The Fray - Happiness

Can't sleep. Have to be at work at 6 a.m.. :(

My housing option is still a go, but it may take a week or two before I can move. This is a relief. I am waiting on some funding.

Have a number of poems ready to send out? It's difficult to know if anything's ready to go anymore. One upon a time poems clicked shut for me. I just knew they were ready. Now, these poems seem ready, but I grow concerned the language isn't fancy enough, complex enough for poet/critics. Yet, I have to go with what I've written. Someone said to wait a few months before I send them out, but I've already waited several years. Then again, I'm hypercritical when it comes to my own work. It's simply very different than it once was.

Once someone said that I had a firm grasp of the language, but didn't seem confident in that-- and I think and hope he was right.

I am looking forward to teaching! I will teach 2 sections of comp. I need to teach again. I began one syllabus yesterday. It feels good. I will take a training course in utilizing the online stuff at school and hope to have syllabi and a number of assignment sheets etc. up before classes start on the 23rd. Very relieved to be teaching. I've asked for reduced hours at 7-11 because I just can't take it anymore. I would rather turn my phone off for a month or two than dredge out 35 hours a week. Cutting expenses seems better than being unhappy. I just can't do repetitive work like that and since the shifts are 8 hours long, it seems it will never end. Next week I will have three six hour shifts, and I'm very, very relieved even though it's kind of crazy. I simply can't be miserable there and can and will cut my expenses somehow. I so like it to a degree in terms of meeting people, but it seems representative of a global economy gone crazy. All the unhealthy products and big brother corporation/franchise owner watching over you with a baseball bat in hand. I have a lot of material though, but find it isn't necessarily working out in poems, but maybe it will later. It seems the stuff of fiction/surreal/unreal, but it is actually non-fiction.

I very much hope that some poems are picked up this fall. I called a press yesterday and am feeling more confident in sending my manuscript out and also that a third one is well in progress, slowly. I'm amazed at how often I have wasted time, as if time were something one could waste. No! It's time to get busy. If I suck now, that will bear itself out, but I need to have more confidence. Too many bad poets have excessive levels of confidence, so I think it may be a good thing that I don't. Sometimes I do, but it's been a long time. I've been struggling since 2008 when I had a serious episode in my life.

I need to read someone's manuscript so I can write a blurb. That in itself should give me some confidence. Very happy for her. Well deserved publication.

I have a lot of nervous manic energy, so hopefully that will translate into being alert and productive at work. Very tired of the job but am concerned about teaching more than two classes right now. Especially since they are two different classes. I need to ease back into things I think even though I'm getting pressure to pick up more classes from friends who mean well, yet don't get my situation at all.

I would love to teach a poetry workshop some day and had pretty much given up on that prospect for many, many reasons, but I think the time has come for me to focus on publishing again and possibly just focus on teaching these two courses well. I'm not sure how 7-11 will come into play since every bone in my body wants to quit, but we can't always do what we want. The fact is that I need the income now and it's usually not as bad as I dread it will be.