Needling The Little Grey Cells

      Oh, damn, I am getting lethargic in my dotage. (Yes, I'm overstating, but a little histrionic language can be a welcome thing, especially when one is writing about one's banality.) I'm supposed to return my students' essays tomorrow, and for the life of me I can't gather any energy just to get the blasted things done. Each paper seems to take not just an hour (on a second reading!), but by the end I feel so sapped that I immediately seek some sort of relief, however, trivial, including writing-- er, venting-- on this blog. Why is it that as I get older, or rather that the more I do this, the more I wish to run away from marking? Why is it that completing a single paper more often than not prompts me to want to seek sanctuary from the process entire by any means possible? Alas, my brain hurts, and not in the good ways of muscular gain-through-pain. I also have to wonder, though, if I'm just losing patience with the whole process, or if I'm just becoming (God forbid!) even more cynical than I already am. Maybe I've just reached Sir Winston's plateau at which bad prose becomes an unforgiveable sin, or maybe I just wish it were as easy as striking a gong when my patience evaporates. But, no, one has to be encouraging, corrective, and hope maybe some of the effort eventually proves instructive. That's my higher self speaking. My lower self, my less noble and certainly more visceral self, though that I could say what I feel and not what I ought to say. Ah, to be able to write comments like, "Yet another example when the night before leaves other people with a feeling of the morning after," or "Reading this, now I understand why some animals eat their young," or "This is a hilarious satire on undergraduate writing, but, er, oops, sorry." I guess part of the problem is this need to be politic and to suppress my own immediate reactions of dismay and frustration and disappointment. Mais, zut alors, I must plod through, like trudging through a bog with anvils for anklets. My intellectual gait feels like it's reverted to some australopithican state. One day, I'll have to figure out a way to maintain a kind of zippy, glib optimism about such things. And damned be damned, I still haven't figured out what I'm going to say tomorrow. *shakes head* It looks like I'll be having to pull a minor miracle out of an orifice to remain unnamed here. Oy vey. Enough rant. Back to the grind. Time to hoist my axe again... Damn, why must marking and sobreity be so antithetical to one another?!?!?! Grrrr. Arrrgh. Eooow.