Hitting the wall early = pre-dawn alarm

I really wish I had more oomph in me tonight, as I still have eleven 102 essays to mark for mechanics review. I will get up early tomorrow--and pray like mad that things are absolutely dead in Advisement--so I have at least a fighting chance of getting everything done in time: I absolutely must be able to return the essays to students tomorrow.

Of course, when I started on the work yesterday, I thought I might not only get all the 102 essays marked but embark on the grading for the SF class. Not. But I'm not really surprised.

Part of the problem--not only why I ran out of time but also why I hit the wall--is that I had to tend to a certain amount of life maintenance this weekend. I don't mind tending to my life, but it does get in the way of getting student work marked. I need a personal assistant, or a 1950s wife.

I keep trying to tell myself that "next" weekend will be better, but every Sunday night I realize that the next weekend is going to be a replay of this one and the ones before. I don't know when I'll get a real weekend again--maybe not until after the semester is over?

Again, I tell myself that I have to seriously rethink the process, especially for the 102s, for spring, or I will lose my tiny mind. I have no idea how to change things, but I'll have to mess around with it--and relatively soon. I also want to reconfigure the readings for Nature in Lit (assuming it will run), and that means time and energy, as does setting up enough online that I can potentially run the course online in the fall.

It's all just endless--and when I spoke to my financial planner on Friday, she helped me figure out what I'd be facing if I were to retire this year, or next, but ultimately she said, "The subtext here is, keep working." Yeah, yeah, I know. The more years I have to sock away retirement money and to increase my savings, the better off I'll be--but the prospect just makes me so very tired, I have a hard time facing it.

The answer to that is not to face it: A) There is nothing but the present; all else is just in the mind and 2) No one knows what the future holds, not even the next 10 seconds, and the further away one looks, the less one can begin to guess. I could win the lottery. I could end up in Bellevue. No telling.

So, I'm stopping for tonight, and I'm trusting that tomorrow will work itself out, as will the days beyond tomorrow. I have to keep reminding myself that I have never ended a semester without getting everything done that needed to be done (though sometimes I've realized that things I thought needed to be done really didn't). That's the only attitude to have right now.

And I may not be any stronger tomorrow, but it is another day.