that employs me is usually pretty heavily involved.

Which means we've been darn busy, and as luck would have it, in my last year at this job, wouldn't you know, but we'd have to have a New Person in Charge who is involved with much of the planning of these events. And New Person in Charge, or as I shall refer to her henceforth, NPiC (hey, that almost looks like an abbreviation for nitpick--which would actually be totally appropriate), has been driving me and everyone else in my office up the freaking wall.

Because, well, it's one thing to not completely know what you're doing, and to be learning the proverbial ropes, and all that. It's an entirely different thing to be in that situation but to act as though you know everything, to be uncommunicative with the other offices you need to coordinate with to pull off aforementioned events, to expect those other offices to respond to your beckon call while also handing their staff inadequate information or poorly conceived materials. Freaking NPiC needs to be schooled in some form or another. Unfortunately, I can't be the person to do the schooling. Because let's face it, I'm still on the lowly end of the office status ladder, and I probably won't even ever meet NPiC face to face. Ah well.

And to go back to the subject of my previous post, my "dream" apartment turned out not to be my dream apartment. Don't get me wrong. It was quite elegant in its way; but I'm not sure it was ME...which I guess means I'm not elegant--and frankly, I'm ok with that. I then thought I'd found my dream apartment again. I was so sure, in fact, that I filled out an application and handed over a security deposit, but then my actual dream apartment came into existence, thanks to a friend's inside scoop, and I had to withdraw the application and beg for my security deposit back, which fortunately for me, was something the realtor and prospective landlord agreed to do (I still need to doublecheck this with my bank, but fortunately, Bflo is not NYC, and people are nicer about things like giving back security deposits). Now I haven't signed a lease yet, and while I'm optimistic about my chances of signing a lease, these things are never really certain until that moment you sign on the proverbial dotted line. (No I don't know why I'm using the word "proverbial" repeatedly. Search me.) And in the meantime, in anticipation of my taking possession of my new dream apartment, I'm getting sick to death of my current apartment, and especially my neighbor who lives in the apartment above me--who is not a fundamentally bad person as far as I know but who smokes like a chimney, stomps around in what appear to be very heavy boots, and appears to constantly be moving (or perhaps dropping?) furniture, and who appears to do nothing but watch t.v. all day while chain-smoking cigarettes or pot, which wouldn't bother me in principle, except that I have to smell the cigarettes/pot, and hear the t.v., which he frequently keeps at a highly questionable volume.

Now, I know these aren't unforgivable crimes. I know that. In fact, this neighbor is a VAST improvement over the previous upstairs tenant. But that doesn't mean he hasn't been driving me nuts for as long as he's been living there, or that I don't rejoice every time he leaves the house while I'm home, or conversely, rejoice when I come home and he's not there, or that I am not desperately hoping to get the hell out of my current apartment a.s.a.p.

My point is this: Make it end, god, please make it end. The semester, the stomach thing-- whatever the hell it is--my time in my current office job, and my time in my current apartment.

When it does finally end, however, I think life will wildly improve.