Entropy

Lately, I’ve been having my morning coffee at three in the afternoon.

An inexplicable lassitude has taken over.  I can’t motivate myself to get out of bed for more than eight or ten hours at a stretch.  I know I’ll have to change my ways soon, since in-service week for the new semester begins Monday with Convocation.  I face the coming weeks with a sense of dread.

But here I lie, laptop on the covers as I type this.  Things around me are in a state of disarray.  I’m normally proactive about fixing what’s amiss in my life.  Since winter, though, the fluorescent lights in the kitchen remain burned out, the venetian blinds in my bedroom hang unrepaired with a blanket tacked over the window, and the garage door opener stays broken.  I did replace the light bulb in the refrigerator yesterday.  Got to see what I’m reaching in there for, you know.

Part of the problem is a partially healed foot injury from last spring that’s left me with weakness in the left ankle and an unsteady stride.  Some of the things I ordinarily do over the semester break I’ve skipped out of apathy, others I do for the sake of doing.  I’ve been down to the lake a couple of times for drinks and socializing with perfect strangers.  Last night I even managed  to get down a light appetizer.  It’s the biggest meal I’ve had in days.  Felt good to get out but I don’t think I’ll do it again soon.  Thought I’d take in Romeo & Juliet at the local Shakespeare festival, but the final two weeks are sold out.  Too bad.

I’ve made a few advances.  I completed the syllabi for my classes.  I’ve updated the learning management system files.  But mostly I watch TV or putter around the internet.  I’ve kept up with the freelance work I do during the break, reviewing textbooks and such.  I ask myself if it will be practical for me to retire in the next year or so without the income from teaching, sparse as it is.

I have spent my time in partial disengagement from the world, communing with myself and asking questions which wouldn’t occur to me ordinarily.  My upstairs neighbors, for instance.  I live in a first floor condominium.  The owners upstairs rent out their unit and sometimes the tenants aren’t the most congenial.  The young couple who lived there last year had me at my wit’s end.  They had a newborn who bawled all night, every night.  Dad was like a hyperactive chimpanzee.  Why walk when you can stomp, back and forth across the apartment for hours on end every day?  The plates in the kitchen cupboard would rattle with every footfall.  After months of this agony my complaints to their landlord finally had an effect and these neighbors from hell were mercifully gone.

The new neighbors seem to be a couple in the late thirties, early forties.  I have only seen them a couple of times.  They seem awfully young for the life they appear to be living though.  At least one of them spends most of his or her days in bed.  I can tell from the periodic creaking of the floorboards above me as s/he gets up or down.  All this started after they had been away for about a week a month ago.  Surgery?  A chronic illness, cancer perhaps?  It’s strange to feel concern for perfect strangers when you know so little about them.  Then again maybe they are in my situation and simply have a lot of time to kill.  Maybe nothing’s wrong at all.  But still, I wonder.

I guess I should focus on something to look forward to.  Not the coming academic year; I’m too jaded for that.  Something simpler, something more easily undertaken and accomplished.  There’s a Law & Order marathon on TV tonight.  No, too far off.  The mail just arrived.  I could make the short walk to the mailboxes and back.

I think I’ll get to that tomorrow.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar