Angry Saturdays

I woke up yesterday to some great weather, but I was experiencing this phenomenon that my mom and I have coined "angry Saturdays." It has something to do with teaching, or working too hard during the week. Then Saturday comes and you finally have free time, but you don't really know what to do with yourself. You feel all tapped out of energy and creativity, but you also feel like your weekend is slipping away from you right before your eyes. You have chores to do that you've been neglecting. You've forgotten what it's like to be into a good book, because you feel like your eyes will explode if you read one more thing. You don't really have any social plans for the evening yet. You've got papers to grade. And you're just angry for all of these vague reasons. It's kind of stupid, but my mom knew exactly what I was talking about when I told her I felt angry and I didn't know why. So did two of my teacher friends at school when I asked them "Do you ever wake up on Saturdays and just feel angry?" and they were like "Yeah. Of course."

So I went for a run. This felt like a triumph because it's been a rough week. I had open house from 6-8 Tuesday night and then I started a particularly violent period on Wednesday afternoon (RIGHT after school. Some wicked cramps hit me while I was sitting on my stool seventh hour and I was afraid I was going to start in the middle of class.). I barely ever have bad cramps, but these laid me out for the rest of the evening. I still felt pretty bad the whole next day, too, and by Friday I felt fine but extremely tired and cloudy-headed. I'm starting to have the usual fears that my job is going to end up being the ruination of my life: I'll never be able to keep up an exercise routine or write or read good books again. I feel like I'm falling further and further out of shape when my original intention was that this summer would be only the beginning of my training.

Anyway, the run went great because the weather is excellent. Some kind of weird cool front came through. Dry weather makes a giant difference--I've been told this, but now I actually believe it. I didn't get overheated and feel dizzy at the end of it. I felt able to sustain a pace without my chest burning. It gives me real hope for this fall and winter. I wrote a little something before the run, too--something fiction-y. It wasn't any good, but there could be some nuggets of something in there.

One of my recent hang-ups with fiction writing is that I write out of that part of me that is dissatisfied with something about life. Then I look at what I wrote and feel a little disgusted because it's obvious how privileged my life is. I feel that someone will read it and think of it as characters whining about a non-problem. Maybe that can be my niche: privileged characters whining about non-problems. Enjoyed by rich whites and hipsters alike. Maybe I can throw in some identity crises for good measure. Or career confusion.

I got to see and talk to Ann recently about how she's embarking on an MFA in fiction (woot!), and it got me thinking about the writing world again and how much I miss it. I'd really like to join some kind of writing circle. I need a more pressing reason (besides my own yearning to write again) to complete a story. Also, I was reading Sandra Cisneros's introduction to the anniversary edition of The House on Mango St. on Friday--part of it was about her life as a writer in the seventies. The cliche description about her life at the time (how she lived in a little apartment and ate omelets with other writers in her program who edited each other's stories and put together a makeshift anthology) made me almost tear up.

I ordered the New York City Ballet workout DVD. I'm thinking of working on my ballet technique from home, since I keep waffling about whether to pay a bunch of money to drive really far for ballet once a week. I only took maybe two ballet classes this summer, and it's been probably a year since I went with any regularity. I know I need ballet, and my body feels great when I take a lot of ballet classes, and it builds technique, but I don't like it deep in my soul. And my booty and hips don't like it. I wish there were some good modern, jazz, and hip hop classes around. I wish I could take more class through my dance company.

Happy cool font, everybody.