The Cloying Nature of Bad Habits ... and the irritating Bright Light of New Circumstances

(ergh)

Just exactly HOW old am I now? Eight? Still in the third grade? Well, no, actually. Forty years have passed since then. And yet, here I am, facing ALL of the following:

1. In school, love school, not quite healthy enough to be in school.

2. Fighting a lingering illness that makes me both worn out and paranoid about never getting well again.

3. Making up for lost time by way of Writing(ing)(ing) Underrrrr Pressure(ure)(ure). If you are still young enough to believe you work "better under pressure," you might not believe me, but this is no way to work well. Illness makes this kind of writing necessary (now that I can focus my eyes and brain again) -- experience makes me painfully aware of how bad writing can be when it is done like this.

When I was young, I often crashed out - physically, I just completely fooped down to zero energy sometimes. Or, my knees would be too painful to use for walking. Or, I'd cough like an ancient emphysema patient ... but not slow down until I had pneumonia. These reactions are not physical responses to physical stimulus - this was never a matter of getting a broken arm due to walking off the roof of a building. This was pure manifestation of emotional and psychological exhaustion and/or a sense of overwhelm. It's obvious.

So what the HECK is my problem NOW??? Why is it so danged difficult to concentrate, work, plan, execute the plan, proceed as if I know what I'm doing, and just do it? Why have I gotten this ill again? What am I looking for? What do I want?

Whatever it is, I've got a paper to write. All I have to do today is write a nice, easy, 4-5 page essay so I can pass my "LLE1 Writing Outcome" so that I will not have to take freshman English again. I am Luke Skywalker, flying over the Death Star, waiting for the perfect moment to sent in my explosive load down that little tiny shaft ... stay on target ... stay on target ...but for some reason that I think I really must figure out soon, it seems that I must also shrink or morph or let go of the extra size or baggage or something else (what IS this?!) in order to be able to hit the target.

Sheesh! People go back to school all the time, and they do NOT have this bizarre physical/emotional/psychological firestorm. They just go to school, get their degrees, and get on with their lives. (Don't they?) I really do think this needs to be the last "oh just get it done" project. Once I get this short essay written, I need to spend some focused time with this reaction and make friends with it so it won't keep roaring at me.

St. Jerome in his study. Saint Jerome making friends with the lion. Don Quixote lying sick in bed. What he says.

The great thing in the life of St. Jerome is that he finally does “stumble again upon what he has renounced”: after being made so miserable by the “uncouth style” of the Greek and Hebrew prophets, by comparison to the elegant Latin of Plautus and Cicero, he hits upon a solution: he will simply devote the whole rest of his life translating the Bible into Latin, producing the Vulgate for which he is still famous. He stopped reading his favorite books, learned to ignore his “preferences,” and created the new literature of his time. A thousand years after the death of St. Jerome, a similar kind of renunciation led to the birth of the novel, in Cervantes’s Don Quijote. Don Quijote, like St. Jerome, has to have his favorite books literally beaten out of him. (It is while Quijote is sick in bed, recovering from his first knightly adventure, that the barber and priest destroy his library of chivalric romances.)