Cansada, confusa

I am so tired. Last night I got my first decent night’s sleep in at least a week, maybe longer. I can go a good four days or so on lousy sleep, but more than that and it begins to wear on me. It makes me sluggish, less talkative, and probably irritable. So, I feel better after last night, but I need another one. Badly. Wednesday night after class some of my colleagues asked if everything was alright—apparently I was not as participatory as usual during seminar. This leaves me wondering whether my students notice, and that leaves me feeling paranoid that they think that their prof is cracking up and won’t pay attention to what I’m teaching them, and believe it or not I still care, even at this point in the semester, whether or not they can conjugate verbs correctly and understand what’s going on in class. And of course I want for them to like Spanish, not just understand it.

I’ve been having a mildly existential crisis about the whole point of my current pursuits— whether it matters at all if I get my MA, and whether which has been further aggravated by recent developments, i.e., the collapse of my committee. My chair is taking another much-needed semester of leave, for which I do not criticize her in the least, and the second member, who has been aptly filling in for my chair while she’s been gone this semester, is taking a desirable post at another university, and if I were in his shoes I’d do the same thing. I had not yet chosen the third member of my committee. This leaves me, then, with my committee chair, who will be an absentee until the semester in which I am tentatively slated to take my exams. We supposedly have a new linguist coming in the fall, but I was sick the day he was here on campus so I never met him. He’ll likely be on my committee by default, and then I’ll have to convince someone form the Linguistics department to please, please please be on my committee. The departing professor has recommended a linguistic anthropologist whom I have never met (that’s my fault—I haven’t taken the initiative to wander by her office in my hours and hours of spare time). She’s amazing apparently, but I still haven’t ever met her—and she doesn’t speak Spanish. None of the Linguistics faculty do. Does this mean I’ll have to take my exams in English? That just doesn’t feel right, somehow.

Not only am I committee-less, I also don’t have an established reading list. I’m supposed to build one with my chair. Yes, that would be that chair who’s out until next January. Exams are next March. I’m guessing we’ll do it by email or something. Guessing, hoping, desperately reaching for a viable solution—what’s the difference? There are some pieces of the literature that are standard and therefore obvious, but it has to be more than that, and I need some guidance. No use worrying too much about it, of course, since the only thing I can do right now is track down the super-busy linguistic anthropologist and try to butter her up. Reva suggested I find out what her favorite cookie is, jajaja.

Which leads me back to the existential query of whether or not my chosen path makes any sense or difference in the rest of my life. What is “the rest of my life”? Except for that mind-numbing stint as a file clerk, all I’ve ever done is academics. I’ve gotten sick of the esotericism of the ivory tower before, which is what got me out of anthropology (twice, and this second time doesn’t seem to be sticking too well, either), but I keep getting seduced back into it. How can something that has so little bearing on the rest of the world be so appealing? I know that to get anything done out there you’ve got to have a theoretical or ideological basis for it, but how do I keep getting wrapped up in the theory and the ideology instead of the work itself? How can I find some balance? What’s the real point, if any, of dedicating my life to academic pursuits? On the other hand, I know (from experience) that I’m not really happy or fulfilled when I’m entirely outside of it, either. I feel like I need to keep on foot in the academic world while I try to establish what “the rest of my life” is, now that I have someone else in my life and think often and seriously about starting a family with him. Even now without any offspring around, I want more time for the “family” that is just him and me. I’d like to have more time to enjoy married life, because I love our time together, and academics is always sucking more and more of my time, and I don’t see that ever changing for as long as I stay in it.

GAH. These are not problems with easy solutions, and they won’t be solved by a few good hours of hard thinking and meditation. I love academics and research, I really do, but not as much as my husband, and I feel like school has hijacked my life. How do I make this work? Is it worth it? Does academic pursuit have any meaning outside of itself? Where does my autonomy fit in all of this?