And you, you are always drawing trees in class.

I usually don't like to write in this blog unless I have something I really want to write, or unless I'm feeling pretty upbeat. Today I really have neither, but I want to be diligent about keeping up this blog nonetheless.

This last week was jampacked with happenings. Most of them challenges rather than gifts. No lottery wins or free trips to Europe for me. Just one thing after another, and one story that ends with me crying in a professor's office.

I suppose that's been the most significant event of the week. I've been considering how I might summarize it, because the dramatic arc is filled with those high school type semiotic bundles- email that said this, body language that got misinterpreted that. On and on in that vein.

Basically, the professor's personality is a layered affair. On top, we have the cosmopolitan, worldly sophisticate. Speaks seven languages, knows famous scholars and politicians, etc. The next layer is arrogance and gruffness clung to in the face of years of midwest socialization to the contrary. Why? Because it maintains the whiff of the exotic. And nearer the core, we have massive immaturity coupled with insecurity. This is always a powder keg of a mix.

Even though teaching is the only thing I look forward to during the week, and even though I spend double the time on lesson plans than I do my own research, he wanted to fire me because I have not seen the film Master and Commander, read Theda Skocpol, and because I draw in my notebook. His threat of taking my teaching away from me had me bursting into tears. I think my sudden display of emotion surprised him. It surprised me too. After he waved his hand in my face and told me my love of teaching was "foolish," he seemed to agree to allow me to keep teaching.

Now the relationship is, of course, quite overly polite and tenuous. I'm exhausted over it.

This kind of interaction is pretty representative of my whole graduate school experience with academics. I just don't know how much more I can take. I don't know how much longer I can exist in this world, or if I want to commit myself to attempting to navigate it my whole life. It makes me sad because I am not succeeding in this world as I hoped I would. I thought it would feel like coming home. Instead, I feel like an immigrant in The Jungle. I got promised a new and wonderful life, which I sacrificed to go out and meet. Now that I'm here, I'm just being exploited every day without the guarantee of anything to show for it. There are days that I feel so broken hearted. I'm sure something will come of all this. Some things already have. But in the moments between remembering those things, I feel bewildered.