Angry.
Exasperated, stomping around.
(And yes, I know, it's 'breast' not 'beast' – although you can see why the mistake is always made, 'savage beast' is pretty good there.)
Hard news, difficult news, and some distinctly bad news. Feeling as though the world is not friendly, not at all – several projects, so many of which have been on the brink of – well, not disaster, but crisis – have tilted slightly and fallen on my head. Not impossible to manage or to save, just – difficult. The world is demanding, and increasingly intemperate.
Which may be why I woke at 5:30 this morning, and started filling out an administrative form on the computer, in bed... still haven't been back to sleep, and now it's early evening.
All followed by actually bad, and highly resent-able, news this afternoon. Same news, from the university administration, as two days ago, just more definite. And, as happened two days ago, I broke off in the midst of doing something useful to stomp around and be angry. For the rest of the whole day.
Okay yes not very productive I know that so what's your point.
I was, though, calmed by hearing some fine tunes by Clannad – before they went all new-agey; you would think I would realize, after so many years of studying and teaching the stuff, that there are situations where one needs to play calming music.
I've also been reading stories by Tove Jansson – that recently published collection, A Winter Book (it would have been better, though, if it had included a lot more stories, as there are a lot that haven't been translated). Beautiful. And she is willing to acknowledge her own anger, her smallness, her tiredness, her jealousy – all very cleanly, with a vast honesty that allows her whole life to make sense.
But I am bothered by my anger, because to me it doesn't make a lot of sense: I have spent so much of, let's see, the past thirty years at least, exasperated and resentful at all the different ways I have been Done Wrong. It always seems to leave me in this same mad impasse – I know that something unfair has happened, but since I'm always-already defensive and egotistical (youngest of family, etc.) I suspect my own reactions, my own viewpoint. Is it all mere narcissism, mere infantile rage? Am I never to get out beyond the adversarial, in my career, in my work, in too many of my professional relationships?
And worse, and more confusing – since I'm a child of the 80s, I'm accustomed to knowing that the cold, the manipulative, the ones in the power suits, are the ones who always win – not the ones who are honestly angry, and are so uncontrolled as to show it. It reminds me of that dreadful lawyer I worked for in the mid-1990s – the one who was so glad to be my friend, and who manipulated paying me, following through on promises, and everyone else, with such vicious, dishonorable cruelty – when he told me about his family, I realized that they all treated each other like that. Imagine it: growing up in a household where everyone was looking to stab everyone else in the back all the time – well, sometimes my career feels a little like that.
Stomping. Round. In circles.
Be glad you're not my downstairs neighbor.
[Painting by Branford Hansen - Red, 2005.]
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