Bad Luck

After a pretty darn long stretch of good luck, or luck that isn't one way or another, Fortuna has begun to turn my wheel toward the downward cycle -- or whatever, my brain isn't functioning very well and I know enough about the original Wheel of Fortune to prove that I know nothing about the original Wheel of Fortune. This is just a hyperbolic way of saying I had a bad day. Not one of those days in which everything that can go wrong does go wrong, and certainly not a day in which someone to whom I had been close had killed himself (which, incidentally, was followed by finding out that big, major, important, famous historian is writing a book about my subject), but one in which you receive a particularly disappointing piece of news and it clouds the rest of the day.

Last December or November or so I sent a book proposal to an agent. He wanted to see a writing sample and suggested ways to improve the proposal. I sent the requested items and, while he thinks it will be great academic book, it's not particularly saleable as a trade book and therefore he can't represent it.

Damn.

So, that put a damper on the day, making other things seem worse. I tried to make it less disappointing by telling myself that this is a pretty privileged sort of a crappy thing to have happen. I mean, how many people end up in a position to have that sort of rejection? Hell, half of you are probably thinking, "cry me a river, sweetheart!" My own self of four years ago is certainly thinking that! Plus, it isn't as if I lost something that I already had. I'm just not getting something that I really wanted. At least, I'm not getting it when and how I want it. I'll still get it one way or another, except some of the steps along the way will now be a little more difficult than they were had I got what I want when and how I wanted it.

That doesn't stop the news from sucking.

The news sucked worse being on top of a headache.

The headache sucked worse when I had to spend the rest of the afternoon answering student e-mails. Answering e-mails eats up a significant amount of time for online classes since most of what can be covered in a two-minute face-to-face conversation takes a series of e-mails online. Don't get me wrong: It's not the answering the questions that's the problem. It's that the answering can take about ten times as long as in a regular classroom, and sometimes to no productive end.

What made the whole e-mail process suck worse was that one was from a student who is now trying to blame me for a late paper. Not the usual "I didn't know" reason, but something more specific. Then, the student objected to something else about the class and wanted to know when that something else was going to be corrected. Put just like that. The student was not asking for clarification, but stating that the student thought that my policy was wrong and unfair and expected it to be changed right now.

The phrasing of the e-mail seemed rude and indignant, and really got my hackles up, especially since this was the second sort of e-mail from this student written in the manner of one from a dissatisfied customer or a manager correcting a disliked employee, minus "please" and "thank you." In fact, in my head, it sounded rather schoolmarmish, even a bit like the Church Lady. I'm the only schoolmarm around here, dammit!

I ignored the tone and addressed the content. Somehow, I don't think that will end the matter; but, that's all part of the job, isn't it? Combined with the bad news and the headache, it just rubbed me the wrong way.

Next, I had my evening class, which was fine, and they are great students and a lot of fun and smart on top of that. They make me look forward to work, and sometimes wipe out the ill will of those dissatisfied customer sorts. Tonight, however, about an hour into this three hour class, the first waves of nausea hit. They kept coming, stronger and more frequently.

"I apologize," I told them when I had to pause yet again because I thought that I might faint. "I'm feeling a little ill." They, bless 'em, were all concerned about my health. Well, first they wanted to know if I was pregnant or hung over...especially pregnant (jeez, I know I haven't had the time to work out in a while, but I didn't think the abs were in such a state so quickly as to suggest pregnancy! Damn those Peeps and their sugary yumness!) Then, they were all concerned about my general well-being. "Professor, maybe you should go home," they said. "Yeah, you aren't looking too good. You should go lie down. We won't mind if you let us out early!" Which made me laugh, and made me feel a bit better.

After about another hour, I had to sit down and direct the class from a chair. I NEVER sit in class. Still, waves and waves, stronger and stronger. I could feel myself sweating. "Everyone gets extra credit if I throw up in class," I joked. They debated the benefits and drawbacks of that.

Then, I couldn't wait. "Class is over," I said, sprinting for the door. The bathroom is around a corner and down a hall. I made it. Barely, running in a short, straight skirt and heels, but I made it. My sandwich from lunch, which I had eaten only a few hours earlier -- closer to dinner time, really -- had not yet digested. You probably could have identified it's ingredients.

I know: TMI for the sake of being gross.

Afterward, I felt much much better. I don't think I'll be getting lunch from the cafeteria in the student center again, if that really was the source. I found myself rather disappointed that I hadn't had something more unhealthy, like cookies and a hamburger and fries. From a bulimic point of view, this would have been a fortuitous bout of poisoning, wouldn't it? Those old eating disorder patterns of thinking die hard, don't they? Of course, when I was bulimic, I would have then castigated myself for having put myself in the position of getting food poisoning by having the audacity to eat in the first place.

I got home around 10pm or so, still feeling o.k. but for the return of the headache. Now, to finish up the tasks left undone due to all of the e-mailing; but, first, a quick glance at SiteMeter. Nothing new, no common referrals, no new comments (because no new posts), no big deal. That is, no big deal until I noticed a hit from a geographic location a bit too familiar for comfort. Better yet, a hit from my work ISP. I wasn't on my own blog today, and certainly not from work at that hour.

"It's cool, it's cool," I told myself. "It could be anyone stumbling across anything. Don't panic." Except today I was rejected by an agent and threw up in class. Except that said visitor found me via links that took them right to the Infernal Internal Fellowship incidents last spring. Except that the visitor clearly read around in the posts about that incident last spring. Except that tomorrow is the day that this year's fellowship begins.

Oh, yeah. I'm fucked.

Or at least I could be outed. If you know me in the outside world, then it ain't hard to put the pieces together from this blog. It's not like I've said anything that I regret in this blog -- although I might regret being caught saying them! Everything is as true from my point of view as anything can be from a subjective point of view. Still, that doesn't always matter so much as events play out, does it? I'm not censoring myself at this point, especially since I don't know anything beyond my own paranoia. This could be a friendly person, or a person who just giggles at the gossip, or a person who came across the post, thought it sounded familiar, and just wanted to satisfy curiosity. Or it could be the Nemesis.* In which case, I'm TOTALLY fucked for reasons that are pretty damn obvious in the posts themselves.

Of course, I started to read through the old posts and through the comments and through Historiann's post that brought the reader to my posts, and the comments on Historiann's post. At one point, Historiann wrote that I would probably look back on the incidents and laugh at how silly they were. True. Very true. Little did I suspect -- well, maybe I did suspect just a little -- that the events would get sillier and worm their way into my knee-jerk paranoid style.

Over the summer, I actually met someone who had been fired for her blog. I wonder if they are hiring at the exotic paraphernalia shop where she landed? Would the demand for such paraphernalia go up or down in an economic crisis? On the one hand, people will want to fool around more -- maybe event to make ends meet -- in an economic crisis. On the other, the economic crisis might mean that they may decide that they need less accoutrement in getting it on.

Well, now I see that today is no longer today. Today is now yesterday. I'll go to bed, have a series of anxiety dreams, then wake up realizing that one function of anxiety dreams is to make you relieved to be awake and happy that your reality is not as outlandishly frustrating as your subconscious wants it to be.

*Clearly I am not as over the whole thing as I would like to think I am, and care more than I would like to admit that I do. Paranoia is such fun!