Post-breakdown post

After a nice, long weekend with my family and my bf, I'm back in Chicago and freezing my butt off. But more importantly, I am feeling a lot better about life in general and have realized that I just need regular doses of home in order to manage my new life and circumstances. I'm close enough to Ohio that a weekend trip is manageable, so I don't know why I was exiling myself for the last two months. That won't happen again...especially since I'm going home 8 days from now and again for Thanksgiving. And after Thanksgiving, only 2 weeks left in the semester.

Despite my recent emotional instability, this semester has been flying by. We're more than half-way done and it's time to start writing papers and revising workshop poems, which are two of my favorite tasks. It's weird...writing term papers is kind of agonizing, but it's the kind of agony I enjoy. Over-caffeinating, running high-lighters out of ink, sitting in my un-ergonomic desk chair for so long I can't walk when I get up, showing up to turn in my paper with a bandanna and grungy sweats... I'll hate myself for a couple of days because I procrastinated too long, and then the adrenaline will kick in and that's when I love being an academic the most. Remind me of this a month from now when I'm panicking, okay?

When I'm done here, I'll be starting on the revisions because one is due tomorrow. I love when revisions are required during the semester and not just for the final portfolio--gives me more motivation to do more than 2 drafts, which is necessary most of the time anyway. It'll be interesting to see where these revisions take me. I've written about five/six new drafts this semester and turned in a couple of older, but not polished, poems for workshop, so there's a combination of Stella manuscript-ish stuff and stuff that doesn't fit into a project yet. Maybe, as I'm revising, I'll see that they're all about Stella & co., or maybe I'll start to see a new trajectory developing. Either way, I'm looking forward to envisioning these poems as part of a series. I've found that I don't like writing poems that don't belong to something larger. They feel shapeless and meandering.

Speaking of shapeless and meandering...my blog is definitely suffering, and has been since I went on the road back in May. I certainly haven't stuck to my resolution about doing more po-biz here, and my site meter is showing that people are tired of me whining. Alas, I struggle to find something more thought-provoking to write about because my brain is just tired lately. When I'm emotionally unstable, I don't do much serious thinking, except about me-me-me. Sorry, folks. Hopefully soon. I'm regaining balance.