By the end of work yesterday, I was pissed-weepy in my boss's office, bitching him half into the ground / pleading for either limit of or reward for workworkwork. But of course the rub with all the freedom I have in my job is that when it is killing me, I'm killing myself. "What do you need? What hole are you filling with all this work?..." I felt like a half gored angry animal. I am only doing this to keep my little world safe. "What world?" The one where you still get to read in it, that that's what you do with your fucking time, even though no fucking reading-is-fundamental trucks come around anymore, even though you, the Dean of a liberal arts school, probably don't even remember those trucks or give a shit, and the few people around here who do might only admit to reading Hegel or some other fucking dead white asshole and only do so as compensation like dickless wonders driving sportcarswhatever. "Some people might actually like Hegel." Armscrossy. "Ok, what is your GOAL, specifically?" I want full professor, I want when everything falls apart and I'm standing in the rubble to have a base pay and job description both that means I can at least go read, that I can at least sit amidst the wreckage and have the solace of time and a book, I want to have that so that at least cannot be taken away from me no matter what else might happen. Wa.

"At their core, literature and prayer each carry an element of faith. For me, it takes faith to write, just like it takes faith to believe that "the Word became flesh," that it was given its own skin and bones. Both, I would argue, are redemptive by their own accord."