I have not been feeling well the past few days. I have been feeling a near-constant anger and frustration at nearly everyone and everything. At the world, so to speak. I have no patience, I have no empathy or understanding, and I have no time nor desire to deal with anyone's bullshit. I am bored of, and angry with, even my daily routine of things that I used to enjoy, things that I spent hours doing to decompress -- such as listening to my podcasts while I play a video game or clean the house. I am restless. I am irritable. I am not happy. And yet, I can look at it from an outside perspective because nothing should be making me feel this way -- but I do.
Brandon, you're probably saying, you have a wonderful fiancee and you have just finished basically everything you need to do for your master's degree. Aside from paying your bills and grading papers, you have absolutely zero responsibility for anything over the course of the next month or so when you graduate. Why are you so angry/frustrated/depressed?
I honestly can't tell you. But I am.
As you folks know at this point, I am not a patient person -- for anything. I try to be when the situation absolutely requires me to be, and I have many levels of patience and tolerance when I have to exhibit it in certain social or professional situations, but outside those situations, I am patient for nothing and no one. For example, when I say I want something done, I want it done now; when I give an order, I expect it to be followed, and when I say something, surprise, I mean it. Despite this, I am not an unpleasant person; I am a kind and loving person, and a very nice guy -- as many, many of my friends and family would attest to. But I am, unfortunately for some people, a very inflexible person; I don't take orders well unless I agree with them, and I do not respond to, nor will I follow, ultimatums. If you give me an ultimatum about something, believe me, I will fire one back at you that is ten times worse for all parties involved simply out of spite. And unlike most, I'll mean it and I will follow through with it. I don't like being put in a box; I don't like rules, and I don't like needless bullshit-monkey we're doing this because that's the way it's always been done sort of edicts -- again, for example, why I was, and am, so diametrically opposed to things like comprehensive exams for graduate students.
I went to campus yesterday morning as per the usual to find that I did not have my results for comps yet; I later found out from a colleague that Jay didn't get his either, and that he just said he did. It has now been a full week and we've yet to receive word on our results -- and as far as I know, nobody in our group of hopeful graduates (eight or nine of us this semester) has found out yet. Because of this, I had a dilemma to face. I needed to get in contact with my director and the MFA director as well to find out just what in the hell I could do with the two freshly-printed, on acid-free 25% cotton paper, copies of my thesis that needed to be over at the library by Monday -- one of three days of any given five-day week that I am not on campus.
As I mentioned before, I emailed my director to ask him, basically, "has my project been totally approved or not? Because nobody in this department will tell us anything unless we specifically ask and badger the hell out of people" in more formal, less-assholish wording, of course. He replied and told me that yes, my project had been approved and that I should be able to take it over to the library to drop it off for binding, but to get the go-ahead from the overall MFA director first.
I am on good terms with the overall MFA director -- she's always been very sweet to me, and likewise I have always been very sweet and respectful to her. I've never given her any shit, and she's always been incredibly helpful to me if I've had any questions about anything, or if I've had any problems (such as at the beginning of the semester with my student loan issues). I also usually see her on the mornings I teach, as most of the time she's there early taking care of business stuff. Yesterday, however, I did not see her, so ten minutes before I went to teach my classes, I sent her an email asking if it would be okay to drop those copies off yesterday afternoon, as I had been told by my director everything had been approved and that I wouldn't be on campus today or Monday. She replied to me between my classes and said that it was fine, that my first two readers had approved it, and then later replied again that she also got word from my third reader (the department chair) that everything had been approved and was good-to-go. I replied and gave her my utmost thanks, and reiterated that I was always sorry to bug her or bother her about little things like this when I know how busy she is (and she is, believe me). I dropped the copies off at the library yesterday afternoon with the appropriate people, and came home.
Everything worked itself out, yes, but the point of telling you this story is that none of it should have been this needlessly complicated -- and it's stuff like this that frustrates and angers me to no end. This is just a small example of it. When I talked to a colleague later who had also gone through this process ages ago here, said colleague told me that this process is apparently much, much less transparent now than it was even seven or eight years ago. Back then, when your thesis had been approved, you were told immediately, and back then, you were able to get your comps results almost just as immediately after you'd taken them -- within three or four days. It's now been a full week (or more, for those people who took them last Thursday) and we've heard nothing -- and, if I hadn't basically badgered both directors into telling me, I would still not know anything about the approval of my thesis.
Mind you, neither my director nor my MFA director would have told me to take my copies over to the library for binding if I had not passed my comps, because that would mean that I wouldn't graduate and thus wouldn't be finished. But, again, there's still no transparency or reassurances one way or the other about this stuff, and that's what drives me crazy -- while I love the people I work with, especially those in administrative roles here, and have gotten a lot out of my graduate school education at the university, my only big gripe about my grad school experience is that it's like pulling teeth to get any kind of pertinent information out of anyone about anything, whether that anything directly affects us or otherwise. It is something that, with my own students, I've always done the exact opposite of -- I always make sure that my students know the deadlines for their assignments and papers, I always make sure they know what is coming up in class via timeline handouts and postings on Blackboard, and if they have any questions about anything I always make sure to take the time to fully answer them -- but, unless they're not paying attention, they don't, because I make everything crystal clear as much as I possibly can. This is why, generally, I have the highest evaluation ratings possible throughout the entire department of GTAs (or at least I did for a long time running; I've had my evals from last semester since the first week of classes back in January, and I've never even looked at them).
It is, really, the little things that do drive, and have driven, me nuts. And most of those things are out of my control -- I can't do anything about them to make them work or make them happen, and being forced to deal with their bullshit on a daily basis just makes me more frustrated and angry with not only those things, but everything and everyone around me. I call this the "Shit Board" Theory of life, and this is how I'm going to relate that theory to everything else.
