Surviving a New Job and a Shakespeare Intensive

For approximately the last three weeks, I have been pondering why it is that I feel compelled to make work for myself, to never allow myself down time.

I was looking forward to a winter break from school. This last semester was hard – I’m tired, chronically sleep-deprived, and my poor daughters are probably wondering if I’ve abandoned them permanently. A solid month of no classes would have been good for me, given me a chance to catch up on sleep, laundry, housecleaning, remember what my daughters look like, all the things I’ve been ignoring since going back to school.

Instead, after a conversation with a professor, I decided to sign up for a winter session course so that I could apply for Middle School certification in Language Arts. Three credits in three weeks. Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Don’t get me wrong, I adore Shakespeare, and have been enjoying the chance to do an in-depth study of a play I was less familiar with. I’ve loved the work, the stretching of the mind, the exposure to a couple strange movies that I would never have seen otherwise.

Then half way through the first week of my Shakespeare Intensive, I received a phone call for a job interview, and got the job – teaching computer classes as the local community college. I love that work, too. The students are nice, the lessons are the kind of teaching work I want to do, so the experience will go a long way to helping me find a full-time teaching job. I’m having fun, I’m feeling useful, and the extra pay is really helpful even if it isn’t enough to live on.

But the combination of a 3-week intensive, plus a new job requiring syllabus writing, reading four textbooks, learning a new online blackboard system so I could set up for class, all amounted to overload, even for a work-a-holic. I’m living extreme life right now.

At the end of the week, as I take a break from writing my final Shakespeare paper, I am pondering while sipping my cup of hot chai latte. I wonder, what propels a person to work when a break is well deserved? What unconscious drive compels me to try harder, work harder, keep moving forward? What kind of Sisyphus-complex am I suffering from? Maybe it’s all a plot from my subconscious mind to successfully avoid cleaning my house!

“Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day”
~ Simone de Beauvoir