Mood swings, anyone?

So after I had that little talk with my inner Victorian, things started to look up--or at least I started working and not ruminating (except for some dead patches on the train--I think I just have to face up to the fact that The Life of Charlotte Bronte is simply unsuitable for the subway) and I feel okay. Sure, I'm still working more slowly than I'd like, and I still haven't gotten my paycheck from Teaching College, which no doubt presages a morning of bitching on Tuesday because--seriously, this is what I was worried about the whole damn time, but I'm cool with it. And, for the record, I was totally cool with it before I started drinking wine.

I think a lot of this has to do with allowing myself to work at home. Generally, I do get more done here. There are days when I'd like to stop by West Village Coffeeshop or The Greatest Cafe In Brooklyn, but I'm daunted by the travel time and the uncertainty (more with WVCS than The Greatest Cafe In Brooklyn) and the knowledge that I will have to again travel to go somewhere else. And I'm always looking for ways to decrease the time I spend in transit. The flip side, of course, is that I start to miss the people I see at said coffeeshops and I begin to worry that my world is shrinking to a lopsided triangle that takes me from home to school to Teaching College and home again. But if I try to break out of that and it doesn't work, then I get all stressy. And I hate going out of my way to WVCS only to find it packed with people. On the third hand, every mode of working for me exhausts itself every now and then. Sometimes I cannot work at home under any circumstances. Right now I can't imagine getting certain things done elsewhere. I have a very fickle relationship with working in the school library--at the moment, this is tied more tightly to K than I would like it to be. WVCS I got annoyed with on Monday. I think I'm going to try to go back to Greatest Cafe next Monday--I haven't been there since the party the owner threw last month. When I lived across the street, I was there almost every day, and I think not being there has contributed most of all to the sense that my world is shrinking. That's the one loss I really feel in this neighborhood--to get to Greatest Cafe and back now involves a Byzantine combination of buses or a really long walk up Bedford Avenue. (Okay, about a half hour. But with my supersize Tennyson and laptop it starts to add up.)

On a totally different note (hey, I told you I'm mood swinging): do you ever have days when strangers just want to talk to you? (And no, not hot and/or potentially datable strangers; I will be making no friends on the Q train as long as I am riding it after the gym.) This was one of those days for me, at least in those times when I wasn't home. I had a student drop by my office hours just to kind of chat about Brooklyn (fine except I had to make roughly 9,000 handouts for class), and two other adjuncts wanted to have really long conversations with me at the copier and, less welcome-ly, in my cubicle. (I sit next to the printer shared by 50 people. Everyone always asks if I mind it. What I never sa is that it's the small talk that drives me nuts.) The second woman is also a bit troll-like, though saying that makes me feel guilty. Finally, on my way home I was stopped by a couple looking at the neighborhood, which under normal circumstances I would be able to talk up, but at that moment I was trying to get some souvlaki home. Strange things.

I'm not sure my grammar lesson was coherent. It didn't help that it took roughly seven years to get the video I wanted to show loaded. I sometimes miss teaching in the "Smart Classrooms"--but I don't miss teaching early enough to get them.

I love my students more than I have loved any group of students, which means I'm giving them a lot of work. But there may really only be 15 of them, which is a bit of a dream.

I am going out with people not from my own school tomorrow.

I am seeing Macbeth at BAM on Saturday.

Right now I feel okay.