A Tedious Discovery Very Late Before I Went To Sleep Last Week

You should know before you try to imagine the frame of mind that I was in when my discovery revealed itself to me that I had just been thinking through the logistics of our bathroom light.

The lightbulb has burned out and its really not a big deal at all. Just an annoying deal to reach behind the lovely glass cover where there's not really enough room to make a screwing motion with your hand, so you can only screw so very carefully and incrementally.

And really the lightbulb wouldn't bother me at all if it didn't also remind me of the unpainted bit of drywall immediately behind the lamp which is unpainted it because i sanded away the wrinkled paint from the drywall, and then plastered and sanded it, when the skylight leaked but couldn't repaint perfectly without taking the lamp itself off.

And as I'm brushing my teeth I'm thinking: That's the last thing that I want to do. Repair that wall and replace that lightbulb.

So the frame of mind that I was in when I laid down in bed was:

---> Ahh the angst of being an inefficient suburbanite homeowner! You know that you're inadequate, but you have a great deal of trouble caring.

ALSO: weighing down in the back of my mind was my missing cell phone.

I hadn't been able to find it all day, even though I KNEW that it was in the chest pocket of my black sport coat, WHICH improbably I had managed to lose yesterday after wearing it under "my regalia"

(i'm not even going to get into why the quotation marks are around "my regalia" that would be a chronicle far longer than this or any blog should contain)

which was actually not my PRIMARY regalia BECAUSE i couldn't find my genuine PhD robe the morning before I had to walk in the processional as (for the first time) a department chair -- and therefore, a front-row-sitter.

So its like I'm going to sleep in a great big theoretical nest of my abstract deficiencies. None of which really prepared me for the ensuing revelation.

I was sort of drifting into a dream. My children were running wildly around a structure in the woods which I remember from my own childhood -- at Bethel Christian Camp where Perry Baptist Church sometimes had their Sunday Evening Service in the summertime, and part of me thought that the structure could, at any moment, become ROS -- our favorite Ice Cream place *or* more menacingly could be the home of angry heroine junkies.

This was the moment where I, fully awake, realized that the first week of school, complete with my new administrative duties, had, possibly been one of the most effective weeks off my academic career.

Oh no! I panicked. What if it turns out I'm BEST at being a department chair at a little evangelical college in the Heartland of Ohio? I was planning on being a novelist or a playwright or a director. And it turns out that maybe I was MADE FOR:

this?

This work which I find tedious, Kafka-esque & proof-positive of the weberian thesis (regarding rationality and the iron cages of bueracracy)...this is what I'm meant for?

You know that moment in the tent in the Lord of the Rings movie when Aragorn finally owns up to his true identity. Is named by his true name? Takes up his True Sword? His Destiny....?

And then I imagine to myself that this probably happens to people all the time. They discover that they're remarkable file clerks. That they were made to be quality control engineers in foundries. Regardless of how connected or disconnected that was to their impressions about who they were, what the world was, and what they might get to achieve.

I guess I could suck it up and get used to it and give in to my destiny....

But that's about as likely as my getting that light bulb changed any time this week....