Thoughts are catlike. Imagine one, wet and crabby and you gotta grab it out of the current, hissing and scratching at you, wants not to be probed, but it's worth it, alive and yours. So you shake it out, poof it up and get a good look: that's your thinking. 

And I don't blame students for being allergic. Thoughts don't behave very well. They can't be made to sit and give paw - if you have thoughts that easily respond to stimuli, those are just habits (which should also be interrogated, but that's not my job, that's psych). 

My job is to add disconcerting to your certanties. 

The irony is I'm a fucking doorstop of a person. Spectacularly good at emergency response, which can conceal the absence of any other skill for a very long time. I have built so much stabilization and redundancy into the institution that I work for that they literally have to kill everybody to get rid of me - now a proven fact. I built A BUNKER. That I am now circling like a cage. 

I'm extraordinarily privileged in being able to define my own exit strategy, but I keep tightening the job skill instead, and I don't know how to stop that. I myself need a me - someone who can throw a monkey wrench into my thoughts enough to disrupt the pattern. Students outgrow teachers and shuck them off, and I need to shuck this one (me) off. 

I just don't know how to be anybody else than this. And no one knows how to treat me other than this either so there's the problem of the echo effect. I want (like an addict wants, an adrenaline-driven anxious craving) every day to check-in and make sure everybody's okay and fix whatever might be making someone not okay; I simply force myself to not do that anymore. I am capable of changing a habit, including that one. 

But I don't know how to fill that space otherwise. So, even really important relationships go quiet because I don't have any other role, really, than emergency contact. If I let it go quiet (stop constantly asking areyouok/howareyou) and it does go quiet, then I'm just a phone number that never changes. And I just have to let it be that way. That's hard on me. But how will anything else ever happen if I don't? In the space that leaves, which is a loooot of quiet, tooo much, I spearfish for cat-thoughts. And migrate more because I am pretty good at moving me / stomping around.

I summoned too much and now I have to go to a cemetary to walk to the grave of another dead coworker friend in a virgo-season thunderstorm. This friend was older, not a sudden wtf tragedy. But it's still hard to imagine that GIANT of a man, 6ft something barrel, with his BOOMING voice, just not-there on earth now. 

Imagine me, tiny like I am now again, at the podium in a large lecture hall, the place filled with faculty for whom I am the new Madame President. I have a gavel, which are louder than you expect. I don't like to bang it - YET - ohhh, I will grow into liking to bang that gavel a LOT. But this was years ago, I would stand in silence and wait, which does work to quiet over 100 people once they begin to notice, the quiet spreads. But Dave would get impatient and bang his HUGE voice, COME TO ORDER! And everybody would shut up, turn to face me. "The meeting will come to order."

Him in the office next to mine, calling Ears through the wall, and my then-toddler son scooting around the doorframe and going to Dave while I taught a class. 

Us all doing the charity corporate run ("run"), lying on a blanket for lunch at the zoo, Ears in a stroller for the "run" part, yelling bullafo!bullafo! at the bison, Dave booming BULLAFO! over the heads of everyone for Ears, impromptu PSA.

Us all hanging out at their place. Ruth, a former student now his wife and historian in her own right, we were thick like an extended family. I hung out the most because every Thursday, Dave ran a little how-to make-stuff woodworking club, like a book club only he had every tool imaginable in an extensive bssement of saws and auls and whatever else. I made frames for my weird mishapen art collection. The largest one, nearly as tall as me, Dave had to carry it up the stairs and home in his truck. That piece of art, "black breasted woman" which was a beautiful huge discarded sketch an art student had made on a cardboard scrap (like from a fridge delivery) - she and the frame I made for her still hang above my old friend Marta's fireplace bc my ex got that in our divorce. 

I can still smell the sawdust in that basement. Still remember him teaching me how to run a router along the edge to make the groove for the glass. The art still hangs, my daughter looks at it when she visits her father, and still remembers its origin all those years ago. I infiltrate her step-mother's space. ("You infiltrate a lot," discerning TJ observes.)

David is gone now. 

I wish the sky would clear. I bought a black umbrella yesterday just in case it doesn't (virgo practical).

How do you prepare for your graveside vigils? What do you wear?

the "fixed" roof, leaking - I almost don't have the heart to tell Craig