It tolls for thee.

Mondays are hard.



Not because of the whole "Five more days 'til the weekend" sort of thing. Don't get me wrong, weekends are lovely and appreciated, but Mondays represent more than that. They're a return to reality, to care and concern and strife.

In short, Mondays are a bummer.

I like the weekend because I don't have to think about anything that even remotely resembles responsibility. I can sleep late and play around and not do anything or do everything. But then Monday comes around and I have to start wondering if I paid the utilities bill, or when the heck is my school going to give me my contract, or how many papers I have left to grade. Then I start worrying about the state of the laundry in my closet, whether or not I have enough clean items, whether or not I should be saving money for a washer and dryer, whether or not I should just give it all up and go live on a hut on the beach... Then I start questioning life and my place in it and whether or not I'm making myself happy or if I'm even giving myself the opportunity to make myself happy, or whether it's ultimately a makeshift sort of happiness anyway and thus not worth concern and then I worry that I worry too much.

I'm at that point now.

I do worry too much, but you know what? It's kind of what I do. It's my thing. My schtick. And what the heck is a schtick anyway and why do I know how to spell it? I guess I always knew the basis of what 'schtick' means, but then, just in case the knowledge may be necessary in the future, I looked it up. And now I know. I had to do that today with antimetabole today, too. I'm going to become a repository for useless word definitions by the time I'm 50.

So yes, today I worried a lot. About everything, my job, my apartment, the next year, the year after that. Specifically... When will I get my contract? What happens if I don't get one? Where will I work? Am I happy in my career? Am I happy in my life? What do people want from me? What do I want from other people? What am I willing to accept, and what am I going to take a stand on? Who invented those microwaveable steamer veggie bags? Because they are fantastic? That's not really question, but will anyone notice? John Donne said that no man is an island, but can a woman be a peninsula? I wouldn't mind being a peninsula, insular yet narrowly connected. By an isthmus!