another harsh winter for parts of the country, especially after long spells of unreasonable warm weather. but I'm away from it all, and do feel kinda good about that most of the time. so its not the weather. its not even the end of the winter vacation because that usually lasts only the first week into the semester. this is worrying then. lately a strange feeling has been gripping me, over and over again, pretty often. and whenever I try to express it to myself or try to have a conversation with myself about it, you know "a talk", so that my inner self knows I don't approve, I keep formulating the word 'angst'. yeah, just that. the talk doesn't even begin. only my mind and my tongue (in my mind) collude together to produce this word and present it to me.

today is probably the second or third day this has happened. and of course, the first day, I dutifully looked it up even though I had more than a sense of what it meant. I was curious to know how it had found me. so looking it up again now, Merriam-Webster defines it as "a strong feeling of being worried or nervous; a feeling of anxiety about your life or situation". Now mark those words, its not just any feeling of worry or anxiety, it is a strong feeling and about not something trivial but about your life or as they say it about your situation. so seeing it spelled out like that made me even worse. at the same time, it was kind of shocking to realize how well some words describe the prick or stab or dead heavy weight of the emotion they so innocuously seem to simply name. angst is not just worry or anxiety or nervousness, it is - angst. nothing else can quite substitute for it alone.

and apparently there isn't an adverb associated with it. its kinda threatening in its exclusivity of use in the language. you cannot be angst-..., you can only feel (deep) angst. and from one victim to another (if you've ever known it) you know when it has found you. it lies there on the tip of your tongue, as a cloud in your mind, as a stone in your heart, as something that makes you shiver and sweat and tremble and lay inert all at the same time.

what is it in my life right now that brought it. I guess its the dread of my current days becoming my unforeseen future. they say being an educator is in many ways a service to society. and I used to think that's what my life lacked in a way, that I'd been too selfish and luxurious in my life choices so far, and that I needed to give back, to relate with people. but the last few days I have found myself thinking "I need to do something for myself, I need to do something for the pleasure it gives me in doing it, in creating, in struggling. and to hell with the world and its people." I haven't even seen a movie alone in months now. I've been waiting to find the time to go see Jackson Pollock's black paintings at the ongoing rare exhibition at the Dallas museum of art. its even been a month since I had my favorite pizza or ate at that Salvadorean place or went exploring the Southside.

this is my first time managing a heavy course load of teaching. and I wonder if this model dilutes the quality because it treats us like laborforce and treats students like the quantity of output. not just that, now labor needs to adjust to the (free) time zone of students who work full time. it leaves us not only tired but limited to our schedules and isolated because everyone is slave to their schedule and has time for nothing else. there are colleagues I haven't seen at all since this semester started just because our schedules don't coincide and neither can ever be found here at any other time than when scheduled to be here. what are we doing to that dream of education as the savior? where are we headed?

(a future post someday on the hyper-commercialization of education).