Bright, windy, very clear: beautiful.
When I came here I was told that what I experienced (as this was the coldest place I'd ever lived – Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Adelaide – except perhaps Berlin of course, and this is probably even colder if less gray) as 'cold' was locally known as 'fresh'. I'm usually fairly sarcastic about the word, but today I must respect it – it really is the right description.
Windows open, not just one but three, in the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom – the heating will have to work a bit, but it's worth it for the air. I can already breathe better – the air is not so dry, not as baked by heaters. I'll never be an outdoorsperson, not in the north certainly, but perhaps I can come to a milder truce with this northern weather, at least on a day like today.
And also metaphorically, it helps to clear the air in the apartment: I've muddled along from reflective and vague over the holidays, to increasingly irritable, suspicious, even angry over the past two days. Two sets of mildly bad news that made me feel ambushed, plus the impending return to students, administration, teaching – the world has felt oppressive and unwelcome.
S. said in an e-mail that she was having "teaching anxiety dreams" – including one where she had to teach a huge, unresponsive first-year class about Dufay. (She is both vastly experienced and exceptionally capable as a teacher – I wish I were half as good as she is – yet she has these dreams, when the semester is about to start....) I sympathize, although my recent dreams haven't involved teaching – but they have included batches of my postgraduates scattered through the landscape, in situations where I was doing something foolish and ridiculous in public, which I suppose is my current version of those dreams.
We rarely talk about such anxieties, but they make sense: facing all these young people, with their hormone-driven emotions and rebellious chaos, not to mention the automatic contempt of the young for those of us who are, unavoidably, older, tireder, less pretty than we once were. The problem of sitting in authority over them, and the reality that their adulation isn't much easier to deal with than their occasionally vindictive resistance: I can't help thinking that the pettiness of academics results from spending too much time trapped with the immature. Just the weight of all their overblown, desperate feelings can be a burden....
And something my colleagues rarely complain about, but which has always bothered me – the endlessly Sisyphean rotation of the school year: just as one gets to know and like students, when you're at a point where a few of them are actually interesting to talk to, they leave, and one faces new batches of insecure, fragile, sometimes resentful neophytes, and you have to waste so much time simply getting them to start listening to anything at all. And the rotation of topics: having to talk over the same things over and over, always beginning at the beginning, year after year – not getting to move on to the things that interest you now, or the interesting bits that you can reach only at the end of weeks of teaching... I find that exhausting at times, and don't know why more academics and teachers aren't maddened by it.
All exacerbated by the 'administered-society-modernist' pattern of teaching in limited segments: the two-hour seminar, where, just as things get interesting, the clock shows it's time to send everyone away – a repeated and predictable frustration. (I know, I sound like that joke about the the two old guys complaining in the cafeteria: the food is so awful here – yes, and such small portions!; but perhaps if we had all the time in the world, those masses of neophytes wouldn't be such hard work.)
But the air flows through the apartment; and I know that, as always, when things actually start happening, they won't seem so bad....
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