Disclosurebot on the fritz again

I wrote this last year, and I just found it, and it made me feel better, because apparently I used to feel worse.

Improvement -> Progress -> Enlightenment.

Crawl -> Walk -> Fly.

Drawl <- Squawk <- Cry.

----

I refrain from writing about school, because I don't anymore often think it wise to give in to my inner disclosurebot, the part of me that relishes using rhetorical jazz hands to just barely cover up the inner horror of what the fuck? I always tend towards drama queenery in these situations. I always tends towards hyperbole.

I am mentally exhausted. I feel like I'm having my brain broken into by a gang of croupiers to whom I owe everything and can't pay. Grad school feels like gambling to me. Like searching for food. You poke a stick in a hole and wiggle it around for a while and hope there's a snake in there that's good eating. We call those "arguments." Pockets inside out like a hobo with a lipstick clown mask. Intuition on hook, on pole, over shoulder. Catch me a whopper. Or a crappie.

I have a presentation paper due at noon today about Edmund Spenser. I have to read it in front of all of the prospective students, coming here to visit, to see if they want to come here, for good, for ever, and never ever leave like me. I can never ever leave. Don't be like me! They're coming to get a taste of grad school, and I have to parrot this paper that couldn't be farther out of my period of specialization -- especially true since I have no period of specialization -- to them. The paper is about rape, something about which I know nothing. This fact does not make me refrain from making grandiose statements like, "if the rape is pleasurable, that only makes it all the more horrible." Because that's true, right?

Let's see that one in slow motion.

I'm caught between the poles of feeling incapable of doing what is required of me, because I would prefer not to, and feeling like a gyrating, breakdancing wind-up monkey who has been wound up for some reason to dance a dance it's never danced before in front of a Carnegie Mellon audience.

I don't even feel inadequate, is the thing -- not in the way you'd expect, not from me. I'm just pissed off that so much has to be done so fast and I move too slow. It's like indignation, directed at abstractions. I tried to work ahead this week. I did. I read Agamben, and I read Henry James, and they took so long to read. I started ahead, and I was already behind. That shit is demoralizing. Now I'm tired, and it's 7 am, but I can't go to sleep, because I have to finish this paper by noon, and then I have a meeting at 2:45. I'm supposed to tell a professor which classes I want to take next semester. I'm not actually supposed to sign up for the classes. Just a meeting, to tell the professor which classes.

And what's terrible about it is, the internal clock is ticking, and every time the clock ticks, the battery hooked to it drains a little. Brain drain. 100 pages of Agamben to go by 24 hours from now. Pain/gain. 145 pages of Henry James to go by 48 hours from now. Train in vain.

Stop writing blog post, go write presentation paper. It's not yet impossible to do what I have to do, but I feel it slipping away, and the question, "when am I going to have to have time to sleep?" sounds less and less like the kind of question you ask when you want your predicament to sound important, and more and more like the kind of question you ask when you really don't know when the next time you're going to be able to sleep is. Or maybe I just want it to sound importanter. All I want to do is watch the next episode of Dexter. Sleep is the enemy, not because it's the cousin of death, but because I want it and I can't have it. It's the enemy like you're the enemy, so long as you're a person I want and can't have. The less I sleep the longer it takes, and the more I sleep the less I can do. No matter what I do I end the week on a wing and a prayer.

I feel. Like a stupid monkey in a crucible having its stupid monkey metal burned down into ore and its stupid monkey mettle tested. I feel like there's a team of tenured machinists staring down at my jaws-of-lifed open corpse nodding at each other, "We can rebuild him." Everybody's looking at you and your ribs are spread open and your nose is wide open. Do something funny! Dance!

Nobody blame the monkey for he knows not what he do. First things first, you dig the hole you fill it up you dig the hole you fill it up you dig the hole you fill it up. When you're done with that, you dig the hole you fill it up you dig the hole you fill it up you dig the hole you fill it up. Finally, you...

Etc.