The trenches

It's that time in the semester that makes me refer to campus as "the trenches." It's a bad time (if you couldn't tell by my last post), one for slipping and nearly breaking my neck on icy sidewalks, for vitamin D deficiency, and for obligatory why-am-I-doing-this-to-myself anxiety. This is always accompanied by vivid fantasies of Other Things I Could Do, along with a very Eeyore-ish moping that I am utterly unqualified to do anything but this. This year's fantasy is a bookstore/coffee shop. I have already scanned a number of help-wanted ads on craigslist and established that no one in their right mind would hire me for anything. So I guess I'll stick around.
Things look grimmer than ever for academia, which has something to do with my fantasies. Funding at public institutions is getting slashed, there's a hiring freeze across the entire university, and there's so much infighting and competition for funding that many great ideas and projects never get off the ground. Meanwhile, I'm reading Derrida and Barthes and some other French guys (despite the fact that I'm in German Studies) who all write about the inability of language to convey meaning, authors to write literature, and literature to hold value.
BUT! This is so far my most humane finals period so far. Teaching has given me much better balance in my life, and while I'm worried about my finals, I'm more focused at the moment on getting my kids ready for theirs. I'm also writing a final paper which is both difficult and interesting (it's about memory, authorship, and trauma), AND is relevant to my long term research plans.
So I'm sitting on a vaguely uncomfortable office chair instead of a throne, wearing pretty worn-out clothes that I can't really afford to replace at the moment, instead of a drapey gown and tiara, and I only have a slowly dying laptop instead of a scribe monkey. Oh well. I'm pretty lucky to be here, instead of sitting in an even less comfortable chair in a cubicle somewhere, in pantyhose and high heels, typing expense reports on a machine running Windows 97. I guess I'll save the bookstore for when I really need it....