Most of you who are on Facebook have probably played, or at least seen or have heard of a very popular game on there called "Candy Crush Saga." Candy Crush Saga is a puzzle game, similar to Columns or Tetris, where you arrange candies on the board in groups of three or more of the same color to make them disappear and make the columns move to complete an objective. Most of the time there are limits on the levels -- solve the puzzle within a timeframe of two minutes, solve it in X amount of moves, solve it in X amount of moves and clear the objective at hand (such as bringing certain items to the bottom of the board), etc. I am stuck on a level there; it is a level where you must bring all "ingredients" to the bottom and clear them within 55 moves. The bottom is bound up by wires, which you have to clear by matching up candies which are caught within the wires before you can clear them -- an extra step.
I just took this screenshot a few moments ago. Now look at that board. This is the beginning of the game; no moves have been made, and there is not a single candy connecting to any of the ones within the wires which can be removed. This is what I call a "Shit Board." The game requires you to move around a bunch of candies above, in vain, in hopes of being able to line up some near the bottom to clear that wire and bring down the ingredients (note the chestnut in the upper right hand corner). This essentially means that for the first half of this level, you'll end up wasting a ton of moves just to clear the shit off the board and hope that, by the time you can, you'll still have enough moves left to be able to bring down those ingredients to clear the level.
I've been playing this level easily fifteen times a day for three days, and there is one thing I can tell you with absolute certainty -- it's all up to luck. If you're given a lucky board with a lot of matches at the beginning of a level like this, you'll be able to complete it easily and within a few minutes. If you're given a shit board, like the one in the picture above, it's fucking impossible, and you'll be forced to replay the level over and over again until you get lucky and something works to help you complete it...if anything ever does. The game is made purposely difficult and purposely unlucky most of the time so that the company can goad you into getting so frustrated that you will spend real money on Facebook purchasing "power ups" for the game from them in order to be able to complete the level and move on. Can't do it with skill or luck? Throw some money at it.
This is, in a nutshell, life. Or, at the very least, it's my life right now. I've been given a shit board that I'm forced to waste moves on and/or replay over and over, getting more frustrated and angry each time because, halfway through it, I can see that there is no possible way for me to win and that I'm wasting my time -- it's all up to chance and total, blind luck, and it's out of my control. It's also a microcosm for how I'm feeling in general. Each setback, each little piece of bullshit that I have to deal with on a daily basis angers and frustrates me more, and makes me more withdrawn and less likely to put myself in a situation where I have to continually deal with it. Everything that irritates me is out of my control; they may all be little things, but when all of them are tied together and thrust upon me at once -- and, probably most importantly, when they're not taken care of by those outside forces in a reasonably timely manner -- my patience disappears and I become fed up with anything and everything, to the point where any tiny little thing, or dealing with people in general, crazily irritates me. To the point where I'm yelling at inanimate objects around the house. To the point where I have a continual frown on my face and am just angry -- at nothing in particular, really, just angry and dissatisfied with everything. For example, I was yelling at my washing machine two nights ago because it wasn't washing my blanket (which Pete vomited on) quickly enough, and all I wanted to do was throw it into the dryer and go back upstairs.
Again, I have no patience anymore, for anything. I'm sick of waiting on things. I'm sick of not being in control of the things that are important to me, the things that I desperately need control or resolution of -- or things that just need to work correctly. The weather is a good example of this. Spring needs to work correctly, meaning no fucking ice storms and low temperatures in the 20s in mid-April. No, it's mid-April, which means that it needs to be 75 degrees every day, and about 50 at night and in the mornings, so that I don't have to wear three layers every day just to be able to stay warm and prevent my fingers and toes from going numb. Again, something out of my control, something little, but something that adds to the continually-growing ball of irritation.
To these ends, I have basically isolated myself from everything and everyone I know for the time being. I need time to decompress. I need that time more now than I have for the better part of the past year or so. I don't want to be bothered, I don't want to be asked "Brandon, why are you so angry and irritable?" or "why won't you talk to me?" over and over. I just, desperately so, need some time to myself. I need time where I don't have to put on a happy mask and act like I'm feeling normal all the time. I need time to where I don't have to get up in the morning or afternoon because of some social or professional obligation hanging over my head, because trying to "sleep this off" isn't enough. I need time to be able to ignore the rest of the world and let everything that needs to fall into place to actually fucking do it. I even told Daisy that I desperately need a few days alone, a few days where I can just be me without repercussions or her worrying about why I'm not spending every waking, available second talking to her. I need space, on all fronts; I need all of the daily irritating bullshit that I have to deal with to just stop or go away for a while to let me completely detach from it, because it feels like this semester has been nothing but one task after the next continually pounding me into the ground, like a hammer hitting a nail. First my thesis, then the basement flooding over and over, then comps studying, then comps, then taxes, then everything surrounding the lack of information about my binding copies, then waiting for comps results (which I'm still doing), then the continually shitty weather, my allergies going nuts, the house being a mess, the credit card bill which I have still not received, and -- let's not forget -- the stack of fifty student papers that I just collected yesterday and need to grade. Stop. Everything, seriously, right yourselves and just stop. World, please unfuck yourself. World, please straighten out and unfuck my life so that I can actually relax without having something hanging over my head to continually stress, get frustrated, or be angry about. All I want right now is peace and quiet. Anything or anyone else intruding into that little bubble that needs to stay intact in order to keep me sane is going to make me start screaming. Yeah, I know. Life is hard. But all I want is a few days where I can decompress enough to deal with it. I have enough shit to do, and enough shit to worry about, already. All I want is a few days of relative peace. Why this has to be so difficult to achieve when I have so few relative responsibilities is beyond me.
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